PART II.

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVII.--MAY, 1866.--NO. CIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND

FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of

Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved

to the end of the article.

THE HARMONISTS.

My brother Josiah I call a successful man,--very successful, though only

an attorney in a manufacturing town. But he fixed his goal, and reached

it. He belongs to the ruling class,--men with slow, measuring eyes and

bull-dog jaws,--men who know their own capacity to an atom's weight, and

who go through life with moderate, inflexible, unrepenting steps. He

looks askance at me when I cross his path; he is in the great market

making his way: I learned long ago that there was no place there for me.

Yet I like to look in, out of the odd little corner into which I have

been shoved,--to look in at the great play, never beginning and never

ending, of bargain and sale, for which all the world's but a stage; to

see how men like my brother have been busy, since God blessed all things

he had made, in dragging them down to the trade level, and stamping

price-marks on them. Josiah looks at me grimly, as I said. Jog as

methodically as I will from desk to bed and back to desk again, he

suspects some outlaw blood under the gray head of the fagged-out old

clerk. He indulges in his pictures, his bronzes: I have my high

office-stool, and bedroom in the fifth story of a cheap hotel. Yet he

suspects me of having forced a way out of the actual common-sense world

by sheer force of whims and vagaries, and to have pre-empted a homestead

for myself in some dream-land, where neither he nor the tax-gatherer can

enter.

"It won't do," he said to-day, when I was there (for I use his books now

and then). "Old Père Bonhours, you're poring over? Put it down, and come

take some clam soup. Much those fellows knew about life! Zachary!

Zachary! you have kept company with shadows these forty years, until you

have grown peaked and gaunt yourself. When will you go to work and be a

live man?"

I knew we were going to have the daily drill which Josiah gave to his

ideas; so I rolled the book up to take with me, while he rubbed his

spectacles angrily, and went on.

"I tell you, the world's a great property-exchanging machine, where

everything has its weight and value; a great, inexorable machine,--and

whoever tries to shirk his work in it will be crushed! Crushed! Think

of your old friend Knowles!"

I began to hurry on my old overcoat; I never had but two or three

friends, and I could not hear their names from Josiah's mouth. But he

was not quick to see when he had hurt people.

"Why, the poet,"--more sententious than before,--"the poet sells his

song; he knows that the airiest visions must resolve into trade-laws.

You cannot escape from them. I see your wrinkled old face, red as a

boy's, over the newspapers sometimes. There was the daring of that Rebel

Jackson, Frémont's proclamation, Shaw's death; you claimed those things

as heroic, prophetic. They were mere facts tending to solve the great

problem of Capital _vs._ Labor. There was one work for which the breath

was put into our nostrils,--to grow, and make the world grow by giving

and taking. Give and take; and the wisest man gives the least and gains

the most."

I left him as soon as I could escape. I respect Josiah: his advice would

be invaluable to any man; but I am content that we should live

apart,--quite content. I went down to Yorke's for my solitary chop. The

old prophet Solomon somewhere talks of the conies or ants as "a feeble

folk who prepare their meat in the summer." I joke to myself about that

sometimes, thinking I should claim kindred with them; for, looking back

over the sixty years of Zack Humphreys's life, they seem to me to have

pretty much gone in preparing the bread and meat from day to day. I see

but little result of all the efforts of that time beyond that solitary

chop; and a few facts and hopes, may be, gathered outside of the market,

which, Josiah says, absorb all of the real world. All day, sitting here

at my desk in Wirt's old counting-house, these notions of Josiah's have

dogged me. These sums that I jotted down, the solid comforts they

typified, the homes, the knowledge, the travel they would buy,--these

were, then, the real gist of this thing we called life, were they? The

great charities money had given to the world,--Christ's Gospel preached

by it.--Did it cover all, then? Did it?

What a wholesome (or unwholesome) scorn of barter Knowles had! The old

fellow never collected a debt; and, by the way, as seldom paid one. The

"dirty dollar" came between him and very few people. Yet the heart in

his great mass of flesh beat fiercely for an honor higher than that

known to most men. I have sat here all the afternoon, staring out at the

winter sky, scratching down a figure now and then, and idly going back

to the time when I was a younger man than now, but even then with

neither wife nor child, and no home beyond an eating-house; thinking how

I caught old Knowles's zest for things which lay beyond trade-laws; how

eager I grew in the search of them; how he inoculated me with

Abolitionism, Communism, every other fever that threatened to destroy

the commercial status of the world, and substitute a single-eyed regard

for human rights. It occurred to me, too, that some of those odd,

one-sided facts, which it used to please me to gather then,--queer bits

of men's history, not to be judged by Josiah's rules,--it might please

others to hear. What if I wrote them down these winter evenings? Nothing

in them rare or strange; but they lay outside of the market, and were

true.

Not one of them which did not bring back Knowles, with his unwieldy heat

and bluster. He found a flavor and meaning in the least of these hints

of mine, gloating over the largess given and received in the world, for

which money had no value. His bones used to straighten, and his eye

glitter under the flabby brow, at the recital of any brave, true deed,

as if it had been his own; as if, but for some mischance back yonder in

his youth, it might have been given to even this poor old fellow to

strike a great, ringing blow on Fate's anvil before he died,--to give

his place in the life-boat to a more useful man,--to help buy with his

life the slave's freedom.

Let me tell you the story of our acquaintance. Josiah, even, would hold

the apology good for claiming so much of your time for this old dreamer

of dreams, since I may give you a bit of useful knowledge in the telling

about a place and people here in the States utterly different from any

other, yet almost unknown, and, so far as I know, undescribed. When I

first met Knowles it was in an obscure country town in Pennsylvania, as

he was on his way across the mountains with his son. I was ill in the

little tavern where he stopped; and, he being a physician, we were

thrown together,--I a raw country lad, and he fresh from the outer

world, of which I knew nothing,--a man of a muscular, vigorous type even

then. But what he did for me, or the relation we bore to each other, is

of no import here.

One or two things about him puzzled me. "Why do you not bring your boy

to this room?" I asked, one day.

His yellow face colored with angry surprise. "Antony? What do you know

of Antony?"

"I have watched you with him," I said, "on the road yonder. He's a

sturdy, manly little fellow, of whom any man would be proud. But you are

not proud of him. In this indifference of yours to the world, you

include him. I've seen you thrust him off into the ditch when he caught

at your hand, and let him struggle on by himself."

He laughed. "Right! Talk of love, family affection! I have tried it. Why

should my son be more to me than any other man's son, but for an

extended selfishness? I have cut loose all nearer ties than those which

hold all men as brothers, and Antony comes no closer than any other."

"I've watched you coming home sometimes," I said, coolly. "One night you

carried the little chap, as he was sound asleep. It was dark; but I saw

you sit by the pond yonder, thinking no one saw you, caressing him,

kissing his face, his soiled little hands, his very feet, as fierce and

tender as a woman."

Knowles got up, pacing about, disturbed and angry; he was like a woman

in other ways, nervous, given to sudden heats of passion,--was leaky

with his own secrets. "Don't talk to me of Antony! I know no child, no

wife, nor any brother, except my brother-man."

He went trotting up and down the room, then sat down with his back to

me. It was night, and the room was dimly lighted by the smoky flame of a

lard lamp. The solitary old man told me his story. Let me be more chary

with his pain than he was; enough to say that his wife was yet living,

but lost, to him. Her boy Antony came into the room just when his father

had ceased speaking,--a stout little chap of four years, with Knowles's

ungainly build, and square, honest face, but with large, hazel,

melancholy eyes. He crept up on my bed, and, lying across the foot, went

to sleep.

Knowles glanced at him,--looked away, his face darkening. "Sir," he

said, "I have thrust away all arbitrary ties of family. The true

life,"--his eye dilating, as if some great thought had come into his

brain,--"the true life is one where no marriage exists,--where the soul

acknowledges only the pure impersonal love to God and our brother-man,

and enters into peace. It can so enter, even here, by dint of long

contemplation and a simple pastoral work for the body."

This was new talk in that country tavern: I said nothing.

"I'm not dreaming dreams," raising his voice. "I have a real plan for

you and me, lad. I have found the Utopia of the prophets and poets, an

actual place, here in Pennsylvania. We will go there together, shut out

the trade-world, and devote ourselves with these lofty enthusiasts to a

life of purity, celibacy, meditation,--helpful and loving to the great

Humanity."

I was but a lad; my way in life had not been smooth. While he talked on

in this strain my blood began to glow. "What of Tony?" I interrupted,

after a while.

"The boy?" not looking at the little heap at the foot of the bed. "They

will take him in, probably. Children are adopted by the society; they

receive education free from the personal taints given by father and

mother."

"Yes," not very clear as to what he meant.

The moon began to fleck the bare floor with patches of light and shadow,

bringing into relief the broad chest of the man beside me, the big,

motionless head dropped forward, and the flabby yellow face set with a

terrible, lifelong gravity. His scheme was no joke to him. Whatever soul

lay inside of this gross animal body had been tortured nigh to death,

and this plan was its desperate chance at a fresh life. Watching me

askance as I tried to cover the boy with the blankets, he began the

history of this new Utopia, making it blunt and practical as words could

compass, to convince me that he was no dreamer of dreams. I will try to

recall the facts as he stated them that night; they form a curious story

at all times.

In 1805, a man named George Rapp, in Würtemberg, became possessed with

the idea of founding a new and pure social system,--sowing a mere seed

at first, but with the hope, doubtless, of planting a universal truth

thereby which should some day affect all humanity. His scheme differed

from Comte's or Saint Simon's, in that it professed to go back to the

old patriarchal form for its mode of government, establishing under

that, however, a complete community of interest. Unlike other communist

reformers, too, Rapp did not look through his own class for men of equal

intelligence and culture with himself of whom to make converts, but,

gathering several hundred of the peasants from the neighborhood, he

managed to imbue them with an absolute faith in his divine mission, and

emigrated with them to the backwoods of Pennsylvania, in Butler County.

After about ten years they removed to the banks of the Wabash, in

Indiana; then, in 1825, returned to Pennsylvania, and settled finally in

Beaver County, some sixteen miles below Pittsburg, calling their village

Economy.

"A great man, as I conceive him, this Rapp," said Knowles. "His own

property, which was large, was surrendered to the society at its

foundation, and this to the least particular, not reserving for his own

use even the library or gallery of paintings pertaining to his family;

nor did the articles of association allow any exclusive advantage to

accrue to him or his heirs from the profits of the community. He held

his office as spiritual and temporal head, not by election of the

people, but assumed it as by Divine commission, as Moses and Aaron held

theirs; and not only did the power of the man over his followers enable

him to hold this autocratic authority during a long life, unimpaired,

but such was the skill with which his decrees were framed that after his

death this authority was reaffirmed by the highest legal tribunal of the

country.[A] With all his faith in his divine mission, too, he had a

clear insight into all the crookedness and weakness of the natures he

was trying to elevate. He knew that these dogged, weak Germans needed

coercion to make them fit for ultimate freedom; he held the power of an

apostle over them, therefore, with as pure purpose, it's my belief, as

any apostle that went before him. The superstitious element lay ready in

them for him to work upon. I find no fault with him for working it."

"How?" I asked.

Knowles hesitated. "When their stupidity blocked any of his plans for

their advancement, he told them that, unless they consented, their names

should be blotted out from the Book of Life,--which was but a coarse way

of stating a great truth, after all; telling them, too, that God must be

an unjust Judge should he mete out happiness or misery to them without

consulting him,--that his power over their fate stretched over this life

and the next,--which, considering the limitless influence of a strong

mind over a weak one, was not so false, either."

Rapp's society, Knowles stated, did not consist altogether of this

class, however. A few men of education and enthusiasm had joined him,

and carried out his plans with integrity. The articles of association

were founded in a strict sense of justice; members entering the society

relinquished all claim to any property, much or little, of which they

might be possessed, receiving thereafter common maintenance, education,

profit, with the others; should they at any time thereafter choose to

leave, they received the sum deposited without interest. A suit had just

been decided in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania[B] which had elicited

this point.

Knowles, more and more eager, went on to describe the settlement as it

had been pictured to him; the quaint, quiet village on the shores of

"the Beautiful River," the rolling hills of woodland, the quiet valleys

over which their flocks wandered, the simple pastoral work in which all

joined; the day begun and ended with music;--even the rich, soft tints

of the fresh Western sky about them were not forgotten, nor the

picturesque dresses of the silent, primitive people.

"A home in which to forget all pain and sore, boy," ended the old man,

gulping down a sigh, and then falling into a heavy silence.

It was long before I broke it. "They do not marry?"

"No," anxiously, as if I had reached the core of the truth in this

matter at last. "It was their founder's scheme, as I believe, to lift

them above all taint of human passion,--to bring them by pure work,

solitude, and contact with a beautiful nature into a state of being

where neither earthly love, nor hate, nor ambition can enter,--a sphere

of infinite freedom, and infinite love for Him and all His creatures."

There was no doubting the fire of rapt enthusiasm in his eye, rising and

looking out across the moonlit fields as if already he saw the pleasant

hills of Beulah.

"Thank God for George Rapp! he has found a home where a man can stand

alone,"--stretching out his arms as if he would have torn out whatever

vestige of human love tugged at his sick old heart, his eye hunting out

Tony as he spoke.

The boy, startled from his sleep, muttered, and groped as a baby will

for its mother's breast or hand. No hand met the poor little fingers,

and they fell on the pillow empty, the child going to sleep again with a

forlorn little cry. Knowles watched him, the thick lips under his

moustache growing white.

"I purpose," he said, "that next week you and I shall go to these

people, and, if possible, become members of their community,--cut loose

from all these narrow notions of home and family, and learn to stand

upright and free under God's heaven. The very air breathed by these

noble enthusiasts will give us strength and lofty thoughts. Think it

over, Humphreys."

"Yes."

He moved to the door,--held it open uncertainly. "I'll leave the boy

here to-night. He got into a foolish habit of sleeping in my arms when

he was a baby; it's time he was broke of it."

"Very well."

"He must learn to stand alone, eh?" anxiously. "Good night";--and in a

moment I heard his heavy steps on the stairs, stopping, then going on

faster, as if afraid of his own resolution.

In the middle of the night I was wakened by somebody fumbling for Tony

at my side,--"Afraid the child would prove troublesome,"--and saw him go

off with the boy like a mite in his arms, growling caresses like a

lioness who has recovered her whelp. I say lioness, for, with all his

weight of flesh and coarseness, Knowles left the impression on your mind

of a sensitive, nervous woman.

