CHAPTER XXVII.

THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. IX.--APRIL, 1862.--NO. LIV.

LETTER TO A YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR.

My dear young gentleman or young lady,--for many are the Cecil Dreemes

of literature who superscribe their offered manuscripts with very

masculine names in very feminine handwriting,--it seems wrong not to

meet your accumulated and urgent epistles with one comprehensive reply,

thus condensing many private letters into a printed one. And so large a

proportion of "Atlantic" readers either might, would, could, or should

be "Atlantic" contributors also, that this epistle will be sure of

perusal, though Mrs. Stowe remain uncut and the Autocrat go for an hour

without readers.

Far from me be the wild expectation that every author will not

habitually measure the merits of a periodical by its appreciation of

his or her last manuscript. I should as soon ask a young lady not to

estimate the management of a ball by her own private luck in respect

to partners. But it is worth while at least to point out that in the

treatment of every contribution the real interests of editor and writer

are absolutely the same, and any antagonism is merely traditional, like

the supposed hostility between France and England, or between England

and Slavery. No editor can ever afford the rejection of a good thing,

and no author the publication of a bad one. The only difficulty lies in

drawing the line. Were all offered manuscripts unequivocally good or

bad, there would be no great trouble; it is the vast range of mediocrity

which perplexes: the majority are too bad for blessing and too good for

banning; so that no conceivable reason can be given for either fate,

save that upon the destiny of any single one may hang that of a hundred

others just like it. But whatever be the standard fixed, it is equally

for the interest of all concerned that it be enforced without flinching.

Nor is there the slightest foundation for the supposed editorial

prejudice against new or obscure contributors. On the contrary, every

editor is always hungering and thirsting after novelties. To take the

lead in bringing forward a new genius is as fascinating a privilege as

that of the physician who boasted to Sir Henry Halford of having been

the first man to discover the Asiatic cholera and to communicate it to

the public. It is only stern necessity which compels the magazine to

fall back so constantly on the regular old staff of contributors, whose

average product has been gauged already; just as every country-lyceum

attempts annually to arrange an entirely new list of lecturers, and ends

with no bolder experiment than to substitute Chapin and Beecher in place

of last year's Beecher and Chapin.

Of course no editor is infallible, and the best magazine contains an

occasional poor article. Do not blame the unfortunate conductor. He

knows it as well as you do,--after the deed is done. The newspapers

kindly pass it over, still preparing their accustomed opiate of sweet

praises, so much for each contributor, so much for the magazine

collectively,--like a hostess with her tea-making, a spoonful for each

person and one for the pot. But I can tell you that there is an official

person who meditates and groans, meanwhile, in the night-watches, to

think that in some atrocious moment of good-nature or sleepiness he left

the door open and let that ungainly intruder in. Do you expect him to

acknowledge the blunder, when you tax him with it? Never,--he feels it

too keenly. He rather stands up stoutly for the surpassing merits of the

misshapen thing, as a mother for her deformed child; and as the mother

is nevertheless inwardly imploring that there may never be such another

born to her, so be sure that it is not by reminding the editor of this

calamity that you can allure him into risking a repetition of it.

An editor thus shows himself to be but human; and it is well enough to

remember this fact, when you approach him. He is not a gloomy despot,

no Nemesis or Rhadamanthus, but a bland and virtuous man, exceedingly

anxious to secure plenty of good subscribers and contributors, and very

ready to perform any acts of kindness not inconsistent with this

grand design. Draw near him, therefore, with soft approaches and mild

persuasions. Do not treat him like an enemy, and insist on reading your

whole manuscript aloud to him, with appropriate gestures. His time has

some value, if yours has not; and he has therefore educated his eye till

it has become microscopic, like a naturalist's, and can classify nine

out of ten specimens by one glance at a scale or a feather. Fancy an

ambitious echinoderm claiming a private interview with Agassiz, to

demonstrate by verbal arguments that he is a mollusk! Besides, do

you expect to administer the thing orally to each of the two hundred

thousand, more or less, who turn the leaves of the "Atlantic"? You are

writing for the average eye, and must submit to its verdict. "Do not

trouble yourself about the light on your statue; it is the light of the

public square which must test its value."

Do not despise any honest propitiation, however small, in dealing with

your editor. Look to the physical aspect of your manuscript, and prepare

your page so neatly that it shall allure instead of repelling. Use good

pens, black ink, nice white paper and plenty of it. Do not emulate

"paper-sparing Pope," whose chaotic manuscript of the "Iliad," written

chiefly on the backs of old letters, still remains in the British

Museum. If your document be slovenly, the presumption is that its

literary execution is the same, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding.

An editor's eye becomes carnal, and is easily attracted by a comely

outside. If you really wish to obtain his good-will for your production,

do not first tax his time for deciphering it, any more than in visiting

a millionnaire to solicit a loan you would begin by asking him to pay

for the hire of the carriage which takes you to his door.

On the same principle, send your composition in such a shape that it

shall not need the slightest literary revision before printing. Many a

bright production dies discarded which might have been made thoroughly

presentable by a single day's labor of a competent scholar, in shaping,

smoothing, dovetailing, and retrenching. The revision seems so slight

an affair that the aspirant cannot conceive why there should be so much

fuss about it.

"The piece, you think, is incorrect; why, take it;

I'm all submission; what you'd have it, make it."

But to discharge that friendly office no universal genius is salaried;

and for intellect in the rough there is no market.

Rules for style, as for manners, must be chiefly negative: a positively

good style indicates certain natural powers in the individual, but an

unexceptionable style is merely a matter of culture and good models. Dr.

Channing established in New England a standard of style which really

attained almost the perfection of the pure and the colorless, and the

disciplinary value of such a literary influence, in a raw and crude

nation, has been very great; but the defect of this standard is that it

ends in utterly renouncing all the great traditions of literature, and

ignoring the magnificent mystery of words. Human language may be polite

and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the

high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with

warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate

and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables. The statue is

not more surely included in the block of marble than is all conceivable

splendor of utterance in "Worcester's Unabridged." And as Ruskin says of

painting that it is in the perfection and precision of the instantaneous

line that the claim to immortality is made, so it is easy to see that a

phrase may outweigh a library. Keats heads the catalogue of things real

with "sun, moon, and passages of Shakspeare"; and Keats himself has

left behind him winged wonders of expression which are not surpassed by

Shakspeare, or by any one else who ever dared touch the English tongue.

There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses

to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive

all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word

shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter:

there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a

sentence.

Such being the majesty of the art you seek to practise, you can at least

take time and deliberation before dishonoring it. Disabuse yourself

especially of the belief that any grace or flow of style can come from

writing rapidly. Haste can make you slipshod, but it can never make

you graceful. With what dismay one reads of the wonderful fellows in

fashionable novels, who can easily dash off a brilliant essay in a

single night! When I think how slowly my poor thoughts come in, how

tardily they connect themselves, what a delicious prolonged perplexity

it is to cut and contrive a decent clothing of words for them, as a

little girl does for her doll,--nay, how many new outfits a single

sentence sometimes costs before it is presentable, till it seems at

last, like our army on the Potomac, as if it never could be thoroughly

clothed,--I certainly should never dare to venture into print, but for

the confirmed suspicion that the greatest writers have done even so. I

can hardly believe that there is any autograph in the world so precious

or instructive as that scrap of paper, still preserved at Ferrara, on

which Ariosto wrote in sixteen different revisions one of his most

famous stanzas. Do you know, my dear neophyte, how Balzac used to

compose? As a specimen of the labor that sometimes goes to make an

effective style, the process is worth recording. When Balzac had a new

work in view, he first spent weeks in studying from real life for it,

haunting the streets of Paris by day and night, note-book in hand. His

materials gained, he shut himself up till the book was written, perhaps

two months, absolutely excluding everybody but his publisher. He emerged

pale and thin, with the complete manuscript in his hand,--not only

written, but almost rewritten, so thoroughly was the original copy

altered, interlined, and rearranged. This strange production, almost

illegible, was sent to the unfortunate printers; with infinite

difficulty a proof-sheet was obtained, which, being sent to the author,

was presently returned in almost as hopeless a chaos of corrections as

the manuscript first submitted. Whole sentences were erased, others

transposed, everything modified. A second and a third followed, alike

torn to pieces by the ravenous pen of Balzac. The despairing printers

labored by turns, only the picked men of the office being equal to the

task, and they relieving each other at hourly intervals, as beyond

that time no one could endure the fatigue. At last, by the fourth

proof-sheet, the author too was wearied out, though not contented. "I

work ten hours out of the twenty-four," said he, "over the elaboration

of my unhappy style, and I am never satisfied, myself, when all is

done."

Do not complain that this scrupulousness is probably wasted, after all,

and that nobody knows. The public knows. People criticize higher than

they attain. When the Athenian audience hissed a public speaker for a

mispronunciation, it did not follow that any one of the malcontents

could pronounce as well as the orator. In our own lyceum-audiences there

may not be a man who does not yield to his own private eccentricities of

dialect, but see if they do not appreciate elegant English from Phillips

or Everett! Men talk of writing down to the public taste who have never

yet written up to that standard. "There never yet was a good tongue,"

said old Fuller, "that wanted ears to hear it." If one were expecting to

be judged by a few scholars only, one might hope somehow to cajole them;

but it is this vast, unimpassioned, unconscious tribunal, this average

judgment of intelligent minds, which is truly formidable,--something

more undying than senates and more omnipotent than courts, something

which rapidly cancels all transitory reputations, and at last becomes

the organ of eternal justice and infallibly awards posthumous fame.

The first demand made by the public upon every composition is, of

course, that it should be attractive. In addressing a miscellaneous

audience, whether through eye or ear, it is certain that no man living

has a right to be tedious. Every editor is therefore compelled to insist

that his contributors should make themselves agreeable, whatever else

they may do. To be agreeable, it is not necessary to be amusing; an

essay may be thoroughly delightful without a single witticism, while a

monotone of jokes soon grows tedious. Charge your style with life,

and the public will not ask for conundrums. But the profounder your

discourse, the greater must necessarily be the effort to refresh and

diversify. I have observed, in addressing audiences of children in

schools and elsewhere, that there is no fact so grave, no thought so

abstract, but you can make it very interesting to the small people, if

you will only put in plenty of detail and illustration; and I have not

observed that in this respect grown men are so very different. If,

therefore, in writing, you find it your mission to be abstruse, fight to

render your statement clear and attractive, as if your life depended on

it: your literary life does depend on it, and, if you fail, relapses

into a dead language, and becomes, like that of Coleridge, only a

_Biographia Literaria_. Labor, therefore, not in thought alone, but in

utterance; clothe and reclothe your grand conception twenty times, until

you find some phrase that with its grandeur shall be lucid also. It is

this unwearied literary patience that has enabled Emerson not merely to

introduce, but even to popularize, thoughts of such a quality as never

reached the popular mind before. And when such a writer, thus laborious

to do his utmost for his disciples, becomes after all incomprehensible,

we can try to believe that it is only that inevitable obscurity of vast

thought which Coleridge said was a compliment to the reader.

In learning to write availably, a newspaper-office is a capital

preparatory school. Nothing is so good to teach the use of materials,

and to compel to pungency of style. Being always at close quarters with

his readers, a journalist must shorten and sharpen his sentences, or he

is doomed. Yet this mental alertness is bought at a severe price; such

living from hand to mouth cheapens the whole mode of intellectual

existence, and it would seem that no successful journalist could ever

get the newspaper out of his blood, or achieve any high literary

success.

For purposes of illustration and elucidation, and even for amplitude of

vocabulary, wealth of accumulated materials is essential; and whether

this wealth be won by reading or by experience makes no great

difference. Coleridge attended Davy's chemical lectures to acquire new

metaphors, and it is of no consequence whether one comes to literature

from a library, a machine-shop, or a forecastle, provided he has learned

to work with thoroughness the soil he knows. After all is said and done,

however, books remain the chief quarries. Johnson declared, putting the

thing perhaps too mechanically, "The greater part of an author's time is

spent in reading in order to write; a man will turn over half a library

to make one book." Addison collected three folios of materials before

publishing the first number of the "Spectator." Remember, however, that

copious preparation has its perils also, in the crude display to which

it tempts. The object of high culture is not to exhibit culture, but

its results. You do not put guano on your garden that your garden may

blossom guano. Indeed, even for the proper subordination of one's own

thoughts the same self-control is needed; and there is no severer test

of literary training than in the power to prune out one's most cherished

sentence, when it grows obvious that the sacrifice will help the

symmetry or vigor of the whole.

Be noble both in the affluence and the economy of your diction; spare

no wealth that you can put in, and tolerate no superfluity that can be

struck out. Remember the Lacedemonian who was fined for saying that in

three words which might as well have been expressed in two. Do not throw

a dozen vague epithets at a thing, in the hope that some one of them

will fit; but study each phrase so carefully that the most ingenious

critic cannot alter it without spoiling the whole passage for everybody

but himself. For the same reason do not take refuge, as was the

practice a few years since, in German combinations, heart-utterances,

soul-sentiments, and hyphenized phrases generally; but roll your thought

into one good English word. There is no fault which seems so hopeless as

commonplaceness, but it is really easier to elevate the commonplace

than to reduce the turgid. How few men in all the pride of culture can

emulate the easy grace of a bright woman's letter!

Have faith enough in your own individuality to keep it resolutely down

for a year or two. A man has not much intellectual capital who cannot

treat himself to a brief interval of modesty. Premature individualism

commonly ends either in a reaction against the original whims, or in a

mannerism which perpetuates them. For mannerism no one is great enough,

because, though in the hands of a strong man it imprisons us in novel

fascination, yet we soon grow weary, and then hate our prison forever.

How sparkling was Reade's crisp brilliancy in "Peg Woffington"!--but

into what disagreeable affectations it has since degenerated! Carlyle

was a boon to the human race, amid the lameness into which English style

was declining; but who is not tired of him and his catchwords now? He

was the Jenner of our modern style, inoculating and saving us all by his

quaint frank Germanism, then dying of his own disease. Now the age has

outgrown him, and is approaching a mode of writing which unites the

smoothness of the eighteenth century with the vital vigor of the

seventeenth, so that Sir Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell seem quite as

near to us as Pope or Addison,--a style penetrated with the best spirit

of Carlyle, without a trace of Carlylism.

Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language: the one

fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang. Some one told the Emperor

Tiberius that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words. To be

sure, Louis XIV. in childhood, wishing for a carriage, called for _mon

carrosse_, and made the former feminine a masculine to all future

Frenchmen. But do not undertake to exercise these prerogatives of

royalty until you are quite sure of being crowned. The only thing I

remember of our college text-book of Rhetoric is one admirable verse of

caution which it quoted:--

"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,

Alike fantastic, if too new or old;

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,

Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."

Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or

Anglo-Saxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars

and sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives an affluence of

synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can

show.

While you utterly shun slang, whether native-or foreign-born,--(at

present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the

English,)--yet do not shrink from Americanisms, so they be good ones.

American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the

nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle,

Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary

instincts to create the new words it needs. To be sure, the inelegancies

with which we are chiefly reproached are not distinctively American:

Burke uses "pretty considerable"; Miss Burney says, "I trembled a

few"; the English Bible says "reckon," Locke has "guess," and Southey

"realize," in the exact senses in which one sometimes hears them used

colloquially here. Nevertheless such improprieties are of course to be

avoided; but whatever good Americanisms exist, let us hold to them by

all means. The diction of Emerson alone is a sufficient proof, by its

unequalled range and precision, that no people in the world ever had

access to a vocabulary so rich and copious as we are acquiring. To

the previous traditions and associations of the English tongue we add

resources of contemporary life such as England cannot rival. Political

freedom makes every man an individual; a vast industrial activity makes

every man an inventor, not merely of labor-saving machines, but of

labor-saving words; universal schooling popularizes all thought and

sharpens the edge of all language. We unconsciously demand of our

writers the same dash and the same accuracy which we demand in

railroading or dry-goods-jobbing. The mixture of nationalities is

constantly coining and exchanging new felicities of dialect: Ireland,

Scotland, Germany, Africa are present everywhere with their various

contributions of wit and shrewdness, thought and geniality; in New York

and elsewhere one finds whole thoroughfares of France, Italy, Spain,

Portugal; on our Western railways there are placards printed in Swedish;

even China is creeping in. The colonies of England are too far and too

provincial to have had much reflex influence on her literature, but

how our phraseology is already amplified by our relations with

Spanish-America! The life-blood of Mexico flowed into our newspapers

while the war was in progress; and the gold of California glitters in

our primer: Many foreign cities may show a greater variety of mere

national costumes, but the representative value of our immigrant tribes

is far greater from the very fact that they merge their mental costume

in ours. Thus the American writer finds himself among his phrases like

an American sea-captain amid his crew: a medley of all nations, waiting

for the strong organizing New-England mind to mould them into a unit of

force.

There are certain minor matters, subsidiary to elegance, if not

elegancies, and therefore worth attention. Do not habitually prop your

sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation-points, but make

them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these

devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness. Do not leave

loose ends as you go on, straggling things, to be caught up and dragged

along uneasily in foot-notes, but work them all in neatly, as Biddy at

her bread-pan gradually kneads in all the outlying bits of dough, till

she has one round and comely mass.

Reduce yourself to short allowance of parentheses and dashes; if you

employ them merely from clumsiness, they will lose all their proper

power in your hands. Economize quotation-marks also, clear that dust

from your pages, assume your readers to be acquainted with the current

jokes and the stock epithets: all persons like the compliment of having

it presumed that they know something, and prefer to discover the wit or

beauty of your allusion without a guide-board.

The same principle applies to learned citations and the results of

study. Knead these thoroughly in, supplying the maximum of desired

information with a minimum of visible schoolmaster. It requires no

pedantic mention of Euclid to indicate a mathematical mind, but only the

habitual use of clear terms and close connections. To employ in argument

the forms of Whately's Logic would render it probable that you are

juvenile and certain that you are tedious; wreathe the chain with roses.

The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be

disposed to keep Ollendorff in the background: the proper result of such

acquirements is visible in a finer ear for words; so that Goethe said,

the man who had studied but one language could not know that one. But

spare the raw material; deal as cautiously in Latin as did General

Jackson when Jack Downing was out of the way; and avoid French as some

fashionable novelists avoid English.

Thus far, these are elementary and rather technical suggestions, fitted

for the very opening of your literary career. Supposing you fairly in

print, there are needed some further counsels.

Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others

the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate

itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on to

something which needs no advocate but itself. It was said of Haydon,

the English artist, that, if he had taken half the pains to paint great

pictures that he took to persuade the public he had painted them, his

fame would have been secure. Similar was the career of poor Horne, who

wrote the farthing epic of "Orion" with one grand line in it, and a

prose work without any, on "The False Medium excluding Men of Genius

from the Public." He spent years in ineffectually trying to repeal the

exclusion in his own case, and has since manfully gone to the grazing

regions in Australia, hoping there at least to find the sheep and the

goats better discriminated. Do not emulate these tragedies. Remember how

many great writers have created the taste by which they were enjoyed,

and do not be in a hurry. Toughen yourself a little, and perform

something better. Inscribe above your desk the words of Rivarol, "Genius

is only great patience." It takes less time to build an avenue of

shingle palaces than to hide away unseen, block by block, the vast

foundation-stones of an observatory. Most by-gone literary fames have

been very short-lived in America, because they have lasted no longer

than they deserved. Happening the other day to recur to a list of

Cambridge lyceum-lecturers in my boyish days, I find with dismay that

the only name now popularly remembered is that of Emerson: death,

oblivion, or a professorship has closed over all the rest, while the

whole standard of American literature has been vastly raised meanwhile,

and no doubt partly through their labors. To this day, some of our most

gifted writers are being dwarfed by the unkind friendliness of too early

praise. It was Keats, the most precocious of all great poets, the stock

victim of critical assassination,--though the charge does him utter

injustice,--who declared that "nothing is finer for purposes of

production than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers."

Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than by notoriety.

Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become

of us, if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe

reasoning from either extreme. You are not necessarily writing like

Holmes because your reputation for talent began in college, nor like

Hawthorne because you have been before the public ten years without an

admirer. Above all, do not seek to encourage yourself by dwelling on

the defects of your rivals: strength comes only from what is above you.

Northcote, the painter, said, that, in observing an inferior picture,

he always felt his spirits droop, with the suspicion that perhaps he

deceived himself and his own paintings were no better; but the works of

the mighty masters always gave him renewed strength, in the hope that

perhaps his own had in their smaller way something of the same divine

quality.

Do not complacently imagine, because your first literary attempt proved

good and successful, that your second will doubtless improve upon it.

The very contrary sometimes happens. A man dreams for years over

one projected composition, all his reading converges to it, all his

experience stands related to it, it is the net result of his existence

up to a certain time, it is the cistern into which he pours his

accumulated life. Emboldened by success, he mistakes the cistern for a

fountain, and instantly taps his brain again. The second production,

as compared with the first, costs but half the pains and attains but

a quarter part of the merit; a little more of fluency and facility

perhaps,--but the vigor, the wealth, the originality, the head of water,

in short, are wanting. One would think that almost any intelligent man

might write one good thing in a lifetime, by reserving himself long

enough: it is the effort after quantity which proves destructive. The

greatest man has passed his zenith, when he once begins to cheapen

his style of work and sink into a book-maker: after that, though the

newspapers may never hint at it, nor his admirers own it, the decline of

his career is begun.

Yet the author is not alone to blame for this, but also the world which

first tempts and then reproves him. Goethe says, that, if a person once

does a good thing, society forms a league to prevent his doing another.

His seclusion is gone, and therefore his unconsciousness and his

leisure; luxuries tempt him from his frugality, and soon he must toil

for luxuries; then, because he has done one thing well, he is urged

to squander himself and do a thousand things badly. In this country

especially, if one can learn languages, he must go to Congress; if he

can argue a case, he must become agent of a factory: out of this comes

a variety of training which is very valuable, but a wise man must

have strength to call in his resources before middle-life, prune off

divergent activities, and concentrate himself on the main work, be it

what it may. It is shameful to see the indeterminate lives of many of

our gifted men, unable to resist the temptations of a busy land, and so

losing themselves in an aimless and miscellaneous career.

Yet it is unjust and unworthy in Marsh to disfigure his fine work on the

English language by traducing all who now write that tongue. "None seek

the audience, fit, though few, which contented the ambition of Milton,

and all writers for the press now measure their glory by their gains,"

and so indefinitely onward,--which is simply cant. Does Sylvanus Cobb,

Jr., who honestly earns his annual five thousand dollars from the "New

York Ledger," take rank as head of American literature by virtue of his

salary? Because the profits of true literature are rising,--trivial as

they still are beside those of commerce or the professions,--its merits

do not necessarily decrease, but the contrary is more likely to happen;

for in this pursuit, as in all others, cheap work is usually poor work.

None but gentlemen of fortune can enjoy the bliss of writing for nothing

and paying their own printer. Nor does the practice of compensation by

the page work the injury that has often been ignorantly predicted. No

contributor need hope to cover two pages of a periodical with what might

be adequately said in one, unless he assumes his editor to be as foolish

as himself. The Spartans exiled Ctesiphon for bragging that he could

speak the whole day on any subject selected; and a modern magazine is of

little value, unless it has a Spartan at its head.

Strive always to remember--though it does not seem intended that we

should quite bring it home to ourselves--that "To-Day is a king in

disguise," and that this American literature of ours will be just as

classic a thing, if we do our part, as any which the past has treasured.

There is a mirage over all literary associations. Keats and Lamb seem to

our young people to be existences as remote and legendary as Homer, yet

it is not an old man's life since Keats was an awkward boy at the

door of Hazlitt's lecture-room, and Lamb was introducing Talfourd to

Wordsworth as his own only admirer. In reading Spence's "Anecdotes,"

Pope and Addison appear no farther off; and wherever I open Bacon's

"Essays," I am sure to end at last with that one magical sentence,

annihilating centuries, "When I was a child, and Queen Elizabeth was in

the flower of her years."

And this imperceptible transformation of the commonplace present into

the storied past applies equally to the pursuits of war and to the

serenest works of peace. Be not misled by the excitements of the moment

into overrating the charms of military life. In this chaos of uniforms,

we seem to be approaching times such as existed in England after

Waterloo, when the splenetic Byron declared that the only distinction

was to be a little undistinguished. No doubt, war brings out grand

and unexpected qualities, and there is a perennial fascination in the

Elizabethan Raleighs and Sidneys, alike heroes of pen and sword. But the

fact is patent, that there is scarcely any art whose rudiments are

so easy to acquire as the military; the manuals of tactics have

no difficulties comparable to those of the ordinary professional

text-books; and any one who can drill a boat's crew or a ball-club can

learn in a very few weeks to drill a company or even a regiment. Given

in addition the power to command, to organize, and to execute,--high

qualities, though not rare in this community,--and you have a man

needing but time and experience to make a general. More than this can be

acquired only by an exclusive absorption in this one art; as Napoleon

said, that, to have good soldiers, a nation must be always at war.

