each getting the mastery by turns, and pretty sudden turns: “Save
us from the extremity of cold and these violent sudden changes.”
“The society will meet after the Lyceum, as it is difficult to bring
people together in the evening,--and no moon.” “Mr. N. F. is dead, and
I expect to hear of the death of Mr. B. It is cruel to separate old
people from their wives in this cold weather.”
With a very limited acquaintance with books, his knowledge was an
external experience, an Indian wisdom, the observation of such facts
as country life for nearly a century could supply. He watched with
interest the garden, the field, the orchard, the house and the barn,
horse, cow, sheep and dog, and all the common objects that engage
the thought of the farmer. He kept his eye on the horizon, and knew
the weather like a sea-captain. The usual experiences of men, birth,
marriage, sickness, death, burial; the common temptations; the common
ambitions;--he studied them all, and sympathized so well in these that
he was excellent company and counsel to all, even the most humble and
ignorant. With extraordinary states of mind, with states of enthusiasm
or enlarged speculation, he had no sympathy, and pretended to none.
He was sincere, and kept to his point, and his mark was never remote.
His conversation was strictly personal and apt to the party and the
occasion. An eminent skill he had in saying difficult and unspeakable
things; in delivering to a man or a woman that which all their other
friends had abstained from saying, in uncovering the bandage from a
sore place, and applying the surgeon’s knife with a truly surgical
spirit. Was a man a sot, or a spendthrift, or too long time a bachelor,
or suspected of some hidden crime, or had he quarrelled with his
wife, or collared his father, or was there any cloud or suspicious
circumstances in his behavior, the good pastor knew his way straight
to that point, believing himself entitled to a full explanation, and
whatever relief to the conscience of both parties plain speech could
effect was sure to be procured. In all such passages he justified
himself to the conscience, and commonly to the love, of the persons
concerned. He was the more competent to these searching discourses
from his knowledge of family history. He knew everybody’s grandfather,
and seemed to address each person rather as the representative of his
house and name, than as an individual. In him have perished more local
and personal anecdotes of this village and vicinity than are possessed
by any survivor. This intimate knowledge of families, and this skill
of speech, and still more, his sympathy, made him incomparable in his
parochial visits, and in his exhortations and prayers. He gave himself
up to his feelings, and said on the instant the best things in the
world. Many and many a felicity he had in his prayer, now forever lost,
which defied all the rules of all the rhetoricians. He did not know
when he was good in prayer or sermon, for he had no literature and no
art; but he believed, and therefore spoke. He was eminently loyal in
his nature, and not fond of adventure or innovation. By education, and
still more by temperament, he was engaged to the old forms of the New
England Church. Not speculative, but affectionate; devout, but with an
extreme love of order, he adopted heartily, though in its mildest form,
the creed and catechism of the fathers, and appeared a modern Israelite
in his attachment to the Hebrew history and faith. He was a man very
easy to read, for his whole life and conversation were consistent. All
his opinions and actions might be securely predicted by a good observer
on short acquaintance. My classmate at Cambridge, Frederick King, told
me from Governor Gore, who was the Doctor’s classmate, that in college
he was called Holy Ripley.
And now, in his old age, when all the antique Hebraism and its customs
are passing away, it is fit that he too should depart,--most fit that
in the fall of laws a loyal man should die.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 12: This sketch was written for the Social Circle, a club
in Concord, now more than a century old, and said to be the lineal
descendant of the Committee of Safety in the Revolution. Mr. Emerson
was a member for many years and greatly valued its weekly evening
meetings, held, during the winter, at the houses of the members. After
the death of Dr. Ripley, an early member and connected with him by
marriage, Mr. Emerson was asked to prepare the customary Memoir for the
Club Book.]
[Footnote 13: Rev. Joseph Emerson.]
MARY MOODY EMERSON.
THE yesterday doth never smile,
To-day goes drudging through the while,
Yet in the name of Godhead, I
The morrow front and can defy;
Though I am weak, yet God, when prayed,
Cannot withhold his conquering aid.
Ah me! it was my childhood’s thought,
If He should make my web a blot
On life’s fair picture of delight,
My heart’s content would find it right.