* * * * *

Late one spring afternoon, a month after that, Knowles and I stood on

one of the hills overlooking the communist village of Economy. I was

weak and dizzy from illness and a long journey; the intense quiet of the

landscape before me affected me like a strain of solemn music. Knowles

had infected me with his eager hope. Nature was about to take me to her

great mother's bosom, for the first time. Life was to give me the repose

I asked, satisfy all the needs of my soul: here was the foretaste. The

quaint little hamlet literally slept on the river-bank; not a living

creature was visible on the three grass-grown streets; many of the

high-gabled brick houses, even at that date of the colony, were closed

and vacant, their inmates having dropped from the quiet of this life

into an even deeper sleep, and having been silently transferred to rest

under the flat grass of the apple-orchards, according to the habit of

the society. From the other houses, however, pale rifts of smoke wavered

across the cold blue sky; great apple and peach orchards swept up the

hills back of the town, quite out of sight. They were in blossom, I

remember, and covered the green of the hills with a veil of delicate

pink. A bleak wind, as we stood there, brought their perfume towards us,

and ruffled the broad, dark river into sudden ripples of cut silver:

beyond that, motion there was none. Looking curiously down into the

town, I could distinguish a great, barn-like church, a public laundry,

bakery, apiary, and one or two other buildings, like factories, but all

empty, apparently, and deserted. After all, was this some quaint German

village brought hither in an enchanted sleep, and dropped down in the

New World? About the houses were silent, trim little gardens, set round

with yew and box cut in monstrous shapes, and filled with plants of

which this soil knew nothing. Up a path from the woods, too, came at

last some curious figures, in a dress belonging to the last century.

Knowles had no idea, like mine, of being bewitched; he rubbed his hands

in a smothered excitement. "We too shall be Arcadians!" he burst out.

"Humphreys!" anxiously, as we plodded down the hill, "we must be

careful, very careful, my boy. These are greatly innocent and pure

natures with which we have come in contact: the world must have grown

vague and dim to them long ago, wrapped in their high communings. We

must leave all worldly words and thoughts outside, as a snake drops his

skin. No talk of money here, lad. It would be as well, too, not to

mention any family ties, such as wife or child: such bonds must seem to

this lofty human brotherhood debasing and gross."

So saying, and dropping Tony's hand in order that the child even might

stand alone, we came into the village street; Knowles growing red with

eagerness as one of the odd figures came towards us. "Careful, Zachary!"

in a hoarse whisper. "It all depends on this first day whether we are

accepted or not. Remember their purity of thought, their forms gathered

from the patriarchs and apostles!"

I had a vague remembrance of a washing of feet, practised in those days;

of calf-killing and open tents for strangers; so stood perplexed while

the brother approached and stood there, like an animate lager-bier

barrel, dressed in flannel, with a round hat on top. "_Was brauchen

Sie?_" he grumbled.

I don't know in what words Knowles's tremulous tones conveyed the idea

that we were strangers, going on to state that we were also world-weary,

and--

"Ach! want der supper," he said, his face brightening, and, turning, he

jogged on, elephant-like, before, muttering something about himself,

"Bin Yosef, an keepit der tavern,"--to the door of which, one of the

silent brick dwellings, he speedily brought us; and, summoning some

"Christ-ina" in a subdued bellow from the bowels of the cellar, went

into the neat bar-room, and swallowed two glasses of wine to revive

himself, dropping exhausted, apparently, into a chair.

Christina, an old dried-up woman, in the quaint, daintily clean dress of

blue, emerged from the cellar-door, bringing with her a savory smell of

frying ham and eggs. She glanced at us with suspicious blue eyes, and

then, with "_Ach! der Liebling! mein schöner Schatz!_" caught up Tony to

her shrivelled breast in a sudden surprise, and, going back to the

door, called "Fredrika!" Another old woman, dried, withered, with pale

blue eyes, appeared, and the two, hastily shoving us chairs, took Tony

between them, chattering in delighted undertones, patting his fat

cheeks, his hands, feeling his clothes, straightening his leg, and

laughing at the miniature muscles.

Knowles stared dumbly.

"You will haf der supper, hein?" said the first old woman, recollecting

herself and coming forward, her thin jaws yet reddened. "Der ham?

Shickens? It is so long as I haf seen a little shild," apologetically.

I assented to the ham and chicken proposition, answering for myself and

Tony at least. As they went down the stairs, they looked wistfully at

him. I nodded, and, picking him up, they carried him with them. I could

presently distinguish his shrill little tones, and half a dozen women's

voices, caressing, laughing with him. Yet it hurt me somehow to notice

that these voices were all old, subdued; none of them could ever hold a

baby on her lap, and call it hers. Joseph roused himself, came suddenly

in with a great pitcher of domestic wine, out again, and back with

ginger-cakes and apples,--"Till der supper be cookin'," with an

encouraging nod,--and then went back to his chair, and presently snored

aloud. In a few minutes, however, we were summoned to the table.

Knowles ate nothing, and looked vaguely over the great smoking dishes,

which Tony and I proved to be marvels of cookery. "Doubtless," he said,

"some of these people have not yet overcome this grosser taste; we have

yet seen but the dregs of the society; many years of Rapp's culture

would be needed to spiritualize German boors."

The old women, who moved gently about, listened keenly, trying to

understand why he did not eat. It troubled them.

"We haf five meals a day in der society," said Christina, catching a

vague notion of his meaning, "Many as finds it not enough puts cheese

and cakes on a shelf at der bed-head, if dey gets faint in de night."

"Do you get faint in the night?" I asked.

"Most times I does," simply.

Knowles burst in with a snort of disgust, and left the table. When I

joined him on the stoop he had recovered his temper and eagerness, even

laughing at Joseph, who was plying him in vain with his wine.

"I was a fool, Humphreys. These are the flesh of the thing; we'll find

the brain presently. But it was a sharp disappointment. Stay here an

hour, until I find the directors of the society,--pure, great thinkers,

I doubt not, on whom Rapp's mantle has fallen. They will welcome our

souls, as these good creatures have our bodies. Yonder is Rapp's house,

they tell me. Follow me in an hour."

As he struck into one of the narrow paths across the grassy street, I

saw groups of the colonists coming in from their field-work through the

twilight, the dress of the women looking not unpicturesque, with the

tight flannel gown and broad-rimmed straw hat. But they were all old, I

saw as they passed; their faces were alike faded and tired; and whether

dull or intelligent, each had a curious vacancy in its look. Not one

passed without a greeting more or less eager for Tony, whom Christina

held on her knees, on the steps of the stoop.

"It is so long as I haf not seen a baby," she said, again turning her

thin old face round.

I found her pleased to be questioned about the society.

"I haf one, two, dree kinder when we come mit Father Rapp," she said.

"Dey is dead in Harmony; since den I just cooken in der tavern. Father

Rapp say the world shall end in five years when we come in der society,

den I shall see mein shilds again. But I wait, and it haf not yet end."

I thought she stifled a quick sigh.

"And your husband?"

She hesitated. "John Volz was my man, in Germany. He lives in yonder

house, mit ein ander family. We are in families of seven."

"Husbands and wives were separated, then?"

"Father Rapp said it must to be. He knows."

There was a long pause, and then, lowering her voice, and glancing

cautiously around, she added hurriedly, "Frederick Rapp was his brother:

he would not leave his wife."

"Well, and then?"

The two old women looked at each other, warningly, but Christina, being

on the full tide of confidence, answered at last in a whisper, "Father

Rapp did hold a counsel mit five others."

"And his brother?"

"He was killed. He did never see his child."

"But," I resumed, breaking the long silence that followed, "your women

do not care to go back to their husbands? They dwell in purer thoughts

than earthly love?"

"Hein?" said the woman with a vacant face.

"Were you married?"--to Fredrika, who sat stiffly knitting a blue

woollen sock.

"Nein," vacantly counting the stitches. "Das ist not gut, Father Rapp

says. He knows."

"_She_ war not troth-plight even," interrupted the other eagerly, with a

contemptuous nod, indicating by a quick motion a broken nose, which

might have hindered Fredrika's chances of matrimony. "There is Rachel,"

pointing to a bent figure in a neighboring garden; "she was to marry in

the summer, and in spring her man came mit Father Rapp. He was a sickly

man."

"And she followed him?"

"Ya. He is dead."

"And Rachel?"

"_Ya wohl!_ There she is," as the figure came down the street, passing

us.

It was only a bent old Dutchwoman, with a pale face and fixed, tearless

eyes, that smiled kindly at sight of the child; but I have never seen in

any tragedy, since, the something which moved me so suddenly and deeply

in that quiet face and smile. I followed her with my eyes, and then

turned to the women. Even the stupid knitter had dropped her work, and

met my look with a vague pity and awe in her face.

"It was not gut she could not marry. It is many years, but she does at

no time forget," she mumbled, taking up her stocking again. Something

above her daily life had struck a quick response from even her, but it

was gone now.

Christina eagerly continued; "And there is ----" (naming a woman, one of

the directors.) "She would be troth-plight, if Father Rapp had not said

it must not be. So they do be lovers these a many years, and every night

he does play beneath her window until she falls asleep."

When I did not answer, the two women began to talk together in

undertones, examining the cut of Tony's little clothes, speculating as

to their price, and so forth. I rose and shook myself. Why! here in the

new life, in Arcadia, was there the world,--old love and hunger to be

mothers, and the veriest gossip? But these were women: I would seek the

men with Knowles. Leaving the child, I crossed the darkening streets to

the house which I had seen him enter. I found him in a well-furnished

room, sitting at a table, in council with half a dozen men in the

old-time garb of the Communists. If their clothes were relics of other

times, however, their shrewd, keen faces were wide awake and alive to

the present. Knowles's alone was lowering and black.

"These are the directors of the society," he said to me aloud, as I

entered.

"Their reception of us is hardly what I expected," nodding me to a seat.

They looked at me with a quiet, business-like scrutiny.

"I hardly comprehend what welcome you anticipated," said one, coolly.

"Many persons offer to become members of our fraternity; but it is, we

honestly tell you, difficult to obtain admission. It is chiefly an

association to make money: the amount contributed by each new-comer

ought, in justice, to bear some proportion to the advantage he

obtains."

"Money? I had not viewed the society in that light," stammered Knowles.

"You probably," said the other, with a dry smile, "are not aware how

successful a corporation ours has been. At Harmony, we owned thirty

thousand acres; here, four thousand. We have steam-mills, distilleries,

carry on manufactures of wool, silk, and cotton. Exclusive of our

stocks, our annual profit, clear of expense, is over two hundred

thousand dollars. There are few enterprises by which money is to be made

into which our capital does not find its way."

Knowles sat dumb as the other proceeded, numbering, alertly as a broker,

shares in railroad stocks, coal-mines, banks.

"You see how we live," he concluded; "the society's lands are

self-supporting,--feed and clothe us amply. What profits accrue are

amassed, intact."

"To what end?" I broke in. "You have no children to inherit your wealth.

It buys you neither place nor power nor pleasure in the world."

The director looked at me with a cold rebuke in his eyes. "It is not

surprising that many should desire to enter a partnership into which

they bring nothing, and which is so lucrative," he said.

"I had no intention of coming empty-handed," said Knowles in a subdued

voice. "But this financial point of view never occurred to me."

The other rose with a look of pity, and led us out through the great

ware-rooms, where their silks and cottons were stored in chests, out to

the stables to inspect stock, and so forth. But before we had proceeded

far, I missed Knowles, who had trotted on before with a stunned air of

perplexity. When I went back to the tavern, late that night, I found him

asleep on the bed, one burly arm around his boy. The next morning he was

up betimes, and at work investigating the real condition of the

Harmonists. They treated him with respect, for, outside of what Josiah

called his vagaries, Knowles was shrewd and honest.

Tony and I wandered about the drowsy village and meadows, looking at the

queer old gardens, dusky with long-forgotten plants, or sometimes at

their gallery of paintings, chief among which was one of West's larger

efforts.

It was not until the close of the second day that Knowles spoke openly

to me. Whatever the disappointment had cost him, he told nothing of

it,--grew graver, perhaps, but discussed the chances in the stock market

with the directors,--ate Christina's suppers, watching the poor withered

women and the gross men with a perplexed look of pity.

"They are but common minds and common bodies, perhaps," he said one

evening, as we sat in our corner, after a long, quiet scrutiny of them:

"in any case, their lives would have been meagre and insignificant, and

yet, Humphreys, yet even that little possibility seems to have been here

palsied and balked. I hope George Rapp cannot look back and see what his

scheme has done for these people."

"You were mistaken in it, then?"

His dark face reddened gloomily. "You see what they are. Yet Rapp,

whatever complaints these people may make of him, I believe to have been

an enthusiast, who sacrificed his property to establish a pure, great

reform in society. But human nature! human nature is as crooked to drive

as a pig tied by a string. Why, these Arcadians, sir, have made a god of

their stomachs, and such of them as have escaped that spend their lives

in amassing dollar after dollar to hoard in their common chest."

I suggested that Rapp and he left them nothing else to do. "You shut

them out both from a home and from the world; love, ambition, politics,

are dead words to them. What can they do but eat and grub?"

"Think! Go back into Nature's heart, and, with contemplation, bear fruit

of noble thoughts unto eternal life!" But he hesitated; his enthusiasm

hung fire strangely.

After a while,--"Well, well, Zachary," with a laugh, "we'd better go

back into the world, and take up our work again. Josiah is partly right,

may be. There are a thousand fibres of love and trade and mutual help

which bind us to our fellow-man, and if we try to slip out of our place

and loose any of them, our own souls suffer the loss by so much life

withdrawn. It is as well not to live altogether outside of the market;

nor--to escape from this," lifting Tony up on his knee, and beginning a

rough romp with him. But I saw his face work strangely as he threw the

boy up in the air, and when he caught him, he strained him to his burly

breast until the child cried out. "Tut! tut! What now, you young

ruffian? Come, shoes off, and to bed; we'll have a little respite from

you. I say, Humphreys, do you see the hungry look with which the old

women follow the child? God help them! I wonder if it will be made right

for them in another world!" An hour after, I heard him still pacing the

floor up stairs, crooning some old nursery song to put the boy to sleep.