If, therefore, duty and opportunity call, count it a privilege to obtain

your share in the new career; throw yourself into it as resolutely and

joyously as if it were a summer-campaign in the Adirondack, but never

fancy for a moment that you have discovered any grander or manlier life

than you might be leading every day at home. It is not needful here to

decide which is intrinsically the better thing, a column of a newspaper

or a column of attack, Wordsworth's "Lines on Immortality" or

Wellington's Lines of Torres Vedras; each is noble, if nobly done,

though posterity seems to remember literature the longest. The writer

is not celebrated for having been the favorite of the conqueror, but

sometimes the conqueror only for having favored or even for having

spurned the writer. "When the great Sultan died, his power and glory

departed from him, and nothing remained but this one fact, that he knew

not the worth of Ferdousi." There is a slight delusion in this dazzling

glory. What a fantastic whim the young lieutenants thought it, when

General Wolfe, on the eve of battle, said of Gray's "Elegy," "Gentlemen,

I would rather have written that poem than have taken Quebec." Yet,

no doubt, it is by the memory of that remark that Wolfe will live the

longest,--aided by the stray line of another poet, still reminding us,

not needlessly, that "Wolfe's great name's cotemporal with our own."

Once the poets and the sages were held to be pleasing triflers, fit for

hours of relaxation in the lulls of war. Now the pursuits of peace are

recognized as the real, and war as the accidental. It interrupts

all higher avocations, as does the cry of fire: when the fire is

extinguished, the important affairs of life are resumed. Six years ago

the London "Times" was bewailing that all thought and culture in England

were suspended by the Crimean War. "We want no more books. Give us good

recruits, at least five feet seven, a good model for a floating-battery,

and a gun to take effect at five thousand yards,--and Whigs and Tories,

High and Low Church, the poets, astronomers, and critics, may settle it

among themselves." How remote seems that epoch now! and how remote will

the present soon appear! while art and science will resume their sway

serene, beneath skies eternal. Yesterday I turned from treatises on

gunnery and fortification to open Milton's Latin Poems, which I had

never read, and there, in the "Sylvarum Liber," I came upon a passage

as grand as anything in "Paradise Lost,"--his description of Plato's

archetypal man, the vast ideal of the human race, eternal, incorrupt,

coeval with the stars, dwelling either in the sidereal spaces, or among

the Lethean mansions of souls unborn, or pacing the unexplored confines

of the habitable globe. There stood the majestic image, veiled in a dead

language, yet still visible; and it was as if one of the poet's own

sylvan groves had been suddenly cut down, and opened a view of Olympus.

Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy

ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing

real in the universe but Plato's archetypal man.

Indeed, it is the same with all contemporary notorieties. In all free

governments, especially, it is the habit to overrate the _dramatis

personae_ of the hour. How empty to us are now the names of the great

politicians of the last generation, as Crawford and Lowndes!--yet it

is but a few years since these men filled in the public ear as large a

space as Clay or Calhoun afterwards, and when they died, the race of the

giants was thought ended. The path to oblivion of these later idols

is just as sure; even Webster will be to the next age but a mighty

tradition, and all that he has left will seem no more commensurate with

his fame than will his statue by Powers. If anything preserves the

statesmen of to-day, it will be only because we are coming to a contest

of more vital principles, which may better embalm the men. Of all gifts,

eloquence is the most short-lived. The most accomplished orator fades

forgotten, and his laurels pass to some hoarse, inaudible Burke,

accounted rather a bore during his lifetime, and possessed of a faculty

of scattering, not convincing, the members of the House. "After all,"

said the brilliant Choate, with melancholy foreboding, "a book is the

only immortality."

So few men in any age are born with a marked gift for literary

expression, so few of this number have access to high culture, so few

even of these have the personal nobleness to use their powers well,

and this small band is finally so decimated by disease and manifold

disaster, that it makes one shudder to observe how little of the

embodied intellect of any age is left behind. Literature is attar of

roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms. Think how Spain and

Portugal once divided the globe between them in a treaty, when England

was a petty kingdom of illiterate tribes!--and now all Spain is

condensed for us into Cervantes, and all Portugal into the fading fame

of the unread Camoens. The long magnificence of Italian culture has

left us only _I Quattro Poeti_, the Four Poets. The difference between

Shakspeare and his contemporaries is not that he is read twice, ten

times, a hundred times as much as they: it is an absolute difference; he

is read, and they are only printed.

Yet, if our life be immortal, this temporary distinction is of little

moment, and we may learn humility, without learning despair, from

earth's evanescent glories. Who cannot bear a few disappointments, if

the vista be so wide that the mute inglorious Miltons of this sphere

may in some other sing their Paradise as Found? War or peace, fame or

forgetfulness, can bring no real injury to one who has formed the fixed

purpose to live nobly day by day. I fancy that in some other realm of

existence we may look back with some kind interest on this scene of our

earlier life, and say to one another,--"Do you remember yonder planet,

where once we went to school?" And whether our elective study here lay

chiefly in the fields of action or of thought will matter little to us

then, when other schools shall have led us through other disciplines.

* * * * *

JOHN LAMAR.

The guard-house was, in fact, nothing but a shed in the middle of a

stubble-field. It had been built for a cider-press last summer; but

since Captain Dorr had gone into the army, his regiment had camped over

half his plantation, and the shed was boarded up, with heavy wickets at

either end, to hold whatever prisoners might fall into their hands

from Floyd's forces. It was a strong point for the Federal troops, his

farm,--a sort of wedge in the Rebel Cheat counties of Western Virginia.

Only one prisoner was in the guard-house now. The sentry, a raw

boat-hand from Illinois, gaped incessantly at him through the bars, not

sure if the "Secesh" were limbed and headed like other men; but the

November fog was so thick that he could discern nothing but a short,

squat man, in brown clothes and white hat, heavily striding to and fro.

A negro was crouching outside, his knees cuddled in his arms to keep

warm: a field-hand, you could be sure from the face, a grisly patch of

flabby black, with a dull eluding word of something, you could not tell

what, in the points of eyes,--treachery or gloom. The prisoner stopped,

cursing him about something: the only answer was a lazy rub of the

heels.

"Got any 'baccy, Mars' John?" he whined, in the middle of the hottest

oath.

The man stopped abruptly, turning his pockets inside out.

"That's all, Ben," he said, kindly enough. "Now begone, you black

devil!"

"Dem's um, Mars'! Goin' 'mediate,"--catching the tobacco, and lolling

down full length as his master turned off again.

Dave Hall, the sentry, stared reflectively, and sat down.

"Ben? Who air you next?"--nursing his musket across his knees,

baby-fashion.

Ben measured him with one eye, polished the quid in his greasy hand, and

looked at it.

"Pris'ner o' war," he mumbled, finally,--contemptuously; for Dave's

trousers were in rags like his own, and his chilblained toes stuck

through the shoe-tops. Cheap white trash, clearly.

"Yer master's some at swearin'. Heow many, neow, hes he like you, down

to Georgy?"

The boatman's bony face was gathering a woful pity. He had enlisted to

free the Uncle Toms, and carry God's vengeance to the Legrees. Here they

were, a pair of them.

Ben squinted another critical survey of the "miss'able Linkinite."

"How many wells hev _yer_ poisoned since yer set out?" he muttered.

The sentry stopped.

"How many 'longin' to de Lamars? 'Bout as many as der's dam' Yankees in

Richmond 'baccy-houses!"

Something in Dave's shrewd, whitish eye warned him off.

"Ki yi! yer white nigger, yer!" he chuckled, shuffling down the stubble.

Dave clicked his musket,--then, choking down an oath into a grim

Methodist psalm, resumed his walk, looking askance at the coarse-moulded

face of the prisoner peering through the bars, and the diamond studs in

his shirt,--bought with human blood, doubtless. The man was the black

curse of slavery itself in the flesh, in his thought somehow, and he

hated him accordingly. Our men of the Northwest have enough brawny

Covenanter muscle in their religion to make them good haters for

opinion's sake.

Lamar, the prisoner, watched him with a lazy drollery in his sluggish

black eyes. It died out into sternness, as he looked beyond the sentry.

He had seen this Cheat country before; this very plantation was his

grandfather's a year ago, when he had come up from Georgia here, and

loitered out the summer months with his Virginia cousins, hunting. That

was a pleasant summer! Something in the remembrance of it flashed into

his eyes, dewy, genial; the man's leather-covered face reddened like a

child's. Only a year ago,--and now----The plantation was Charley Dorr's

now, who had married Ruth. This very shed he and Dorr had planned last

spring, and now Charley held him a prisoner in it. The very thought of

Charley Dorr warmed his heart. Why, he could thank God there were such

men. True grit, every inch of his little body! There, last summer, how

he had avoided Ruth until the day when he (Lamar) was going away!--then

he told him he meant to try and win her. "She cared most for you

always," Lamar had said, bitterly; "why have you waited so long?" "You

loved her first, John, you know." That was like a man! He remembered

that even that day, when his pain was breathless and sharp, the words

made him know that Dorr was fit to be her husband.

Dorr was his friend. The word meant much to John Lamar. He thought less

meanly of himself, when he remembered it. Charley's prisoner! An odd

chance! Better that than to have met in battle. He thrust back the

thought, the sweat oozing out on his face,--something within him

muttering, "For Liberty! I would have killed him, so help me God!"

He had brought despatches to General Lee, that he might see Charley, and

the old place, and--Ruth again; there was a gnawing hunger in his heart

to see them. Fool! what was he to them? The man's face grew slowly

pale, as that of a savage or an animal does, when the wound is deep and

inward.

The November day was dead, sunless: since morning the sky had had only

enough life in it to sweat out a few muddy drops, that froze as they

fell: the cold numbed his mouth as he breathed it. This stubbly slope

was where he and his grandfather had headed the deer: it was covered

with hundreds of dirty, yellow tents now. Around there were hills like

uncouth monsters, swathed in ice, holding up the soggy sky; shivering

pine-forests; unmeaning, dreary flats; and the Cheat, coiled about the

frozen sinews of the hills, limp and cold, like a cord tying a dead

man's jaws. Whatever outlook of joy or worship this region had borne on

its face in time gone, it turned to him to-day nothing but stagnation,

a great death. He wondered idly, looking at it, (for the old Huguenot

brain of the man was full of morbid fancies,) if it were winter alone

that had deadened color and pulse out of these full-blooded hills, or if

they could know the colder horror crossing their threshold, and forgot

to praise God as it came.

Over that farthest ridge the house had stood. The guard (he had been

taken by a band of Snake-hunters, back in the hills) had brought him

past it. It was a heap of charred rafters. "Burned in the night," they

said, "when the old Colonel was alone." They were very willing to

show him this, as it was done by his own party, the Secession

"Bush-whackers"; took him to the wood-pile to show him where his

grandfather had been murdered, (there was a red mark,) and buried, his

old hands above the ground. "Colonel said 't was a job fur us to pay up;

so we went to the village an' hed a scrimmage,"--pointing to gaps in

the hedges where the dead Bush-whackers yet lay unburied. He looked at

them, and at the besotted faces about him, coolly.

Snake-hunters and Bush-whackers, he knew, both armies used in Virginia

as tools for rapine and murder: the sooner the Devil called home his

own, the better. And yet, it was not God's fault, surely, that there

were such tools in the North, any more than that in the South Ben

was--Ben. Something was rotten in freer States than Denmark, he thought.

One of the men went into the hedge, and brought out a child's golden

ringlet as a trophy. Lamar glanced in, and saw the small face in its

woollen hood, dimpled yet, though dead for days. He remembered it. Jessy

Birt, the ferryman's little girl. She used to come up to the house every

day for milk. He wondered for which flag _she_ died. Ruth was teaching

her to write. _Ruth!_ Some old pain hurt him just then, nearer than even

the blood of the old man or the girl crying to God from the ground. The

sergeant mistook the look. "They'll be buried," he said, gruffly. "Ye

brought it on yerselves." And so led him to the Federal camp.

The afternoon grew colder, as he stood looking out of the guard-house.

Snow began to whiten through the gray. He thrust out his arm through the

wicket, his face kindling with childish pleasure, as he looked closer at

the fairy stars and crowns on his shaggy sleeve. If Floy were here! She

never had seen snow. When the flakes had melted off, he took a case out

of his pocket to look at Floy. His sister,--a little girl who had no

mother, nor father, nor lover, but Lamar. The man among his brother

officers in Richmond was coarse, arrogant, of dogged courage, keen

palate at the table, as keen eye on the turf. Sickly little Floy, down

at home, knew the way to something below all this: just as they of the

Rommany blood see below the muddy boulders of the streets the enchanted

land of Boabdil bare beneath. Lamar polished the ivory painting with his

breath, remembering that he had drunk nothing for days. A child's face,

of about twelve, delicate,--a breath of fever or cold would shatter such

weak beauty; big, dark eyes, (her mother was pure Castilian,) out of

which her little life looked irresolute into the world, uncertain what

to do there. The painter, with an unapt fancy, had clustered about the

Southern face the Southern emblem, buds of the magnolia, unstained, as

yet, as pearl. It angered Lamar, remembering how the creamy whiteness of

the full-blown flower exhaled passion of which the crimsonest rose knew

nothing,--a content, ecstasy, in animal life. Would Floy----Well, God

help them both! they needed help. Three hundred souls was a heavy weight

for those thin little hands to hold sway over,--to lead to hell or

heaven. Up North they could have worked for her, and gained only her

money. So Lamar reasoned, like a Georgian: scribbling a letter to

"My Baby" on the wrapper of a newspaper,--drawing the shapes of the

snowflakes,--telling her he had reached their grandfather's plantation,

but "have not seen our Cousin Ruth yet, of whom you may remember I have

told you, Floy. When you grow up, I should like you to be just such a

woman; so remember, my darling, if I"----He scratched the last words

out: why should he hint to her that he could die? Holding his life loose

in his hand, though, had brought things closer to him lately,--God and

death, this war, the meaning of it all. But he would keep his brawny

body between these terrible realities and Floy, yet awhile. "I want

you," he wrote, "to leave the plantation, and go with your old maumer to

the village. It will be safer there." He was sure the letter would reach

her. He had a plan to escape to-night, and he could put it into a post

inside the lines. Ben was to get a small hand-saw that would open the

wicket; the guards were not hard to elude. Glancing up, he saw the negro

stretched by a camp-fire, listening to the gaunt boatman, who was off

duty. Preaching Abolitionism, doubtless: he could hear Ben's derisive

shouts of laughter. "And so, good bye, Baby Florence!" he scrawled. "I

wish I could send you some of this snow, to show you what the floor of

heaven is like."

While the snow fell faster--without, he stopped writing, and began idly

drawing a map of Georgia on the tan-bark with a stick. Here the Federal

troops could effect a landing: he knew the defences at that point. If

they did? He thought of these Snake-hunters who had found in the war a

peculiar road for themselves downward with no gallows to stumble over,

fancied he saw them skulking through the fields at Cedar Creek, closing

around the house, and behind them a mass of black faces and bloody

bayonets. Floy alone, and he here,--like a rat in a trap! "God keep my

little girl!" he wrote, unsteadily. "God bless you, Floy!" He gasped for

breath, as if he had been writing with his heart's blood. Folding up the

paper, he hid it inside his shirt and began his dogged walk, calculating

the chances of escape. Once out of this shed, he could baffle a

blood-hound, he knew the hills so well.

His head bent down, he did not see a man who stood looking at him over

the wicket. Captain Dorr. A puny little man, with thin yellow hair, and

womanish face: but not the less the hero of his men,--they having found

out, somehow, that muscle was not the solidest thing to travel on in

war-times. Our regiments of "roughs" were not altogether crowned with

laurel at Manassas! So the men built more on the old Greatheart soul

in the man's blue eyes: one of those souls born and bred pure, sent to

teach, that can find breath only in the free North. His hearty "Hillo!"

startled Lamar.

"How are you, old fellow?" he said, unlocking the gate and coming in.

Lamar threw off his wretched thoughts, glad to do it. What need to

borrow trouble? He liked a laugh,--had a lazy, jolly humor of his own.

Dorr had finished drill, and come up, as he did every day, to freshen

himself with an hour's talk to this warm, blundering fellow. In this

dismal war-work, (though his whole soul was in that, too,) it was

like putting your hands to a big blaze. Dorr had no near relations;

Lamar--they had played marbles together--stood to him where a younger

brother might have stood. Yet, as they talked, he could not help his

keen eye seeing him just as he was.

Poor John! he thought: the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that

he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his

sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that

worst of mud-moulds,--belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the

tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life

God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, though,

Dorr thought. Some pain or passion was bringing the man in him out of

the flesh, vigilant, alert, aspirant. A different man from Dorr.

In fact, Lamar was just beginning to think for himself, and of course

his thoughts were defiant, intolerant. He did not comprehend how his

companion could give his heresies such quiet welcome, and pronounce

sentence of death on them so coolly. Because Dorr had gone farther up

the mountain, had he the right to make him follow in the same steps?

The right,--that was it. By brute force, too? Human freedom, eh?

Consequently, their talks were stormy enough. To-day, however, they were

on trivial matters.

"I've brought the General's order for your release at last, John. It

confines you to this district, however."

Lamar shook his head.

"No parole for me! My stake outside is too heavy for me to remain a

prisoner on anything but compulsion. I mean to escape, if I can. Floy

has nobody but me, you know, Charley."

There was a moment's silence.

"I wish," said Dorr, half to himself, "the child was with her cousin

Ruth. If she could make her a woman like herself!"

"You are kind," Lamar forced out, thinking of what might have been a

year ago.

Dorr had forgotten. He had just kissed little Ruth at the door-step,

coming away: thinking, as he walked up to camp, how her clear thought,

narrow as it was, was making his own higher, more just; wondering if

the tears on her face last night, when she got up from her knees after

prayer, might not help as much in the great cause of truth as the life

he was ready to give. He was so used to his little wife now, that he

could look to no hour of his past life, nor of the future coming ages

of event and work, where she was not present,--very flesh of his flesh,

heart of his heart. A gulf lay between them and the rest of the world.

It was hardly probable he could see her as a woman towards whom another

man looked across the gulf, dumb, hopeless, defrauded of his right.

"She sent you some flowers, by the way, John,--the last in the

yard,--and bade me be sure and bring you down with me. Your own colors,

you see?--to put you in mind of home,"--pointing to the crimson asters

flaked with snow.

The man smiled faintly: the smell of the flowers choked him: he laid

them aside. God knows he was trying to wring out this bitter old

thought: he could not look in Dorr's frank eyes while it was there.

He must escape to-night: he never would come near them again, in this

world, or beyond death,--never! He thought of that like a man going to

drag through eternity with half his soul gone. Very well: there was man

enough left in him to work honestly and bravely, and to thank God for

that good pure love he yet had. He turned to Dorr with a flushed face,

and began talking of Floy in hearty earnest,--glancing at Ben coming up

the hill, thinking that escape depended on him.

"I ordered your man up," said Captain Dorr. "Some canting Abolitionist

had him open-mouthed down there."

The negro came in, and stood in the corner, listening while they talked.

A gigantic fellow, with a gladiator's muscles. Stronger than that Yankee

captain, he thought,--than either of them: better breathed,--drawing the

air into his brawny chest. "A man and a brother." Did the fool think he

didn't know that before? He had a contempt for Dave and his like. Lamar

would have told you Dave's words were true, but despised the man as a

crude, unlicked bigot. Ben did the same, with no words for the idea. The

negro instinct in him recognized gentle blood by any of its signs,--the

transparent animal life, the reticent eye, the mastered voice: he

had better men than Lamar at home to learn it from. It is a trait of

serfdom, the keen eye to measure the inherent rights of a man to be

master. A negro or a Catholic Irishman does not need "Sartor Resartus"

to help him to see through any clothes. Ben leaned, half-asleep, against

the wall, some old thoughts creeping out of their hiding-places through

the torpor, like rats to the sunshine: the boatman's slang had been hot

and true enough to rouse them in his brain.

"So, Ben," said his master, as he passed once, "your friend has been

persuading you to exchange the cotton-fields at Cedar Creek for New-York

alleys, eh?"

"Ki!" laughed Ben, "white darkey. Mind ole dad, Mars' John, as took off

in der swamp? Um asked dat Linkinite ef him saw dad up Norf. Guess him's

free now. Ki! ole dad!"

"The swamp was the place for him," said Lamar. "I remember."

"Dunno," said the negro, surlily: "him's dad, af'er all: tink him's free

now,"--and mumbled down into a monotonous drone about

"Oh yo, bredern, is yer gwine ober Jordern?"

Half-asleep, they thought,--but with dull questionings at work in his

brain, some queer notions about freedom, of that unknown North, mostly

mixed with his remembrance of his father, a vicious old negro, that in

Pennsylvania would have worked out his salvation in the under cell of

the penitentiary, but in Georgia, whipped into heroism, had betaken

himself into the swamp, and never returned. Tradition among the Lamar

slaves said he had got off to Ohio, of which they had as clear an idea

as most of us have of heaven. At any rate, old Kite became a mystery, to

be mentioned with awe at fish-bakes and barbecues. He was this uncouth

wretch's father,--do you understand? The flabby-faced boy, flogged in

the cotton-field for whining after his dad, or hiding away part of his

flitch and molasses for months in hopes the old man would come back, was

rather a comical object, you would have thought. Very different his,

from the feeling with which you left your mother's grave,--though as yet

we have not invented names for the emotions of those people. We'll grant

that it hurt Ben a little, however. Even the young polypus, when it is

torn from the old one, bleeds a drop or two, they say. As he grew up,

the great North glimmered through his thought, a sort of big field,--a

paradise of no work, no flogging, and white bread every day, where the

old man sat and ate his fill.

The second point in Ben's history was that he fell in love. Just as

you did,--with the difference, of course: though the hot sun, or the

perpetual foot upon his breast, does not make our black Prometheus less

fierce in his agony of hope or jealousy than you, I am afraid. It was

Nan, a pale mulatto house-servant, that the field-hand took into his

dull, lonesome heart to make life of, with true-love defiance of caste.

I think Nan liked him very truly. She was lame and sickly, and if Ben

was black and a picker, and stayed in the quarters, he was strong, like

a master to her in some ways: the only thing she could call hers in the

world was the love the clumsy boy gave her. White women feel in that

way sometimes, and it makes them very tender to men not their equals.

However, old Mrs. Lamar, before she died, gave her house-servants their

free papers, and Nan was among them. So she set off, with all the finery

little Floy could give her: went up into that great, dim North. She

never came again.

The North swallowed up all Ben knew or felt outside of his hot, hated

work, his dread of a lashing on Saturday night. All the pleasure left

him was 'possum and hominy for Sunday's dinner. It did not content him.

The spasmodic religion of the field-negro does not teach endurance. So

it came, that the slow tide of discontent ebbing in everybody's heart

towards some unreached sea set in his ignorant brooding towards that

vague country which the only two who cared for him had found. If he

forgot it through the dogged, sultry days, he remembered it when the

overseer scourged the dull tiger-look into his eyes, or when, husking

corn with the others at night, the smothered negro-soul, into which

their masters dared not look, broke out in their wild, melancholy songs.

Aimless, unappealing, yet no prayer goes up to God more keen in its

pathos. You find, perhaps, in Beethoven's seventh symphony the secrets

of your heart made manifest, and suddenly think of a Somewhere to come,

where your hope waits for you with late fulfilment. Do not laugh at Ben,

then, if he dully told in his song the story of all he had lost, or gave

to his heaven a local habitation and a name.

From the place where he stood now, as his master and Dorr walked up and

down, he could see the purplish haze beyond which the sentry had told

him lay the North. The North! Just beyond the ridge. There was a pain

in his head, looking at it; his nerves grew cold and rigid, as yours do

when something wrings your heart sharply: for there are nerves in these

black carcasses, thicker, more quickly stung to madness than yours. Yet

if any savage longing, smouldering for years, was heating to madness now

in his brain, there was no sign of it in his face. Vapid, with sordid

content, the huge jaws munching tobacco slowly, only now and then the

beady eye shot a sharp glance after Dorr. The sentry had told him the

Northern army had come to set the slaves free; he watched the Federal

officer keenly.

"What ails you, Ben?" said his master. "Thinking over your friend's

sermon?"

Ben's stolid laugh was ready.

"Done forgot dat, Mars'. Wouldn't go, nohow. Since Mars' sold dat cussed

Joe, gorry good times 't home. Dam' Abolitioner say we ums all goin'

Norf,"--with a stealthy glance at Dorr.

"That's more than your philanthropy bargains for, Charley," laughed

Lamar.

The men stopped; the negro skulked nearer, his whole senses sharpened

into hearing. Dorr's clear face was clouded.

"This slave question must be kept out of the war. It puts a false face

on it."

"I thought one face was what it needed," said Lamar. "You have too many

slogans. Strong government, tariff, Sumter, a bit of bunting, eleven

dollars a month. It ought to be a vital truth that would give soul and

_vim_ to a body with the differing members of your army. You, with your

ideal theory, and Billy Wilson with his 'Blood and Baltimore!' Try human

freedom. That's high and sharp and broad."

Ben drew a step closer.

"You are shrewd, Lamar. I am to go below all constitutions or expediency

or existing rights, and tell Ben here that he is free? When once the

Government accepts that doctrine, you, as a Rebel, must be let alone."

The slave was hid back in the shade.

"Dorr," said Lamar, "you know I'm a groping, ignorant fellow, but it

seems to me that prating of constitutions and existing rights is surface

talk; there is a broad common-sense underneath, by whose laws the world

is governed, which your statesmen don't touch often. You in the North,

in your dream of what shall be, shut your eyes to what is. You want a

republic where every man's voice shall be heard in the council, and the

majority shall rule. Granting that the free population are educated to a

fitness for this,--(God forbid I should grant it with the Snake-hunters

before my eyes!)--look here!"