But O, these waves and leaves,--
When happy, stoic Nature grieves,--
No human speech so beautiful
As their murmurs mine to lull.
On this altar God hath built
I lay my vanity and guilt;
Nor me can Hope or Passion urge,
Hearing as now the lofty dirge
Which blasts of Northern mountains hymn,
Nature’s funeral high and dim,--
Sable pageantry of clouds,
Mourning summer laid in shrouds.
Many a day shall dawn and die,
Many an angel wander by,
And passing, light my sunken turf,
Moist perhaps by ocean surf,
Forgotten amid splendid tombs,
Yet wreathed and hid by summer blooms.
On earth I dream;--I die to be:
Time! shake not thy bald head at me.
I challenge thee to hurry past,
Or for my turn to fly too fast.
[LUCY PERCY, Countess of Carlisle, the friend of Strafford and
of Pym, is thus described by Sir Toby Matthews:]
“She is of too high a mind and dignity not only to seek, but almost
to wish, the friendship of any creature. They whom she is pleased to
choose are such as are of the most eminent condition both for power and
employment,--not with any design towards her own particular, either of
advantage or curiosity, but her nature values fortunate persons. She
prefers the conversation of men to that of women; not but she can talk
on the fashions with her female friends, but she is too soon sensible
that she can set them as she wills; that pre-eminence shortens all
equality. She converses with those who are most distinguished for their
conversational powers. Of Love freely will she discourse, listen to
all its faults and mark its power: and will take a deep interest for
persons of celebrity.”
MARY MOODY EMERSON.[14]
I WISH to meet the invitation with which the ladies have honored me by
offering them a portrait of real life. It is a representative life,
such as could hardly have appeared out of New England; of an age now
past, and of which I think no types survive. Perhaps I deceive myself
and overestimate its interest. It has to me a value like that which
many readers find in Madame Guyon, in Rahel, in Eugénie de Guérin, but
it is purely original and hardly admits of a duplicate. Then it is a
fruit of Calvinism and New England, and marks the precise time when the
power of the old creed yielded to the influence of modern science and
humanity.
I have found that I could only bring you this portrait by selections
from the diary of my heroine, premising a sketch of her time and
place. I report some of the thoughts and soliloquies of a country girl,
poor, solitary,--‘a goody’ as she called herself,--growing from youth
to age amid slender opportunities and usually very humble company.
Mary Moody Emerson was born just before the outbreak of the Revolution.
When introduced to Lafayette at Portland, she told him that she was
“in arms” at the Concord Fight. Her father, the minister of Concord,
a warm patriot in 1775, went as a chaplain to the American army at
Ticonderoga: he carried his infant daughter, before he went, to his
mother in Malden and told her to keep the child until he returned.
He died at Rutland, Vermont, of army-fever, the next year, and Mary
remained at Malden with her grandmother, and, after her death, with her
father’s sister, in whose house she grew up, rarely seeing her brothers
and sisters in Concord. This aunt and her husband lived on a farm, were
getting old, and the husband a shiftless, easy man. There was plenty of
work for the little niece to do day by day, and not always bread enough
in the house.
One of her tasks, it appears, was to watch for the approach of the
deputy-sheriff, who might come to confiscate the spoons or arrest the
uncle for debt. Later, another aunt, who had become insane, was brought
hither to end her days. More and sadder work for this young girl. She
had no companions, lived in entire solitude with these old people,
very rarely cheered by short visits from her brothers and sisters.
Her mother had married again,--married the minister who succeeded her
husband in the parish at Concord, [Dr. Ezra Ripley,] and had now a
young family growing up around her.
Her aunt became strongly attached to Mary, and persuaded the family to
give the child up to her as a daughter, on some terms embracing a care
of her future interests. She would leave the farm to her by will. This
promise was kept; she came into possession of the property many years
after, and her dealings with it gave her no small trouble, though they
give much piquancy to her letters in after years. Finally it was sold,
and its price invested in a share of a farm in Maine, where she lived
as a boarder with her sister, for many years. It was in a picturesque
country, within sight of the White Mountains, with a little lake in
front at the foot of a high hill called Bear Mountain. Not far from
the house was a brook running over a granite floor like the Franconia
Flume, and noble forests around. Every word she writes about this farm
(“Elm Vale,” Waterford,) her dealings and vexations about it, her joys
and raptures of religion and Nature, interest like a romance, and to
those who may hereafter read her letters, will make its obscure acres
amiable.