* * * * *

I visited the Harmonists again not many months ago; the village and

orchards lie as sleepily among the quiet hills as ever. There are more

houses closed, more grass on the streets. A few more of the simple,

honest folk have crept into their beds under the apple-trees, from which

they will not rise in the night to eat, or to make money,--Christina

among the rest. I was glad she was gone where it was sunny and bright,

and where she would not have to grow tired for the sight of "a little

shild." There have been but few additions, if any, to the society in the

last twenty years. They still retain the peculiar dress which they wore

when they left Würtemberg: the men wearing the common German peasant

habit; the women, a light, narrow flannel gown, with wide sleeves and a

bright-colored silk handkerchief crossed over the breast, the whole

surmounted by a straw hat, with a rim of immense width. They do not

carry on the manufactures of silk or woollen now, which were Rapp's

boast; they have "struck oil" instead, and are among the most successful

and skillful land-owners in Pennsylvania in the search for that

uncertain source of wealth.

The "Economite Wells" are on the Upper Alleghany, nearly opposite

Tidionte. In later years, I believe, children have been brought into the

society to be cared for by the women.

It needs no second-sight to discern the end of Rapp's scheme. His single

strength sustained the colony during his life, and since his death one

or two strong wills have kept it from crumbling to pieces, converting

the whole machinery of his system into a powerful money-making agent.

These men are the hand by which it keeps its hold on the world,--or the

market, perhaps I should say. They are intelligent and able; honorable

too, we are glad to know, for the sake of the quiet creatures drowsing

away their little remnant of life, fat and contented, driving their

ploughs through the fields, or smoking on the stoops of the village

houses when evening comes. I wonder if they ever cast a furtive glance

at the world and life from which Rapp's will so early shut them out?

When they finish smoking, one by one, the great revenues of the society

will probably fall into the hands of two or three active survivors, and

be merged into the small currents of trade, according to the rapid

sequence which always follows the accretion of large properties in this

country.

Rapp is remembered, already, even by the people whom he meant to serve,

only as a harsh and tyrannical ruler, and his very scheme will not only

prove futile, but be forgotten very soon after Fredrika and Joseph have

drank their last cup of home-made wine, and gone to sleep under the

trees in the apple-orchard.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _Vide_ Trustees of Harmony Society _vs._ Nachtrieb, 19 Howard, U. S.

Reports, p. 126, Campbell, J.

[B] Schreiber _vs._ Rapp, 5 Watts, 836, Gibson, C. J.

ABRAHAM DAVENPORT.

In the old days (a custom laid aside

With breeches and cocked hats) the people sent

Their wisest men to make the public laws.

And so, from a brown homestead, where the Sound

Drinks the small tribute of the Mianas,

Waved over by the woods of Rippowams,

And hallowed by pure lives and tranquil deaths,

Stamford sent up to the councils of the State

Wisdom and grace in Abraham Davenport.

'Twas on a May-day of the far old year

Seventeen hundred eighty, that there fell

Over the bloom and sweet life of the Spring,

Over the fresh earth and the heaven of noon,

A horror of great darkness, like the night

In day of which the Norland sagas tell,--

The Twilight of the Gods. The low-hung sky

Was black with ominous clouds, save where its rim

Was fringed with a dull glow, like that which climbs

The crater's sides from the red hell below.

Birds ceased to sing, and all the barn-yard fowls

Roosted; the cattle at the pasture bars

Lowed, and looked homeward; bats on leathern wings

Flitted abroad; the sounds of labor died;

Men prayed, and women wept; all ears grew sharp

To hear the doom-blast of the trumpet shatter

The black sky, that the dreadful face of Christ

Might look from the rent clouds, not as he looked

A loving guest at Bethany, but stern

As Justice and inexorable Law.

Meanwhile in the old State-House, dim as ghosts,

Sat the lawgivers of Connecticut,

Trembling beneath their legislative robes.

"It is the Lord's Great Day! Let us adjourn,"

Some said; and then, as if with one accord,

All eyes were turned to Abraham Davenport.

He rose, slow cleaving with his steady voice

The intolerable hush. "This well may be

The Day of Judgment which the world awaits;

But be it so or not, I only know

My present duty, and my Lord's command

To occupy till he come. So at the post

Where he hath set me in his providence,

I choose, for one, to meet him face to face,--

No faithless servant frightened from my task,

But ready when the Lord of the harvest calls;

And therefore, with all reverence, I would say,

Let God do his work, we will see to ours.

Bring in the candles." And they brought them in.

Then by the flaring lights the Speaker read,

Albeit with husky voice and shaking hands,

An act to amend an act to regulate

The shad and alewive fisheries. Whereupon

Wisely and well spake Abraham Davenport,

Straight to the question, with no figures of speech

Save the nine Arab signs, yet not without

The shrewd dry humor natural to the man:

His awe-struck colleagues listening all the while,

Between the pauses of his argument,

To hear the thunder of the wrath of God

Break from the hollow trumpet of the cloud.

And there he stands in memory to this day,

Erect, self-poised, a rugged face, half seen

Against the background of unnatural dark,

A witness to the ages as they pass,

That simple duty hath no place for fear.

LAST DAYS OF WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

PART II.

It is too general an opinion, confirmed by tradition, (and quite as

untrue as many traditions,) that Landor, seated securely upon his high

literary pedestal, never condescended to say a good word of writers of

less degree, and that the praise of greater lights was rarely on his

lips. They who persist in such assertions can have read but few of his

works, for none of his profession has given so much public approbation

to literary men. The form of his writings enabled him to show himself

more fully than is possible to most authors, and in all his many

literary discussions he gave expression to honest criticism, awarding

full praise in the numerous cases where it was due. Even at an age when

prejudice and petulancy are apt to get the better of a man's judgment,

Landor was most generous in his estimate of many young writers. I

remember to have once remarked, that on one page he had praised (and not

passingly) Cowper, Byron, Southey, Wordsworth, Burns, Campbell, Hemans,

and Scott. In the conversation between Archdeacon Hare and Landor, the

latter says: "I believe there are few, if any, who enjoy more heartily

than I do the best poetry of my contemporaries, or who have commended

them both in private and in public with less parsimony and reserve."

_Hare._ "Are you quite satisfied that you never have sought a pleasure

in detecting and exposing the faults of authors, even good ones?"

_Landor._ "I have here and there sought that pleasure, and found it. To

discover a truth and separate it from a falsehood is surely an

occupation of the best intellect, and not at all unworthy of the best

heart. Consider how few of our countrymen have done it, or attempted it,

on works of criticism; how few of them have analyzed and compared.

Without these two processes there can be no sound judgment on any

production of genius."

_Hare._ "How much better would it be if our reviewers and magazine men

would analyze, in this manner, to the extent of their abilities, and

would weigh evidence before they pass sentence!"

And if this analyzing is needed in England, the land of reviews and

reviewing, how much more necessary is it in America, where veritable

criticism is not even old enough to be young; its germ, however

grovelling it may be, not yet having taken the primary form of the

caterpillar.

Great as was Landor's personal animosity towards Byron, he considered

him a "great poet,"--"the keenest and most imaginative of poets"; nor

should we attribute this dislike to the bitter attacks made by Byron

upon the "deep-mouthed Boeotian," though surely such would be

sufficient to excite indignation in more amiable breasts. It was Byron's

furious assaults upon Landor's beloved friend, Southey, that roused the

ire of the lion poet; later knowledge of the man, derived from private

sources, helped to keep alive the fire of indignation. "While he wrote

or spoke against me alone, I said nothing of him in print or

conversation; but the taciturnity of pride gave way immediately to my

zeal in defence of my friend. What I write is not written on slate; and

no finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the clouds of years, can

efface it. To condemn what is evil and to commend what is good is

consistent. To soften an asperity, to speak all the good we can after

worse than we wish, is _that_, and more. If I must understand the

meaning of consistency as many do, I wish I may be inconsistent with all

my enemies. There are many hearts which have risen higher and sunk lower

at his tales, and yet have been shocked and sorrowed at his untimely

death a great deal less than mine has been. Honor and glory to him for

the extensive good he did! peace and forgiveness for the partial evil!"

Shall Landor be branded with intense egotism for claiming immortality?

Can it be denied that he will be read with admiration as long as

printing and the English language endure? Can there be greatness without

conscious power? Do those of us who believe in Christ as the grandest of

men degrade his manly and inspired self-confidence to the level of

egotism? Far be it from me, however, to insinuate a comparison where

none can exist, save as one ray of light may relate to the sun. Egotism

is the belief of narrow minds in the supreme significance of a mortal

self: conscious power is the belief in certain immortal attributes,

emanating from, and productive of, Truth and Beauty. I should not call

Landor an egotist.

The friendship existing between Southey and Landor must have had much of

the heroic element in it, for instances are rare where two writers have

so thoroughly esteemed one another. Those who have witnessed the

enthusiasm with which Landor spoke of Southey can readily imagine how

unpardonable a sin he considered it in Byron to make his friend an

object of satire. Landor's strong feelings necessarily caused him to be

classed in the _ou tout ou rien_ school. Seeing those whom he liked

through the magnifying-glass of perfection, he painted others in less

brilliant colors than perhaps they merited. Southey to Landor was the

essence of all good things, and there was no subject upon which he dwelt

with more unaffected pleasure. "Ah, Southey was the best man that ever

lived. There never was a better, my dear, good friends, Francis and

Julius Hare, excepted. They were true Christians; and it is an honor to

me that two such pure men should have been my friends for so many years,

up to the hour of death." It was to Julius Hare that Landor dedicated

his great work of "Pericles and Aspasia," and, while in England, it was

his habit to submit to this friend (and to his brother also, I think)

his manuscript. The complete edition of his works published in 1846 was

inscribed to Julius Hare and to John Forster, an equally devoted friend.

Both of the Hares have been embalmed in his verse.

Esteemed so highly in Landor's heart, Southey occupies the place of

honor in the "Imaginary Conversations," taking part in four dialogues,

two with Porson and two with Landor, on subjects of universal literary

interest, Milton and Wordsworth. These Conversations are among the most

valuable of the series, being models of criticism. Landor delighted to

record every meeting with Southey, where it was compatible with the

subject-matter. Thus in writing of Como he says: "It was in Como I

received and visited the brave descendants of the Jovii; it was in Como

I daily conversed with the calm, philosophical Sironi; and I must love

the little turreted city for other less intrinsic recollections. Thither

came to see me the learned and modest Bekker; and it was there, after

several delightful rambles, I said farewell to Southey." Often have I

heard Landor express his great liking for "The Curse of Kehama." One may

obtain an idea of how this admiration was reciprocated, from Southey's

criticism on "Gebir," in the Critical Review for September, 1799. Of

Gebir's speech to the Gadites, he says: "A passage more truly Homeric

than the close of this extract we do not remember in the volumes of

modern poetry." He took the entire poem as a model in blank verse. After

Southey's death, Landor used his influence with Lord Brougham to obtain

a pension for the family, in justice to the memory of one who had added

to the fame of England's literature. Again, in a letter to Southey's

son, the Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey, he pronounced a eulogy upon his

friend's character and public services.

Directing Landor's attention to the assertion in Pycroft's "Course of

English Reading," that he, Landor, failed to appreciate Chaucer, the old

man, much vexed, refuted such a falsehood, saying: "On the contrary, I

am a great admirer of his. I am extremely fond of the 'Canterbury

Tales.' I much prefer Chaucer to Spenser; for allegory, when spun out,

is unendurable." It is strange that a man apparently so well read as Mr.

Pycroft should have so unjustly interpreted Landor, when it needed but a

passing reference to the Conversations to disprove his statement. By

turning to the second dialogue between Southey and Landor, he might have

culled the following tribute to Chaucer: "I do not think Spenser equal

to Chaucer even in imagination, and he appears to me very inferior to

him in all other points, excepting harmony. Here the miscarriage is in

Chaucer's age, not in Chaucer, many of whose verses are highly

beautiful, but never (as in Spenser) one whole period. I love the

geniality of his temperature: no straining, no effort, no storm, no

fury. His vivid thoughts burst their way to us through the coarsest

integuments of language." In another book Landor says: "Since the time

of Chaucer there have been only two poets who at all resemble him; and

these two are widely dissimilar one from the other,--Burns and Keats.

The accuracy and truth with which Chaucer has described the manners of

common life, with the foreground and background, are also to be found in

Burns, who delights in broader strokes of external nature, but equally

appropriate. He has parts of genius which Chaucer has not in the same

degree,--the animated and pathetic. Keats, in his 'Endymion,' is richer

in imagery than either; and there are passages in which no poet has

arrived at the same excellence on the same ground. Time alone was

wanting to complete a poet, who already far surpassed all his

contemporaries in this country in the poet's most noble attributes."

Once more, in some beautiful lines to the fair and free soul of

poesy,--Keats,--Landor concludes with a verse that surely shows an

appreciation of Chaucer:--

"Ill may I speculate on scenes to come,

Yet would I dream to meet thee at our home

With Spenser's quiet, Chaucer's livelier ghost,

Cognate to thine,--not higher and less fair,--

And Madalene and Isabella there

Shall say, _Without thee half our loves were lost_."

When a man chooses an author as a companion, not for time but for

eternity, he gives the best possible proof of an esteem that no rash

assertion of critics can qualify.

"I have always deeply regretted that I never met Shelley," said Landor

to me. "It was my own fault, for I was in Pisa the winter he resided

there, and was told that Shelley desired to make my acquaintance. But I

refused to make his, as, at that time, I believed the disgraceful story

related of him in connection with his first wife. Years after, when I

called upon the second Mrs. Shelley, who, then a widow, was living out

of London, I related to her what I had heard. She assured me that it was

a most infamous falsehood, one of the many that had been maliciously

circulated about her husband. I expressed my sorrow at not having been

undeceived earlier, and assured her I never could forgive myself for

crediting a slander that had prevented me from knowing Shelley. I was

much pleased with Mrs. Shelley." Landor's enthusiasm was most aroused at

generous deeds; for these he honored Shelley. Meanness he scorned, and

believed it to be an attribute of Byron. As a proof of contrast in the

natures of these two poets, he related an interesting anecdote, which

has appeared in one of his Conversations. "Byron could comprehend

nothing heroic, nothing disinterested. Shelley, at the gates of Pisa,

threw himself between him and the dragoon, whose sword in his

indignation was lifted and about to strike. Byron told a common friend,

some time afterward, that he could not conceive how any man living

should act so. 'Do you know he might have been killed! and there was

every appearance that he would be!' The answer was, 'Between you and

Shelley there is but little similarity, and perhaps but little sympathy;

yet what Shelley did then, he would do again, and always. There is not a

human creature, not even the most hostile, that he would hesitate to

protect from injury at the imminent hazard of life.' ... 'By God! I

cannot understand it!' cried Byron. 'A man to run upon a naked sword for

another!'"