He turned round, and drew the slave out into the light: he crouched

down, gaping vacantly at them.

"There is Ben. What, in God's name, will you do with him? Keep him a

slave, and chatter about self-government? Pah! The country is paying in

blood for the lie, to-day. Educate him for freedom, by putting a musket

in his hands? We have this mass of heathendom drifted on our shores by

your will as well as mine. Try to bring them to a level with the whites

by a wrench, and you'll waken out of your dream to a sharp reality. Your

Northern philosophy ought to be old enough to teach you that spasms in

the body-politic shake off no atom of disease,--that reform, to be

enduring, must be patient, gradual, inflexible as the Great Reformer.

'The mills of God,' the old proverb says, 'grind surely.' But, Dorr,

they grind exceeding slow!"

Dorr watched Lamar with an amused smile. It pleased him to see his brain

waking up, eager, vehement. As for Ben, crouching there, if they talked

of him like a clod, heedless that his face deepened in stupor, that his

eyes had caught a strange, gloomy treachery,--we all do the same, you

know.

"What is your remedy, Lamar? You have no belief in the right of

Secession, I know," said Dorr.

"It's a bad instrument for a good end. Let the white Georgian come out

of his sloth, and the black will rise with him. Jefferson Davis may not

intend it, but God does. When we have our Lowell, our New York, when we

are a self-sustaining people instead of lazy land-princes, Ben here will

have climbed the second of the great steps of Humanity. Do you laugh at

us?" said Lamar, with a quiet self-reliance. "Charley, it needs only

work and ambition to cut the brute away from my face, and it will leave

traits very like your own. Ben's father was a Guinea fetich-worshipper;

when we stand where New England does, Ben's son will be ready for his

freedom."

"And while you theorize," laughed Dorr, "I hold you a prisoner, John,

and Ben knows it is his right to be free. He will not wait for the

grinding of the mill, I fancy."

Lamar did not smile. It was womanish in the man, when the life of great

nations hung in doubt before them, to go back so constantly to little

Floy sitting in the lap of her old black maumer. But he did it,--with

the quick thought that to-night he must escape, that death lay in delay.

While Dorr talked, Lamar glanced significantly at Ben. The negro was not

slow to understand,--with a broad grin, touching his pocket, from which

projected the dull end of a hand-saw. I wonder what sudden pain made the

negro rise just then, and come close to his master, touching him with a

strange affection and remorse in his tired face, as though he had done

him some deadly wrong.

"What is it, old fellow?" said Lamar, in his boyish way. "Homesick, eh?

There's a little girl in Georgia that will be glad to see you and your

master, and take precious good care of us when she gets us safe again.

That's true, Ben!" laying his hand kindly on the man's shoulder, while

his eyes went wandering off to the hills lying South.

"Yes, Mars'," said Ben, in a low voice, suddenly bringing a

blacking-brush, and beginning to polish his master's shoes,--thinking,

while he did it, of how often Mars' John had interfered with the

overseers to save him from a flogging,--(Lamar, in his lazy way,

was kind to his slaves,)--thinking of little Mist' Floy with an odd

tenderness and awe, as a gorilla might of a white dove: trying to think

thus,--the simple, kindly nature of the negro struggling madly with

something beneath, new and horrible. He understood enough of the talk of

the white men to know that there was no help for him,--none. Always a

slave. Neither you nor I can ever know what those words meant to him.

The pale purple mist where the North lay was never to be passed. His

dull eyes turned to it constantly,--with a strange look, such as the

lost women might have turned to the door, when Jesus shut it: they

forever outside. There was a way to help himself? The stubby black

fingers holding the brush grew cold and clammy,--noting withal, the poor

wretch in his slavish way, that his master's clothes were finer than the

Northern captain's, his hands whiter, and proud that it was so,--holding

Lamar's foot daintily, trying to see himself in the shoe, smoothing down

the trousers with a boorish, affectionate touch,--with the same fierce

whisper in his ear, Would the shoes ever be cleaned again? would the

foot move to-morrow?

It grew late. Lamar's supper was brought up from Captain Dorr's, and

placed on the bench. He poured out a goblet of water.

"Come, Charley, let's drink. To Liberty! It is a war-cry for Satan or

Michael."

They drank, laughing, while Ben stood watching. Dorr turned to go, but

Lamar called him back,--stood resting his hand on his shoulder: he never

thought to see him again, you know.

"Look at Ruth, yonder," said Dorr, his face lighting. "She is coming to

meet us. She thought you would be with me."

Lamar looked gravely down at the low field-house and the figure at the

gate. He thought he could see the small face and earnest eyes, though it

was far off, and night was closing.

"She is waiting for you, Charley. Go down. Good night, old chum!"

If it cost any effort to say it, Dorr saw nothing of it.

"Good night, Lamar! I'll see you in the morning."

He lingered. His old comrade looked strangely alone and desolate.

"John!"

"What is it, Dorr?"

"If I could tell the Colonel you would take the oath? For Floy's sake."

The man's rough face reddened.

"You should know me better. Good bye."

"Well, well, you are mad. Have you no message for Ruth?"

There was a moment's silence.

"Tell her I say, God bless her!"

Dorr stopped and looked keenly in his face,--then, coming back, shook

hands again, in a different way from before, speaking in a lower

voice,--

"God help us all, John! Good night!"--and went slowly down the hill.

It was nearly night, and bitter cold. Lamar stood where the snow drifted

in on him, looking out through the horizon-less gray.

"Come out o' dem cold, Mars' John," whined Ben, pulling at his coat.

As the night gathered, the negro was haunted with a terrified wish to be

kind to his master. Something told him that the time was short. Here and

there through the far night some tent-fire glowed in a cone of ruddy

haze, through which the thick-falling snow shivered like flakes of

light. Lamar watched only the square block of shadow where Dorr's house

stood. The door opened at last, and a broad, cheerful gleam shot out

red darts across the white waste without; then he saw two figures go

in together. They paused a moment; he put his head against the bars,

straining his eyes, and saw that the woman turned, shading her eyes

with her hand, and looked up to the side of the mountain where the

guard-house lay,--with a kindly look, perhaps, for the prisoner out in

the cold. A kind look: that was all. The door shut on them. Forever: so,

good night, Ruth!

He stool there for an hour or two, leaning his head against the muddy

planks, smoking. Perhaps, in his coarse fashion, he took the trouble of

his manhood back to the same God he used to pray to long ago. When he

turned at last, and spoke, it was with a quiet, strong voice, like one

who would fight through life in a manly way. There was a grating sound

at the back of the shed: it was Ben, sawing through the wicket, the

guard having lounged off to supper. Lamar watched him, noticing that the

negro was unusually silent. The plank splintered, and hung loose.

"Done gone, Mars' John, now,"--leaving it, and beginning to replenish

the fire.

"That's right, Ben. We'll start in the morning. That sentry at two

o'clock sleeps regularly."

Ben chuckled, heaping up the sticks.

"Go on down to the camp, as usual. At two, Ben, remember! We will be

free to-night, old boy!"

The black face looked up from the clogging smoke with a curious stare.

"Ki! we'll be free to-night, Mars'!"--gulping his breath.

Soon after, the sentry unlocked the gate, and he shambled off out into

the night. Lamar, left alone, went closer to the fire, and worked busily

at some papers he drew from his pocket: maps and schedules. He intended

to write until two o'clock; but the blaze dying down, he wrapped his

blanket about him, and lay down on the heaped straw, going on sleepily,

in his brain, with his calculations.

The negro, in the shadow of the shed, watched him. A vague fear beset

him,--of the vast, white cold,--the glowering mountains,--of himself;

he clung to the familiar face, like a man drifting out into an unknown

sea, clutching some relic of the shore. When Lamar fell asleep, he

wandered uncertainly towards the tents. The world had grown new,

strange; was he Ben, picking cotton in the swamp-edge?--plunging his

fingers with a shudder in the icy drifts. Down in the glowing torpor of

the Santilla flats, where the Lamar plantations lay, Ben had slept off

as maddening hunger for life and freedom as this of to-day; but here,

with the winter air stinging every nerve to life, with the perpetual

mystery of the mountains terrifying his bestial nature down, the

strength of the man stood up: groping, blind, malignant, it may be; but

whose fault was that? He was half-frozen: the physical pain sharpened

the keen doubt conquering his thought. He sat down in the crusted snow,

looking vacantly about him, a man, at last,--but wakening, like a

new-born soul, into a world of unutterable solitude. Wakened dully,

slowly; sitting there far into the night, pondering stupidly on his old

life; crushing down and out the old parasite affection for his master,

the old fears, the old weight threatening to press out his thin life;

the muddy blood heating, firing with the same heroic dream that bade

Tell and Garibaldi lift up their hands to God, and cry aloud that they

were men and free: the same,--God-given, burning in the imbruted veins

of a Guinea slave. To what end? May God be merciful to America while

she answers the question! He sat, rubbing his cracked, bleeding feet,

glancing stealthily at the southern hills. Beyond them lay all that was

past; in an hour he would follow Lamar back to--what? He lifted his

hands up to the sky, in his silly way sobbing hot tears. "Gor-a'mighty,

Mars' Lord, I'se tired," was all the prayer he made. The pale purple

mist was gone from the North; the ridge behind which love, freedom

waited, struck black across the sky, a wall of iron. He looked at it

drearily. Utterly alone: he had always been alone. He got up at last,

with a sigh.

"It's a big world,"--with a bitter chuckle,--"but der's no room in it

fur poor Ben."

He dragged himself through the snow to a light in a tent where a

voice in a wild drone, like that he had heard at negro camp-meetings,

attracted him. He did not go in: stood at the tent-door, listening. Two

or three of the guard stood around, leaning on their muskets; in the

vivid fire-light rose the gaunt figure of the Illinois boatman, swaying

to and fro as he preached. For the men were honest, God-fearing souls,

members of the same church, and Dave, in all integrity of purpose, read

aloud to them,--the cry of Jeremiah against the foul splendors of the

doomed city,--waving, as he spoke, his bony arm to the South. The shrill

voice was that of a man wrestling with his Maker. The negro's fired

brain caught the terrible meaning of the words,--found speech in it:

the wide, dark night, the solemn silence of the men, were only fitting

audience.

The man caught sight of the slave, and, laying down his book, began one

of those strange exhortations in the manner of his sect. Slow at first,

full of unutterable pity. There was room for pity. Pointing to the human

brute crouching there, made once in the image of God,--the saddest

wreck on His green foot-stool: to the great stealthy body, the

revengeful jaws, the foreboding eyes. Soul, brains,--a man, wifeless,

homeless, nationless, hawked, flung from trader to trader for a handful

of dirty shinplasters. "Lord God of hosts," cried the man, lifting up

his trembling hands, "lay not this sin to our charge!" There was a scar

on Ben's back where the lash had buried itself: it stung now in the

cold. He pulled his clothes tighter, that they should not see it; the

scar and the words burned into his heart: the childish nature of the man

was gone; the vague darkness in it took a shape and name. The boatman

had been praying for him; the low words seemed to shake the night:--

"Hear the prayer of Thy servant, and his supplications! Is not this what

Thou hast chosen: to loose the bands, to undo the heavy burdens, and let

the oppressed go free? O Lord, hear! O Lord, hearken and do! Defer not

for Thine own sake, O my God!"

"What shall I do?" said the slave, standing up.

The boatman paced slowly to and fro, his voice chording in its dull

monotone with the smothered savage muttering in the negro's brain.

"The day of the Lord cometh; it is nigh at hand. Who can abide it? What

saith the prophet Jeremiah? 'Take up a burden against the South. Cry

aloud, spare not. Woe unto Babylon, for the day of her vengeance is

come, the day of her visitation! Call together the archers against

Babylon; camp against it round about; let none thereof escape.

Recompense her: as she hath done unto my people, be it done unto her.

A sword is upon Babylon: it shall break in pieces the shepherd and his

flock, the man and the woman, the young man and the maid. I will render

unto her the evil she hath done in my sight, saith the Lord.'"

It was the voice of God: the scar burned fiercer; the slave came forward

boldly,--

"Mars'er, what shall I do?"

"Give the poor devil a musket," said one of the men. "Let him come with

us, and strike a blow for freedom."

He took a knife from his belt, and threw it to him, then sauntered off

to his tent.

"A blow for freedom?" mumbled Ben, taking it up.

"Let us sing to the praise of God," said the boatman, "the sixty-eighth

psalm," lining it out while they sang,--the scattered men joining,

partly to keep themselves awake. In old times David's harp charmed away

the demon from a human heart. It roused one now, never to be laid again.

A dull, droning chant, telling how the God of Vengeance rode upon the

wind, swift to loose the fetters of the chained, to make desert the

rebellious land; with a chorus, or refrain, in which Ben's wild,

melancholy cry sounded like the wail of an avenging spirit:--

"That in the blood of enemies

Thy foot imbrued may be:

And of thy dogs dipped in the same

The tongues thou mayest see."

The meaning of that was plain; he sang it lower and more steadily each

time, his body swaying in cadence, the glitter in his eye more steely.

Lamar, asleep in his prison, was wakened by the far-off plaintive song:

he roused himself, leaning on one elbow, listening with a half-smile. It

was Naomi they sang, he thought,--an old-fashioned Methodist air that

Floy had caught from the negroes, and used to sing to him sometimes.

Every night, down at home, she would come to his parlor-door to say

good-night: he thought he could see the little figure now in its white

nightgown, and hear the bare feet pattering on the matting. When he was

alone, she would come in, and sit on his lap awhile, and kneel down

before she went away, her head on his knee, to say her prayers, as she

called it. Only God knew how many times he had remained alone after

hearing those prayers, saved from nights of drunken debauch. He thought

he felt Floy's pure little hand on his forehead now, as if she were

saying her usual "Good night, Bud." He lay down to sleep again, with a

genial smile on his face, listening to the hymn.

"It's the same God," he said,--"Floy's and theirs."

Outside, as he slept, a dark figure watched him. The song of the men

ceased. Midnight, white and silent, covered the earth. He could hear

only the slow breathing of the sleeper. Ben's black face grew ashy pale,

but he did not tremble, as he crept, cat-like, up to the wicket, his

blubber lips apart, the white teeth clenched.

"It's for Freedom, Mars' Lord!" he gasped, looking up to the sky, as if

he expected an answer. "Gor-a'mighty, it's for Freedom!" And went in.

A belated bird swooped through the cold moonlight into the valley, and

vanished in the far mountain-cliffs with a low, fearing cry, as though

it had passed through Hades.

They had broken down the wicket: he saw them lay the heavy body on the

lumber outside, the black figures hurrying over the snow. He laughed

low, savagely, watching them. Free now! The best of them despised him;

the years past of cruelty and oppression turned back, fused in a slow,

deadly current of revenge and hate, against the race that had trodden

him down. He felt the iron muscles of his fingers, looked close at the

glittering knife he held, chuckling at the strange smell it bore. Would

the Illinois boatman blame him, if it maddened him? And if Ben took the

fancy to put it to his throat, what right has he to complain? Has not he

also been a dweller in Babylon? He hesitated a moment in the cleft of

the hill, choosing his way, exultantly. He did not watch the North now;

the quiet old dream of content was gone; his thick blood throbbed and

surged with passions of which you and I know nothing: he had a lost life

to avenge. His native air, torrid, heavy with latent impurity, drew him

back: a fitter breath than this cold snow for the animal in his body,

the demon in his soul, to triumph and wallow in. He panted, thinking of

the saffron hues of the Santilla flats, of the white, stately dwellings,

the men that went in and out from them, quiet, dominant,--feeling the

edge of his knife. It was his turn to be master now! He ploughed his way

doggedly through the snow,--panting, as he went,--a hotter glow in his

gloomy eyes. It was his turn for pleasure now: he would have his fill!

Their wine and their gardens and----He did not need to choose a wife

from his own color now. He stopped, thinking of little Floy, with her

curls and great listening eyes, watching at the door for her brother.

He had watched her climb up into his arms and kiss his cheek. She never

would do that again! He laughed aloud, shrilly. By God! she should keep

the kiss for other lips! Why should he not say it?

Up on the hill the night-air throbbed colder and holier. The guards

stood about in the snow, silent, troubled. This was not like a death in

battle: it put them in mind of home, somehow. All that the dying man

said was, "Water," now and then. He had been sleeping, when struck,

and never had thoroughly wakened from his dream. Captain Poole, of the

Snake-hunters, had wrapped him in his own blanket, finding nothing more

could be done. He went off to have the Colonel summoned now, muttering

that it was "a damned shame." They put snow to Lamar's lips constantly,

being hot and parched; a woman, Dorr's wife, was crouching on the ground

beside him, chafing his hands, keeping down her sobs for fear they would

disturb him. He opened his eyes at last, and knew Dorr, who held his

head.

"Unfasten my coat, Charley. What makes it so close here?"

Dorr could not speak.

"Shall I lift you up, Captain Lamar?" asked Dave Hall, who stood leaning

on his rifle.

He spoke in a subdued tone, Babylon being far off for the moment. Lamar

dozed again before he could answer.

"Don't try to move him,--it is too late," said Dorr, sharply.

The moonlight steeped mountain and sky in a fresh whiteness. Lamar's

face, paling every moment, hardening, looked in it like some solemn work

of an untaught sculptor. There was a breathless silence. Ruth, kneeling

beside him, felt his hand grow slowly colder than the snow. He moaned,

his voice going fast,--

"At two, Ben, old fellow! We'll be free to-night!"

Dave, stooping to wrap the blanket, felt his hand wet: he wiped it with

a shudder.

"As he hath done unto My people, be it done unto him!" he muttered, but

the words did not comfort him.

Lamar moved, half-smiling.

"That's right, Floy. What is it she says? 'Now I lay me down'----I

forget. Good night. Kiss me, Floy."

He waited,--looked up uneasily. Dorr looked at his wife: she stooped,

and kissed his lips. Charley smoothed back the hair from the damp face

with as tender a touch as a woman's. Was he dead? The white moonlight

was not more still than the calm face.

Suddenly the night-air was shattered by a wild, revengeful laugh from

the hill. The departing soul rushed back, at the sound, to life, full

consciousness. Lamar started from their hold,--sat up.

"It was Ben," he said, slowly.

In that dying flash of comprehension, it may be, the wrongs of the white

man and the black stood clearer to his eyes than ours: the two lives

trampled down. The stern face of the boatman bent over him: he was

trying to stanch the flowing blood. Lamar looked at him: Hall saw no

bitterness in the look,--a quiet, sad question rather, before which his

soul lay bare. He felt the cold hand touch his shoulder, saw the pale

lips move.

"Was this well done?" they said.

Before Lamar's eyes the rounded arch of gray receded, faded into dark;

the negro's fierce laugh filled his ear: some woful thought at the sound

wrung his soul, as it halted at the gate. It caught at the simple faith

his mother taught him.

"Yea," he said aloud, "though I walk through the valley of the shadow of

death, I will fear no evil; for Thou art with me."

Dorr gently drew down the uplifted hand. He was dead.

"It was a manly soul," said the Northern captain, his voice choking, as

he straightened the limp hair.

"He trusted in God? A strange delusion!" muttered the boatman.

Yet he did not like that they should leave him alone with Lamar, as

they did, going down for help. He paced to and fro, his rifle on his

shoulder, arming his heart with strength to accomplish the vengeance

of the Lord against Babylon. Yet he could not forget the murdered man

sitting there in the calm moonlight, the dead face turned towards the

North,--the dead face, whereon little Floy's tears should never fall.

The grave, unmoving eyes seemed to the boatman to turn to him with the

same awful question. "Was this well done?" they said. He thought in

eternity they would rise before him, sad, unanswered. The earth, he

fancied, lay whiter, colder,--the heaven farther off; the war, which had

become a daily business, stood suddenly before him in all its terrible

meaning. God, he thought, had met in judgment with His people. Yet he

uttered no cry of vengeance against the doomed city. With the dead face

before him, he bent his eyes to the ground, humble, uncertain,--speaking

out of the ignorance of his own weak, human soul.

"The day of the Lord is nigh," he said; "it is at hand; and who can

abide it?"

MOUNTAIN PICTURES.

II.

MONADNOCK FROM WACHUSET.

I would I were a painter, for the sake

Of a sweet picture, and of her who led,

A fitting guide, with light, but reverent tread,

Into that mountain mystery! First a lake

Tinted with sunset; next the wavy lines

Of far receding hills; and yet more far,

Monadnock lifting from his night of pines

His rosy forehead to the evening star.

Beside us, purple-zoned, Wachuset laid

His head against the West, whose warm light made

His aureole; and o'er him, sharp and clear,

Like a shaft of lightning in mid launching stayed,

A single level cloud-line, shone upon

By the fierce glances of the sunken sun,

Menaced the darkness with its golden spear!

So twilight deepened round us. Still and black

The great woods climbed the mountain at our back;

And on their skirts, where yet the lingering day

On the shorn greenness of the clearing lay,

The brown old farm-house like a bird's nest hung.

With home-life sounds the desert air was stirred:

The bleat of sheep along the hill we heard,

The bucket plashing in the cool, sweet well,

The pasture-bars that clattered as they fell;

Dogs barked, fowls fluttered, cattle lowed; the gate

Of the barn-yard creaked beneath the merry weight

Of sun-brown children, listening, while they swung,

The welcome sound of supper-call to hear;

And down the shadowy lane, in tinklings clear,

The pastoral curfew of the cow-bell rung.

Thus soothed and pleased, our backward path we took,

Praising the farmer's home. He only spake,

Looking into the sunset o'er the lake,

Like one to whom the far-off is most near:

"Yes, most folks think it has a pleasant look;

I love it for my good old mother's sake,

Who lived and died here in the peace of God!"

The lesson of his words we pondered o'er,

As silently we turned the eastern flank

Of the mountain, where its shadow deepest sank,

Doubling the night along our rugged road:

We felt that man was more than his abode,--

The inward life than Nature's raiment more;

And the warm sky, the sundown-tinted hill,

The forest and the lake, seemed dwarfed and dim

Before the saintly soul, whose human will

Meekly in the Eternal footsteps trod,

Making her homely toil and household ways

An earthly echo of the song of praise

Swelling from angel lips and harps of seraphim!

INDIVIDUALITY.

At a certain depth, as has already been intimated in our literature,

all bosoms communicate, all hearts are one. Hector and Ajax, in Homer's

great picture, stand face to face, each with advanced foot, with

levelled spear, and turgid sinew, eager to kill, while on either side

ten thousand slaughterous wishes poise themselves in hot breasts,

waiting to fly with the flying weapons; yet, though the combatants

seem to surrender themselves wholly to this action, there is in each a

profound element that is no party to these hostilities. It is the pure

nature of man. Ajax is not all Greek, nor is Hector wholly Trojan: both

are also men; and to the extent of their mutual participation in this

pure and perpetual element of Manhood, they are more than friends,

more than relatives,--they are of identical spirit. For there is an

imperishable nature of Man, ever and everywhere the same, of which each

particular man is a testimony and representation. As the solid earth

underruns the "dissociating sea"--_Oceano dissociabili_--and joins in

one all sundered lands, so does this nature dip beneath the dividing

parts of our being, and make of all men one simple and inseparable

humanity. In love, in friendship, in true conversation, in all happiness

of communion between men, it is this unchangeable substratum or

substance of man's being that is efficient and supreme: out of

divers bosoms, Same calls, and replies to Same with a great joy

of self-recognition. It is only in virtue of this nature that men

understand, appreciate, admire, trust each other,--that books of the

earliest times remain true in the latest,--that society is possible; and

he in whom the virtue of it dwells divinely is admitted to the secret

confidence of all bosoms, lives in all times, and converses with each

soul and age in its own vernacular. Socrates looked beyond the gates of

death for happy communion with Homer and all the great; but already we

interchange words with these, whenever we are so sweetly prospered as to

become, in some good degree, identical with the absolute nature of man.

Not only, moreover, is this immortal substance of man's being common and

social, but it is so great and venerable that no one can match it

with an equal report. All the epithets by which we would extol it

are disgraced by it, as the most brilliant artificial lights become

blackness when placed between the eye and the noonday sun. It is older,

it is earlier in existence than the earliest star that shone in heaven;

and it will outlive the fixed stars that now in heaven seem fixed

forever. There is nothing in the created universe of which it was not

the prophecy in its primal conception; there is nothing of which it is

not the interpretation and ultimatum in its final form. The laws which

rule the world as forces are, in it, thoughts and liberties. All the

grand imaginations of men, all the glorified shapes, the Olympian gods,

cherubic and seraphic forms, are but symbols and adumbrations of what it

contains. As the sun, having set, still leaves its golden impress on the

clouds, so does the absolute nature of man throw up and paint, as it

were, on the sky testimonies of its power, remaining itself unseen.

Only, therefore, is one a poet, as he can cause particular traits and

events, without violation of their special character, or concealment

of their peculiar interest, to bear the deep, sweet, and infinite

suggestion of this. All princeliness and imperial worth, all that is

regal, beautiful, pure in men, comes from this nature; and the words

by which we express reverence, admiration, love, borrow from it their

entire force: since reverence, admiration, love, and all other grand

sentiments, are but modes or forms of _noble unification_ between men,

and are therefore shown to spring from that spiritual unity of which

persons are exponents; while, on the other hand, all evil epithets

suggest division and separation. Of this nature all titles of honor, all

symbols that command homage and obedience on earth, are pensioners. How

could the claims of kings survive successions of Stuarts and Georges,

but for a royalty in each peasant's bosom that pleads for its poor image

on the throne?