In Malden she lived through all her youth and early womanhood, with
the habit of visiting the families of her brothers and sisters on any
necessity of theirs. Her good will to serve in time of sickness or of
pressure was known to them, and promptly claimed, and her attachment
to the youths and maidens growing up in those families was secure for
any trait of talent or of character. Her sympathy for young people who
pleased her was almost passionate, and was sure to make her arrival in
each house a holiday.
Her early reading was Milton, Young, Akenside, Samuel Clarke, Jonathan
Edwards, and always the Bible. Later, Plato, Plotinus, Marcus
Antoninus, Stewart, Coleridge, Cousin, Herder, Locke, Madame De Staël,
Channing, Mackintosh, Byron. Nobody can read in her manuscript, or
recall the conversation of old-school people, without seeing that
Milton and Young had a religious authority in their mind, and nowise
the slight, merely entertaining quality of modern bards. And Plato,
Aristotle, Plotinus, how venerable and organic as Nature they are in
her mind! What a subject is her mind and life for the finest novel!
When I read Dante, the other day, and his paraphrases to signify
with more adequateness Christ or Jehovah, whom do you think I was
reminded of? Whom but Mary Emerson and her eloquent theology? She
had a deep sympathy with genius. When it was unhallowed, as in Byron,
she had none the less, whilst she deplored and affected to denounce
him. But she adored it when ennobled by character. She liked to
notice that the greatest geniuses have died ignorant of their power
and influence. She wished you to scorn to shine. “My opinion,” she
writes, (is) “that a mind like Byron’s would never be satisfied with
modern Unitarianism,--that the fiery depths of Calvinism, its high
and mysterious elections to eternal bliss, beyond angels, and all its
attendant wonders would have alone been fitted to fix his imagination.”
Her wit was so fertile, and only used to strike, that she never used
it for display, any more than a wasp would parade his sting. It was
ever the will and not the phrase that concerned her. Yet certain
expressions, when they marked a memorable state of mind in her
experience, recurred to her afterwards, and she would vindicate herself
as having said to Dr. R---- or Uncle L---- so and so, at such a period
of her life. But they were intensely true when first spoken. All her
language was happy, but inimitable, unattainable by talent, as if
caught from some dream. She calls herself “the puny pilgrim, whose sole
talent is sympathy.” “I like that kind of apathy that is a triumph to
overset.”
She writes to her nephew Charles Emerson, in 1833:--“I could never have
adorned the garden. If I had been in aught but dreary deserts, I should
have idolized my friends, despised the world and been haughty. I never
expected connections and matrimony. My taste was formed in romance, and
I knew I was not destined to please. I love God and his creation as I
never else could. I scarcely feel the sympathies of this life enough to
agitate the pool. This in general, one case or so excepted, and even
this is a relation to God through you. ’Twas so in my happiest early
days, when you were at my side.”
Destitution is the Muse of her genius,--Destitution and Death. I used
to propose that her epitaph should be: “Here lies the angel of Death.”
And wonderfully as she varies and poetically repeats that image in
every page and day, yet not less fondly and sublimely she returns to
the other,--the grandeur of humility and privation, as thus; “The chief
witness which I have had of a God-like principle of action and feeling
is in the disinterested joy felt in others’ superiority. For the love
of superior virtue is mine own gift from God.” “Where were thine own
intellect if others had not lived?”
She had many acquaintances among the notables of the time; and now and
then in her migrations from town to town in Maine and Massachusetts,
in search of a new boarding-place, discovered some preacher with
sense or piety, or both. For on her arrival at any new home she was
likely to steer first to the minister’s house and pray his wife to
take a boarder; and as the minister found quickly that she knew all
his books and many more, and made shrewd guesses at his character and
possibilities, she would easily rouse his curiosity, as a person who
could read his secret and tell him his fortune.
She delighted in success, in youth, in beauty, in genius, in manners.