And this Shelley, who, through a noble impulse, would have sacrificed

himself, is the man whom Moore seriously advised Byron to avoid, lest

his religious theories should undermine the immaculate morality of the

author of Don Juan! It is to be supposed that Moore wrote in earnestness

of spirit, yet it is impossible not to smile in wonderment at this

letter. Moore doubtless had greater belief in salvation by faith than by

works. "Ah, Moore was a superstitious dog!" exclaimed Landor one day. "I

was once walking with him in a garden," (I forget in what part of

England,) "laughing and joking, when Moore remarked the approach of some

dignitary of the Catholic Church. He immediately began to mumble

something, ran forward, and on his knees implored a blessing from the

priest, crossing himself with reverential air. Ah, what it is to have

faith! Landor, Landor, you are incorrigible! Don't you think so,

Giallo?" asked the master of his dog. "I never heard Moore sing, much to

my regret. I once asked him, but he excused himself with a sigh, saying

that he had lost his voice."

* * * * *

One of Landor's prominent characteristics was generosity, carried to the

verge of rashness. Even in his last years, when living on a very limited

income, he was only too ready to empty his pockets at the call of any

charity, whether public or private. Impulse, however, prompted him to

give most heartily when he thought to further the cause of liberty. At

the time a subscription was opened in Florence to aid Garibaldi's

Sicilian expedition, Landor, anxious to lay an offering at the feet of

his heart's hero, pulled out his watch, the only article of value about

him, and begged Mr. Browning to present it to the fund. Mr. Browning

took it, but knowing how lost the old man would be without his

timepiece, kept it for a few days; and then, seizing a favorable moment

when Landor was missing his watch greatly, though without murmuring, Mr.

Browning persuaded him to retain it. This he did, with reluctance, after

being assured of the fund's prosperous condition. It was about the same

time, I think, that Landor wrote an Italian Conversation between

Savonarola and the Prior of San Marco, which he published in pamphlet

form for the benefit of this or a similar cause. Most admirably did

Landor write Italian, his wonderful knowledge of Latin undoubtedly

giving him the key to the soft, wooing tongue. He, of course, spoke the

language with equal correctness; but, as with most Englishmen who go to

Italy after having arrived at mature years, his pronunciation was

_proprio Inglese_.

Landor would never accept payment for his books, presenting the amount

due him either to the publisher, or, more generally, to some friend who

had been most active in aiding their publication. Few will applaud this

idiosyncrasy, the general and sensible opinion being that the laborer is

worthy of his hire: but Landor took peculiar pride in writing for fame

alone, without thought of the more tangible product of genius; and,

unlike most authors, he could well afford to indulge in this heroic

taste. Three years ago--and for the first time in his life, he

said--Landor accepted payment for a Conversation contributed to the

London Athenæum. The money had no sooner been received, than he urged,

though unsuccessfully, its acceptance upon a young American in whom he

was interested, declaring that he had no possible use for it. On another

occasion he proposed to give everything he might write to this same

American, to dispose of for the latter's benefit, and appeared grieved

when the offer was gratefully declined.

One day I was surprised by the appearance of Landor's little

waiting-maid bearing an old Florentine box of carved wood, almost as

large as herself, which she deposited on the table in obedience to her

master's wishes. She departed without vouchsafing any explanation.

Curiosity however was not long unsatisfied, for soon Giallo's white nose

peered through the door and heralded the coming of the old lion, who had

no sooner entered the room than he put into my hands a quaint old key,

saying: "I have brought you something that one of these days, when these

old bones of mine are packed away in the long box, may be of

considerable value. I have brought you what we may call, in anticipation

of a long-deferred but inevitable event, my literary remains. In that

box you will find all my notes and memoranda, together with many

unpublished verses. You can do what you like with them." Startled at

this unexpected endowment, I looked very great hesitancy, whereupon

Landor smiled, and begged me to unlock the box, as its opening would not

be fraught with evil consequences. "It is not Pandora's casket, I assure

you," he added. Turning the key and raising the lid, I discovered quite

a large collection of manuscripts, of very great interest to me of

course, but to which I had no right, nor was I the proper person with

whom to leave them. To have argued would have been useless.

Expostulation with Landor when in the white heat of a new idea was

Quixotic, so I expressed my very grateful thanks, and determined to

watch for a favorable opportunity to return the gift. I had not long to

wait, as it was not more than a month after that Landor bore them off,

with the intention of making certain selections for immediate

publication in England and returning the remainder. Time had not dealt

gently with Landor's memory of things nearest, therefore I knew that the

old Florentine box would wait in vain for its jewels. I was right: they

never came. The box since then has braved shipwreck, and now stands

beneath a modern writing-table, dark and proud of its antiquity,

telling perpetually of former noble associations. I felt relieved that

it so happened the manuscripts were not again left with me, yet I should

have been a saint had I not occasionally experienced a secret regret at

not having been forced to retain them in spite of entreaty and

propriety.

The greater part of these manuscripts have since appeared, under the

title of "Heroic Idyls, with Additional Poems," published late in 1863

by T. Cantley Newby, London.[C] This very last fruit off an old tree can

in no way add to Landor's reputation; it is interesting, however, for

having been written "within two paces of his ninetieth year," and as

showing the course of the mind's empire. Landor would have been more

heroic than these Idyls had he withheld them from publication, for it is

not cheering to see Thor cracking nuts with his most ponderous hammer.

And Landor realized as much when he wrote the following apology:--

"You ask how I, who could converse

With Pericles, can stoop to worse:

How I, who once had higher aims,

Can trifle so with epigrams.

I would not lose the wise from view,

But would amuse the children too:

Besides, my breath is short and weak,

And few must be the words I speak."

Ah! but it is a question whether the children are amused. Occasionally

there is a line with the old ring to it, a couplet seasoned with Attic

salt, but for the rest there is the body without the spirit,--there is

the well of English undefiled, but it is pumped dry! Probably the desire

to publish was never so great as during Landor's last years, when the

interests of his life had narrowed down to reading and writing, and he

had become a purely introverted man. It was then he wrote:--

"The heaviest curse that can on mortal fall

Is, 'Who has friends may he outlive them all!'

This malediction has awaited me,

Who had so many.... I could once count three."

Cursed thus, he turned to the public for the only consolation left him

on this side of the grave. It was not sufficient to write, for it is he

as the Homer of his Idyls that confesses

"A pardonable fault: we wish for listeners

Whether we speak or sing: the young and old

Alike are weak in this, unwise and wise

Cheerful and sorrowful."

Twenty years before, Landor wrote to Lady Blessington: "Once beyond

seventy, I will never write a line in verse or prose for publication. I

will be my own Gil Blas. The wisest of us are unconscious when our

faculties begin to decay." He, wisest of all, forgot his own good

resolutions; but the listeners to these latter-day Idyls were few, and

Landor had scarce collected his small audience before the lights were

blown out and the curtain fell upon the deathbed of the singer.

To express a liking for any of Landor's pictures--provided you were a

friend--was almost sufficient to cause them to be taken down and

presented to you; hence to praise anything in his presence was

exceedingly unsafe. I remember looking over a large album once belonging

to Barker, the English artist, which Landor had purchased to relieve him

of certain debts, and particularly admiring four original sketches by

Turner--two in oil and two in india-ink--that had been given by this

artist to his brother-painter. No sooner had I spoken than Landor went

in search of the scissors, and, had I not earnestly protested, would

have cut out the Turners and given them to me. Such being Landor's

disposition, one can well imagine how easily he could be imposed upon by

designing people. There is an instance of his kindly feeling so

prominent and so honorable both to himself and the object of it, that it

is but right the public should read the contents of two letters

belonging to and greatly treasured by me. They were put into my hands

nearly four years ago by Landor to do with as I pleased after his death.

The letters explain themselves.

"8 SOUTH BANK, REGENT'S PARK,

LONDON, March 24, 1856.

"MY VENERABLE FRIEND,--

"Though I very gratefully appreciate the generosity of your intentions,

still I must confess that few things have ever affected me more

painfully than to see from the 'Times' of to-day my private

circumstances--the sacred domain of life--thrust as an object of

commiseration upon public discussion,--a miserable subject of public

sneers.

"My head turns giddy at the very thought, and my resignation is scarcely

able to overcome the shame. I don't know how I shall muster sufficient

resolution to appear in public ever hereafter; and I fear, with all your

good intentions, you shall have become the involuntary instrument for

driving me out of England before my time. I really scarcely can imagine

what else I have to do, unless you devise some means for healing the

wound.

"I am poor, very poor; but there was, I dare say, something honorable in

that poverty, something sacred I would say. But seeing it made the

object of a public appeal for commiseration, I feel as if everything

that was sacred in my position had undergone a profanation.

"I repeat that I respect and appreciate the nobility of your impulses,

but I regret that such a step should have been taken without my having

an idea of its possibility.

"I will say no more, but leave it with your prudence and discretion to

mitigate the blow your kindness has inflicted on me. And remain with

wonted esteem, only mingled with grief,

"Yours very truly,

"KOSSUTH.

"TO WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR."

Opposite the nervous yet legible scrawl of the noble and maligned

Magyar, Landor traced the following answer.

"It is impossible for me to rest until I have attempted to remove the

vexation I have caused to the man I most venerate of any upon earth.

"My noble Kossuth! 'the sacred domain of your life' is far more

extensive than your measurement. Neither your house nor your banker's

are its confines. Do not imagine that the world is ignorant of your

circumstances; it would be a crime to be indifferent to them.

"The editor of the Atlas, in announcing that he had _secured your

co-operation_, published a manifesto. I know nothing of this editor; but

so long as you contributed to the paper, I was your humble subsidiary.

"Consider how many men, wealthier than you and me, have accepted the

offers of those who came forward to indemnify the persecuted for the

demolition of their property. Ask yourself if Demosthenes or Milton, the

two most illustrious defenders of liberty, by speech and pen, would have

thrust aside the tribute which is due to such men alone. Would you dash

out the signature of one who declares you his trustee for a legacy to

your children? No, you would not. Neither will you reject the proofs of

high esteem, however manifested, which England, however debased, is

anxious to give.

"Believe me ever sincerely and affectionately yours,

"W. S. LANDOR.

"March 27."

Landor was essentially a hero-worshipper. His admiration for Washington

exceeded that entertained by him for any man of any time. Franklin, too,

he greatly esteemed. "Ah, if you had but another Washington and

Franklin!" he exclaimed one day. To have suffered for freedom was the

open-sesame to Landor's heart; nor did age in any way chill this noble

enthusiasm, as the letter here inserted amply proves. It was sufficient

to name Kossuth to bring fire to the old man's eye and eulogistic

volubility to his tongue.

Orsini, too, was a great favorite with him. Coming in one morning as

usual, and sitting down in the arm-chair by the fire, he took from under

his arm a small paper-covered book, saying: "I have brought you

something that I know you will like to read. Giallo and I have enjoyed

it immensely; and a better critic than Giallo is not to be found in all

Italy, though I say it who shouldn't. An approving wag of his tail is

worth all the praise of all the Quarterlies published in the United

Kingdom." Hereupon Giallo, apparently delighted at this compliment,

barked and frisked about like a creature bewitched, jumped into his

master's lap, and did not return to a quiescent state until he had

kissed his master's face. "Down, Giallo, down!" finally cried Landor.

"Where are your manners, sir? Don't you know it is very uncivil to

interrupt a conversation? And, moreover, remember never to spoil a

_tête-à-tête_." Then turning to me, Landor continued, presenting the

book, "Here it is; the _Memorie Politiche di Felice Orsini_, which you

will find vastly entertaining and far more romantic than any novel. A

very noble, brave fellow was that Orsini, and handsome too! It is a

great pity he did not succeed in his plot against that scoundrel

Napoleon, although it was not well planned, and failure was written on

the face of it." Right gladly did I read memoirs which were all that

Landor (and Giallo) claimed. It is strange that this book should be so

little known. Were students of Italian to transfer their affections from

_Le mie Prigioni_ to these _Memorie Politiche_, they would be the

gainers; for the patriotism of Silvio Pellico is but a sick and weakly

sentiment compared with the dauntless energy and unflinching

determination of Orsini. His escape from Mantua, aided by no other

friends than four sheets and four towels, and described most admirably

and in detail by him, is one of the most brilliant and perilous exploits

in the annals of prison history. Those who knew Orsini have since told

me that he was one of the most lovable of men, as he was one of the most

handsome,--full of the fire of intense and stalwart manhood, yet as

gentle as a young girl. Disappointed and wronged in his domestic

relations, a loving but wretched father, and stung to madness by his

country's servitude, whose cause he early made his own, Orsini's life

was from the beginning a tragedy. Fate seemed to have wrested from him

every form of happiness in order to make him a more desperate

conspirator. He conspired from pure love of liberty, for which at any

moment he was ready to die. Those who merely know Orsini by the last act

of his life can have no proper appreciation of the wonderful purity and

nobility of his character. In his attempt to assassinate Louis Napoleon,

he was actuated by as exalted motives as led Charlotte Corday to do a

bloody deed. Exiled, a price upon his head, deceived by those in whom he

had put faith, in despair at the state of Italian affairs, Orsini

committed what he himself, in a letter to his intended victim, Napoleon,

confessed to be _un fatale errore mentale_,--assassination being in

direct opposition to the faith and facts of his life up to the

conspiracy of the 14th of January. For this fatal error he offered his

own blood as an expiatory sacrifice. Few nobler heads than Orsini's have

bowed before the guillotine.

In "Pericles and Aspasia," Cleone has written with Landor's pen, that

"study is the bane of boyhood, the aliment of youth, the indulgence of

manhood, and the restorative of old age." Of this theory there could be

no better example than Landor's self. That life which outlasted all the

friends of its zenith was made endurable by a constant devotion to the

greatest works of the greatest men. Milton and Shakespeare were his

constant companions, by night as well as by day. "I never tire of them,"

he would say; "they are always a revelation. And how grand is Milton's

prose! quite as fine as his poetry!" He was very fond of repeating the

following celebrated lines that have the true ring to a tuneful ear as

well as to an appreciative intellect:--

"But when God commands to take the trumpet

And blow a dolorous or thrilling blast,

It rests not with man's will what he shall say

Or what he shall conceal."

"Was anything more harmonious ever written?" Landor would ask. "But

Milton, you know, is old-fashioned. I believe _I_ am old-fashioned.