In the high sense, no man is great save he that is a large continent of

this absolute humanity. The common nature of man it is; yet those are

ever, and in the happiest sense, uncommon men, in whom it is liberally

present.

But every man, besides the nature which constitutes him man, has, so to

speak, another nature, which constitutes him a particular individual. He

is not only like all others of his kind, but, at the same time, unlike

all others. By physical and mental feature he is distinguished,

insulated; he is endowed with a quality so purely in contrast with the

common nature of man, that in virtue of it he can be singled out from

hundreds of millions, from all the myriads of his race. So far, now, as

one is representative of absolute humanity, he is a Person; so far

as, by an element peculiar to himself, he is contrasted with absolute

humanity, he is an Individual. And having duly chanted our _Credo_

concerning man's pure and public nature, let us now inquire respecting

this dividing element of Individuality,--which, with all the force it

has, strives to cut off communication, to destroy unity, and to make of

humanity a chaos or dust of biped atoms.

Not for a moment must we make this surface nature of equal estimation

with the other. It is secondary, _very_ secondary, to the pure substance

of man. The Person first in order of importance; the Individual next,--

"Proximus huic, longo sed proximus intervallo,"--

"next with an exceeding wide remove."

Take from Epaminondas or Luther all that makes him man, and the

rest will not be worth selling to the Jews. Individuality is an

accompaniment, an accessory, a red line on the map, a fence about the

field, a copyright on the book. It is like the particular flavors of

fruits,--of no account but in relation to their saccharine, acid, and

other staple elements. It must therefore keep its place, or become

an impertinence. If it grow forward, officious, and begin to push in

between the pure nature and its divine ends, at once it is a meddling

Peter, for whom there is no due greeting but "Get thee behind me,

Satan." If the fruit have a special flavor of such ambitious pungency

that the sweets and acids cannot appear through it, be sure that to come

at this fruit no young Wilhelm Meister will purloin keys. If one be so

much an Individual that he wellnigh ceases to be a Man, we shall not

admire him. It is the same in mental as in physical feature. Let there,

by all means, be slight divergence from the common type; but by all

means let it be no more than a slight divergence. Too much is monstrous:

even a very slight excess is what we call _ugliness_. Gladly I perceive

in my neighbor's face, voice, gait, manner, a certain charm of

peculiarity; but if in any the peculiarity be so great as to suggest

a doubt whether he be not some other creature than man, may he not be

neighbor of mine!

A little of this surface nature suffices; yet that little cannot be

spared. Its first office is to guard frontiers. We must not lie quite

open to the inspection or invasion of others: yet, were there no medium

of unlikeness interposed between one and another, privacy would be

impossible, and one's own bosom would not be sacred to himself. But

Nature has secured us against these profanations; and as we have locks

to our doors, curtains to our windows, and, upon occasion, a passport

system on our borders, so has she cast around each spirit this veil to

guard it from intruding eyes, this barrier to keep away the feet of

strangers. Homer represents the divinities as coming invisibly to

admonish their favored heroes; but Nature was beforehand with the poet,

and every one of us is, in like manner, a celestial nature walking

concealed. Who sees _you_, when you walk the street? Who would walk the

street, did be not feel himself fortressed in a privacy that no foreign

eyes can enter? But for this, no cities would be built. Society,

therefore, would be impossible, save for this element, which seems to

hinder society. Each of us, wrapt in his opaque individuality, like

Apollo or Athene in a blue mist, remains hidden, if he will; and

therefore do men dare to come together.

But this superficial element, while securing privacy to the pure nature,

also aids it to expression. It emphasizes the outlines of Personality by

gentle contrast. It is like the shadow in the landscape, without which

all the sunbeams of heaven could not reveal with precision a single

object. Assured lovers resort to happy banter and light oppositions, to

give themselves a sweeter sense of unity of heart. The child, with a

cunning which only Nature has taught, will sometimes put a little honey

of refusal into its kisses before giving them; the maiden adds to her

virgin blooms the further attraction of virgin coyness and reserve; the

civilizing dinner-table would lose all its dignity in losing its delays;

and so everywhere, delicate denial, withholding reserve have an inverse

force, and add a charm of emphasis to gift, assent, attraction, and

sympathy. How is the word Immortality emphasized to our hearts by the

perpetual spectacle of death! The joy and suggestion of it could,

indeed, never visit us, had not this momentary loud denial been uttered

in our ears. Such, therefore, as have learned to interpret these

oppositions in Nature, hear in the jarring note of Death only a jubilant

proclamation of life eternal; while all are thus taught the longing for

immortality, though only by their fear of the contrary. And so is the

pure universal nature of man affirmed by these provocations of contrast

and insulation on the surface. We feel the personality far more, and far

more sweetly, for its being thus divided from our own. From behind this

veil the pure nature comes to us with a kind of surprise, as out of

another heaven. The joy of truth and delight of beauty are born anew for

us from each pair of chanting lips and beholding eyes; and each new soul

that comes promises another gift of the universe. Whoever, in any time

or under any sky, sees the worth and wonder of existence, sees it for

me; whatever language he speak, whatever star he inhabit, we shall

one day meet, and through the confession of his heart all my ancient

possessions will become a new gain; he shall make for me a natal day of

creation, showing the producing breath, as it goes forth from the lips

of God, and spreads into the blue purity of sky, or rounds into the

luminance of suns; the hills and their pines, the vales and their

blooms, and heroic men and beauteous women, all that I have loved or

reverenced, shall come again, appearing and trooping out of skies never

visible before. Because of these dividing lines between souls, each new

soul is to all the others a possible factor of heaven.

Such uses does individuality subserve. Yet it is capable of these

ministries only as it does indeed _minister_. All its uses are lost with

the loss of its humility and subordinance. It is the porter at the

gate, furthering the access of lawful, and forbidding the intrusion of

unlawful visitors to the mansion; who becomes worse than useless, if in

surly excess of zeal he bar the gate against all, or if in the excess of

self-importance he receive for himself what is meant for his master,

and turn visitors aside into the porter's lodge. Beautiful is virgin

reserve, and true it is that delicate half-denial reinforces attraction;

yet the maiden who carries only _No_ upon her tongue, and only refusal

in her ways, shall never wake before dawn on the day of espousal, nor

blush beneath her bridal veil, like Morning behind her clouds. This

surface element, we must remember, is not income and resource, but

an item of needful, and, so far as needful, graceful and economical

expenditure. Excess of it is wasteful, by causing Life to pay for

that which he does not need, by increase of social fiction, and by

obstruction of social flow with the fructifications which this brings,

not to be spared by any mortal. Nay, by extreme excess, it may so cut

off and sequester a man, that no word or aspect of another soul can

reach him; he shall see in mankind only himself, he shall hear in the

voices of others only his own echoes. Many and many a man is there, so

housed in his individuality, that it goes, like an impenetrable wall,

over eye and ear; and even in the tramp of the centuries he can find

hint of nothing save the sound of his own feet. It is a frequent

tragedy,--but profound as frequent.

One great task, indeed _the_ great task of good-breeding is,

accordingly, to induce in this element a delicacy, a translucency,

which, without robbing any action or sentiment of the hue it imparts,

shall still allow the pure human quality perfectly and perpetually to

shine through. The world has always been charmed with fine manners; and

why should it not? For what are fine manners but this: to carry your

soul on your lip, in your eye, in the palm of your hand, and yet to

stand not naked, but clothed upon by your individual quality,--visible,

yet inscrutable,--given to the hearts of others, yet contained in your

own bosom,--nobly and humanly open, yet duly reticent and secured from

invasion? _Polished_ manners often disappoint us; _good_ manners never.

The former may be taken on by indigent souls: the latter imply a noble

and opulent nature. And wait you not for death, according to the counsel

of Solon, to be named happy, if you are permitted fellowship with a man

of rich mind, whose individual savor you always finely perceive,

and never more than finely,--who yields you the perpetual sense of

community, and never of confusion, with your own spirit. The happiness

is all the greater, if the fellowship be accorded by a mind eminently

superior to one's own; for he, while yet more removed, comes yet nearer,

seeming to be that which our own soul may become in some future life,

and so yielding us the sense of our own being more deeply and powerfully

than it is given by the consciousness in our own bosom. And going

forward to the supreme point of this felicity, we may note that the

worshipper, in the ecstasy of his adoration, feels the Highest to be

also Nearest,--more remote than the borders of space and fringes of

heaven,--more intimate with his own being than the air he breathes or

the thought be thinks; and of this double sense is the rapture of his

adoration, and the joy indeed of every angel, born.

Divineness appertains to the absolute nature of man; piquancy and charm

to that which serves and modifies this. Infinitude and immortality are

of the one; the strictest finiteness belongs to the other. In the first

you can never be too deep and rich; in the second never too delicate and

measured. Yet you will easily find a man in whom the latter so abounds

as not only to shut him out from others, but to absorb all the vital

resource generated in his own bosom, leaving to the pure personality

nothing. The finite nature fares sumptuously every day; the other is a

heavenly Lazarus sitting at the gate.

Of such individuals there are many classes; and the majority of

eccentric men constitute one class. If a man have very peculiar ways, we

readily attribute to him a certain depth and force, and think that the

polished citizen wants character in comparison. Probably it is not so.

Singularity may be as shallow as the shallowest conformity. There are

numbers of such from whom if you deduct the eccentricity, it is like

subtracting red from vermilion or six from half a dozen. They are

grimaces of humanity,--no more. In particular, I make occasion to say,

that those oddities, whose chief characteristic it is to slink away from

the habitations of men, and claim companionship with musk-rats, are,

despite Mr. Thoreau's pleasant patronage of them, no whit more manly or

profound than the average citizen, who loves streets and parlors, and

does not endure estrangement from the Post-Office. Mice lurk in holes

and corners; could the cat speak, she would say that they have a genius

_only_ for lurking in holes. Bees and ants are, to say the least, quite

as witty as beetles, proverbially blind; yet they build insect cities,

and are as invincibly social and city-loving as Socrates himself.

Aside, however, from special eccentricity, there are men, like the Earl

of Essex, Bacon's _soi-disant_ friend, who possess a certain emphatic

and imposing individuality, which, while commonly assumed to indicate

character and force, is really but the _succedaneum_ for these. They

are like oysters, with extreme stress of shell, and only a blind, soft,

acephalous body within. These are commonly great men so long as little

men will serve; and are something less than little ever after. As an

instance of this, I should select the late chief magistrate of this

nation. His whole ability lay in putting a most imposing countenance

upon commonplaces. He made a mere _air_ seem solid as rock. Owing to

this possibility of presenting all force on the outside, and so creating

a false impression of resource, all great social emergencies are

followed by a speedy breaking down of men to whom was generally

attributed an able spirit; while others of less outward mark, and for

this reason hitherto unnoticed, come forward, and prove to be indeed the

large vessels of manhood accorded to that generation.

Our tendency to assume individual mark as the measure of personality

is flattered by many of the books we read. It is, of course, easier to

depict character, when it is accompanied by some striking individual

hue; and therefore in romances and novels this is conferred upon all the

forcible characters, merely to favor the author's hand: as microscopists

feed minute creatures with colored food to make their circulations

visible. It is only the great master who can represent a powerful

personality in the purest state, that is, with the maximum of character

and the minimum of individual distinction; while small artists, with a

feeble hold upon character, habitually resort to extreme quaintnesses

and singularities of circumstance, in order to confer upon their weak

portraitures some vigor of outline. It takes a Giotto to draw readily

a nearly perfect O; but a nearly perfect triangle any one can draw.

Shakspeare is able to delineate a Gentleman,--one, that is, who, while

nobly and profoundly a man, is so delicately individualized, that the

impression of him, however vigorous and commanding, cannot be harsh:

Shakspeare is equal to this task, but even so very able a painter as

Fielding is not. His Squire Western and Parson Adams are exquisite, his

Allworthy is vapid: deny him strong pigments of individualism, and he is

unable to portray strong character. Scott, among British novelists, is,

perhaps, in this respect most Shakspearian, though the Colonel Esmond of

Thackeray is not to be forgotten; but even Scott's Dandie Dinmonts, or

gentlemen in the rough, sparkle better than his polished diamonds.

Yet in this respect the Waverley Novels are singularly and admirably

healthful, comparing to infinite advantage with the rank and file of

novels, wherein the "characters" are but bundles of quaintnesses, and

the action is impossible.

Written history has somewhat of the same infirmity with fictitious

literature, though not always by the fault of the historian. Far too

little can it tell us respecting those of whom we desire to know much;

while, on the other hand, it is often extremely liberal of information

concerning those of whom we desire to know nothing. The greatest of men

approach a pure personality, a pure representation of man's imperishable

nature; individual peculiarity they far less abound in; and what they do

possess is held in transparent solution by their manhood, as a certain

amount of vapor is always held by the air. The higher its temperature,

the more moisture can the atmosphere thus absorb, exhibiting it not as

cloud, but only as immortal azure of sky: and so the greater intensity

there is of the pure quality of man, the more of individual peculiarity

can it master and transform into a simple heavenliness of beauty, of

which the world finds few words to say. Men, in general, have, perhaps,

no more genius than novelists in general,--though it seems a hard speech

to make,--and while profoundly _impressed_ by any manifestation of the

pure genius of man, can _observe_ and _relate_ only peculiarities and

exceptional traits. Incongruities are noted; congruities are only felt.

If a two-headed calf be born, the newspapers hasten to tell of it; but

brave boys and beautiful girls by thousands grow to fulness of stature

without mention. We know so little of Homer and Shakspeare partly

because they were Homer and Shakspeare. Smaller men might afford more

plentiful materials for biography, because their action and character

would be more clouded with individualism. The biography of a supreme

poet is the history of his kind. He transmits himself by pure vital

impression. His remembrance is committed, not to any separable faculty,

but to a memory identical with the total being of men. If you would

learn his story, listen to the sprites that ride on crimson steeds along

the arterial highways, singing of man's destiny as they go.

THE GERMAN BURNS.

The extreme southwestern corner of Germany is an irregular right-angle,

formed by the course of the Rhine. Within this angle and an

hypothenuse drawn from the Lake of Constance to Carlsruhe lies a wild

mountain-region--a lateral offshoot from the central chain which

extends through Europe from west to east--known to all readers of

robber-romances as the Black Forest. It is a cold, undulating upland,

intersected with deep valleys which descend to the plains of the Rhine

and the Danube, and covered with great tracts of fir-forest. Here and

there a peak rises high above the general level, the Feldberg attaining

a height of five thousand feet. The aspect of this region is stern and

gloomy: the fir-woods appear darker than elsewhere; the frequent little

lakes are as inky in hue as the pools of the High Alps; and the meadows

of living emerald give but a partial brightness to the scenery. Here,

however, the solitary traveller may adventure without fear. Robbers and

robber-castles have long since passed away, and the people, rough and

uncouth as they may at first seem, are as kindly-hearted as they are

honest. Among them was born--and in their incomprehensible dialect

wrote--Hebel, the German Burns.

We dislike the practice of using the name of one author as the

characteristic designation of another. It is, at best, the sign of an

imperfect fame, implying rather the imitation of a scholar than the

independent position of a master. We can, nevertheless, in no other way

indicate in advance the place which the subject of our sketch occupies

in the literature of Germany. A contemporary of Burns, and ignorant of

the English language, there is no evidence that he had ever even heard

of the former; but Burns, being the first truly great poet who succeeded

in making classic a local dialect, thereby constituted himself an

illustrious standard, by which his successors in the same path must be

measured. Thus, Bellman and Béranger have been inappropriately invested

with his mantle, from the one fact of their being song-writers of a

democratic stamp. The Gascon, Jasmin, better deserves the title; and

Longfellow, in translating his "Blind Girl of Castèl-Cuillè," says,--

"Only the lowland tongue of Scotland might

Rehearse this little tragedy aright":--

a conviction which we have frequently shared, in translating our German

author.

It is a matter of surprise to us, that, while Jasmin's poems have gone

far beyond the bounds of France, the name of John Peter Hebel--who

possesses more legitimate claims to the peculiar distinction which

Burns achieved--is not only unknown outside of Germany, but not

even familiarly known to the Germans themselves. The most probable

explanation is, that the Alemannic dialect, in which he wrote, is spoken

only by the inhabitants of the Black Forest and a portion of Suabia,

and cannot be understood, without a glossary, by the great body of the

North-Germans. The same cause would operate, with greater force, in

preventing a translation into foreign languages. It is, in fact, only

within the last twenty years that the Germans have become acquainted

with Burns,--chiefly through the admirable translations of the poet

Freiligrath.

To Hebel belongs the merit of having bent one of the harshest of German

dialects to the uses of poetry. We doubt whether the lyre of Apollo was

ever fashioned from a wood of rougher grain. Broad, crabbed, guttural,

and unpleasant to the ear which is not thoroughly accustomed to its

sound, the Alemannic _patois_ was, in truth, a most unpromising

material. The stranger, even though he were a good German scholar, would

never suspect the racy humor, the _naïve_, childlike fancy, and the pure

human tenderness of expression which a little culture has brought to

bloom on such a soil. The contractions, elisions, and corruptions which

German words undergo, with the multitude of terms in common use derived

from the Gothic, Greek, Latin, and Italian, give it almost the character

of a different language. It was Hebel's mother-tongue, and his poetic

faculty always returned to its use with a fresh delight which insured

success. His _German_ poems are inferior in all respects.

Let us first glance at the poet's life,--a life uneventful, perhaps, yet

interesting from the course of its development. He was born in Basle,

in May, 1760, in the house of Major Iselin, where both his father and

mother were at service. The former, a weaver by trade, afterwards became

a soldier, and accompanied the Major to Flanders, France, and Corsica.

He had picked up a good deal of stray knowledge on his campaigns, and

had a strong natural taste for poetry. The qualities of the son were

inherited from him rather than from the mother, of whom we know nothing

more than that she was a steady, industrious person. The parents lived

during the winter in the little village of Hausen, in the Black Forest,

but with the approach of spring returned to Basle for their summer

service in Major Iselin's house.

The boy was but a year old when his father died, and the discipline of

such a restless spirit as he exhibited in early childhood seems to have

been a task almost beyond the poor widow's powers. An incorrigible

spirit of mischief possessed him. He was an arrant scape-grace,

plundering cupboards, gardens, and orchards, lifting the gates of

mill-races by night, and playing a thousand other practical and not

always innocent jokes. Neither counsel nor punishment availed, and

the entire weight of his good qualities, as a counterbalance, barely

sufficed to prevent him from losing the patrons whom his bright,

eager, inquisitive mind attracted. Something of this was undoubtedly

congenital, and there are indications that the strong natural impulse,

held in check only by a powerful will and a watchful conscience, was the

torment of his life. In his later years, when he filled the posts of

Ecclesiastical Counsellor and Professor in the Gymnasium at Carlsruhe,

the phrenologist Gall, in a scientific _séance_, made an examination of

his head. "A most remarkable development of"----, said Gall, abruptly

breaking off, nor could he be induced to complete the sentence.

Hebel, however, frankly exclaimed,--"You certainly mean the thievish

propensity. I know I have it by nature, for I continually feel its

suggestions." What a picture is presented by this confession! A pure,

honest, and honorable life, won by a battle with evil desires, which,

commencing with birth, ceased their assaults only at the brink of the

grave! A daily struggle, and a daily victory!

Hebel lost his mother in his thirteenth year, but was fortunate in

possessing generous patrons, who contributed enough to the slender means

he inherited to enable him to enter the Gymnasium at Carlsruhe. Leaving

this institution with the reputation of a good classical scholar, he

entered the University of Erlangen as a student of theology. Here his

jovial, reckless temperament, finding a congenial atmosphere, so got the

upperhand that he barely succeeded in passing the necessary examination,

in 1780. At the end of two years, during which time he supported himself

as a private tutor, he was ordained, and received a meagre situation

as teacher in the Academy at Lörrach, with a salary of one hundred and

forty dollars a year! Laboring patiently in this humble position for

eight years, he was at last rewarded by being transferred to the

Gymnasium at Carlsruhe, with the rank of Sub-Deacon. Hither, the

Markgraf Frederick of Baden, attracted by the warmth, simplicity, and

genial humor of the man, came habitually to listen to his sermons. He

found himself, without seeking it, in the path of promotion, and his

life thenceforth was a series of sure and moderate successes. His

expectations, indeed, were so humble that they were always exceeded by

his rewards. When Baden became a Grand Duchy, with a constitutional form

of government, it required much persuasion to induce him to accept

the rank of Prelate, with a seat in the Upper House. His friends were

disappointed, that, with his readiness and fluent power of speech,

he took so little part in the legislative proceedings. To one who

reproached him for this timidity he naively wrote,--"Oh, you have a

right to talk: you are the son of Pastor N. in X. Before you were twelve

years old, you heard yourself called _Mr._ Gottlieb; and when you went

with your father down the street, and the judge or a notary met you,

they took off their hats, you waiting for your father to return the

greeting, before you even lifted your cap. But I, as you well know,

grew up as the son of a poor widow in Hausen; and when I accompanied my

mother to Schopfheim or Basle, and we happened to meet a notary, she

commanded, 'Peter, jerk your cap off, there's a gentleman!'--but when

the judge or the counsellor appeared, she called out to me, when they

were twenty paces off, 'Peter, stand still where you are, and off with

your cap quick, the Lord Judge is comin'!' Now you can easily

imagine how I feel, when I recall those times,--and I recall them

often,--sitting in the Chamber among Barons, Counsellors of State,

Ministers, and Generals, with Counts and Princes of the reigning House

before me." Hebel may have felt that rank is but the guinea-stamp, but

he never would have dared to speak it out with the defiant independence

of Burns. Socially, however, he was thoroughly democratic in his tastes;

and his chief objection to accepting the dignity of Prelate was the fear

that it might restrict his intercourse with humbler friends.

His ambition appears to have been mainly confined to his theological

labors, and he never could have dreamed that his after-fame was to rest

upon a few poems in a rough mountain-dialect, written to beguile his

intense longing for the wild scenery of his early home. After his

transfer to Carlsruhe, he remained several years absent from the Black

Forest; and the pictures of its dark hills, its secluded valleys, and

their rude, warm-hearted, and unsophisticated inhabitants, became more

and more fresh and lively in his memory. Distance and absence turned the

quaint dialect to music, and out of this mild home-sickness grew the

Alemannic poems. A healthy oyster never produces a pearl.

These poems, written in the years 1801 and 1802, were at first

circulated in manuscript among the author's friends. He resisted the

proposal to collect and publish them, until the prospect of pecuniary

advantage decided him to issue an anonymous edition. The success of

the experiment was so positive that in the course of five years four

editions appeared,--a great deal for those days. Not only among his

native Alemanni, and in Baden and Würtemberg, where the dialect was

more easily understood, but from all parts of Germany, from poets and

scholars, came messages of praise and appreciation. Jean Paul (Richter)

was one of Hebel's first and warmest admirers. "Our Alemannic poet," he

wrote, "has life and feeling for everything,--the open heart, the open

arms of love; and every star and every flower are human in his sight....

In other, better words,--the evening-glow of a lovely, peaceful soul

slumbers upon all the hills he bids arise; for the flowers of poetry he

substitutes the flower-goddess Poetry herself; he sets to his lips the

Swiss Alp-horn of youthful longing and joy, while pointing with the

other hand to the sunset-gleam of the lofty glaciers, and dissolved

in prayer, as the sound of the chapel-bells is flung down from the

mountains."

Contrast this somewhat confused rhapsody with the clear, precise, yet

genial words wherewith Goethe welcomed the new poet. He instantly

seized, weighed in the fine balance of his ordered mind, and valued with

nice discrimination, those qualities of Hebel's genius which had but

stirred the splendid chaos of Richter with an emotion of vague delight.

"The author of these poems," says he, in the Jena "Literaturzeitung,"

(1804,) "is about to achieve a place of his own on the German Parnassus.

His talent manifests itself in two opposite directions. On the one hand,

he observes with a fresh, cheerful glance those objects of Nature which

express their life in positive existence, in growth and in motion,

(objects which we are accustomed to call _lifeless_,) and thereby

approaches the field of descriptive poetry; yet he succeeds, by his

happy personifications, in lifting his pictures to a loftier plane of

Art. On the other hand, he inclines to the didactic and the allegorical;

but here, also, the same power of personification comes to his aid, and

as, in the one case, he finds a soul for his bodies, so, in the other,

he finds a body for his souls. As the ancient poets, and others who have

been developed through a plastic sentiment for Art, introduce

loftier spirits, related to the gods,--such as nymphs, dryads, and

hamadryads,--in the place of rocks, fountains, and trees: so the author

transforms these objects into peasants, and countrifies [_verbauert_]

the universe in the most _naïve_, quaint, and genial manner, until the

landscape, in which we nevertheless always recognize the human figure,

seems to become one with man in the cheerful enchantment exercised upon

our fancy."