When she met a young person who interested her, she made herself
acquainted and intimate with him or her at once, by sympathy, by
flattery, by raillery, by anecdotes, by wit, by rebuke, and stormed the
castle. None but was attracted or piqued by her interest and wit and
wide acquaintance with books and with eminent names. She said she gave
herself full swing in these sudden intimacies, for she knew she should
disgust them soon, and resolved to have their best hours. “Society
is shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom
wastes her attentions.” She surprised, attracted, chided and denounced
her companion by turns, and pretty rapid turns. But no intelligent
youth or maiden could have once met her without remembering her with
interest, and learning something of value. Scorn trifles, lift your
aims: do what you are afraid to do: sublimity of character must come
from sublimity of motive: these were the lessons which were urged with
vivacity, in ever new language. But if her companion was dull, her
impatience knew no bounds. She tired presently of dull conversations,
and asked to be read to, and so disposed of the visitor. If the voice
or the reading tired her, she would ask the friend if he or she would
do an errand for her, and so dismiss them. If her companion were a
little ambitious, and asked her opinions on books or matters on which
she did not wish rude hands laid, she did not hesitate to stop the
intruder with “How’s your cat, Mrs. Tenner?”
“I was disappointed,” she writes, “in finding my little Calvinist
no companion, a cold little thing who lives in society alone, and
is looked up to as a specimen of genius. I performed a mission in
secretly undermining his vanity, or trying to. Alas! never done but by
mortifying affliction.” From the country she writes to her sister in
town, “You cannot help saying that my epistle is a striking specimen of
egotism. To which I can only answer that, in the country, we converse
so much more with ourselves, that we are almost led to forget everybody
else. The very sound of your bells and the rattling of the carriages
have a tendency to divert selfishness.” “This seems a world rather of
trying each others’ dispositions than of enjoying each others’ virtues.”
She had the misfortune of spinning with a greater velocity than any
of the other tops. She would tear into the chaise or out of it, into
the house or out of it, into the conversation, into the thought, into
the character of the stranger,--disdaining all the graduation by which
her fellows time their steps: and though she might do very happily in
a planet where others moved with the like velocity, she was offended
here by the phlegm of all her fellow-creatures, and disgusted them by
her impatience. She could keep step with no human being. Her nephew
[R. W. E.] wrote of her: “I am glad the friendship with Aunt Mary is
ripening. As by seeing a high tragedy, reading a true poem, or a novel
like ‘Corinne,’ so, by society with her, one’s mind is electrified
and purged. She is no statute-book of practical commandments, nor
orderly digest of any system of philosophy, divine or human, but a
Bible, miscellaneous in its parts, but one in its spirit, wherein are
sentences of condemnation, promises and covenants of love that make
foolish the wisdom of the world with the power of God.”
Our Delphian was fantastic enough, Heaven knows, yet could always
be tamed by large and sincere conversation. Was there thought and
eloquence, she would listen like a child. Her aspiration and prayer
would begin, and the whim and petulance in which by diseased habit she
had grown to indulge without suspecting it, was burned up in the glow
of her pure and poetic spirit, which dearly loved the Infinite.
She writes: “August, 1847: Vale.--My oddities were never
designed--effect of an uncalculating constitution, at first, then
through isolation; and as to dress, from duty. To be singular of
choice, without singular talents and virtues, is as ridiculous as
ungrateful.” “It is so universal with all classes to avoid contact
with me that I blame none. The fact has generally increased piety and
self-love.” “As a traveller enters some fine palace and finds all
the doors closed, and he only allowed the use of some avenues and
passages, so have I wandered from the cradle over the apartments of
social affections, or the cabinets of natural or moral philosophy,
the recesses of ancient and modern love. All say--Forbear to enter
the pales of the initiated by birth, wealth, talents and patronage. I
submit with delight, for it is the echo of a decree from above; and
from the highway hedges where I get lodging, and from the rays which
burst forth when the crowd are entering these noble saloons, whilst I
stand in the doors, I get a pleasing vision which is an earnest of the
interminable skies where the mansions are prepared for the poor.”
“To live to give pain rather than pleasure (the latter so delicious)
seems the spider-like necessity of my being on earth, and I have
gone on my queer way with joy, saying, “Shall the clay interrogate?”