However, it is rather an honor to be classed thus, if one may keep such

distinguished company." How devoted a student of Milton Landor was is

evidenced in his delightful critical conversation between Southey and

himself, wherein he declared, "Such stupendous genius, so much fancy, so

much eloquence, so much vigor of intellect never were united as in

Paradise Lost." Yet the lover is still an impartial critic, and does not

indorse all things. Quoting the charming couplet,

"Yielded with coy submission, modest pride,

And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay,"

he says: "I would rather have written these two lines than all the

poetry that has been written since Milton's time in all the regions of

the earth." In 1861 Landor sent me the last lines he ever wrote,

addressed to the English Homer, entitled

"MILTON IN ITALY.

"O Milton! couldst thou rise again, and see

The land thou lovedst in an earlier day!

See, springing from her tomb, fair Italy

(Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away,--

That tightly-fastened, triply-folded shroud!

Around her, shameful sight! crowd upon crowd,

Nations in agony lie speechless down,

And Europe trembles at a despot's frown."

The despot is, of course, Louis Napoleon, for Landor would never allow

that the French Emperor comprehended his epoch, and that Italian

regeneration was in any way due to the co-operation of France. In his

allegorical poem of "The gardener and the Mole," the gardener at the

conclusion of the argument chops off the mole's head, such being the

fate to which the poet destined Napoleon. No reference, however, is made

to "that rascal" in the lines to Milton inserted in the "Heroic Idyls,"

and as the printed version was, doubtless, Landor's own preference, it

is but just to insert it here:--

"O Milton! couldst thou rise again and see

The land thou lovedst in _thy_ earlier day

See springing from her tomb fair Italy

(Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away,

That tightly-fastened, triply-folded shroud,

_Torn by her children off their mother's face!_

_O couldst thou see her now, more justly proud_

_Than of an earlier and a stronger race!"_

There certainly is more unity of idea in the printed copy, but so faulty

is it in punctuation--or at least for the want of it--that one is

warranted in believing the substitution of _thy_ for _an_, in the second

line, to be an _erratum_. Though Milton visited Italy in his youth,

there is no evidence to prove that he did not love it in old age. In its

present form the line loses in sense. Nothing annoyed Landor more than

to have his manuscript "corrected," and no one's temper was ever more

tried than his in this respect; for, having an orthography peculiar to

himself, which he maintained was according to the genius of the

language, and which printers would persist in translating into the

vulgate, Landor grew to be morbidly sensitive concerning revision. It

was the more intolerable to him, because of his extreme care in the

preparation of his manuscript. Few celebrated authors have written so

clear and clean a hand; none ever sent his work to the press in a more

highly finished state. Fastidious beyond expression, the labor of

correction was unending. Even "Gebir" was subjected to revision, and at

one time I was intrusted with quite a long introduction, which, the day

after, Landor altered and sent to me the following note.

"Again the old creature comes to bother you. The enclosed is to take the

place of what I wrote yesterday, and to cancel, as you will see, what a

tolerably good critic" (Southey) "thought _too good to be thrown away_,

&c., &c. I do not think so, but certainly the beginning of 'Gebir' is

better with

'Kings! ye athirst for conquest,' etc.

_You_ are not _athirst_ for it but _take it coolly_."

Later, this introduction passed out of my hands. Previously Landor had

written on a slip of paper now before me:--

"'Gebir' should begin thus:--

'Hear ye the fate of Gebir!'

_Not_

'I sing the _fates_ of Gebir,'"--

which is a correction suggested to future publishers of this poem.

It would be a hopeful sign were our young American writers inoculated

with somewhat of Landor's reverence for literature, as it was no less

than reverence that made him treat ideas with respect, and array them in

the most dignified language, thus making of every sentence a study. And

it is well that these writers should know what intense labor is required

to produce anything great or lasting. "Execution is the chariot of

genius," William Blake, the great poet-artist, has said; and it is just

this execution which is unattainable without immense application and

fastidiousness. If patience be genius,--"La patience cherche et le génie

trouve,"--and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there

be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at

so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue,

devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been

ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest critic

should be himself. To be carried away by the popular current is easy and

pleasant, but some fine morning the popular man wakes up to find himself

stranded and deserted,--Nature playing queer pranks with currents

changing their beds as best suits her fancy;--for even popular taste

follows laws of progression, and grows out of one error into a less.

Pope wisely maintains that "no man ever rose to any degree of perfection

in writing but through obstinacy and an inveterate resolution against

the stream of mankind." Unless he mount the chariot of execution, his

ideas, however good, will never put a girdle round the earth. They will

halt and limp as do his own weary feet.

* * * * *

Landor's enthusiasm for Shakespeare grew young as he grew old, and it

was his desire to bid farewell to earth with his eyes resting upon the

Shakespeare that so constantly lay open before him. Nothing excited his

indignation more than to hear little people of great pretension

carpingly criticise the man of whom he makes Southey, in a discussion

with Porson, declare, that "all the faults that ever were committed in

poetry would be but as air to earth, if we could weigh them against one

single thought or image such as almost every scene exhibits in every

drama of this unrivalled genius." In three fine lines Landor has said

even more:--

"In poetry there is but one supreme,

Though there are many angels round his throne,

Mighty, and beauteous, while his face is hid."

To Landor's superior acumen, also, we owe two readings of Shakespeare

that have made intelligible what was previously "a contradictory

inconceivable." Did it ever occur to dealers in familiar quotations that

there was a deal of nonsense in the following lines as they are printed?

"_Vaulting_ ambition that o'erleaps _itself_

And falls on the _other side_."

"Other side of what?" exclaims Landor "It should be _its sell_. _Sell_

is _saddle_ in Spenser and elsewhere, from the Latin and Italian." Yet,

in spite of correction, every Macbeth on the stage still maintains in

stentorian tones that ambition o'erleaps _itself_, thereby demonstrating

how useless it is to look for Shakespearian scholarship in so-called

Shakespearian actors, who blindly and indolently accept theatrical

tradition.

Equally important is Landor's correction of the lines

"And the _delighted_ spirit

To bathe in fiery floods."

"Truly this would be a very odd species of delight. But Shakespeare

never wrote such nonsense; he wrote _belighted_ (whence our _blighted_),

struck by lightning; a fit preparation for such bathing."

The last stanza ever inscribed to Shakespeare by Landor was sent to me

with the following preface: "An old man sends the last verses he has

written, or probably he may ever write to ---- ----."

"SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY.

"Beyond our shores, beyond the Apennines,

Shakespeare, from heaven came thy creative breath!

'Mid citron grove and overarching vines

Thy genius wept at Desdemona's death:

In the proud sire thou badest anger cease,

And Juliet by her Romeo sleep in peace.

Then rose thy voice above the stormy sea,

And Ariel flew from Prospero to thee.

"July 1, 1860."

Dante was not one of Landor's favorites, although he was quite ready to

allow the greatness of _il gran poeta_. He had no sympathy with what he

said was very properly called a comedy. He would declare that about one

sixth only of Dante was intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's

writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to

Dante. In the "Pen_te_meron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the garb

of Petrarch, asserts that "at least sixteen parts in twenty of the

_Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ are detestable both in poetry and principle;

the higher parts are excellent, indeed." Dante's powers of language, he

allows, "are prodigious; and, in the solitary places where he exerts his

force rightly, the stroke is irresistible. But how greatly to be pitied

must he be who can find nothing in Paradise better than sterile

theology! and what an object of sadness and consternation he who rises

up from hell like a giant refreshed!" While allowing his wonderful

originality, Landor goes so far as to call him "the great master of the

disgusting"! Dante is not sympathetic.

Yet he wrote the glorious episode of Francesca da Rimini, of which

Landor's Boccaccio says: "Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a

delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius;

and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the

work, betrays a deplorable want of it."

Landor used often to say what Cleone has written to Aspasia,--"I do not

believe the best writers of love-poetry ever loved. How could they write

if they did? where could they collect the thoughts, the words, the

courage?" This very discouraging belief admits of argument, for there is

much proof to the contrary. Shelley and Keats could not write what they

had not felt; and Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, the most

exquisite love-poems in the English language, came direct from the

heart. It were hardly possible to make poetry while living it; but when

the white heat of passion has passed, and hangs as a beautiful picture

on memory's walls, the artist may write his poem. If the best writers of

love-poetry have never loved, at least they have been capable of loving,

or they could not make the reader feel. Appreciation is necessary to

production. But Petrarca was such a poet as Cleone refers to. He was

happy to be theoretically miserable, that he might indite sonnets to an

unrequited passion: and who is not sensible of their insincerity? One is

inclined to include Dante in the same category, though far higher in

degree. Landor, however, has conceived the existence of a truly ardent

affection between Dante and Beatrice, and it was my good fortune to hear

him read this beautiful imaginary conversation. To witness the aged poet

throwing the pathos of his voice into the pathos of his intellect, his

eyes flooded with tears, was a scene of uncommon interest. "Ah!" said

he, while closing the book, "I never wrote anything half as good as

that, and I never can read it that the tears do not come." Landor's

voice must have been exceedingly rich and harmonious, as it then (1861)

possessed much fulness. This was the first and only time I ever heard

him read aloud one of his own Conversations.

* * * * *

Petrarch and Boccaccio were highly esteemed by Landor, who did not

sympathize with Lord Chesterfield in his opinion that the former

deserved his _Laura_ better than his _lauro_. The best evidence of this

predilection is Landor's great work, "The Pentemeron," second only to

his greatest, "Pericles and Aspasia." Its _couleur locale_ is

marvellous. On every page there is a glimpse of cloudless blue sky, a

breath of warm sunny air, a sketch of Italian manner. The masterly

_gusto_ with which the author enters into the spirit of Italy would

make us believe him to be "the noblest Roman of them all," had he not

proved himself a better Grecian. Margaret Fuller realized this when,

after comparing the Pentemeron and Petrarca together, she wrote: "I find

the prose of the Englishman worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a

happiness to see such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary."

* * * * *

I gave evidence of great surprise one day upon hearing Landor express

himself warmly in favor of Alfieri, as I had naturally concluded, from a

note appended to the Conversation between "Galileo, Milton, and a

Dominican," that he entertained a sorry opinion of this poet. Reading

the note referred to, Landor seemed to be greatly annoyed, and replied:

"This is a mistake. It was never my intention to condemn Alfieri so

sweepingly." A few days later I received the following correction.

"Keats, in whom the spirit of poetry was stronger than in any

contemporary, at home or abroad, delighted in Hellenic imagery and

mythology, displaying them admirably; but no poet came nearer than

Alfieri to the heroic, since Virgil. Disliking, as I do, prefaces and

annotations, excrescences which hang loose like the deciduous bark on a

plane-tree, I will here notice an omission of mine on Alfieri, in the

'Imaginary Conversations.' The words, '_There is not a glimpse of poetry

in his Tragedies_,' should be, as written, '_There is not an extraneous

glimpse_,' &c."

Since then Landor has addressed these lines to Alfieri:--

"Thou art present in my sight,

Though far removed from us, for thou alone

Hast touched the inmost fibres of the breast,

Since Tasso's tears made damper the damp floor

Whereon one only light came through the bars," &c.;

thus redeeming the unintentioned slur of many years' publicity.

Landor pronounced (as must everyone else) Niccolini to be the best of

the recent Italian poets. Of Redi, whose verses taste of the rich juice

of the grape in those good old days when Tuscan vines had not become

demoralized, and wine was cheaper than water, Landor spoke fondly. Leigh

Hunt has given English readers a quaff of Redi in his rollicking

translation of "Bacchus in Tuscany," which is steeped in

"Montepulciano," "the king of all wine."

But Redi is not always bacchanalian. He has a loving, human heart as

well, which Landor has shown in a charming translation given to me

shortly after our conversation concerning this poet. "I never publish

translations," he remarked at the time; but though translations may not

be fit company for the "Imaginary Conversations," the verses from Redi

are more than worthy of an abiding place here.

"Ye gentle souls! ye love-devoted fair!

Who, passing by, to Pity's voice incline,

O stay awhile and hear me; then declare

If there was ever grief that equals mine.

"There was a woman to whose sacred breast

Faith had retired, where Honor fixt his throne,

Pride, though upheld by Virtue she represt....

Ye gentle souls! that woman was my own.

"Beauty was more than beauty in her face,

Grace was in all she did, in all she said.

In sorrow as in pleasure there was grace....

Ye gentle souls! that gentle soul is fled."

FOOTNOTES:

[C] Out of three hundred and forty-eight pages, sixty-eight are devoted

to Latin verses.

TO-MORROW.

'Tis late at night, and in the realm of sleep

My little lambs are folded like the flocks;

From room to room I hear the wakeful clocks

Challenge the passing hour, like guards that keep

Their solitary watch on tower and steep;

Far off I hear the crowing of the cocks,

And through the opening door that time unlocks

Feel the fresh breathing of To-morrow creep.

To-morrow! the mysterious, unknown guest,

Who cries aloud: "Remember Barmecide,

And tremble to be happy with the rest!"

And I make answer: "I am satisfied;

I dare not ask; I know not what is best;

God hath already said what shall betide."

DOCTOR JOHNS.

LVIII.

A letter from Reuben indeed has come; but not for Miss Adèle. The Doctor

is glad of the relief its perusal will give him. Meantime Miss Eliza, in

her stately, patronizing manner, and with a coolness that was worse than

a sneer, says, "I hope you have pleasant news from your various friends

abroad, Miss Maverick?"

Adèle lifted her eyes with a glitter in them that for a moment was

almost serpent-like; then, as if regretting her show of vexation, and

with an evasive reply, bowed her head again to brood over the strange

suspicions that haunted her. Miss Johns, totally unmoved,--thinking all

the grief but a righteous dispensation for the sin in which the poor

child had been born,--next addressed the Doctor, who had run his eye

with extraordinary eagerness through the letter of his son.

"What does Reuben say, Benjamin?"

"His 'idols,' again, Eliza; 't is always the 'flesh-pots of Egypt.'"

And the Doctor reads: "There is just now rare promise of a good venture

in our trade at one of the ports of Sicily, and we have freighted two

ships for immediate despatch. At the last moment our supercargo has

failed us, and Brindlock has suggested that I go myself; it is short

notice, as the ship is in the stream and may sail to-morrow, but I

rather fancy the idea, and have determined to go. I hope you will

approve. Of course, I shall have no time to run up to Ashfield to say

good by. I shall try for a freight back from Naples, otherwise shall

make some excuse to run across the Straits for a look at Vesuvius and

the matters thereabout. St. Paul, you know, voyaged in those seas, which

will interest you in my trip. I dare say I shall find where he landed:

it's not far from Naples, Mrs. Brindlock tells me. Give love to the

people who ever ask about me in Ashfield. I enclose a check of five

hundred dollars for parish contingencies till I come back; hoping to

find you clean out of harness by that time." (The Doctor cannot for his

life repress a little smile here.) "Tell Adèle I shall see her blue

Mediterranean at last, and will bring her back an olive-leaf, if I find

any growing within reach. Tell Phil I love him, and that he deserves all

the good he will surely get in this world, or in any other. Ditto for

Rose. Ditto for good old Mrs. Elderkin, whom I could almost kiss for the

love she's shown me. What high old romps haven't we had in her garden!