This is entirely correct, as a poetic characterization. Hebel, however,

possesses the additional merit--no slight one, either--of giving

faithful expression to the thoughts, emotions, and passions of the

simple people among whom his childhood was passed. The hearty native

kindness, the tenderness, hidden under a rough exterior, the lively,

droll, unformed fancy, the timidity and the boldness of love, the

tendency to yield to temptation, and the unfeigned piety of the

inhabitants of the Black Forest, are all reproduced in his poems. To say

that they teach, more or less directly, a wholesome morality, is but

indifferent praise; for morality is the cheap veneering wherewith

would-be poets attempt to conceal the lack of the true faculty. We

prefer to let our readers judge for themselves concerning this feature

of Hebel's poetry.

The Alemannic dialect, we have said, is at first harsh to the ear.

It requires, indeed, not a little practice, to perceive its especial

beauties; since these consist in certain quaint, playful inflections and

elisions, which, like the speech of children, have a fresh, natural,

simple charm of their own. The changes of pronunciation, in German

words, are curious. _K_ becomes a light guttural _ch_, and a great

number of monosyllabic words--especially those ending in _ut_ and

_üh_--receive a peculiar twist from the introduction of _e_ or _ei_:

as _gut, früh_, which become _guet, früeih_. This seems to be a

characteristic feature of the South-German dialects, though in none is

it so pronounced as in the Alemannic. The change of _ist_ into _isch,

hast_ into _hesch, ich_ into _i, dich_ into _de_, etc., is much more

widely spread, among the peasantry, and is readily learned, even by the

foreign reader. But a good German scholar would be somewhat puzzled by

the consolidation of several abbreviated words into a single one, which

occurs in almost every Alemannic sentence: for instance, in _woni_ he

would have some difficulty in recognizing _wo ich; ságene_ does not

suggest _sage ihnen_, nor _uffeme, auf einem_.

These singularities of the dialect render the translation of Hebel's

poems into a foreign language a work of great difficulty. In the absence

of any English dialect which possesses corresponding features, the

peculiar quaintness and raciness which they confer must inevitably be

lost. Fresh, wild, and lovely as the Schwarzwald heather, they are

equally apt to die in transplanting. How much they lose by being

converted into classical German was so evident to us (fancy, "Scots who

have with Wallace bled"!) that we at first shrank from the experiment of

reproducing them in a language still farther removed from the original.

Certainly, classical English would not answer; the individual soul of

the poems could never be recognized in such a garb. The tongue of Burns

can be spoken only by a born Scot; and our Yankee, which is rather a

grotesque English than a dialect, is unfortunately so associated

with the coarse and the farcical--Lowell's little poem of "'Zekel's

Courtship" being the single exception--that it seems hardly adapted to

the simple and tender fancies of Hebel. Like the comedian whose one

serious attempt at tragic acting was greeted with roars of laughter, as

an admirable burlesque, the reader might, in such a case, persist in

seeing fun where sentiment was intended.

In this dilemma, it occurred to us that the common, rude form of the

English language, as it is spoken by the uneducated everywhere, without

reference to provincial idioms, might possibly be the best medium.

It offers, at least, the advantage of simplicity, of a directness

of expression which overlooks grammatical rules, of natural pathos,

even,--and therefore, so far as these traits go, may reproduce them

without detracting seriously from the original. Those other qualities of

the poems which spring from the character of the people of whom and

for whom they were written must depend, for their recognition, on the

sympathetic insight of the reader. We can only promise him the utmost

fidelity in the translation, having taken no other liberty than the

substitution of common idiomatic phrases, peculiar to our language,

for corresponding phrases in the other. The original metre, in every

instance, has been strictly adhered to.

The poems, only fifty-nine in number, consist principally of short songs

or pastorals, and narratives. The latter are written in hexameter, but

by no means classic in form. It is a rough, irregular metre, in which

the trochees preponderate over the dactyls: many of the lines, in fact,

would not bear a critical scansion. We have not scrupled to imitate this

irregularity, as not inconsistent with the plain, ungrammatical speech

of the characters introduced, and the homely air of even the most

imaginative passages. The opening poem is a charmingly wayward idyl,

called "The Meadow," (_Die Wiese_,) the name of a mountain-stream,

which, rising in the Feldberg, the highest peak of the Black Forest,

flows past Hausen, Hebel's early home, on its way to the Rhine. An

extract from it will illustrate what Jean Paul calls the "hazardous

boldness" of Hebel's personifications:--

Beautiful "Meadow," daughter o' Feldberg, I

welcome and greet you.

Listen: I'm goin' to sing a song, and all in

y'r honor,

Makin' a music beside ye, follerin' wherever

you wander.

Born unbeknown in the rocky, hidden heart

o' the mountain,

Suckled o' clouds and fogs, and weaned by

the waters o' heaven,

There you slep' like a babblin' baby, a-kep'

in the bed-room,

Secret, and tenderly cared-for: and eye o'

man never saw you,--

Never peeked through a key-hole and saw

my little girl sleepin'

Sound in her chamber o' crystal, rocked in

her cradle o' silver.

Neither an ear o' man ever listened to hear

her a-breathin',

No, nor her voice all alone to herself

a-laughin' or cryin'.

Only the close little spirits that know every

passage and entrance,

In and out dodgin', they brought ye up and

teached ye to toddle,

Gev' you a cheerful natur', and larnt you

how to be useful:

Yes, and their words didn't go into one ear

and out at the t'other.

Stand on your slippery feet as soon as may

be, and use 'em,

That you do, as you slyly creep from your

chamber o' crystal

Out o' doors, barefoot, and squint up to

heaven, mischievously smilin'.

Oh, but you're pretty, my darlin', y'r eyes

have a beautiful sparkle!

Isn't it nice, out o' doors? you didn't guess

't was so pleasant?

Listen, the leaves is rustlin', and listen, the

birdies a-singin'!

"Yes," says you, "but I'm goin' furder, and

can't stay to hear 'm:

Pleasant, truly, 's my way, and more so the

furder I travel."

Only see how spry my little one is at her

jumpin'!

"Ketch me!" she shouts, in her fun,--"if

you want me, foller and ketch me!"

Every minute she turns and jumps in another

direction.

There, you'll fall from the bank! You see,

she's done it: I said so.

Didn't I say it? And now she wobbles

furder and furder,

Creepin' along on all-fours, then off on her

legs she's a-toddlin',--

Slips in the bushes,--"Hunt me!"--and

there, on a sudden, she peeks out.

Wait, I'm a-comin'! Back o' the trees I

hear her a-callin':

"Guess where I am!"--she's whims of her

own, a plenty, and keeps 'em.

But, as you go, you're growin' han'somer,

bigger, and stronger.

Where the breath o' y'r breathin' falls, the

meadows is greener,

Fresher o' color, right and left, and the

weeds and the grasses

Sprout up as juicy as _can_ be, and posies o'

loveliest colors

Blossom as brightly as wink, and bees come

and suck 'em.

Water-wagtails come tiltin',--and, look!

there's the geese o' the village!

All are a-comin' to see you, and all want to

give you a welcome;

Yes, and you're kind o' heart, and you

prattle to all of 'em kindly;

"Come, you well-behaved creeturs, eat and

drink what I bring you,--

I must be off and away: God bless you,

well-behaved creeturs!"[A]

[Footnote A: As the reader of German may be curious to see a specimen

of the original, we give this last passage, which contains, in a brief

compass, many distinctive features of the Alemannic dialect:--

"Nei so lucg me doch, wie cha mi Meiddeli springe!

'Chunnsch mi über,' seits und lacht, 'und witt

mi, se hol mi!'

All' wil en andere Weg, und alliwil anderi

Sprüngli!

Fall mer nit sel Reiuli ab!--Do hemmer's, i sags io--

Hani's denn nit gseit? Doch gauckelet's witers

und witers,

Groblet uf alle Vieren, und stellt si wieder uf

d' Beinli,

Schlieft in d' Hürst--iez such mer's eisl--dört

güggelet's use,

Wart, i chumm! Druf rüefts mer wieder hinter

de Bäume:

'Roth wo bin i iez!'--und het si urige Phatest.

Aber wie de gosch, wirsch sichtli grösser und

schöner.

Wo di liebligen Othern weiht, so färbt si der Rase

Grüener rechts und links, es stöhn in saftige

Triebe

Gras und Chrüter uf, es stöhn in frischere Gstalte

Farbigi Blüemli do, und d' Immli chömmen und

suge.

'S Wasserstelzli chunnt, und lueg doch,'s Wuli

vo Todtnau!

Alles will di bschauen, und Alles will di bigrüsse,

Und di fründlig Herz git alle fründligi Rede:

'Chömmet ihr ordlige Thierli, do hender, esset

und trinket!

Witers goht mi Weg, Gsegott, ihr ordlige Thierli!'"

]

The poet follows the stream through her whole course, never dropping the

figure, which is adapted, with infinite adroitness, and with the play

of a fancy as wayward and unrestrained as her own waters, to all her

changing aspects. Beside the Catholic chapel of Fair-Beeches she pauses

to listen to the mass; but farther down the valley becomes an apostate,

and attends the Lutheran service in the Husemer church. Stronger and

statelier grown, she trips along with the step of a maiden conscious of

her own beauty, and the poet clothes her in the costume of an Alemannic

bride, with a green kirtle of a hundred folds, and a stomacher of Milan

gauze, "like a loose cloud on a morning sky in spring-time." Thus

equipped, she wanders at will over the broader meadows, around the feet

of vineyard-hills, visits villages and churches, or stops to gossip with

the lusty young millers. But the woman's destiny is before her; she

cannot escape it; and the time is drawing near when her wild, singing,

pastoral being shall be absorbed in that of the strong male stream, the

bright-eyed son of the Alps, who has come so far to woo and win her.

Daughter o' Feldberg, half-and-half I've got

a suspicion

How as you've virtues and faults enough now

to choose ye a husband.

Castin' y'r eyes down, are you? Pickin' and

plattin' y'r ribbons?

Don't be so foolish, wench!--She thinks I

know nothin' about it,

How she's already engaged, and each is

a-waitin' for t'other.

Don't I know him, my darlin', the lusty

young fellow, y'r sweetheart?

Over powerful rocks, and through the hedges

and thickets,

Right away from the snowy Swiss mountains

he plunges at Rheineck

Down to the lake, and straight ahead swims

through it to Constance,

Sayin': "'T's no use o' talkin', I'll have

the gal I'm engaged to!"

But, as he reaches Stein, he goes a little more slowly,

Leavin' the lake where he's decently washed his feet and his body.

Diessenhofen don't please him,--no, nor the convent beside it.

For'ard he goes to Schaffhausen, onto the rocks at the corner;

There he says: "It's no use o' talkin', I'll git to my sweetheart:

Body and life I'll stake, cravat and embroidered suspenders."

Woop! but he jumps! And now he talks to hisself, goin' furder,

Giddy, belike, in his head, but pushes for'ard to Rheinau,

Eglisau, and Kaiserstuhl, and Zurzach, and Waldshut,--

All are behind him, passin' one village after another

Down to Grenzach, and out on the broad and beautiful bottoms

Nigh unto Basle; and there he must stop and look after his license.

* * * * *

Look! isn't that y'r bridegroom a-comin' down yonder to meet you?--

Yes, it's him, it's him, I hear't, for his voice is so jolly!

Yes, it's him, it's him,--with his eyes as blue as the heavens,

With his Swiss knee-breeches o' green, and suspenders o' velvet,

With his shirt o' the color o' pearl, and buttons o' crystal,

With his powerful loins, and his sturdy back and his shoulders,

Grand in his gait, commandin', beautiful, free in his motions,

Proud as a Basle Councilman,--yes, it's the big boy o' Gothard![B]

[Footnote B: The Rhine.]

The daring with which Hebel _countrifies_ (or, rather, _farmerizes_, to

translate Goethe's--word more literally) the spirit of natural objects,

carrying his personifications to that point where the imaginative

borders on the grotesque, is perhaps his strongest characteristic. His

poetic faculty, putting on its Alemannic costume, seems to abdicate all

ambition of moving in a higher sphere of society, but within the bounds

it has chosen allows itself the utmost range of capricious enjoyment.

In another pastoral, called "The Oatmeal Porridge," he takes the grain

which the peasant has sown, makes it a sentient creature, and carries it

through the processes of germination, growth, and bloom, without once

dropping the figure or introducing an incongruous epithet. It is not

only a child, but a child of the Black Forest, uttering its hopes, its

anxieties, and its joys in the familiar dialect. The beetle, in

his eyes, becomes a gross, hard-headed boor, carrying his sacks of

blossom-meal, and drinking his mug of XX morning-dew; the stork parades

about to show his red stockings; the spider is at once machinist and

civil engineer; and even the sun, moon, and morning-star are not secure

from the poet's familiarities. In his pastoral of "The Field-Watchmen,"

he ventures to say,--

Mister Schoolmaster Moon, with y'r forehead wrinkled with teachin',

With y'r face full o' larnin', a plaster stuck on y'r cheek-bone,

Say, do y'r children mind ye, and larn their psalm and their texes?

We much fear that this over-quaintness of fancy, to which the Alemannic

dialect gives such a racy flavor, and which belongs, in a lesser

degree, to the minds of the people who speak that dialect, cannot be

successfully clothed in an English dress. Let us try, therefore, a

little poem, the sentiment whereof is of universal application:--

THE CONTENTED FARMER.

I guess I'll take my pouch, and fill

My pipe just once,--yes, that I will!

Turn out my plough and home'ards go:

_Buck_ thinks, enough's been done, I know.

Why, when the Emperor's council's done,

And he can hunt, and have his fun,

He stops, I guess, at any tree,

And fills his pipe as well as me.

But smokin' does him little good:

He can't have all things as he would.

His crown's a precious weight, at that:

It isn't like my old straw hat.

He gits a deal o' tin, no doubt,

But all the more he pays it out;

And everywheres they beg and cry

Heaps more than he can satisfy.

And when, to see that nothin' 's wrong,

He plagues hisself the whole day long,

And thinks, "I guess I've fixed it now,"

Nobody thanks him, anyhow.

And so, when in his bloody clo'es

The Gineral out o' battle goes,

He takes his pouch, too, I'll agree,

And fills his pipe as well as me.

But in the wild and dreadfle fight,

His pipe don't taste ezackly right:

He's galloped here and galloped there,

And things a'n't pleasant, anywhere.

And sich a cursin': "Thunder!" "Hell!"

And "Devil!" (worse nor I can tell:)

His grannydiers in blood lay down,

And yonder smokes a burnin' town.

And when, a-travellin' to the Fairs,

The merchant goes with all his wares,

He takes a pouch o' th' best, I guess,

And fills and smokes his pipe, no less.

Poor devil, 't isn't good for you!

With all y'r gold, you've trouble, too.

Twice two is four, if stocks'll rise:

I see the figgers in your eyes.

It's hurry, worry, tare and tret;

Ye ha'n't enough, the more ye get,--

And couldn't use it, if ye had:

No wonder that y'r pipe tastes bad!

But good, thank God! and wholesome's mine:

The bottom-wheat is growin' fine,

And God, o' mornin's, sends the dew,

And sends his breath o' blessin', too.

And, home, there's Nancy bustlin' round:

The supper's ready, I'll be bound,

And youngsters waitin'. Lord! I vow

I dunno which is smartest, now.

My pipe tastes good; the reason's plain:

(I guess I'll fill it once again:)

With cheerful heart, and jolly mood,

And goin' home, all things is good.

Hebel's narrative poems abound with the wayward pranks of a fancy which

seems a little too restive to be entirely controlled by his artistic

sense; but they possess much dramatic truth and power. He delights in

the supernatural element, but approaches it from the gentler human side.

In "The Carbuncle," only, we find something of that weird, uncanny

atmosphere which casts its glamour around the "Tam O'Shanter" of Burns.

A more satisfactory illustration of his peculiar qualities is "The

Ghost's Visit on the Feldberg,"--a story told by a loafer of Basle to a

group of beer-drinkers in the tavern at Todtnau, a little village at

the foot of the mountain. This is, perhaps, the most popular of Hebel's

poems, and we therefore translate it entire. The superstition that a

child born on Sunday has the power of seeing spirits is universal among

the German peasantry.

THE GHOST'S VISIT ON THE FELDBERG.

Hark ye, fellows o' Todtnau, if ever I told

you the Scythe-Ghost[C]

Was a spirit of Evil, I've now got a different

story.

Out of the town am I,--yes, that I'll honestly

own to,--

Related to merchants, at seven tables free to

take pot-luck.

But I'm a Sunday's child; and wherever the ghosts

at the cross-roads

Stand in the air, in vaults, and cellars, and

out-o'-way places,--

Guardin' hidden money with eyes like fiery

sauce-pans,

Washin' with bitter tears the spot where

somebody's murdered,

Shovellin' the dirt, and scratchin' it over

with nails all so bloody,--

Clear as day I can see, when it lightens.

Ugh! how they whimper!

Also, whenever with beautiful blue eyes the

heavenly angels,

Deep in the night, in silent, sleepin'

villages wander,

Peekin' in at the windows, and talkin'

together so pleasant,

Smilin' one at the t'other, and settin'

outside o' the house-doors,

So that the pious folks shall take no harm

while they're sleepin':

Then ag'in, when in couples or threes they

walk in the grave-yard,

Talkin' in this like: "There a faithful

mother is layin';

And here's a man that was poor, but took no

advantage o' no one:

Take your rest, for you're tired,--we'll waken

ye up when the time comes!"

Clearly I see by the light o' the stars, and I

hear them a-talkin'.

Many I know by their names, and speak to,

whenever I meet 'em,

Give 'em the time o' day, and ask 'em, and

answer their questions.

"How do ye do?" "How's y'r watch?"

"Praise God, it's tolerable, thank you!"

Believe it, or not! Well, once on a time my

cousin, he sent me

Over to Todtnau, on business with all sorts o'

troublesome people,

Where you've coffee to drink, and biscuit

they give you to soak in 't.

"Don't you stop on the road, nor gabble

whatever comes foremost,"

Hooted my cousin at startin', "nor don't you

let go o' your snuff-box,

Leavin' it round in the tavern, as gentlemen

do, for the next time."

Up and away I went, and all that my cousin

he'd ordered

Fairly and squarely I fixed. At the sign o'

the Eagle in Todtnau

Set for a while; then, sure o' my way, tramped

off ag'in, home'ards,

Nigh by the village, I reckoned,--but found

myself climbin' the Feldberg,

Lured by the birdies, and down by the brooks

the beautiful posies:

That's a weakness o' mine,--I ran like a fool

after such things.

Now it was dusk, and the birdies hushed up,

settin' still on the branches.

Hither and yonder a starlie stuck its head

through the darkness,

Peekin' out, as oncertain whether the sun was

in bed yet,--

Whether it mightn't come, and called to the

other ones: "Come now!"

Then I knowed I was lost, and laid myself

down,--I was weary:

There, you know, there's a hut, and I found

an armful o' straw in 't.

"Here's a go!" I thinks to myself, "and I

wish I was safely

Cuddled in bed to home,--or 't was midnight,

and some little spirit

Somewhere popped out, as o' nights when it's

twelve they're accustomed,

Passin' the time with me, friendly, till winds

that blow early o' mornin's

Blow out the heavenly lights, and I see the

way back to the village."

Now, as thinkin' in this like, I felt all over my

watch-face,--

Dark as pitch all around,--and felt with my

finger the hour-hand,

Found it was nigh onto 'leven, and hauled my

pipe from my pocket,

Thinkin': "Maybe a bit of a smoke'll keep

me from snoozin'":

Thunder! all of a sudden beside me was two

of 'em talkin',

Like as they'd business together! You'd

better believe that I listened.

"Say, a'n't I late a-comin'? Because there

was, over in Mambach,

Dyin', a girl with pains in the bones and terrible

fever:

Now, but she's easy! I held to her mouth the

drink o' departure,

So that the sufferin' ceased, and softly lowered

the eyelids,

Sayin': 'Sleep, and in peace,--I'll waken

thee up when the time comes!'

Do me the favor, brother: fetch in the basin o'

silver

Water, ever so little: my scythe, as you see,

must be whetted."

"Whetted?" says I to myself, "and a spirit?"

and peeked from the window.

Lo and behold, there sat a youngster with

wings that was golden;

White was his mantle, white, and his girdle

the color o' roses,

Fair and lovely to see, and beside him two

lights all a-burnin'.

"All the good spirits," says I, "Mr. Angel,

God have you in keepin'!"

"Praise their Master, the Lord," said the angel;

"God thank you, as I do!"

"Take no offence, Mr. Ghost, and by y'r good

leave and permission,

Tell me, what have you got for to mow?"

"Why, the scythe!" was his answer.

"Yes," says I, "for I see it; and that is my

question exackly,

What you're goin' to do with the scythe."

"Why, to mow!" was his answer.

Then I ventur'd to say: "And that is my question

exackly,

What you're goin' to mow, supposin' you're

willin' to tell me."

"Grass! And what is your business so late up

here in the night-time?"

"Nothin' special," I answered; "I'm burnin'

a little tobacco.

Lost my way, or most likely I'd be at the

Eagle, in Todtnau.

But to come to the subject, supposin' it isn't

a secret,

Tell me, what do you make o' the grass?"

And he answered me: "Fodder!"

"Don't understand it," says I; "for the Lord

has no cows up in heaven."

"Not precisely a cow," he remarked, "but

heifers and asses.

Seest, up yonder, the star?" and he pointed

one out with his finger.

"There's the ass o' the Christmas-Child, and

Fridolin's heifers,[D]

Breathin' the starry air, and waitin' for grass

that I bring 'em:

Grass doesn't grow there,--nothin' grows but

the heavenly raisins,

Milk and honey a-runnin' in rivers, plenty as

water:

But they're particular cattle,--grass they

must have every mornin',

Mouthfuls o' hay, and drink from earthly

fountains they're used to.

So for them I'm a-whettin' my scythe, and

soon must be mowin':

Wouldn't it be worth while, if politely you'd

offer to help me?"

So the angel he talked, and this way I answered

the angel:

"Hark ye, this it is, just: and I'll go wi' the

greatest o' pleasure.

Folks from the town know nothin' about it:

we write and we cipher,

Reckon up money,--that we can do!--and

measure and weigh out,

Unload, and on-load, and eat and drink without

any trouble.

All that we want for the belly, in kitchen,

pantry, and cellar,

Comes in lots through every gate, in baskets

and boxes,

Runs in every street, and cries at every

corner:

'Buy my cherries!' and 'Buy my butter!'

and 'Look at my salad!'

'Buy my onions!' and 'Here's your carrots!'

and 'Spinage and parsley!'

'Lucifer matches! Lucifer matches!' 'Cabbage

and turnips!'

'Here's your umbrellas!' 'Caraway-seed and

juniper-berries!

Cheap for cash, and all to be traded for sugar

and coffee!'

Say, Mr. Angel, didst ever drink coffee?

how do you like it?"

"Stop with y'r nonsense!" then he said, but

he couldn't help laughin';

"No, we drink but the heavenly air, and eat

nothin' but raisins,

Four on a day o' the week, and afterwards five

on a Sunday.

Come, if you want to go with me, now, for

I'm off to my mowin',

Back o' Todtnau, there on the grassy holt by

the highway."

"Yes, Mr. Angel, that will I truly, seein'

you're willin':

Seems to me that it's cooler: give me y'r

scythe for to carry:

Here's a pipe and a pouch,--you're welcome

to smoke, if you want to."

While I was talkin', "Poohoo!" cried the

angel. A fiery man stood,

Quicker than lightnin', beside me. "Light us

the way to the village!"

Said he. And truly before us marched, a-burnin',

the Poohoo,

Over stock and rock, through the bushes, a

travellin' torch-light.

"Handy, isn't it?" laughin', the angel said.

--"What are ye doin'?

Why do you nick at y'r flint? You can light

y'r pipe at the Poohoo.

Use him whenever you like: but it seems to

me you're a-frightened,--

You, and a Sunday's-child, as you are: do you

think he will bite you?"

"No, he ha'n't bit me; but this you'll allow

me to say, Mr. Angel,--

Half-and-half I mistrust him: besides, my tobacco's

a-burnin'.

That's a weakness o' mine,--I'm afeard o'

them fiery creeturs:

Give me seventy angels, instead o' this big

burnin' devil!"

"Really, it's dreadfle," the angel says he,

"that men is so silly,

Fearful o' ghosts and spectres, and skeery

without any reason.

Two of 'em only is dangerous, two of 'em hurtful

to mankind:

One of 'em's known by the name o' Delusion,

and Worry the t'other.

Him, Delusion, 's a dweller in wine: from

cans and decanters

Up to the head he rises, and turns your sense

to confusion.

This is the ghost that leads you astray in forest

and highway:

Undermost, uppermost, hither and yon the

ground is a-rollin',

Bridges bendin', and mountains movin', and

everything double.

Hark ye, keep out of his way!" "Aha!"

I says to the angel,

"There you prick me, but not to the blood: I

see what you're after.

Sober am I, as a judge. To be sure, I emptied

my tankard

Once, at the Eagle,--_once_,--and the landlord

'll tell you the same thing,

S'posin' you doubt me. And now, pray, tell

me who is the t'other?"

"Who is the t'other? Don't know without

askin'?" answered the angel.

"He's a terrible ghost: the Lord forbid you

should meet him!