But in every actual case, ’tis hard, and we lose sight of the first
necessity,--here too amid works red with default in all great and
grand and infinite aims. Yet with intentions disinterested, though
uncontrolled by proper reverence for others.”
When Mrs. Thoreau called on her one day, wearing pink ribbons, she shut
her eyes, and so conversed with her for a time. By and by she said,
“Mrs. Thoreau, I don’t know whether you have observed that my eyes are
shut.” “Yes, Madam, I have observed it.” “Perhaps you would like to
know the reasons?” “Yes, I should.” “I don’t like to see a person of
your age guilty of such levity in her dress.”
When her cherished favorite, E. H., was at the Vale, and had gone out
to walk in the forest with Hannah, her niece, Aunt Mary feared they
were lost, and found a man in the next house and begged him to go and
look for them. The man went and returned saying that he could not find
them. “Go and cry, ‘Elizabeth!’” The man rather declined this service,
as he did not know Miss H. She was highly offended, and exclaimed,
“God has given you a voice that you might use it in the service of
your fellow-creatures. Go instantly and call ‘Elizabeth’ till you find
them.” The man went immediately, and did as he was bid, and having
found them apologized for calling thus, by telling what Miss Emerson
had said to him.
When some ladies of my acquaintance by an unusual chance found
themselves in her neighborhood and visited her, I told them that she
was no whistle that every mouth could play on, but a quite clannish
instrument, a pibroch, for example, from which none but a native
Highlander could draw music.
In her solitude of twenty years, with fewest books and those only
sermons, and a copy of “Paradise Lost,” without covers or title-page,
so that later, when she heard much of Milton and sought his work, she
found it was her very book which she knew so well,--she was driven
to find Nature her companion and solace. She speaks of “her attempts
in Malden, to wake up the soul amid the dreary scenes of monotonous
Sabbaths, when Nature looked like a pulpit.”
“Malden, November 15th, 1805.--What a rich day, so fully occupied in
pursuing truth that I scorned to touch a novel which for so many years
I have wanted. How insipid is fiction to a mind touched with immortal
views! November 16th.--I am so small in my expectations, that a week
of industry delights. Rose before light every morn; visited from
necessity once, and again for books; read Butler’s Analogy; commented
on the Scriptures; read in a little book,--Cicero’s Letters,--a few:
touched Shakspeare,--washed, carded, cleaned house, and baked. To-day
cannot recall an error, nor scarcely a sacrifice, but more fulness
of content in the labors of a day never was felt. There is a sweet
pleasure in bending to circumstances while superior to them.
“Malden, September, 1807.--The rapture of feeling I would part from,
for days more devoted to higher discipline. But when Nature beams
with such excess of beauty, when the heart thrills with hope in its
Author,--feels that it is related to him more than by any ties of
Creation,--it exults, too fondly perhaps for a state of trial. But in
dead of night, nearer morning, when the eastern stars glow or appear
to glow with more indescribable lustre, a lustre which penetrates the
spirit with wonder and curiosity,--then, however awed, who can fear?
Since Sabbath, Aunt B---- [the insane aunt] was brought here. Ah!
mortifying sight! instinct perhaps triumphs over reason, and every
dignified respect to herself, in her anxiety about recovery, and the
smallest means connected. Not one wish of others detains her, not one
care. But it alarms me not, I shall delight to return to God. His name
my fullest confidence. His sole presence ineffable pleasure.
“I walked yesterday five or more miles, lost to mental or heart
existence, through fatigue,--just fit for the society I went into,
all mildness and the most commonplace virtue. The lady is celebrated
for her cleverness, and she was never so good to me. Met a lady in
the morning walk, a foreigner,--conversed on the accomplishments of
Miss T. My mind expanded with novel and innocent pleasure. Ah! were
virtue, and that of dear heavenly meekness attached by any necessity to
a lower rank of genteel people, who would sympathize with the exalted
with satisfaction? But that is not the case, I believe. A mediocrity
does seem to me more distant from eminent virtue than the extremes of
station; though after all it must depend on the nature of the heart. A
mediocre mind will be deranged in either extreme of wealth or poverty,
praise or censure, society or solitude. The feverish lust of notice
perhaps in all these cases would injure the heart of common refinement
and virtue.”