Eh, Adèle? (I suppose you'll show her this letter, father.)

"Good by, again.

"N. B. We hope to make a cool thirty thousand out of this venture!"

Adèle had half roused herself at the hearing of her name, but the

careless, jocular mention of it, (so it seemed at least,) in contrast

with the warmer leave-taking of other friends, added a new pang to her

distress. She wished, for a moment, that she had never written her

letter of thanks. What if she wished--in that hour of terrible suspicion

and of vain search after any object upon which her future happiness

might rest--that she had never been born? Many a one has given hearty

utterance to that wish with less cause. Many a one of those just

tottering into childhood will live to give utterance to the same. But

the great wheel of fate turns ever relentlessly on. It drags us up from

the nether mysterious depths; we sport and struggle and writhe and

rejoice, as it bears us into the flashing blaze of life's meridian;

then, with awful surety, it hurries us down, drags us under, once more

into the abysses of silence and of mystery. Happy he who reads such

promise as he passes in the lights fixed forever on the infinite depths

above, that the silence and the mystery shall be as welcome as sleep to

the tired worker!

"It will be of service to Reuben, I think, Benjamin," said Aunt Eliza;

"I quite approve,"--and slipped away noiselessly.

The Doctor was still musing,--the letter in his hand,--when Adèle rose,

and, approaching him, said in her gentlest way, "It's a great grief to

you, New Papa, I know it is, but 'God orders all things well,'--except

for me."

"Adaly! my child, I am shocked!"

She had roused the preacher in him unwittingly.

"I can't listen now," said she, impatiently, "and tell me,--you

must,--did papa give you the name of this--new person he is to marry?"

"Yes, Adaly, yes," but he has forgotten it; and, searching for the

previous letter, he presently finds it, and sets it before

her,--"Mademoiselle Chalet."

"Chalet!" screams she. "There is some horrible mistake, New Papa. More

than ever I am in the dark,--in the dark!" And with a hasty adieu she

rushed away, taking her course straight for the house of that outlawed

woman, with whom now, more than ever, she must have so many sympathies

in common. Her present object, however, was to learn if any more

definite evidence could be found that the deceased lady--mother still,

in her thought--bore the name of Chalet. She found the evidence. One or

two little books (devotional books they prove to be), which the mistress

of the house had thrown by as valueless, were brought out, upon the

fly-leaves of which the keen eyes of Adèle detected the name,--crossed

and recrossed indeed, as if the poor woman would have destroyed all

traces of her identity,--but still showing when held to the light a

portion of the name she so cherished in her heart,--Chalet.

Adèle was more than ever incensed at thought of the delusion or the

deception of her father. But, by degrees, her indignation yielded to her

affection. He was himself to come, he would make it clear; this new

mother--whom she was sure she should not love--was to remain; the Doctor

had told her this much. She was glad of it. Yet she found in that fact a

new proof that this person could not be her true mother. _She_ would

have rushed to her arms; no fear of idle tongues could have kept her

back. And though she yearned for the time when she should be clasped

once more in her father's arms, she dreaded the thought of crossing the

seas with him upon such empty pilgrimage. She half wished for some

excuse to detain her here,--some fast anchor by which her love might

cling, within reach of that grave where her holier affections had

centred.

This wish was confirmed by the more cordial manner in which she was

received by the Elderkins, and, indeed, by the whole village, so soon as

the Doctor had made known the fact--as he did upon the earliest

occasion--that Mr. Maverick was speedily to come for Adèle, and to

restore her to the embraces of a mother whom she had not seen for years.

Even the spinster, at the parsonage, was disposed to credit something to

the rigid legal aspects which the affair was taking, and to find in them

a shelter for her wounded dignities. Nor did she share the inquietude of

the Doctor at thought of the new and terrible religious influences to

which Adèle must presently be exposed; under her rigid regard, this

environment of the poor victim with all the subtlest influences of the

Babylonish Church was but a proper and orderly retribution under

Providence for family sins and the old spurning of the law. 'T was

right, in her exalted view, that she should struggle and agonize and

wrestle with Satan for much time to come, before she should fully

cleanse her bedraggled skirts of all taint of heathenism, and stand upon

the high plane with herself, among the elect.

"It is satisfactory to reflect, Benjamin," said she, "that during her

residence with us the poor girl has been imbued with right principles;

at least I trust so."

And as she spoke, the exemplary old lady plucked a little waif of down

from her bombazine dress, and snapped it away jauntily upon the

air,--even as, throughout her life, she had snapped from her the

temptations of the world. And when, in his Scripture reading that very

night, the Doctor came upon the passage "_Wo unto you, Pharisees!_" the

mind of the spinster was cheerfully intent upon the wretched sinners of

Judæa.

LIX.

THE news of Maverick's prospective arrival, and the comments of the good

Doctor,--as we have said,--shed a new light upon the position of Adèle.

Old Squire Elderkin, with a fatherly interest, was not unaffected by it;

indeed, the Doctor had been communicative with him to a degree that had

enlisted very warmly the old gentleman's sympathies.

"Better late than never, Doctor," had been his comment; and he had

thought it worth his while to drop a hint or two in the ear of Phil.

"I say, Phil, my boy, I gave you a word of caution not long ago in

regard to--to Miss Maverick. There were some bad stories afloat, my boy;

but they are cleared up,--quite cleared up, Phil."

"I'm glad of it, sir," says Phil.

"So am I,--so am I, my boy. She's a fine girl, Phil, eh?"

"I think she is, sir."

"The deuse you do! Well, and what then?"

Phil blushed, but the smile that came on his face was not a hearty one.

"Well, Phil?"

"I said she was a fine girl, sir," said he, measuredly.

"But she's an uncommon fine girl, Phil, eh?"

"I think she is, sir."

"Well?"

Phil was twirling his hat in an abstracted way between his knees. "I

don't think she's to be won very easily," said he at last.

"Nonsense, Phil! Faint heart never won. Make a bold push for it, my boy.

The best birds drop at a quick shot."

"Do they?" said Phil, with a smile of incredulity that the old gentleman

did not comprehend.

He found, indeed, a much larger measure of hope in a little hint that

was let fall by Rose two days after. "I wouldn't despair if I were you,

Phil," she had whispered in his ear.

Ah, those quiet, tender, sisterly words of encouragement, of cheer, of

hope! Blest is the man who can enjoy them! and accursed must he be who

scorns them, or who can never win them.

Phil, indeed, had never given over most devoted and respectful

attentions to Adèle; but he had shown them latterly with a subdued and

half-distrustful air, which Adèle with her keen insight had not been

slow to understand. Trust a woman for fathoming all the shades of doubt

which overhang the addresses of a lover!

Yet it was not easy for Phil, or indeed for any other, to understand or

explain the manner of Adèle at this time. Elated she certainly was in

the highest degree at the thought of meeting and welcoming her father;

and there was an exuberance in her spirits when she talked of it, that

seemed almost unnatural; but the coming shadow of the new mother whom

she was bound to welcome dampened all. The Doctor indeed had warned her

against the Romish prejudices of this newly found relative, and had

entreated her to cling by the faith in which she had been reared; but it

was no fear of any such conflict that oppressed her;--creeds all

vanished under the blaze of that natural affection which craved a

motherly embrace and which foresaw only falsity.

What wonder if her thought ran back, in its craving, to the days long

gone,--to the land where the olive grew upon the hills, and the sunshine

lay upon the sea,--where an old godmother, with withered hands clasped

and raised, lifted up her voice at nightfall and chanted,--

"O sanctissima,

O piissima,

Dulcis virgo Maria,

Mater amata,

Intemerata,

Ora, ora, pro nobis!"

The Doctor would have been shocked had he heard the words tripping from

the tongue of Adèle; yet, for her, they had no meaning save as

expressive of a deep yearning for motherly guidance and motherly

affection.

Mrs. Elderkin, with her kindly instinct, had seen the perplexity of

Adèle, and had said to her one day, "Ady, my dear, is the thought not

grateful to you that you will meet your mother once more, and be clasped

in her arms?"

"If I could,--if I could!" said Adèle, with a burst of tears.

"But you will, my child, you will. The Doctor has shown us the letters

of your father. Nothing can be clearer. Even now she must be longing to

greet you."

"Why does she not come, then?"--with a tone that was almost taunting.

"But, Adèle, my dear, there may be reasons of which you do not know or

which you could not understand."

"I could,--I do!" said Adèle, with spirit mastering her grief. "'T is

not my mother, my true mother; she is in the graveyard; I know it!"

"My dear child, do not decide hastily. We love you; we all love you. You

know that. And whatever may happen, you shall have a home with us. I

will be a mother to you, Adèle."

The girl kissed her good hostess, and the words lingered on her ear long

after nightfall. Why not her mother? What parent could be more kind?

What home more grateful? And should she bring dishonor to it then? Could

she be less sensitive to that thought than her father had already shown

himself? She perceives, indeed, that within a short time, and since the

later communications from her father, the manner of those who had looked

most suspiciously upon her has changed. But they do not know the secret

of that broidered kerchief,--the secret of that terrible death-clasp,

which she never, never can forget. She will be true to her own sense of

honor; she will be true, too, to her own faith,--the faith in which she

has been reared,--whatever may be the persuasions of that new relative

beyond the seas whom she so dreads to meet.

Indeed, it is with dreary anticipations that she forecasts now her

return to that _belle France_ which has so long borne olive-branches

along its shores for welcome; she foresees struggle, change,

hypocrisies, may be,--who can tell?--and she begins to count the weeks

of her stay amid the quiet of Ashfield in the same spirit in which

youngsters score off the remaining days of the long vacation. Adèle

finds herself gathering, and pressing within the leaves of some

cherished book, little sprays of dead bloom that shall be, in the dim

and mysterious future, mementoes of the walks, the frolics, the joys

that have belonged to this staid New England home. From the very

parsonage door she has brought away a sprig of a rampant sweet-brier

that has grown there this many a year, and its delicate leaflets are

among her chiefest treasures.

More eagerly than ever she listens to the kindly voices that greet her

and speak cheer to her in the home of the Elderkins,--voices which she

feels bitterly will soon be heard no more by her. Even the delicate and

always respectful attentions of Phil have an added, though a painful

charm, since they are so soon to have an end. She knows that she will

remember him always, though his tenderest words can waken no hopes of a

brighter future for her. She even takes him partially into her

confidence, and, strolling with him down the street one day, she decoys

him to the churchyard gate, where she points out to him the stone she

had placed over the grave that was so sacred to her.

"Phil," said she, "you have always been full of kindness for me. When I

am gone, have a care of that stone and grave, please, Phil. My best

friend lies there."

"I don't think you know your best friends," stammered Phil.

"I know you are one," said Adèle, calmly, "and that I can trust you to

do what I ask about this grave. Can I, Phil?"

"You know you can, Adèle; but I don't like this talk of your going, as

if you were never to be among us again. Do you think you can be happiest

yonder with strangers, Adèle?"

"It's not--where I can be happiest, Phil; I don't ask myself that

question; I fear I never can";--and her lips trembled as she said it.

"You can,--you ought," burst out Phil, fired at sight of her emotion,

and would have gone on bravely and gallantly, may be, with the passion

that was surging in him, if a look of hers and a warning finger had not

stayed him.

"We'll talk no more of this, Phil"; and her lips were as firm as iron

now.

Both of them serious and silent for a while; until at length Adèle, in

quite her old manner, says: "Of course, Phil, father may bring me to

America again some day; and if so, I shall certainly beg for a little

visit in Ashfield. It would be very ungrateful in me not to remember the

pleasant times I've had here."

But Phil cannot so deftly change the color of his talk; his chattiness

has all gone from him. Nor does it revive on reaching home. Good Mrs.

Elderkin says, "What makes you so crusty, Phil?"

LX.

Maverick arrives, as he had promised to do, some time in early July;

comes up from the city without announcing himself in advance; and,

leaving the old coach, which still makes its periodical trips from the

river, a mile out from the town, strolls along the highway. He remembers

well the old outline of the hills; and the straggling hedge-rows, the

scattered granite boulders, the whistling of a quail from a near fence

in the meadow, all recall the old scenes which he knew in boyhood. At a

solitary house by the wayside a flaxen-haired youngster is blowing off

soap-bubbles into the air,--with obstreperous glee whenever one rises

above the house-tops,--while the mother, with arms akimbo, looks

admiringly from the open window. It was the home to which the feet of

Adèle had latterly so often wandered.

Maverick is anxious for a word with the Doctor before his interview with

Adèle even. He does not know her present home; but he is sure he can

recall the old parsonage, in whose exterior, indeed, there have been no

changes for years. The shade of the embowering elms is grateful as he

strolls on into the main street of the town. It is early afternoon, and

there are few passers-by. Here and there a blind is coyly turned, and a

sly glance cast upon the stranger. A trio of school-boys look

wonderingly at his foreign air and dress. A few loiterers upon the

tavern steps--instructed, doubtless, by the stage-driver, who has duly

delivered his portmanteau--remark upon him as he passes.

And now at last he sees the old porch,--the diamond lights in the door.

Twenty and more years ago, and he had lounged there, as the pretty

Rachel drove up in the parson's chaise. The same rose-brier is nodding

its untrimmed boughs by the door. From the open window above he catches

a glimpse of a hard, thin face, with spectacles on nose, that scans him

curiously. The Doctor's hat and cane are upon the table at the foot of

the stairs within. He taps with his knuckles upon the study-door,--and

again the two college mates are met together. At sight of the visitor,

whom he recognizes at a glance, the heart of the old man is stirred by a

little of the old youthful feeling.

"Maverick!" and he greets him with open hand.

"Johns, God bless you!"

The parson was white-haired, and was feeble to a degree that shocked

Maverick; while the latter was still erect and prim, and, with his gray

hair carefully brushed to conceal his growing baldness, appeared in

excellent preservation. His coquettings for sixty years with the world,

the flesh, and the Devil had not yet reduced his _phisique_ to that

degree of weakness which the multiplied spiritual wrestlings had

entailed upon the good Doctor. The minister recognized this with a look

rather of pity than of envy, and may possibly have bethought himself of

that Dives who "in his lifetime received good things," but "now is

tormented."