When you waken early, at four or five in the

mornin',

There he stands a-waitin' with burnin eyes

at y'r bed-side,

Gives you the time o' day with blazin switches

and pinchers:

Even prayin' don't help, nor helps all your

_Ave Marias!_

When you begin 'em, he takes your jaws and

claps 'em together;

Look to heaven, he comes and blinds y'r eyes

with his ashes;

Be you hungry, and eat, he pizons y'r soup

with his wormwood;

Take you a drink o' nights, he squeezes gall

in the tankard;

Run like a stag, he follows as close on y'r trail

as a blood-hound;

Creep like a shadow, be whispers: 'Good! we

had best take it easy';

Kneels at y'r side in the church, and sets at

y'r side in the tavern.

Go wherever you will, there's ghosts a-hoverin'

round you.

Shut your eyes in y'r bed, they mutter:

'There 's no need o' hurry;

By-and-by you can sleep, but listen! we've

somethin' to tell you:

Have you forgot how you stoled? and how

you cheated the orphans?

Secretly sinned?'--and this, and t'other;

and when they have finished,

Say it over ag'in, and you get little good o'

your slumber."

So the angel he talked, and, like iron under

the hammer,

Sparked and spirited the Poohoo. "Surely,"

I says to the angel,

"Born on a Sunday was I, and friendly with

many a preacher,

Yet the Father protect me from these!" Says

he to me, smilin':

"Keep y'r conscience pure; it is better than

crossin' and blessin'.

Here we must part, for y'r way turns off and

down to the village.

Take the Poohoo along, but mind! put him

out, in the meadow,

Lest he should run in the village, settin' fire

to the stables.

God be with you and keep you!" And then

says I: "Mr. Angel,

God, the Father, protect you! Be sure, when

you come to the city,

Christmas evenin', call, and I'll hold it an

honor to see you:

Raisins I'll have at your service, and hippocras,

if you like it.

Chilly 's the air, o' evenin's, especially down

by the river."

Day was breakin' by this, and right there was

Todtnau before me!

Past, and onward to Basle I wandered, i' the

shade and the coolness.

When into Mambach I came, they bore a dead

girl to the grave-yard,

After the Holy Cross, and the faded banner o'

Heaven,

With the funeral garlands upon her, with sobbin'

and weepin'.

Ah, but she 'd heard what he said! he'll

waken her up when the time comes.

Afterwards, Tuesday it was, I got safely back

to my cousin;

But it turned out as he said,--I'd somewhere

forgotten my snuff-box!

[Footnote C: _Dengle-Geist_, literally, "Whetting-Spirit." The exact

meaning of _dengeln_ is to sharpen a scythe by hammering the edge of the

blade, which was practised before whetstones came in use.]

[Footnote D: According to an old legend, Fridolin (a favorite saint with

the Catholic population of the Black Forest) harnessed two young heifers

to a mighty fir-tree, and hauled it into the Rhine near Säckingen,

thereby damming the river and forcing it to take a new course, on the

other side of the town.]

In this poem the hero of the story unconsciously describes himself by

his manner of telling it,--a reflective action of the dramatic faculty,

which Browning, among living poets, possesses in a marked degree. The

"moral" is so skilfully inwoven into the substance of the narrative as

to conceal the appearance of design, and the reader has swallowed the

pill before its sugar-coating of fancy has dissolved in his mouth. There

are few of Hebel's poems which were not written for the purpose of

inculcating some wholesome lesson, but in none does this object

prominently appear. Even where it is not merely implied, but directly

expressed, he contrives to give it the air of having been accidentally

suggested by the theme. In the following, which is the most pointedly

didactic of all his productions, the characteristic fancy still betrays

itself:--

THE GUIDE-POST.

D' ye know the road to th' bar'l o' flour?

At break o' day let down the bars,

And plough y'r wheat-field, hour by hour,

Till sundown,--yes, till shine o' stars.

You peg away, the livelong day,

Nor loaf about, nor gape around;

And that's the road to the thrashin'-floor,

And into the kitchen, I'll be bound!

D' ye know the road where dollars lays?

Follow the red cents, here and there:

For if a man leaves them, I guess,

He won't find dollars anywhere.

D' ye know the road to Sunday's rest?

Jist don't o' week-days be afeard;

In field and workshop do y'r best,

And Sunday comes itself, I've heerd.

On Saturdays it's not fur off,

And brings a basketful o' cheer,--

A roast, and lots o' garden-stuff,

And, like as not, a jug o' beer!

D' ye know the road to poverty?

Turn in at any tavern-sign:

Turn in,--it's temptin' as can be:

There's bran'-new cards and liquor fine.

In the last tavern there's a sack,

And, when the cash y'r pocket quits,

Jist hang the wallet on y'r back,--

You vagabond! see how it fits!

D' ye know what road to honor leads,

And good old age?--a lovely sight!

By way o' temperance, honest deeds,

And tryin' to do y'r dooty right.

And when the road forks, ary side,

And you're in doubt which one it is,

Stand still, and let y'r conscience guide:

Thank God, it can't lead much amiss!

And now, the road to church-yard gate

You needn't ask! Go anywhere!

For, whether roundabout or straight,

All roads, at last, 'll bring you there.

Go, fearin' God, but lovin' more!--

I've tried to be an honest guide,--

You'll find the grave has got a door,

And somethin' for you t'other side.

We could linger much longer over our simple, brave old poet, were we

sure of the ability of the reader approximately to distinguish his

features through the veil of translation. In turning the leaves of the

smoky book, with its coarse paper and rude type,--which suggests to us,

by-the-by, the fact that Hebel was accustomed to hang a book, which he

wished especially to enjoy, in the chimney, for a few days,--we are

tempted by "The Market-Women in Town," by "The Mother on Christmas-Eve,"

"The Morning-Star," and the charming fairy-story of "Riedliger's

Daughter," but must be content to close our specimens, for the present,

with a song of love,--"_Hans und Verene_,"--under the equivalent title

of

JACK AND MAGGIE.

There's only one I'm after,

And she's the one, I vow!

If she was here, and standin' by,

She is a gal so neat and spry,

So neat and spry,

I'd be in glory now!

It's so,--I'm hankerin' for her,

And want to have her, too.

Her temper's always gay, and bright,

Her face like posies red and white,

Both red and white,

And eyes like posies blue.

And when I see her comin',

My face gits red at once;

My heart feels chokin'-like, and weak,

And drops o' sweat run down my cheek,

Yes, down my cheek,--

Confound me for a dunce!

She spoke so kind, last Tuesday,

When at the well we met:

"Jack, give a lift! What ails you? Say!

I see that somethin' 's wrong to-day:

What's wrong to-day?"

No, that I can't forget!

I know I'd ought to tell her,

And wish I'd told her then;

And if I wasn't poor and low,

And sayin' it didn't choke me so,

(It chokes me so,)

I'd find a chance again.

Well, up and off I'm goin':

She's in the field below:

I'll try and let her know my mind;

And if her answer isn't kind,

If 't isn't kind,

I'll jine the ranks, and go!

I'm but a poor young fellow,

Yes, poor enough, no doubt:

But ha'n't, thank God, done nothin' wrong,

And be a man as stout and strong,

As stout and strong,

As any roundabout.

What's rustlin' in the bushes?

I see a movin' stalk:

The leaves is openin': there's a dress!

O Lord, forbid it! but I guess--

I guess--I guess

Somebody's heard me talk!

"Ha! here I am! you've got me!

So keep me, if you can!

I've guessed it ever since last Fall,

And Tuesday morn I saw it all,

_I_ saw it all!

Speak out, then, like a man!

"Though rich you a'n't in money,

Nor rich in goods to sell,

An honest heart is more than gold,

And hands you've got for field and fold,

For house and fold,

And--Jack--I love you well!"

"O Maggie, say it over!

O Maggie, is it so?

I couldn't longer bear the doubt:

'Twas hell,--but now you've drawed me out,

You've drawed me out!

And will I? _Won't_ I, though!"

The later years of Hebel's life quietly passed away in the circle of his

friends at Carlsruhe. After the peculiar mood which called forth the

Alemannic poems had passed away, he seems to have felt no further

temptation to pursue his literary success. His labors, thenceforth, were

chiefly confined to the preparation of a Biblical History, for schools,

and the editing of the "Rhenish House-Friend," an illustrated calendar

for the people, to which he gave a character somewhat similar to that of

Franklin's "Poor Richard." His short, pithy narratives, each with its

inevitable, though unobtrusive moral, are models of style. The calendar

became so popular, under his management, that forty thousand copies were

annually printed. He finally discontinued his connection with it, in

1819, in consequence of an interference with his articles on the part of

the censor.

In society Hebel was a universal favorite. Possessing, in his personal

appearance, no less than in his intellect, a marked individuality, he

carried a fresh, vital, inspiring element into every company which he

visited. His cheerfulness was inexhaustible, his wit keen and lambent

without being acrid, his speech clear, fluent, and genial, and his fund

of anecdote commensurate with his remarkable narrative power. He was

exceedingly frank, joyous, and unconstrained in his demeanor; fond of

the pipe and the beer-glass; and as one of his maxims was, "Not to close

any door through which Fortune might enter," he not only occasionally

bought a lottery-ticket, but was sometimes to be seen, during the

season, at the roulette-tables of Baden-Baden. One of his friends

declares, however, that he never obtruded "the clergyman" at

inappropriate times!

In person he was of medium height, with a body of massive Teutonic

build, a large, broad head, inclined a little towards one shoulder, the

eyes small, brown, and mischievously sparkling, the hair short, crisp,

and brown, the nose aquiline, and the mouth compressed, with the

commencement of a smile stamped in the corners. He was careless in

his gait, and negligent in his dress. Warm-hearted and tender, and

especially attracted towards women and children, the cause of his

celibacy always remained a mystery to his friends.

The manner of his death, finally, illustrated the genuine humanity of

his nature. In September, 1826, although an invalid at the time, he made

a journey to Mannheim for the sake of procuring a mitigation of the

sentence of a condemned poacher, whose case appealed strongly to his

sympathy. His exertions on behalf of the poor man so aggravated his

disease that he was soon beyond medical aid. Only his corpse, crowned

with laurel, returned to Carlsruhe. Nine years afterwards a monument was

erected to his memory in the park attached to the Ducal palace. Nor have

the inhabitants of the Black Forest failed in worthy commemoration of

their poet's name. A prominent peak among the mountains which inclose

the valley of his favorite "Meadow" has been solemnly christened

"Hebel's Mount"; and a flower of the Forest--the _Anthericum_ of

Linnaeus--now figures in German botanies as the _Hebelia Alemannica_.

THE FORESTER.

Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch

At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb,

Keep clean, bear fruit, earn life, and watch

Till the white-winged reapers come.--Henry Vaughan

I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country as

this friend of mine, and so purely a son of Nature. Perhaps he has

the profoundest passion for it of any one living; and had the human

sentiment been as tender from the first, and as pervading, we might have

had pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus would have envied him the

authorship, had they chanced to be his contemporaries. As it is, he has

come nearer the antique spirit than any of our native poets, and touched

the fields and groves and streams of his native town with a classic

interest that shall not fade. Some of his verses are suffused with an

elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and fields bewailed the absence

of their forester, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one

another,--responsive like idyls. Living in close companionship with

Nature, his Muse breathes the spirit and voice of poetry; his excellence

lying herein: for when the heart is once divorced from the senses and

all sympathy with common things, then poetry has fled, and the love that

sings.

The most welcome of companions, this plain countryman. One shall not

meet with thoughts invigorating like his often; coming so scented of

mountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like a luxuriant

clod from under forest-leaves, moist and mossy with earth-spirits. His

presence is tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen

pent in chambers and under brazen ceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of

brooks, the dripping of pitchers,--then drink and be cool! He seems one

with things, of Nature's essence and core, knit of strong timbers, most

like a wood and its inhabitants. There are in him sod and shade, woods

and waters manifold, the mould and mist of earth and sky. Self-poised

and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he has the key to every

animal's brain, every plant, every shrub; and were an Indian to flower

forth, and reveal the secrets hidden in his cranium, it would not be

more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus. He must belong to the

Homeric age,--is older than pastures and gardens, as if he were of the

race of heroes, and one with the elements. He, of all men, seems to be

the native New-Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge, our

best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by the Old Country,

unless he came down from Thor, the Northman; as yet unfathered by any,

and a nondescript in the books of natural history.

A peripatetic philosopher, and out of doors for the best parts of his

days and nights, he has manifold weather and seasons in him, and the

manners of an animal of probity and virtues unstained. Of our moralists

he seems the wholesomest; and the best republican citizen in the

world,--always at home, and minding his own affairs. Perhaps a little

over-confident sometimes, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean

out of his theories, while standing friendly in his strict sense of

friendship, there is in him an integrity and sense of justice that make

possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics, and all the

more welcome to us in these times of shuffling and of pusillanimity.

Plutarch would have made him immortal in his pages, had he lived before

his day. Nor have we any so modern as be,--his own and ours; too purely

so to be appreciated at once. A scholar by birthright, and an author,

his fame has not yet travelled far from the banks of the rivers he has

described in his books; but I hazard only the truth in affirming of his

prose, that in substance and sense it surpasses that of any naturalist

of his time, and that he is sure of a reading in the future. There are

fairer fishes in his pages than any now swimming in our streams, and

some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt

never rivalled; a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music,

and a greyhound that was meant for Adonis; some frogs, too, better than

any of Aristophanes. Perhaps we have had no eyes like his since Pliny's

time. His senses seem double, giving him access to secrets not easily

read by other men: his sagacity resembling that of the beaver and the

bee, the dog and the deer; an instinct for seeing and judging, as by

some other or seventh sense, dealing with objects as if they were

shooting forth from his own mind mythologically, thus completing Nature

all round to his senses, and a creation of his at the moment. I am sure

he knows the animals, one by one, and everything else knowable in our

town, and has named them rightly as Adam did in Paradise, if he be

not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces of exquisite sense,

celebrations of Nature's virginity, exemplified by rare learning and

original observations. Persistently independent and manly, he criticizes

men and times largely, urging and defending his opinions with the spirit

and pertinacity befitting a descendant of him of the Hammer. A head

of mixed genealogy like his, Franco-Norman crossed by Scottish and

New-England descent, may be forgiven a few characteristic peculiarities

and trenchant traits of thinking, amidst his great common sense and

fidelity to the core of natural things. Seldom has a head circumscribed

so much of the sense of Cosmos as this footed intelligence,--nothing

less than all out-of-doors sufficing his genius and scopes, and, day by

day, through all weeks and seasons, the year round.

If one would find the wealth of wit there is in this plain man, the

information, the sagacity, the poetry, the piety, let him take a walk

with him, say of a winter's afternoon, to the Blue Water, or anywhere

about the outskirts of his village-residence. Pagan as he shall

outwardly appear, yet he soon shall be seen to be the hearty worshipper

of whatsoever is sound and wholesome in Nature,--a piece of russet

probity and sound sense that she delights to own and honor. His talk

shall be suggestive, subtile, and sincere, under as many masks and

mimicries as the shows he passes, and as significant,--Nature choosing

to speak through her chosen mouth-piece,--cynically, perhaps, sometimes,

and searching into the marrows of men and times he chances to speak of,

to his discomfort mostly, and avoidance. Nature, poetry, life,--not

politics, not strict science, not society as it is,--are his preferred

themes: the new Pantheon, probably, before he gets far, to the naming of

the gods some coming Angelo, some Pliny, is to paint and describe. The

world is holy, the things seen symbolizing the Unseen, and worthy of

worship so, the Zoroastrian rites most becoming a nature so fine as ours

in this thin newness, this worship being so sensible, so promotive of

possible pieties,--calling us out of doors and under the firmament,

where health and wholesomeness are finely insinuated into our

souls,--not as idolaters, but as idealists, the seekers of the Unseen

through images of the Invisible.

I think his religion of the most primitive type, and inclusive of all

natural creatures and things, even to "the sparrow that falls to the

ground,"--though never by shot of his,--and, for whatsoever is manly

in man, his worship may compare with that of the priests and heroes

of pagan times. Nor is he false to these traits under any

guise,--worshipping at unbloody altars, a favorite of the Unseen,

Wisest, and Best. Certainly he is better poised and more nearly

self-reliant than other men.

Perhaps he deals best with matter, properly, though very adroitly with

mind, with persons, as he knows them best, and sees them from Nature's

circle, wherein he dwells habitually. I should say he inspired the

sentiment of love, if, indeed, the sentiment he awakens did not seem to

partake of a yet purer sentiment, were that possible,--but nameless from

its excellency. Friendly he is, and holds his friends by bearings as

strict in their tenderness and consideration as are the laws of his

thinking,--as prompt and kindly equitable,--neighborly always, and as

apt for occasions as he is strenuous against meddling with others in

things not his.

I know of nothing more creditable to his greatness than the thoughtful

regard, approaching to reverence, by which he has held for many years

some of the best persons of his time, living at a distance, and wont

to make their annual pilgrimage, usually on foot, to the master,--a

devotion very rare in these times of personal indifference, if not of

confessed unbelief in persons and ideas.

He has been less of a housekeeper than most, has harvested more wind and

storm, sun and sky; abroad night and day with his leash of keen scents,

bounding any game stirring, and running it down, for certain, to be

spread on the dresser of his page, and served as a feast to the sound

intelligences, before he has done with it. We have been accustomed to

consider him the salt of things so long that they must lose their savor

without his to season them. And when he goes hence, then Pan is dead,

and Nature ailing throughout.

His friend sings him thus, with the advantages of his Walden to show him

in Nature:--

"It is not far beyond the Village church,

After we pass the wood that skirts the road,

A Lake,--the blue-eyed Walden, that doth smile

Most tenderly upon its neighbor Pines;

And they, as if to recompense this love,

In double beauty spread their branches forth.

This Lake has tranquil loveliness and breadth,

And, of late years, has added to its charms;

For one attracted to its pleasant edge

Has built himself a little Hermitage,

Where with much piety he passes life.

"More fitting place I cannot fancy now,

For such a man to let the line run off

The mortal reel,--such patience hath the Lake,

Such gratitude and cheer is in the Pines.

But more than either lake or forest's depths

This man has in himself: a tranquil man,

With sunny sides where well the fruit is ripe,

Good front and resolute bearing to this life,

And some serener virtues, which control

This rich exterior prudence,--virtues high,

That in the principles of Things are set,

Great by their nature, and consigned to him,

Who, like a faithful Merchant, does account

To God for what he spends, and in what way.

Thrice happy art thou, Walden, in thyself!

Such purity is in thy limpid springs,--

In those green shores which do reflect in thee,

And in this man who dwells upon thy edge,

A holy man within a Hermitage.

May all good showers fall gently into thee,

May thy surrounding forests long be spared,

And may the Dweller on thy tranquil marge

There lead a life of deep tranquillity,

Pure as thy Waters, handsome as thy Shores,

And with those virtues which are like the Stars!"

METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.

VII.

I come now to an obscure part of my subject, very difficult to present

in a popular form, and yet so important in the scientific investigations

of our day that I cannot omit it entirely. I allude to what are called

by naturalists Collateral Series or Parallel Types. These are by

no means difficult to trace, because they are connected by seeming

resemblances, which, though very likely to mislead and perplex the

observer, yet naturally suggest the association of such groups. Let me

introduce the subject with the statement of some facts.

There are in Australia numerous Mammalia, occupying the same relation

and answering the same purposes as the Mammalia of other countries. Some

of them are domesticated by the natives, and serve them with meat, milk,

wool, as our domesticated animals serve us. Representatives of almost

all types, Wolves, Foxes, Sloths, Bears, Weasels, Martens, Squirrels,

Rats, etc., are found there; and yet, though all these animals resemble

ours so closely that the English settlers have called many of them by

the same names, there are no genuine Wolves, Foxes, Sloths, Bears,

Weasels, Martens, Squirrels, or Rats in Australia. The Australian

Mammalia are peculiar to the region where they are found, and are all

linked together by two remarkable structural features which distinguish

them from all other Mammalia and unite them under one head as the

so-called Marsupials. They bring forth their young in an imperfect

condition, and transfer them to a pouch, where they remain attached to

the teats of the mother till their development is as far advanced as

that of other Mammalia at the time of their birth; and they are further

characterized by an absence of that combination of transverse fibres

forming the large bridge which unites the two hemispheres of the brain

in all the other members of their class. Here, then, is a series of

animals parallel with ours, separated from them by anatomical features,

but so united with them by form and external features that many among

them have been at first associated together.

This is what Cuvier has called subordination of characters,

distinguishing between characters that control the organization and

those that are not essentially connected with it. The skill of the

naturalist consists in detecting the difference between the two, so

that he may not take the more superficial features as the basis of his

classification, instead of those important ones which, though often less

easily recognized, are more deeply rooted in the organization. It is a

difference of the same nature as that between affinity and analogy, to

which I have alluded before, when speaking of the ingrafting of certain

features of one type upon animals of another type, thus producing a

superficial resemblance, not truly characteristic. In the Reptiles, for

instance, there are two groups,--those devoid of scales, with naked

skin, laying numerous eggs, but hatching their young in an imperfect

state, and the Scaly Reptiles, which lay comparatively few eggs, but

whose young, when hatched, are completely developed, and undergo no

subsequent metamorphosis. Yet, notwithstanding this difference in

essential features of structure, and in the mode of reproduction and

development, there is such an external resemblance between certain

animals belonging to the two groups that they were associated together

even by so eminent a naturalist as Linnaeus. Compare, for instance, the

Serpents among the Scaly Reptiles with the Caecilians among the Naked

Reptiles. They have the same elongated form, and are both destitute

of limbs; the head in both is on a level with the body, without any

contraction behind it, such as marks the neck in the higher Reptiles,

and moves only by the action of the back-bone; they are singularly alike

in their external features, but the young of the Serpent are hatched in

a mature condition, while the young of the type to which the Caecilians

belong undergo a succession of metamorphoses before attaining to a

resemblance to the parent. Or compare the Lizard and the Salamander, in

which the likeness is perhaps even more striking; for any inexperienced

observer would mistake one for the other. Both are superior to the

Serpents and Caecilians, for in them the head moves freely on the neck

and they creep on short imperfect legs. But the Lizard is clothed with

scales, while the body of the Salamander is naked, and the young of

the former is complete when hatched, while the Tadpole born from the

Salamander has a life of its own to live, with certain changes to pass

through before it assumes its mature condition; during the early part of

its life it is even destitute of legs, and has gills like the Fishes.

Above the Lizards and Salamanders, highest in the class of Reptiles,

stand two other collateral types,--the Turtles at the head of the Scaly

Reptiles, the Toads and Frogs at the Lead of the Naked Reptiles. The

external likeness between these two groups is perhaps less striking than

between those mentioned above, on account of the large shield of the

Turtle. But there are Turtles with a soft covering, and there are some

Toads with a hard shield over the head and neck at least, and both

groups are alike distinguished by the shortness and breadth of the body

and by the greater development of the limbs as compared with the lower

Reptiles. But here again there is the same essential difference in the

mode of development of their young as distinguishes all the rest. The

two series may thus be contrasted:--

_Naked Reptiles_. Toads and Frogs, Salamanders, Caecilians.

_Scaly Reptiles._ Turtles, Lizards, Serpents.

Such corresponding groups or parallel types, united only by external

resemblance, and distinguished from each other by essential elements of

structure, exist among all animals, though they are less striking among

Birds on account of the uniformity of that class. Yet even there we may

trace such analogies,--as between the Palmate or Aquatic Birds, for

instance, and the Birds of Prey, or between the Frigate Bird and the

Kites. Among Fishes such analogies are very common, often suggesting a

comparison even with land animals, though on account of the scales and

spines of the former the likeness may not be easily traced. But the

common names used by the fishermen often indicate these resemblances,

--as, for instance, Sea-Vulture, Sea-Eagle, Cat-Fish, Flying-Fish,

Sea-Porcupine, Sea-Cow, Sea-Horse, and the like. In the branch of

Mollusks, also, the same superficial analogies are found. In the lowest

class of this division of the Animal Kingdom there is a group so similar

to the Polyps, that, until recently, they have been associated with

them,--the Bryozoa. They are very small animals, allied to the Clams by

the plan of their structure, but they have a resemblance to the Polyps

on account of a radiating wreath of feelers around the upper part of

their body: yet, when examined closely, this wreath is found to be

incomplete; it does not, form a circle, but leaves an open space between

the two ends, where they approach each other, so that it has a horseshoe

outline, and partakes of the bilateral symmetry characteristic of its

type and on which its own structure is based. These series have not yet

been very carefully traced, and young naturalists should turn their

attention to them, and be prepared to draw the nicest distinction

between analogies and true affinities among animals.

VIII.

After this digression, let us proceed to a careful examination of the

natural groups of animals called Families by naturalists,--a subject

already briefly alluded to in a previous chapter. Families are natural

assemblages of animals of less extent than Orders, but, like Orders,

Classes, and Branches, founded upon certain categories of structure,

which are as distinct for this kind of group as for all the other

divisions in the classification of the Animal Kingdom.

That we may understand the true meaning of these divisions, we must not

be misled by the name given by naturalists to this kind of group. Here,

as in so many other instances, a word already familiar, and that had

become, as it were, identified with the special sense in which it

had been used, has been adopted by science and has received a new

signification. When naturalists speak of Families among animals, they do

not allude to the progeny of a known stock, as we designate, in common

parlance, the children or the descendants of known parents by the word

family; they understand by Families natural groups of different kinds

of animals, having no genetic relations so far as we know, but agreeing

with one another closely enough to leave the impression of a more

or less remote common parentage. The difficulty here consists in

determining the natural limits of such groups, and in tracing the

characteristic features by which they may be defined; for individual

investigators differ greatly as to the degree of resemblance existing

between the members of many Families, and there is no kind of

group which presents greater diversity of circumscription in the

classifications of animals proposed by different naturalists than these

so-called Families.