Yet he ventured upon no warning; there is, indeed, a certain assured

manner about the man of the world who has passed middle age, which a

country parson, however good or earnest he may be, would no more attempt

to pierce than he would attempt a thrust of his pen through ice.

Their conversation, after the first greetings, naturally centres upon

Adèle. Maverick is relieved to find that she knows, even now, the worst;

but he is grievously pained to learn that she is still in doubt, by

reason of that strange episode which had grown out of the presence and

death of Madame Arles,--an episode which, even now, he is at a loss to

explain.

"She will be unwilling to return with me then," said Maverick, in a

troubled manner.

"No," said the Doctor, "she expects that. You will find in her,

Maverick, a beautiful respect for your authority; and, I think, a still

higher respect for the truth."

So it was with disturbed and conflicting feelings that Maverick made his

way to the present home of Adèle.

The windows and doors of the Elderkin mansion were all open upon that

July day. Adèle had seen him, even as he entered the little gate, and,

recognizing him on the instant, had rushed down to meet him in the hall.

"Papa! papa!" and she had buried her face upon his bosom.

"Adèle, darling! you are glad to welcome me then?"

"Delighted, papa."

And Maverick kissed, again and again, that fair face of which he was so

proud.

We recoil from the attempt to transcribe the glowing intimacy of their

first talk.

After a time, Maverick says, "You will be glad to return with me,--glad

to embrace again your mother?"

"My own, true mother?" said Adèle, the blood running now swift over

cheek and brow.

"Your own, Adèle,--your own! As God is true!"

Adèle grows calm,--an unwonted calmness. "Tell me how she looks, papa,"

said she.

"Your figure, Adèle; not so tall, perhaps, but slight like you; and her

hair,--you have her hair, darling (and he kissed it). Your eye too, for

color, with a slight, hardly noticeable cast in it." And as Adèle turned

an inquiring glance upon him, he exclaimed: "You have that too, my

darling, as you look at me now."

Adèle, still calm, says: "I know it, papa; I have seen her. Do not

deceive me. She died in these arms, papa!"--and with that her calmness

is gone. She can only weep upon his shoulder.

"But, Adèle, child, this cannot be; do not trust to so wild a fancy. You

surely believe me, darling!"

Had she argued the matter, he would have been better satisfied. She did

not, however. Her old tranquillity came again.

"I will go with you, papa, cheerfully," said she.

It was only too evident to Maverick that there was a cause of distrust

between them. Under all of Adèle's earnest demonstrations of affection,

which were intensely grateful to him, there was still a certain apparent

reserve of confidence, as if some great inward leaning of her heart

found no support in him or his. This touched him to the quick. The

Doctor--had he unfolded the matter to him fully--would have called it,

may be, the sting of retribution. Nor was Maverick at all certain that

the shadowy doubt which seemed to rest upon the mind of Adèle with

respect to the identity of her mother was the sole cause of this secret

reserve of confidence. It might be, he thought, that her affections were

otherwise engaged, and that the change to which she assented with so

little fervor would be at the cost of other ties to which he was a

stranger.

On this score he consulted with the Doctor. As regarded Reuben, there

could be no doubt. Whatever tie may have existed there was long since

broken. With respect to Phil Elderkin the parson was not so certain.

Maverick had been attracted by his fine, frank manner, and was not blind

to his capital business capacities and prospects. If the happiness of

Adèle were in question, he could entertain the affair. He even ventured

to approach the topic--coyly as he could--in a talk with Adèle; and she,

as the first glimmer of his meaning dawned upon her, says, "Don't

whisper it, papa. It can never be."

And so Maverick--not a little disconcerted at the thought that he cannot

now, as once, fathom all the depths of his child's sensibilities--sets

himself resolutely to the work of preparation for departure. His

_affaires_ may keep him a month, and involve a visit to one or two of

the principal cities; then, ho for _la belle France_! Adèle certainly

lends a cheerful assent. He cannot doubt--with those repeated kisses on

his cheek and brow--her earnest filial affection; and if her sentiment

slips beyond his control, or parries all his keenness of vision, what

else has a father, verging upon sixty, to expect in a daughter, tenderly

affectionate as she may be? Maverick's philosophy taught him to "take

the world as it is." Only one serious apprehension of disquietude

oppressed him; the doubts and vagaries of Adèle would clear themselves

under the embrace of Julie; but in respect to the harmony of their

religious beliefs he had grave doubts. There had grown upon Adèle, since

he had last seen her, a womanly dignity, which even a mother must

respect; and into that dignity--into the woof and warp of it--were

inwrought all her religious sympathies. Was his home yonder, across the

seas, to become the scene of struggles about creeds? It certainly was

not the sort of domestic picture he had foreshadowed to himself at

twenty-five. But at sixty a man blows bubbles no longer--except that of

his own conceit. The heart of Maverick was not dead in him; a kiss of

Adèle wakened a thrilling, delicious sensation there, of which he had

forgotten his capability. He followed her graceful step and figure with

an eye that looked beyond and haunted the past--vainly, vainly! Her

"Papa!"--sweetly uttered--stirred sensibilities in him that amazed

himself, and seemed like the phantoms of dreams he dreamed long ago.

But in the midst of Maverick's preparations for departure a letter came

to hand from Mrs. Maverick, which complicated once more the situation.

LXI.

The mother has read the letter of her child,--the letter in which appeal

had been made to the father in behalf of the "unworthy" one whom the

daughter believed to be sleeping in her grave. The tenderness of the

appeal smote the poor woman to the heart. It bound her to the child she

scarce had seen by bonds into which her whole moral being was knitted

anew. But we must give the letter entire, as offering explanations which

can in no way be better set forth. The very language kindles the ardor

of Adèle. Her own old speech again, with the French echo of her

childhood in every line.

"_Mon cher Monsieur_,"--in this way she begins; for her religious

severities, if not her years, have curbed any disposition to explosive

tenderness,--"I have received the letter of our child, which was

addressed to you. I cannot tell you the feelings with which I have read

it. I long to clasp her to my heart. And she appeals to you, for

me,--the dear child! Yes, you have well done in telling her that I was

unworthy (_méchante_). It is true,--unworthy in forgetting

duty,--unworthy in loving too well. O Monsieur! if I could live over

again that life,--that dear young life among the olive orchards! But the

good Christ (thank Him!) leads back the repentant wanderers into the

fold of His Church.

'Laus tibi, Christe!'

"And the poor child believes that I am in my grave! May be that were

better for her and better for me. But no, I shall clasp her to my heart

once more,--she, the poor babe! But I forget myself; it is a woman's

letter I have been reading. What earnestness! what maturity! what

dignity! what tenderness! And will she be as tender to the living as to

the erring one whom she believes dead? My heart stops when I ask myself.

Yes, I know she will. The Blessed Virgin whispers me that she will, and

I fly to greet her! A month, two months, three months, four months?--It

is an age.

"Monsieur! I cannot wait. I must take ship--sail--wings (if I could find

them), and go to meet my child. Until I do there is a tempest in my

brain--heart--everywhere. You are surprised, Monsieur, but there is

another reason why I should go to this land where Adèle has lived. Do

you wish to know it? Listen, then, Monsieur!

"Do you know who this poor sufferer was whom our child had learned so to

love, who died in her arms, who sleeps in the graveyard there, and of

whom Adèle thinks as of a mother? I have inquired, I have searched high

and low, I have fathomed all. Ah, my poor, good sister Marie! Only

Marie! You have never known her. In those other days at dear Arles she

was too good for you to know her. Yet even then she was a guardian

angel,--a guardian too late. _Mea culpa! Mea culpa!_

"I know it can be only Marie; I know it can be only she, who sleeps

under the sod in Ash----(_ce nom m'échappe_).

"Listen again: in those early, bitter charming days, when you, Monsieur,

knew the hillsides and the drives about our dear old town of Arles, poor

Marie was away; had she been there, I had never listened, as I did

listen, to the words you whispered in my ear. Only when it was too late,

she came. Poor, good Marie! how she pleaded with me! How her tender,

good face spoke reproaches to me! If I was the pride of our household,

she was the angel. She it was, who, knowing the worst, said, 'Julie,

this must end!' She it was who labored day and night to set me free from

the wicked web that bound me. I reproached her, the poor, good Marie, in

saying that she was the plainer, that she had no beauty, that she was

devoured with envy. But the Blessed Virgin was working ever by her side.

Whatever doubts you may have entertained of me, Monsieur,--she created

them; whatever suspicions tortured you,--she fed them, but always with

the holiest of motives. And when shame came, as it did come, the poor

Marie would have screened me,--would have carried the odium herself.

Good Marie! the angels have her in keeping!

"Listen again, Monsieur! When that story, that false story, of the death

of my poor child, came to light in the journals, who but Marie should

come to me--deceived herself as I was deceived--and say, 'Julie, dear

one, God has taken the child in mercy; there is no stigma can rest upon

you in the eyes of the world. Live now as the Blessed Magdalen lived

when Christ had befriended her.' And by her strength I was made strong;

the Blessed Virgin be thanked!

"Finally, it came to her knowledge one day,--the dear Marie!--that the

rumor of the death was untrue,--that the babe was living,--that the poor

child had been sent over the seas to your home, Monsieur. Well, I was

far away in the East. Does Marie tell me? No, the dear one! She writes

me, that she is going 'over seas,'--tired of _la belle France_,--she who

loved it so dearly! And she went,--to watch, to pray, to console. And I,

the mother!--_Mon Dieu, Monsieur_, the words fail me. No wonder our

child loved her; no wonder she seems a mother to her!

"Listen yet again, Monsieur. My poor sister died yonder, in that

heretical land,--may be without absolution.

'Ave Martha margarita

In corona Jesu sita,

Tam in morte quam in vita

Sis nobis propitia!'

I must go, if it be only to find her grave, and to secure her burial in

some consecrated spot. She waits for me,--her ghost, her spirit,--I must

go; the holy water must be sprinkled; the priestly rites be said. Marie,

poor Marie, I will not fail you.

"Monsieur, I must go!--not alone to greet our child, but to do justice

to my sainted sister! Listen well! All that has been devotional in my

poor life centres here! I must go,--I must do what I may to hallow my

poor sister's grave. Adèle will not give up her welcome surely, if I am

moved by such religious purpose. She, too, must join me in an _Ave

Maria_ over that resting-place of the departed.

"I shall send this letter by the overland and British mail, that it may

come to you very swiftly. It will come to you while you are with the

poor child,--our Adèle. Greet her for me as warmly as you can. Tell her

I shall hope, God willing, to bring her into the bosom of his Holy

Church Catholic. I shall try and love her, though she remain a heretic;

but this will not be.

"If I can enough curb myself, I shall wait for your answer, Monsieur;

but it is necessary that I go yonder. Look for me; kiss our child for

me. And if you ever prayed, Monsieur, I should say, pray for

"_Votre amie_,

"JULIE."

The letter is of the nature of a revelation to Adèle; her doubts

respecting Madame Arles vanish on the instant. The truth, as set forth

in her mother's language, blazes upon her mind like a flame. She loves

the grave none the less, but the mother by far the more. She, too,

wishes to greet her amid the scenes which she has known so long. Nor is

Maverick himself averse to this new disposition of affairs, if indeed he

possessed any power (which he somewhat doubts) of readjusting it. Seeing

the kindly intentions toward Adèle, and the tolerant feeling (to say the

least) with which Mrs. Maverick will be met by these friends of the

daughter, he trusts that the mother's interviews with the Doctor, and a

knowledge of the kindly influences under which Adèle has grown up, may

lessen the danger of a religious altercation between mother and child,

which has been his great bugbear in view of their future association.

A man of the world, like Maverick, naturally takes this common-sense

view of religious differences; why not compound matters, he thinks; and

he hints as much quietly to the parson. The old gentleman's spirit is

stirred to its depths by the intimation; like all earnest zealots, he

recognizes one only unswerving rule of faith, and that the faith in

which he has been reared. They who hold conflicting doctrines must

yield,--yield absolutely,--or there is no safety for them. In his eye

there was but one strait gate to the Celestial City, and that any

wearing the furbelows of Rome should ever enter thereat could only come

of God's exceeding mercy; for himself, it must always be a duty to cry

aloud to such to strip themselves clean of their mummery, and do works

"meet for repentance."

Adèle, after her first period of exultation over the recent news is

passed, relapses--perhaps by reason of its excess--into something of her

old vague doubt and apprehension of coming evil. The truth--if it be

truth--is so strange!--so mysteriously strange that she shall indeed

clasp her mother to her heart; the grave yonder is so real! and that

fearful embrace in death so present to her! Or it may be an anticipation

of the fearful spiritual estrangement that must ensue, and of which she

seems to find confirmation in the earnest talk and gloomy forebodings of

the Doctor.

Maverick effects a diversion by proposing a jaunt of travel, in which

Rose shall be their companion. Adèle accepts the scheme with delight,--a

delight, after all, which lies as much in the thought of watching the

eager enjoyment of Rose as in any pleasant distractions of her own. The

pleasure of Maverick is by no means so great as in that trip of a few

years back. Then he had for companion an enthusiastic girl, to whom life

was fresh, and all the clouds that seemed to rest upon it so shadowy,

that each morning sun lifting among the mountains dispersed them

utterly.

Now, Adèle showed the thoughtfulness of a woman,--her enthusiasms held

in check by a more calm estimate of the life that opened before

her,--her sportiveness overborne by a soberness, which, if it gave

dignity, gave also a womanly gravity. Yet she did not lack filial

devotion; she admired still that easy world-manner of his which had once

called out her enthusiastic regard, but now queried in her secret heart

if its acquisition had not involved cost of purity of conscience. She

loved him too,--yes, she loved him; and her evening and morning kiss and

embrace were reminders to him of a joy he might have won, but had

not,--of a home peace that might have been his, but whose image now only

lifted above his horizon like some splendid mirage crowded with floating

fairy shapes, and like the mirage melted presently into idle vapor.

It was a novel experience for Maverick to find himself (as he did time

and again upon this summer trip in New England) sandwiched, of a Sunday,

between his two blooming companions and some sober-sided deacon, in the

pew of a country meeting-house. How his friend Papiol would have stared!

And the suggestion, coming to him with the buzz of a summer fly through

the open windows, did not add to his devotional sentiment. Yet Maverick

would follow gravely the scramble of the singers through the appointed

hymn with a sober self-denial, counting the self-denial a virtue. We all

make memoranda of the small religious virtues when the large ones are

missing.

Upon the return to Ashfield there is found a new letter from Madam

Maverick. She can restrain herself no longer. Under the advices of her

brother, she will, with her maid, take the first safe ship leaving

Marseilles for New York. She longs to bring Adèle with herself, by

special consecration, under the guardianship of the Holy Virgin.

The Doctor is greatly grieved in view of the speedy departure of Adèle,

and tenfold grieved when Maverick lays before him the letter of the

mother, and he sees the fiery zeal which the poor child must confront.

Over and over in those last interviews he seeks to fortify her faith; he

warns her against the delusions, the falsities, the idolatries of Rome;

he warns her to distrust a religion of creeds, of human authority, of

traditions. Christ, the Bible,--these are the true monitors; and "Mind,

Adaly," says he, "hold fast always to the Doctrine of the Westminster

Divines. That is sound,--that is sound!"

LXII.

Reuben went with a light heart upon his voyage. The tender memories of

Ashfield were mostly lived down. (Had the letter of Adèle ever reached

him, it might have been far different.) Rose, Phil, the Tourtelots, the

Tew partners (still worrying through a green old age), the

meeting-house, even the Doctor himself and Adèle, seemed to belong to a

sphere whose interests were widely separate from his own, and in which

he should appear henceforth only as a casual spectator. The fascinations

of his brilliant business successes had a firm grip upon him. He

indulges himself, indeed, from time to time, with the fancy that some

day, far off now, he will return to the scenes of his boyhood, and

astonish some of the old landholders by buying them out at a fabulous

price, and by erecting a "castle" of his own, to be enlivened by the

fairy graces of some sylph not yet fairly determined upon. Surely not

Rose, who would hardly be equal to the grandeur of his proposed

establishment, if she were not already engrossed by that "noodle" (his

thought expressing itself thus wrathfully) of an assistant minister.

Adèle,--and the name has something in it that electrifies, in spite of

himself,--Adèle, if she ever overcomes her qualms of conscience, will

yield to the tender persuasions of Phil. "Good luck to him!"--and he

says this, too, with a kind of wrathful glee.

Still, he builds his cloud castles; some one must needs inhabit them.

Some paragon of refinement and of beauty will one day appear, for whose

tripping feet his wealth will lay down a path of pearls and gold. The

lonely, star-lit nights at sea encourage such phantasms; and the break

of the waves upon the bow, with their myriad of phosphorescent sparkles,

cheats and illumines the fancy. We will not follow him throughout his

voyage. On a balmy morning of July he wakes with the great cliff of

Gibraltar frowning on him. After this come light, baffling winds, and

for a week he looks southward upon the mysterious, violet lift of the

Barbary shores, and pushes slowly eastward into the blue expanse of the

Mediterranean. In the Sicilian ports he is abundantly successful. He has

ample time to cross over to Naples, to ascend Vesuvius, and to explore

Herculaneum and Pompeii. But he does not forget the other side of the

beautiful bay, Baiæ and Pozzuoli. He takes, indeed, a healthful pleasure

in writing to the Doctor a description of this latter, and of his walk

in the vicinity of the great seaport where St. Paul must have landed

from his ship of the Castor and Pollux, on his way from Syracuse. But he

does not tell the Doctor that, on the same evening, he attended an opera

at the San Carlo in Naples, of which the ballet, if nothing else, would

have called down the good man's anathema.

An American of twenty-five, placed for the first time upon the sunny

pavements of Naples, takes a new lease of life,--at least of its

imaginative part. The beautiful blue stretch of sea, the lava streets,

the buried towns and cities, the baths and ruins of Baiæ, the burning

mountain, piling its smoke and fire into the serene sky, the memories of

Tiberius, of Cicero, of Virgil,--all these enchant him. And beside these

are the things of to-day,--the luscious melons, the oranges, the figs,

the war-ships lying on the bay, the bloody miracle of St. Januarius, the

Lazzaroni upon the church steps, the processions of friars, and always

the window of his chamber, looking one way upon blue Capri, and the

other upon smouldering Vesuvius.

At Naples Reuben hears from the captain of the Meteor--in which good

ship he has made his voyage, and counts upon making his return--that the

vessel can take up half her cargo at a better freight by touching at

Marseilles. Whereupon Reuben orders him to go thither, promising to join

him at that port in a fortnight. A fortnight only for Rome, for

Florence, for Pisa, for the City of Palaces, and then the marvellous

Cornice road along the shores of the sea. Terracina brought back to him

the story of Mr. Alderman Popkins and the Principessa, and the bandits;

after this came the heights of Albano and Soracte, and there, at last,

the Tiber, the pyramid tomb, the great church dome, the stone pines of

the Janiculan hill,--Rome itself. Reuben was not strong or curious in

his classics; the galleries and the churches took a deeper hold upon him

than the Forum and the ruins. He wandered for hours together under the

arches of St. Peter's. He wished he might have led the Doctor along its

pavement into the very presence of the mysteries of the Scarlet Woman of

Babylon. He wished Miss Almira, with her saffron ribbons, might be

there, sniffing at her little vial of salts, and may be singing treble.

The very meeting-house upon the green, that was so held in reverence,

with its belfry and spire atop, would hardly make a scaffolding from

which to brush the cobwebs from the frieze below the vaulting of this

grandest of temples. Oddly enough, he fancies Deacon Tourtelot, in his

snuff-colored surtout, pacing down the nave with him, and saying,--as he

would be like to say,--"Must ha' been a smart man that built it; but I

guess they don't have better preachin', as a gineral thing, than the old

Doctor gives us on Fast-Days or in 'protracted' meetin's."

Such queer humors and droll comparisons flash into the mind of Reuben,

even under all his sense of awe,--a swift, disorderly mingling of the

themes and offices which kindled his first sense of religious awe under

a home atmosphere with the wondrous forms and splendor which kindle a

new awe now. The great dome enwalling with glittering mosaics a heaven

of its own, and blazing with figured saints, and the golden distich,

"Thou art Peter,--to thee will I give the keys of the kingdom of

heaven,"--all this seems too grand to be untrue. Are not the keys verily

here? Can falsehood build up so august a lie? A couple of friars shuffle

past him, and go to their prayers at some near altar; he does not even

smile at their shaven pates and their dowdy, coarse gowns of serge. Low

music from some far-away chapel comes floating under the panelled

vaultings, and loses itself under the great dome, with a sound so

gentle, so full of entreaty, that it seems to him the dove on the high

altar might have made it with a cooing and a flutter of her white wings.

A mother and two daughters, in black, glide past him, and drop upon

their knees before some saintly shrine, and murmur their thanksgivings,

or their entreaty. And he, with no aim of worship, yet somehow shocked

out of his unbelief by the very material influences around him.

Reuben's old wranglings and struggles with doubt had ended--where so

many are apt to end, when the world is sunny and success weaves its

silken meshes for the disport of self--in a quiet disbelief that angered

him no longer, because he had given over all fight with it. But the

great dome, flaming with its letters, _Ædificabo meam Ecclesiam_,

shining there for ages, kindled the fight anew. And strange as it may

seem, and perplexing as it was to the Doctor (when he received Reuben's

story of it), he came out from his first visit to the great Romish

temple with his religious nature more deeply stirred than it had been

for years.

_Ædificabo meam Ecclesiam._ _HE_ had uttered it. There was then

something to build,--something that had been built, at whose shrine

millions worshipped trustingly.

Under the sombre vaultings of the great Florentine Cathedral, the

impression was not weakened. The austere gloom of it chimed more nearly

with his state of unrest. Then there are the galleries, the painted

ceilings,--angels, saints, martyrs, holy families,--can art have been

leashed through so many ages with a pleasant fiction? Is there not

somewhere at bottom an earnest, vital truth, which men must needs cling

by if they be healthful and earnest themselves? Even the meretricious

adornments of the churches of Genoa afford new evidence of the way in

which the heart of a people has lavished itself upon belief; and if

belief, why, then, hope.

Upon the Cornice road, with Italy behind him and home before (such home

as he knows), he thinks once more of those he has left. Not that he has

forgotten them altogether; he has purchased a rich coral necklace in

Naples, which will be the very thing for his old friend Rose; and, in

Rome, the richest cameos to be found in the Via Condotti he has secured

for Adèle; even for Aunt Eliza he has brought away from Florence a bit

of the _pietra dura_, a few olive-leaves upon a black ground. Nor has he

forgotten a rich piece of the Genoese velvet for Mrs. Brindlock; and,

for his father, an old missal, which, he trusts, dates back far enough

to save it from the odium he attaches to the present Church, and to give

it an early Christian sanctity. He has counted upon seeing Mr. Maverick

at Marseilles, but learns, with surprise, upon his arrival there, that

this gentleman had sailed for America some months previously. The ship

is making a capital freight, and the captain informs him that

application has been made for the only vacant state-room in their little

cabin by a lady attended by her maid. Reuben assents cheerfully to this

accession of companionship; and, running off for a sight of the ruins at

Nismes and Arles, returns only in time to catch the ship upon the day of

its departure. As they pass out of harbor, the lady passenger, in deep

black, (the face seems half familiar to him,) watches wistfully the

receding shores, and, as they run abreast the chapel of Nôtre Dame de la

Garde, she devoutly crosses herself and tells her beads.

Reuben is to make the voyage with the mother of Adèle. Both bound to the

same quiet township of New England; he, to reach Ashfield once more,

there to undergo swiftly a new experience,--an experience that can come

to no man but once; she, to be clasped in the arms of Adèle,--a cold

embrace and the last!

PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S NOTE-BOOKS.

V.

Brook Farm, _Sept. 26, 1841._--A walk this morning along the Needham

road. A clear, breezy morning, after nearly a week of cloudy and showery

weather. The grass is much more fresh and vivid than it was last month,

and trees still retain much of their verdure, though here and there is a

shrub or a bough arrayed in scarlet and gold. Along the road, in the

midst of a beaten track, I saw mushrooms or toadstools, which had sprung

up probably during the night.

The houses in this vicinity are, many of them, quite antique, with long,

sloping roofs, commencing at a few feet from the ground, and ending in a

lofty peak. Some of them have huge, old elms overshadowing the yard. One

may see the family sleigh near the door, it having stood there all

through the summer sunshine, and perhaps with weeds sprouting through

the crevices of its bottom, the growth of the months since snow

departed. Old barns, patched and supported by timbers leaning against

the sides, and stained with the excrement of past ages.

In the forenoon, I walked along the edge of the meadow, towards Cow

Island. Large trees, almost a wood, principally of pine with the green

pasture-glades intermixed, and cattle feeding. They cease grazing when

an intruder appears, and look at him with long and wary observation,

then bend their heads to the pasture again. Where the firm ground of the

pasture ceases, the meadow begins,--loose, spongy, yielding to the

tread, sometimes permitting the foot to sink into black mud, or perhaps

over ankles in water. Cattle paths, somewhat firmer than the general

surface, traverse the dense shrubbery which has overgrown the meadow.

This shrubbery consists of small birch, elders, maples, and other trees,

with here and there white pines of larger growth. The whole is tangled

and wild and thick-set, so that it is necessary to part the nestling

stems and branches, and go crashing through. There are creeping plants

of various sorts, which clamber up the trees, and some of them have

changed color in the slight frosts which already have befallen these low

grounds, so that one sees a spiral wreath of scarlet leaves twining up

to the top of a green tree, intermingling its bright hues with their

verdure, as if all were of one piece. Sometimes, instead of scarlet, the

spiral wreath is of a golden yellow.

Within the verge of the meadow, mostly near the firm shore of pasture

ground, I found several grape-vines, hung with an abundance of large

purple grapes. The vines had caught hold of maples and alders, and

climbed to the summit, curling round about and interwreathing their

twisted folds in so intimate a manner that it was not easy to tell the

parasite from the supporting tree or shrub. Sometimes the same vine had

enveloped several shrubs, and caused a strange, tangled confusion,

converting all these poor plants to the purpose of its own support, and

hindering their growing to their own benefit and convenience. The broad

vine-leaves, some of them yellow or yellowish-tinged, were seen

apparently glowing on the same stems with the silver-maple leaves, and

those of the other shrubs, thus married against their will by the

conjugal twine; and the purple clusters of grapes hung down from above

and in the midst, so that one might "gather grapes," if not "of thorns,"

yet of as alien bushes.

One vine had ascended almost to the tip of a large white pine, spreading

its leaves, and hanging its purple clusters among all its

boughs,--still climbing and clambering, as if it would not be content

till it had crowned the very summit with a wreath of its own foliage and

bunches of grapes. I mounted high into the tree and ate the fruit there,

while the vine wreathed still higher into the depths above my head. The

grapes were sour, being not yet fully ripe. Some of them, however, were

sweet and pleasant.

* * * * *

_September 27._--A ride to Brighton yesterday morning, it being the day

of the weekly Cattle Fair. William Allen and myself went in a wagon,

carrying a calf to be sold at the fair. The calf had not had his

breakfast, as his mother had preceded him to Brighton, and he kept

expressing his hunger and discomfort by loud, sonorous baas, especially

when we passed any cattle in the fields or in the road. The cows,

grazing within hearing, expressed great interest, and some of them came

galloping to the roadside to behold the calf. Little children, also, on

their way to school, stopped to laugh and point at poor little Bossie.

He was a prettily behaved urchin, and kept thrusting his hairy muzzle

between William and myself, apparently wishing to be stroked and patted.

It was an ugly thought that his confidence in human nature, and nature

in general, was to be so ill-rewarded as by cutting his throat, and

selling him in quarters. This, I suppose, has been his fate before now!

It was a beautiful morning, clear as crystal, with an invigorating, but

not disagreeable coolness. The general aspect of the country was as

green as summer,--greener indeed than mid or latter summer,--and there

were occasional interminglings of the brilliant hues of autumn, which

made the scenery more beautiful, both visibly and in sentiment. We saw

no absolutely mean nor poor-looking abodes along the road. There were

warm and comfortable farm-houses, ancient, with the porch, the sloping

roof, the antique peak, the clustered chimney, of old times; and modern

cottages, smart and tasteful; and villas, with terraces before them, and

dense shade, and wooden urns on pillars, and other such tokens of

gentility. Pleasant groves of oak and walnut, also, there were,

sometimes stretching along valleys, sometimes ascending a hill and

clothing it all round, so as to make it a great clump of verdure.

Frequently we passed people with cows, oxen, sheep, or pigs for Brighton

Fair.