It should be remembered, however, that, unless a sound criterion be

applied to the limitation of Families, they, like all other groups

introduced into zoölogical systems, must forever remain arbitrary

divisions, as they have been hitherto. A retrospective glance at the

progress of our science during the past century, in this connection,

may perhaps help us to solve the difficulty. Linnaeus, in his System

of Nature, does not admit Families; he has only four kinds of

groups,--Classes, Orders, Genera, and Species. It was among plants that

naturalists first perceived those general traits of resemblance which

exist everywhere among the members of natural families, and added this

kind of group to the framework of their system. In France, particularly,

this method was pursued with success; and the improvements thus

introduced by the French botanists were so great, and rendered their

classification so superior to that of Linnaeus, that the botanical

systems in which Families were introduced were called natural systems,

in contradistinction especially to the botanical classification of

Linnaeus, which was founded upon the organs of reproduction, and which

received thenceforth the name of the sexual system of plants. The same

method so successfully used by botanists was soon introduced

into Zoölogy by the French naturalists of the beginning of this

century,--Lamarck, Latreille, and Cuvier. But, to this day, the

limitation of Families among animals has not yet reached the precision

which it has among plants, and I see no other reason for the difference

than the absence of a leading principle to guide us in Zoölogy.

Families, as they exist in Nature, are based upon peculiarities of form

as related to structure; but though a very large number of them have

been named and recorded, very few are characterized with anything like

scientific accuracy. It has been a very simple matter to establish such

groups according to the superficial method that has been pursued, for

the fact that they are determined by external outline renders the

recognition of them easy and in many instances almost instinctive; but

it is very difficult to characterize them, or, in other words, to trace

the connection between form and structure. Indeed, many naturalists do

not admit that Families are based upon form; and it was in trying to

account for the facility with which they detect these groups, while they

find it so difficult to characterize them, that I perceived that they

are always associated with peculiarities of form. Naturalists have

established Families simply by bringing together a number of animals

resembling each other more or less closely, and, taking usually the name

of the Genus to which the best known among them belongs, they have given

it a patronymic termination to designate the Family, and allowed the

matter to rest there, sometimes without even attempting any description

corresponding to those by which Genus and Species are commonly defined.

For instance, from _Canis_, the Dog, _Canidae_ has been formed, to

designate the whole Family of Dogs, Wolves, Foxes, etc. Nothing can be

more superficial than such a mode of classification; and if these

groups actually exist in Nature, they must be based, like all the other

divisions, upon some combination of structural characters peculiar to

them. We have seen that Branches are founded upon the general plan of

structure, Classes on the mode of executing the plan, Orders upon the

greater or less complication of a given mode of execution, and we shall

find that form, as _determined by structure_, characterizes Families. I

would call attention to this qualification of my definition; since, of

course, when speaking of form in this connection, I do not mean those

superficial resemblances in external features already alluded to in

my remarks upon Parallel or Collateral Types. I speak now of form as

controlled by structural elements; and unless we analyze Families in

this way, the mere distinguishing and naming them does not advance our

science at all. Compare, for instance, the Dogs, the Seals, and the

Bears. These are all members of one Order,--that of the Carnivorous

Mammalia. Their dentition is peculiar and alike in all, (cutting teeth,

canine teeth, and grinders,) adapted for tearing and chewing their

food; and their internal structure bears a definite relation to their

dentition. But look at these animals with reference to form. The Dog is

comparatively slender, with legs adapted for running and hunting his

prey; the Bear is heavier, with shorter limbs; while the Seal has a

continuous uniform outline adapted for swimming. They form separate

Families, and are easily recognized as such by the difference in their

external outline; but what is the anatomical difference which produces

the peculiarity of form in each, by which they have been thus

distinguished? It lies in the structure of the limbs, and especially in

that of the wrist and fingers. In the Seal the limbs are short, and the

wrists are on one continuous line with them, so that it has no power of

bending the wrist or the fingers, and the limbs, therefore, act like

flappers or oars. The Bear has a well-developed paw with a flexible

wrist, but it steps on the whole sole of the foot, from the wrist to the

tip of the toe, giving it the heavy tread so characteristic of all the

Bears. The Dogs, on the contrary, walk on tip-toe, and their step,

though firm, is light, while the greater slenderness and flexibility of

their legs add to their nimbleness and swiftness. By a more extensive

investigation of the anatomical structure of the limbs in their

connection with the whole body, it could easily be shown that the

peculiarity of form in these animals is essentially determined by, or at

least stands in the closest relation to, the peculiar structure of the

wrist and fingers.

Take the Family of Owls as distinguished from the Falcons, Kites, etc.

Here the difference of form is in the position of the eyes. In the

Owl, the sides of the head are prominent and the eye-socket is brought

forward. In the Falcons and Kites, on the contrary, the sides of the

head are flattened and the eyes are set back. The difference in the

appearance of the birds is evident to the most superficial observer; but

to call the one Strigidae and the other Falconidae tells us nothing of

the anatomical peculiarities on which this difference is founded.

These few examples, selected purposely among closely allied and

universally known animals, may be sufficient to show, that, beyond the

general complication of the structure which characterizes the Orders,

there is a more limited element in the organization of animals, bearing

chiefly upon their form, which, if it have any general application as

a principle of classification, may well be considered as essentially

characteristic of the Families. There are certainly closely allied

natural groups of animals, belonging to the same Order, but including

many Genera, which differ from each other chiefly in their form, while

that form is determined by peculiarities of structure which do not

influence the general structural complication upon which Orders are

based, or relate to the minor details of structure on which Genera are

founded. I am therefore convinced that form is the criterion by which

Families may be determined. The great facility with which animals may

be combined together in natural groups of this kind without any special

investigation of their structure, a superficial method of classification

in which zoölogists have lately indulged to a most unjustifiable degree,

convinces me that it is the similarity of form which has unconsciously

led such shallow investigators to correct results, since upon close

examination it is found that a large number of the Families so

determined, and to which no characters at all are assigned, nevertheless

bear the severest criticism founded upon anatomical investigation.

The questions proposed to themselves by all students who would

characterize Families should be these: What are, throughout the

Animal Kingdom, the peculiar patterns of form by which Families are

distinguished? and on what structural features are these patterns based?

Only the most patient investigations can give us the answer, and it will

be very long before we can write out the formulae of these patterns with

mathematical precision, as I believe we shall be able to do in a more

advanced stage of our science. But while the work is in progress, it

ought to be remembered that a mere general similarity of outline is not

yet in itself evidence of identity of form or pattern, and that, while

seemingly very different forms may be derived from the same formula, the

most similar forms may belong to entirely different systems, when their

derivation is properly traced. Our great mathematician, in a lecture

delivered at the Lowell Institute last winter, showed that in his

science, also, similarity of outline does not always indicate identity

of character. Compare the different circles,--the perfect circle, in

which every point of the periphery is at the same distance from the

centre, with an ellipse in which the variation from the true circle is

so slight as to be almost imperceptible to the eye; yet the latter, like

all ellipses, has its two _foci_ by which it differs from a circle,

and to refer it to the family of circles instead of the family of

ellipses would be overlooking its true character on account of its

external appearance; and yet ellipses may be so elongated, that, far

from resembling a circle, they make the impression of parallel lines

linked at their extremities. Or we may have an elastic curve in which

the appearance of a circle is produced by the meeting of the two ends;

nevertheless it belongs to the family of elastic curves, in which may

even be included a line actually straight, and is formed by a process

entirely different from that which produces the circle or the ellipse.

But it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to find the relation between

structure and form in Families, and I remember a case which I had taken

as a test of the accuracy of the views I entertained upon this subject,

and which perplexed and baffled me for years. It was that of our

fresh-water Mussels, the Family of Unios. There is a great variety of

outline among them,--some being oblong and very slender, others broad

with seemingly square outlines, others having a nearly triangular form,

while others again are almost circular; and I could not detect among

them all any feature of form that was connected with any essential

element of their structure. At last, however, I found this

test-character, and since that time I have had no doubt left in my mind

that form, determined by structure, is the true criterion of Families.

In the Unios it consists of the rounded outline of the anterior end of

the body reflected in a more or less open curve of the shell, bending

more abruptly along the lower side with an inflection followed by a

bulging, corresponding to the most prominent part of the gills, to which

alone, in a large number of American Species of this Family, the eggs

are transferred, giving to this part of the shell a prominence which it

has not in any of the European Species. At the posterior end of the body

this curve then bends upwards and backwards again, the outline meeting

the side occupied by the hinge and ligament, which, when very short, may

determine a triangular form of the whole shell, or, when equal to the

lower side and connected with a great height of the body, gives it a

quadrangular form, or, if the height is reduced, produces an elongated

form, or, finally, a rounded form, if the passage from one side to the

other is gradual. A comparison of the position of the internal organs of

different Species of Unios with the outlines of their shells will leave

no doubt that their form is determined by the structure of the animal.

A few other and more familiar examples may complete this discussion.

Among Climbing Birds, for instance, which are held together as a

more comprehensive group by the structure of their feet and by other

anatomical features, there are two Families so widely different in

their form that they may well serve as examples of this principle. The

Woodpeckers (_Picidae_) and the Parrots (_Psittacidae_), once considered

as two Genera only, have both been subdivided, in consequence of a more

intimate knowledge of their generic characters, into a large number of

Genera; but all the Genera of Woodpeckers and all the Genera of the

Parrots are still held together by their form as Families, corresponding

as such to the two old Genera of _Picus_ and _Psittacus_. They are now

known as the Families of Woodpeckers and Parrots; and though each group

includes a number of Genera combined upon a variety of details in the

finish of special parts of the structure, such as the number of toes,

the peculiarities of the bill, etc., it is impossible to overlook the

peculiar form which is characteristic of each. No one who is familiar

with the outline of the Parrot will fail to recognize any member of

that Family by a general form which is equally common to the diminutive

Nonpareil, the gorgeous Ara, and the high-crested Cockatoo. Neither will

any one, who has ever observed the small head, the straight bill, the

flat back, and stiff tail of the Woodpecker, hesitate to identify the

family form in any of the numerous Genera into which this group is now

divided. The family characters are even more invariable than the generic

ones; for there are Woodpeckers which, instead of the four toes, two

turning forward and two backward, which form an essential generic

character, have three toes only, while the family form is always

maintained, whatever variations there may be in the characters of the

more limited groups it includes.

The Turtles and Terrapins form another good illustration of family

characters. They constitute together a natural Order, but are

distinguished from each other as two Families very distinct in general

form and outline. Among Fishes I may mention the Family of Pickerels,

with their flat, long snout, and slender, almost cylindrical body, as

contrasted with the plump, compressed body and tapering tail of the

Trout Family. Or compare, among Insects, the Hawk-Moths with the Diurnal

Butterfly, or with the so-called Miller,--or, among Crustacea, the

common Crab with the Sea-Spider, or the Lobsters with the Shrimps,--or,

among Worms, the Leeches with the Earth-Worms,--or, among Mollusks,

the Squids with the Cuttle-Fishes, or the Snails with the Slugs, or the

Periwinkles with the Limpets and Conchs, or the Clam with the so-called

Venus, or the Oyster with the Mother-of-Pearl shell,--everywhere,

throughout the Animal Kingdom, difference of form points at difference

of Families.

There is a chapter in the Natural History of Animals that has hardly

been touched upon as yet, and that will be especially interesting with

reference to Families. The voices of animals have a family character not

to be mistaken. All the Canidae bark and howl: the Fox, the Wolf, the

Dog have the same kind of utterance, though on a somewhat different

pitch. All the Bears growl, from the White Bear of the Arctic snows to

the small Black Bear of the Andes. All the Cats _miau_, from our quiet

fireside companion to the Lions and Tigers and Panthers of the forest

and jungle. This last may seem a strange assertion; but to any one who

has listened critically to their sounds and analyzed their voices,

the roar of the Lion is but a gigantic _miau_, bearing about the same

proportion to that of a Cat as its stately and majestic form does to the

smaller, softer, more peaceful aspect of the Cat. Yet, notwithstanding

the difference in their size, who can look at the Lion, whether in his

more sleepy mood as he lies curled up in the corner of his cage, or in

his fiercer moments of hunger or of rage, without being reminded of a

Cat? And this is not merely the resemblance of one carnivorous animal to

another; for no one was ever reminded of a Dog or Wolf by a Lion. Again,

all the Horses and Donkeys neigh; for the bray of the Donkey is only a

harsher neigh, pitched on a different key, it is true, but a sound of

the same character,--as the Donkey himself is but a clumsy and dwarfish

Horse. All the Cows low, from the Buffalo roaming the prairie, the

Musk-Ox of the Arctic ice-fields, or the Jack of Asia, to the Cattle

feeding in our pastures. Among the Birds, this similarity of voice in

Families is still more marked. We need only recall the harsh and noisy

Parrots, so similar in their peculiar utterance. Or take as an example

the web-footed Family,--do not all the Geese and the innumerable host

of Ducks quack? Does not every member of the Crow Family caw, whether it

be the Jackdaw, the Jay, the Magpie, the Rook in some green rookery of

the Old World, or the Crow of our woods, with its long, melancholy caw

that seems to make the silence and solitude deeper? Compare all the

sweet warblers of the Songster Family,--the Nightingales, the Thrushes,

the Mocking-Birds, the Robins; they differ in the greater or less

perfection of their note, but the same kind of voice runs through the

whole group. These affinities of the vocal systems among animals form a

subject well worthy of the deepest study, not only as another character

by which to classify the Animal Kingdom correctly, but as bearing

indirectly also on the question of the origin of animals. Can we suppose

that characteristics like these have been communicated from one animal

to another? When we find that all the members of one zoological Family,

however widely scattered over the surface of the earth, inhabiting

different continents and even different hemispheres, speak with one

voice, must we not believe that they have originated in the places where

they now occur with all their distinctive peculiarities? Who taught the

American Thrush to sing like his European relative? He surely did not

learn it from his cousin over the waters. Those who would have us

believe that all animals have originated from common centres and single

pairs, and have been distributed from such common centres over the

world, will find it difficult to explain the tenacity of such characters

and their recurrence and repetition under circumstances that seem to

preclude the possibility of any communication, on any other supposition

than that of their creation in the different regions where they are now

found. We have much yet to learn in this kind of investigation, with

reference not only to Families among animals, but to nationalities among

men also. I trust that the nature of languages will teach us as much

about the origin of the races as the vocal systems of the animals may

one day teach us about the origin of the different groups of animals.

At all events, similarity of vocal utterance among animals is not

indicative of identity of Species; I doubt, therefore, whether

similarity of speech proves community of origin among men.

The similarity of motion in Families is another subject well worth the

consideration of the naturalist: the soaring of the Birds of Prey,--the

heavy flapping of the wings in the Gallinaceous Birds,--the floating of

the Swallows, with their short cuts and angular turns,--the hopping

of the Sparrows,--the deliberate walk of the Hens and the strut of the

Cocks,--the waddle of the Ducks and Geese,--the slow, heavy creeping

of the Land-Turtle,--the graceful flight of the Sea-Turtle under the

water,--the leaping and swimming of the Frog,--the swift run of the

Lizard, like a flash of green or red light in the sunshine,--the

lateral undulation of the Serpent,--the dart of the Pickerel,--the

leap of the Trout,--the rush of the Hawk-Moth through the air,--the

fluttering flight of the Butterfly,--the quivering poise of the

Humming-Bird,--the arrow-like shooting of the Squid through the water,

--the slow crawling of the Snail on the land,--the sideway movement

of the Sand-Crab,--the backward walk of the Crawfish,--the almost

imperceptible gliding of the Sea-Anemone over the rock,--the graceful,

rapid motion of the Pleurobrachia, with its endless change of curve and

spiral. In short, every Family of animals has its characteristic action

and its peculiar voice; and yet so little is this endless variety

of rhythm and cadence both of motion and sound in the organic world

understood, that we lack words to express one-half its richness and

beauty.

IX.

The well-known meaning of the words _generic_ and _specific_ may serve,

in the absence of a more precise definition, to express the relative

importance of those groups of animals called Genera and Species in our

scientific systems. The Genus is the more comprehensive of the two kinds

of groups, while the Species is the most precisely defined, or at least

the most easily recognized, of all the divisions of the Animal Kingdom.

But neither the term Genus nor Species has always been taken in the same

sense. Genus especially has varied in its acceptation, from the time

when Aristotle applied it indiscriminately to any kind of comprehensive

group, from the Classes down to what we commonly call Genera, till the

present day. But we have already seen, that, instead of calling all the

various kinds of more comprehensive divisions by the name of Genera,

modern science has applied special names to each of them, and we have

now Families, Orders, Classes, and Branches above Genera proper. If

the foregoing discussion upon the nature of these groups is based upon

trustworthy principles, we must admit that they are all founded upon

distinct categories of characters,--the primary divisions, or the

Branches, on plan of structure, the Classes upon the manner of its

execution, the Orders upon the greater or less complication of a given

mode of execution, the Families upon form; and it now remains to be

ascertained whether Genera also exist in Nature, and by what kind of

characteristics they may be distinguished. Taking the practice of the

ablest naturalists in discriminating Genera as a guide in our estimation

of their true nature, we must, nevertheless, remember that even now,

while their classifications of the more comprehensive groups usually

agree, they differ greatly in their limitation of Genera, so that the

Genera of some authors correspond to the Families of others, and vice

versa. This undoubtedly arises from the absence of a definite standard

for the estimation of these divisions. But the different categories of

structure which form the distinctive criteria of the more comprehensive

divisions once established, the question is narrowed down to an inquiry

into the special category upon which Genera may be determined; and if

this can be accurately defined, no difference of opinion need interfere

hereafter with their uniform limitation. Considering all these divisions

of the Animal Kingdom from this point of view, it is evident that the

more comprehensive ones must be those which are based on the broadest

characters,--Branches, as united upon plan of structure, standing of

course at the head; next to these the Classes, since the general mode

of executing the plan presents a wider category of characters than

the complication of structure on which Orders rest; after Orders come

Families, or the patterns of form in which these greater or less

complications of structure are clothed; and proceeding in the same way

from more general to more special considerations, we can have no other

category of structure as characteristic of Genera than the details of

structure by which members of the same Family may differ from each

other, and this I consider as the only true basis on which to limit

Genera, while it is at the same time in perfect accordance with the

practice of the most eminent modern zoologists. It is in this way that

Cuvier has distinguished the large number of Genera he has characterized

in his great Natural History of the Fishes, in connection with

Valenciennes. Latreille has done the same for the Crustacea and Insects;

and Milne Edwards, with the coöperation of Haime, has recently proceeded

upon the same principle in characterizing a great number of Genera among

the Corals. Many others have followed this example, but few have kept

in view the necessity of a uniform mode of proceeding, or, if they have

done their researches have covered too limited a ground, to be taken

into consideration in a discussion of principles. It is, in fact, only

when extending over a whole Class that the study of Genera acquires a

truly scientific importance, as it then shows in a connected manner, in

what way, by what features, and to what extent a large number of animals

are closely linked together in Nature. Considering the Animal Kingdom as

a single complete work of one Creative Intellect, consistent throughout,

such keen analysis and close criticism of all its parts have the same

kind of interest, in a higher degree, as that which attaches to other

studies undertaken in the spirit of careful comparative research.

These different categories of characters are, as it were, different

peculiarities of style in the author, different modes of treating the

same material, new combinations of evidence bearing on the same general

principles. The study of Genera is a department of Natural History which

thus far has received too little attention even at the hands of our best

zoologists, and has been treated in the most arbitrary manner; it

should henceforth be made a philosophical investigation into the closer

affinities which naturally bind in minor groups all the representatives

of a natural Family.

Genera, then, are groups of a more restricted character than any of

those we have examined thus far. Some of them include only one Species,

while others comprise hundreds; since certain definite combinations of

characters may be limited to a single Species, while other combinations

may be repeated in many. We have striking examples of this among Birds:

the Ostrich stands alone in its Genus, while the number of Species among

the Warblers is very great. Among Mammalia the Giraffe also stands

alone, while Mice and Squirrels include many Species. Genera are

founded, not, as we have seen, on general structural characters, but on

the finish of special parts, as, for instance, on the dentition. The

Cats have only four grinders in the upper jaw and three in the lower,

while the Hyenas have one more above and below, and the Dogs and Wolves

have two more above and two more below. In the last, some of the teeth

have also flat surfaces for crushing the food, adapted especially to

their habits, since they live on vegetable as well as animal substances.

The formation of the claws is another generic feature. There is a

curious example with reference to this in the Cheetah, which is again

a Genus containing only one Species. It belongs to the Cat Family,

but differs from ordinary Lions and Tigers in having its claws so

constructed that it cannot draw them back under the paws, though in

every other respect they are like the claws of all the Cats. But while

it has the Cat-like claw, its paws are like those of the Dog, and this

singular combination of features is in direct relation to its habits,

for it does not lie in wait and spring upon its prey like the Cat, but

hunts it like the Dog.

While Genera themselves are, like Families, easily distinguished, the

characters on which they are founded, like those of Families, are

difficult to trace. There are often features belonging to these groups

which attract the attention and suggest their association, though they

are not those which may be truly considered generic characters. It is

easy to distinguish the Genus Fox, for instance, by its bushy tail, and

yet that is no true generic character; the collar of feathers round the

neck of the Vultures leads us at once to separate them from the Eagles,

but it is not the collar that truly marks the Genus, but rather the

peculiar structure of the feathers which form it. No Bird has a more

striking plumage than the Peacock, but it is not the appearance merely

of its crest and spreading fan that constitutes a Genus, but the

peculiar structure of the feathers. Thousands of examples might be

quoted to show how easily Genera may be singled out, named, and entered

in our systems, without being duly characterized, and it is much to be

lamented that there is no possibility of checking the loose work of this

kind with which the annals of our science are daily flooded.

It would, of course, be quite inappropriate to present here any

general revision of these groups; but I may present a few instances to

illustrate the principle of their classification, and to show on what

characters they are properly based. Among Reptiles, we find, for

instance, that the Genera of our fresh-water Turtles differ from each

other in the cut of their bill, in the arrangement of their scales,

in the form of their claws, etc. Among Fishes, the different Genera

included under the Family of Perches are distinguished by the

arrangement of their teeth, by the serratures of their gill-covers, and

of the arch to which the pectoral fins are attached, by the nature and

combination of the rays of their fins, by the structure of their scales,

etc. Among Insects, the various Genera of the Butterflies differ in the

combination of the little rods which sustain their wings, in the form

and structure of their antennae, of their feet, of the minute scales

which cover their wings, etc. Among Crustacea, the Genera of Shrimps

vary in the form of the claws, in the structure of the parts of the

mouth, in the articulations of their feelers, etc. Among Worms, the

different Genera of the Leech Family are combined upon the form of the

disks by which they attach themselves, upon the number and arrangement

of their eyes, upon the structure of the hard parts with which the mouth

is armed, etc. Among Cephalopods, the Family of Squids contains several

Genera distinguished by the structure of the solid shield within the

skin of the back, by the form and connection of their fins, by the

structure of the suckers with which their arms are provided, by the

form of their beak, etc. In every Class, we find throughout the Animal

Kingdom that there is no sound basis for the discrimination of Genera

except the details of their structure; but in order to define them

accurately an extensive comparison of them is indispensable, and in

characterizing them only such features should be enumerated as are truly

generic; whereas in the present superficial method of describing them,

features are frequently introduced which belong not only to the whole

Family, but even to the whole Class which includes them.

X.

There remains but one more division of the Animal Kingdom for our

consideration, the most limited of all in its circumscription,--that

of Species. It is with the study of this kind of group that naturalists

generally begin their investigations. I believe, however, that the study

of Species as the basis of a scientific education is a great mistake.

It leads us to overrate the value of Species, and to believe that they

exist in Nature in some different sense from other groups; as if there

were something more real and tangible in Species than in Genera,

Families, Orders, Classes, or Branches. The truth is, that to study a

vast number of Species without tracing the principles that combine

them under more comprehensive groups is only to burden the mind with

disconnected facts, and more may be learned by a faithful and careful

comparison of a few Species than by a more cursory examination of a

greater number. When one considers the immense number of Species already

known, naturalists might well despair of becoming acquainted with them

all, were they not constructed on a few fundamental patterns, so that

the study of one Species teaches us a great deal for all the rest. De

Candolle, who was at the same time a great botanist and a great teacher,

told me once that he could undertake to illustrate the fundamental

principles of his science with the aid of a dozen plants judiciously

selected, and that it was his unvarying practice to induce students to

make a thorough study of a few minor groups of plants, in all their

relations to one another, rather than to attempt to gain a superficial

acquaintance with a large number of species. The powerful influence he

has had upon the progress of Botany vouches for the correctness of his

views. Indeed, every profound scholar knows that sound learning can be

attained only by this method, and the study of Nature makes no exception

to the rule. I would therefore advise every student to select a few

representatives from all the Classes, and to study these not only with

reference to their specific characters, but as members also of a Genus,

of a Family, of an Order, of a Class, and of a Branch. He will soon

convince himself that Species have no more definite and real existence

in Nature than all the other divisions of the Animal Kingdom, and that

every animal is the representative of its Branch, Class, Order, Family,

and Genus as much as of its Species, Specific characters are only

those determining size, proportion, color, habits, and relations to

surrounding circumstances and external objects. How superficial, then,

must be any one's knowledge of an animal who studies it only with

relation to its specific characters! He will know nothing of the finish

of special parts of the body,--nothing of the relations between its

form and its structure,--nothing of the relative complication of its

organization as compared with other allied animals,--nothing of the

general mode of execution,--nothing of the plan expressed in that mode

of execution. Yet, with the exception of the ordinal characters, which,

since they imply relative superiority and inferiority, require, of

course, a number of specimens for comparison, his one animal would tell

him all this as well as the specific characters.

All the more comprehensive groups, equally with Species, have a

positive, permanent, specific principle, maintained generation after

generation with all its essential characteristics. Individuals are

the transient representatives of all these organic principles, which

certainly have an independent, immaterial existence, since they outlive

the individuals that embody them, and are no less real after the

generation that has represented them for a time has passed away than

they were before.

From a comparison of a number of well-known Species belonging to a

natural Genus, it is not difficult to ascertain what are essentially

specific characters. There is hardly among Mammalia a more natural Genus

than that which includes the Rabbits and Hares, or that to which the

Rats and Mice are referred. Let us see how the different Species differ

from one another. Though we give two names in the vernacular to

the Genus Hare, both Hares and Rabbits agree in all the structural

peculiarities which constitute a Genus; but the different Species are

distinguished by their absolute size when full-grown,--by the nature and

color of their fur,--by the size and form of the ear,--by the relative

length of their legs and tail,--by the more or less slender build of

their whole body,--by their habits, some living in open grounds,

others among the bushes, others in swamps, others burrowing under the

earth,--by the number of young they bring forth,--by their different

seasons of breeding,--and by still minor differences, such as the

permanent color of the hair throughout the year in some, while in others

it turns white in winter. The Rats and Mice differ in a similar way:

there being large and small Species,--some gray, some brown, others

rust-colored,--some with soft, others with coarse hair; they differ also

in the length of the tail, and in having it more or less covered with

hair,--in the cut of the ears, and their size,--in the length of

their limbs, which are slender and long in some, short and thick in

others,--in their various ways of living,--in the different substances

on which they feed,--and also in their distribution over the surface

of the earth, whether circumscribed within certain limited areas

or scattered over a wider range. What is now the nature of these

differences by which we distinguish Species? They are totally distinct

from any of the categories on which Genera, Families, Orders, Classes,

or Branches are founded, and may readily be reduced to a few heads. They

are differences in the proportion of the parts and in the absolute size

of the whole animal, in the color and general ornamentation of the

surface of the body, and in the relations of the individuals to one

another and to the world around. A farther analysis of other Genera

would show us that among Birds, Reptiles, Fishes, and, in fact,

throughout the Animal Kingdom, Species of well-defined natural Genera

differ in the same way. We are therefore justified in saying that the

category of characters on which Species are based implies no structural

differences, but presents the same structure combined under certain

minor differences of size, proportion, and habits. All the specific

characters stand in direct reference to the generic structure, the

family form, the ordinal complication of structure, the mode of

execution of the Class, and the plan of structure of the Branch, all of

which are embodied in the frame of each individual in each Species, even

though all these individuals are constantly dying away and reproducing

others; so that the specific characters have no more permanency in the

individuals than those which characterize the Genus, the Family, the

Order, the Class, and the Branch. I believe, therefore, that naturalists

have been entirely wrong in considering the more comprehensive groups

to be theoretical and in a measure arbitrary, an attempt, that is, of

certain men to classify the Animal Kingdom according to their individual

views, while they have ascribed to Species, as contrasted with the other

divisions, a more positive existence in Nature. No further argument

is needed to show that it is not only the Species that lives in the

individual, but that every individual, though belonging to a distinct

Species, is built upon a precise and definite plan which characterizes

its Branch,--that that plan is executed in each individual in a

particular way which characterizes its Class,--that every individual

with its kindred occupies a definite position in a series of structural

complications which characterizes its Order,--that in every individual

all these structural features are combined under a definite pattern of

form which characterizes its Family,--that every individual exhibits

structural details in the finish of its parts which characterize its

Genus,--and finally that every individual presents certain peculiarities

in the proportion of its parts, in its color, in its size, in its

relations to its fellow-beings and surrounding things, which constitute

its specific characters; and all this is repeated in the same kind of

combination, generation after generation, while the individuals die.

If we accept these propositions, which seem to me self-evident, it is

impossible to avoid the conclusion that Species do not exist in Nature

in any other sense than the more comprehensive groups of the zoological

systems.

There is one question respecting Species that gives rise to very earnest

discussions in our day, not only among naturalists, but among all

thinking people. How far are they permanent, and how far mutable? With

reference to the permanence of Species, there is much to be learned from

the geological phenomena that belong to our own period, and that bear

witness to the invariability of types during hundreds of thousands of

years at least. I hope to present a part of this evidence in a future

article upon Coral Reefs, but in the mean time I cannot leave this

subject without touching upon a point of which great use has been made

in recent discussions. I refer to the variability of Species as shown in

domestication.

The domesticated animals with their numerous breeds are constantly

adduced as evidence of the changes which animals may undergo, and as

furnishing hints respecting the way in which the diversity now observed

among animals has already been produced. It is my conviction that such

inferences are in no way sustained by the facts of the case, and that,

however striking the differences may be between the breeds of our

domesticated animals, as compared with the wild Species of the same

Genus, they are of a peculiar character entirely distinct from those

that prevail among the latter, and are altogether incident to the

circumstances under which they occur. By this I do not mean the natural

action of physical conditions, but the more or less intelligent

direction of the circumstances under which they live. The inference

drawn from the varieties introduced among animals in a state of

domestication, with reference to the origin of Species, is usually this:

that what the farmer does on a small scale Nature may do on a large one.

It is true that man has been able to produce certain changes in the

animals under his care, and that these changes have resulted in a

variety of breeds. But in doing this, he has, in my estimation, in no

way altered the character of the Species, but has only developed its

pliability to the will of man, that is, to a power similar in its

nature and mode of action to that power to which animals owe their very

existence. The influence of man upon Animals is, in other words, the

action of mind upon them; and yet the ordinary mode of arguing upon

this subject is, that, because the intelligence of man has been able to

produce certain varieties in domesticated animals, therefore physical

causes have produced all the diversities among wild ones. Surely, the

sounder logic would be to infer, that, because our finite intelligence

can cause the original pattern to vary by some slight shades of

difference, therefore an infinite intelligence must have established

all the boundless diversity of which our boasted varieties are but the

faintest echo. It is the most intelligent farmer that has the greatest

success in improving his breeds; and if the animals he has so fostered

are left to themselves without that intelligent care, they return

to their normal condition. So with plants: the shrewd, observing,

thoughtful gardener will obtain many varieties from his flowers; but

those varieties will fade out, if left to themselves. There is, as it

were, a certain degree of pliability and docility in the organization

both of animals and plants, which may be developed by the fostering care

of man, and within which he can exercise a certain influence; but the

variations which he thus produces are of a peculiar kind, and do not

correspond to the differences of the wild Species. Let us take some

examples to illustrate this assertion.

Every Species of wild Bull differs from the others in its size; but

all the individuals correspond to the average standard of size

characteristic of their respective Species, and show none of those

extreme differences of size so remarkable among our domesticated

Cattle. Every Species of wild Bull has its peculiar color, and all the

individuals of one Species share in it: not so with our domesticated

Cattle, among which every individual may differ in color from every

other. All the individuals of the same Species of wild Bull agree in the

proportion of their parts, in the mode of growth of the hair, in its

quality, whether fine or soft: not so with our domesticated Cattle,

among which we find in the same Species overgrown and dwarfish

individuals, those with long and short legs, with slender and stout

build of the body, with horns or without, as well as the greatest

variety in the mode of twisting the horns,--in short, the widest

extremes of development which the degree of pliability in that Species

will allow.

A curious instance of the power of man, not only in developing the

pliability of an animal's organization, but in adapting it to suit his

own caprices, is that of the Golden Carp, so frequently seen in bowls

and tanks as the ornament of drawing-rooms and gardens. Not only an

infinite variety of spotted, striped, variegated colors has been

produced in these Fishes, but, especially among the Chinese, so famous

for their morbid love of whatever is distorted and warped from its

natural shape and appearance, all sorts of changes have been brought

about in this single Species. A book of Chinese paintings showing the

Golden Carp in its varieties represents some as short and stout,

others long and slender,--some with the ventral side swollen, others

hunch-backed,--some with the mouth greatly enlarged, while in others

the caudal fin, which in the normal condition of the Species is placed

vertically at the end of the tail and is forked like those of other

Fishes, has become crested and arched, or is double, or crooked, or has

swerved in some other way from its original pattern. But in all these

variations there is nothing which recalls the characteristic specific

differences among the representatives of the Carp Family, which in their

wild state are very monotonous in their appearance all the world over.

Were it appropriate to accumulate evidence here upon this subject, I

could bring forward many more examples quite as striking as those above

mentioned. The various breeds of our domesticated Horses present the

same kind of irregularities, and do not differ from each other in the

same way as the wild Species differ from one another. Or take the Genus

Dog: the differences between its wild Species do not correspond in the

least with the differences observed among the domesticated ones. Compare

the differences between the various kinds of Jackals and Wolves with

those that exist between the Bull-Dog and Greyhound, for instance, or

between the St. Charles and the Terrier, or between the Esquimaux and

the Newfoundland Dog. I need hardly add that what is true of the Horses,

the Cattle, the Dogs, is true also of the Donkey, the Goat, the Sheep,

the Pig, the Cat, the Rabbit, the different kinds of barn-yard fowl,--in

short, of all those animals that are in domesticity the chosen

companions of man.

In fact, all the variability among domesticated Species is due to the

fostering care, or, in its more extravagant freaks, to the fancies of

man, and it has never been observed in the wild Species, where, on

the contrary, everything shows the closest adherence to the distinct,

well-defined, and invariable limits of the Species. It surely does

not follow, that, because the Chinese can, under abnormal conditions,

produce a variety of fantastic shapes in the Golden Carp, therefore

water, or the physical conditions established in the water, can create a

Fish, any more than it follows, that, because they can dwarf a tree, or

alter its aspect by stunting its growth in one direction and forcing it

in another, therefore the earth, or the physical conditions connected

with their growth, can create a Pine, an Oak, a Birch, or a Maple.

I confess that in all the arguments derived from the phenomena of

domestication, to prove that all animals owe their origin and diversity

to the natural action of the conditions under which they live, the

conclusion does not seem to me to follow logically from the premises.

And the fact that the domesticated animals of all races of men, equally

with the white race, vary among themselves in the same way and differ

in the same way from the wild Species, makes it still more evident that

domesticated varieties do not explain the origin of Species, except, as

I have said, by showing that the intelligent will of man can produce

effects which physical causes have never been known to produce, and that

we must therefore look to some cause outside of Nature, corresponding in

kind, though so different in degree, to the intelligence of man, for

all the phenomena connected with the existence of animals in their wild

state. So far from attributing these original differences among animals

to natural influences, it would seem, that, while a certain freedom of

development is left, within the limits of which man can exercise his

intelligence and his ingenuity, not even this superficial influence is

allowed to physical conditions unaided by some guiding power, since in

their normal state the wild Species remain, so far as we have been able

to discover, entirely unchanged,--maintained, it is true, in their

integrity by the circumstances that were established for their support

by the power that created both, but never altered by them. Nature holds

inviolable the stamp that God has set upon his creatures; and if man

is able to influence their organization in some slight degree, it is

because the Creator has given to his relations with the animals he has

intended for his companions the same plasticity which he has allowed to

every other side of his life, in virtue of which he may in some sort

mould and shape it to his own ends, and be held responsible also for its

results.

The common sense of a civilized community has already pointed out the

true distinction in applying another word to the discrimination of the

different kinds of domesticated animals. They are called Breeds, and

Breeds among animals are the work of man;--Species were created by God.

* * * * *

THE STRASBURG CLOCK.

Many and many a year ago,--

To say how many I scarcely dare,--

Three of us stood in Strasburg streets,

In the wide and open square,

Where, quaint and old and touched with the gold

Of a summer morn, at stroke of noon

The tongue of the great Cathedral tolled,

And into the church with the crowd we strolled

To see their wonder, the famous Clock.

Well, my love, there are clocks a many,

As big as a house, as small as a penny;

And clocks there be with voices as queer

As any that torture human ear,--

Clocks that grunt, and clocks that growl,

That wheeze like a pump, and hoot like an owl,

From the coffin shape with its brooding face

That stands on the stair, (you know the place,)

Saying, "Click, cluck," like an ancient hen,

A-gathering the minutes home again,

To the kitchen knave with its wooden stutter,

Doing equal work with double splutter,

Yelping, "Click, clack," with a vulgar jerk,

As much as to say, "Just see me work!"

But of all the clocks that tell Time's bead-roll,

There are none like this in the old Cathedral;

Never a one so bids you stand

While it deals the minutes with even hand:

For clocks, like men, are better and worse,

And some you dote on, and some you curse;

And clock and man may have such a way

Of telling the truth that you can't say nay.

So in we went and stood in the crowd

To hear the old clock as it crooned aloud,

With sound and symbol, the only tongue

The maker taught it while yet 't was young.

And we saw Saint Peter clasp his hands,

And the cock crow hoarsely to all the lands,

And the Twelve Apostles come and go,

And the solemn Christ pass sadly and slow;

And strange that iron-legged procession,

And odd to us the whole impression,

As the crowd beneath, in silence pressing,

Bent to that cold mechanic blessing.

But I alone thought far in my soul

What a touch of genius was in the whole,

And felt how graceful had been the thought

Which for the signs of the months had sought,

Sweetest of symbols, Christ's chosen train;

And much I pondered, if he whose brain

Had builded this clock with labor and pain

Did only think, twelve months there are,

And the Bible twelve will fit to a hair;

Or did he say, with a heart in tune,

Well-loved John is the sign of June,

And changeful Peter hath April hours,

And Paul the stately, October bowers,

And sweet, or faithful, or bold, or strong,

Unto each one shall a month belong.

But beside the thought that under it lurks,

Pray, do you think clocks are saved by their works?

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.

To win such love as Arthur Hugh Clough won in life, to leave so dear a

memory as he has left, is a happiness that falls to few men. In America,

as in England, his death is mourned by friends whose affection is better

than fame, and who in losing him have met with an irreparable loss.

Outside the circle of his friends his reputation had no large extent;

but though his writings are but little known by the great public of

readers, they are prized by all those of thoughtful and poetic temper

to whose hands they have come, as among the most precious and original

productions of the time. To those who knew him personally his poems had

a special worth and charm, as the sincere expression of a character of

the purest stamp, of rare truthfulness and simplicity, not less tender

than strong, and of a genius thoroughly individual in its form, and full

of the promise of a large career. He was by Nature endowed with subtile

and profound powers of thought, with feeling at once delicate and

intense, with lively and generous sympathies, and with conscientiousness

so acute as to pervade and control his whole intellectual disposition.

Loving, seeking, and holding fast to the truth, he despised all

falseness and affectation. With his serious and earnest thinking was

joined the play of a genial humor and the brightness of poetic fancy.

Liberal in sentiment, absolutely free from dogmatism and pride of

intellect, of a questioning temper, but of reverent spirit, faithful in

the performance not only of the larger duties, but also of the lesser

charities and the familiar courtesies of life, he has left a memory of

singular consistency, purity, and dignity. He lived to conscience, not

for show, and few men carry through life so white a soul.

A notice of Mr. Clough understood to be written by one who knew him well

gives the outline of his life.

"Arthur Hugh Clough was educated at Rugby, to which school he went

very young, soon after Dr. Arnold had been elected head-master. He

distinguished himself at once by gaining the only scholarship which

existed at that time, and which was open to the whole school under the

age of fourteen. Before he was sixteen he was at the head of the fifth

form, and, as that was the earliest age at which boys were then admitted

into the sixth, had to wait for a year before coming under the personal

tuition of the headmaster. He came in the next (school) generation to

Stanley and Vaughan, and gained a reputation, if possible, even greater

than theirs. At the yearly speeches, in the last year of his residence,

when the prizes are given away in the presence of the school and the

friends who gather on such occasions, Arnold took the almost unexampled

course of addressing him, (when he and two fags went up to carry off his

load of splendidly bound books,) and congratulating him on having

gained every honor which Rugby could bestow, and having also already

distinguished himself and done the highest credit to his school at the

University. He had just gained a scholarship at Balliol, then, as now,

the blue ribbon of undergraduates.

"At school, although before all things a student, he had thoroughly

entered into the life of the place, and before he left had gained

supreme influence with the boys. He was the leading contributor to the

'Rugby Magazine'; and though a weakness in his ankles prevented him from

taking a prominent part in the games of the place, was known as the

best goal-keeper on record, a reputation which no boy could have gained

without promptness and courage. He was also one of the best swimmers in

the school, his weakness of ankle being no drawback here, and in his

last half passed the crucial test of that day, by swimming from Swift's

(the bathing-place of the sixth) to the mill on the Leicester road, and

back again, between callings over.

"He went to reside at Oxford when the whole University was in a ferment.

The struggle of Alma Mater to humble or cast out the most remarkable

of her sons was at its height. Ward had not yet been arraigned for his

opinions, and was a fellow and tutor of Balliol, and Newman was in

residence at Oriel, and incumbent of St. Mary's.

"Clough's was a mind which, under any circumstances, would have thrown

itself into the deepest speculative thought of its time. He seems soon

to have passed through the mere ecclesiastical debatings to the deep

questions which lay below them. There was one lesson--probably one

only--which he had never been able to learn from his great master,

namely, to acknowledge that there are problems which intellectually are

not to be solved by man, and before these to sit down quietly. Whether

it were from the harass of thought on such matters which interfered with

his regular work, or from one of those strange miscarriages in the most

perfect of examining machines, which every now and then deprive the best

men of the highest honors, to the surprise of every one Clough missed

his first class. But he completely retrieved this academical mishap

shortly afterwards by gaining an Oriel fellowship. In his new college,

the college of Pusey, Newman, Keble, Marriott, Wilberforce, presided

over by Dr. Hawkins, and in which the influence of Whately, Davidson,

and Arnold had scarcely yet died out, he found himself in the very

centre and eye of the battle. His own convictions were by this time

leading him far away from both sides in the Oxford contest; he, however,

accepted a tutorship at the college, and all who had the privilege of

attending them will long remember his lectures on logic and ethics.

His fault (besides a shy and reserved manner) was that he was much too

long-suffering to youthful philosophic coxcombry, and would rather

encourage it by his gentle 'Ah! you think so?' or, 'Yes, but might not

such and such be the case?'"

Clough was at Oxford in 1847,--the year of the terrible Irish famine,

and with others of the most earnest men at the University he took part

in an association which had for its object "Retrenchment for the sake

of the Irish." Such a society was little likely to be popular with the

comfortable dignitaries or the luxurious youth of the University. Many

objections, frivolous or serious as the case might be, were raised

against so subversive a notion as that of the self-sacrifice of the rich

for the sake of the poor. Disregarding all personal considerations,

Clough printed a pamphlet entitled, "A Consideration of Objections

against the Retrenchment Association," in which he met the careless or

selfish arguments of those who set themselves against the efforts of

the society. It was a characteristic performance. His heart was deeply

stirred by the harsh contrast between the miseries of the Irish poor and

the wasteful extravagance of living prevalent at Oxford. He wrote with

vehement indignation against the selfish pleas of the indifferent and

the thoughtless possessors of wealth, wasters of the goods given them as

a trust for others. His words were chiefly addressed to the young men

at the University,--and they were not without effect. Such views of the

rights and duties of property as he put forward, of the claims of labor,

and of the responsibilities of the aristocracy, had not been often heard

at Oxford. He was called a Socialist and a Radical, but it mattered

little to him by what name he was known to those whose consciences were

not touched by his appeal. "Will you say," he writes toward the end of

this pamphlet, "this is all rhetoric and declamation? There is, I dare

say, something too much in that kind. What with criticizing style and

correcting exercises, we college tutors perhaps may be likely, in the

heat of composition, to lose sight of realities, and pass into the limbo

of the factitious,--especially when the thing must be done at odd times,

in any case, and, if at all, quickly. But if I have been obliged to

write hurriedly, believe me, I have obliged myself to think not hastily.

And believe me, too, though I have desired to succeed in putting vividly

and forcibly that which vividly and forcibly I felt and saw, still the

graces and splendors of composition were thoughts far less present to my

mind than Irish poor men's miseries, English poor men's hardships, and

your unthinking indifference. Shocking enough the first and the second,

almost more shocking the third."

It was about this time that the most widely known of his works, "The

Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich, a Long-Vacation Pastoral," was written. It

was published in 1848, and though it at once secured a circle of warm

admirers, and the edition was very soon exhausted, it "is assuredly

deserving of a far higher popularity than it has ever attained." The

poem was reprinted in America, at Cambridge, in 1849, and it may be

safely asserted that its merit was more deeply felt and more generously

acknowledged by American than by English readers. The fact that its

essential form and local coloring were purely and genuinely English, and

thus gratified the curiosity felt in this country concerning the social

habits and ways of life in the mother-land, while on the other hand its

spirit was in sympathy with the most liberal and progressive thought

of the age, may sufficiently account for its popularity here. But

the lovers of poetry found delight in it, apart from these

characteristics,--in its fresh descriptions of Nature, its healthy

manliness of tone, its scholarly construction, its lively humor, its

large thought quickened and deepened by the penetrating imagination of

the poet.

"Any one who has read it will acknowledge that a tutorship at Oriel was

not the place for the author. The intense love of freedom, the deep and

hearty sympathy with the foremost thought of the time, the humorous

dealing with old formulas and conventionalisms grown meaningless, which

breathe in every line of the 'Bothie,' show this clearly enough. He

would tell in after-life, with much enjoyment, how the dons of the

University, who, hearing that he had something in the press, and knowing

that his theological views were not wholly sound, were looking for a

publication on the Articles, were astounded by the appearance of that

fresh and frolicsome poem. Oxford (at least the Oriel common room)

and he were becoming more estranged daily. How keenly he felt the

estrangement, not from Oxford, but from old friends, about this time,

can be read only in his own words." It is in such poems as the "Qua

Cursum Ventus," or the sonnet beginning, "Well, well,--Heaven bless you

all from day to day!" that it is to be read. These, with a few other

fugitive pieces, were printed, in company with verses by a friend, as

one part of a small volume entitled, "Ambarvalia," which never attained

any general circulation, although containing some poems which will take

their place among the best of English poetry of this generation.

"_Qua Cursum Ventus_.

"As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay

With canvas drooping, side by side,

Two towers of sail at dawn of day,

Are scarce long leagues apart descried:

"When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,

And all the darkling hours they plied,

Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas

By each was cleaving side by side:

"E'en so----But why the tale reveal

Of those whom, year by year unchanged,

Brief absence joined anew to feel,

Astounded, soul from soul estranged?

"At dead of night their sails were filled,

And onward each rejoicing steered:

Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,

Or wist, what first with dawn appeared!

"To veer, how vain! On, onward strain,

Brave barks! In light, in darkness too,

Through winds and tides one compass guides:

To that, and your own selves, be true!

"But, O blithe breeze! and O great seas!

Though ne'er, that earliest parting past,

On your wide plain they join again,

Together lead them home at last!

"One port, methought, alike they sought,

One purpose hold where'er they fare:

O bounding breeze! O rushing seas!

At last, at last, unite them there!"

"In 1848-49 the revolutionary crisis came on Europe, and Clough's

sympathies drew him with great earnestness into the struggles which were

going on. He was in Paris directly after the barricades, and in Rome

during the siege, where he gained the friendship of Saffi and other

leading Italian patriots." A part of his experiences and his thoughts

while at Rome are interwoven with the story in his "Amours de Voyage," a

poem which exhibits in extraordinary measure the subtilty and delicacy

of his powers, and the fulness of his sympathy with the intellectual

conditions of the time. It was first published in the "Atlantic Monthly"

for 1858, and was at once established in the admiration of readers

capable of appreciating its rare and refined excellence. The spirit

of the poem is thoroughly characteristic of its author, and the

speculative, analytic turn of his mind is represented in many passages

of the letters of the imaginary hero. Had he been writing in his own

name, he could not have uttered his inmost conviction more distinctly,

or have given the clue to his intellectual life more openly than in the

following verses:--

"I will look straight out, see things, not try to

evade them:

Fact shall be Fact for me; and the Truth the

Truth as ever,

Flexible, changeable, vague, and multiform

and doubtful."

Or, again,--

"Ah, the key of our life, that passes all wards,

opens all locks,

Is not _I will_, but _I must_. I must,--I must,

--and I do it."

And still again,--

"But for the steady fore-sense of a freer and

larger existence,

Think you that man could consent to be

circumscribed here into action?

But for assurance within of a limitless ocean

divine, o'er

Whose great tranquil depths unconscious

the wind-tost surface

Breaks into ripples of trouble that come and

change and endure not,--

But that in this, of a truth, we have our

being, and know it,

Think you we men could submit to live and

move as we do here?"

"To keep on doing right,--not to speculate only, but to act, not to

think only, but to live,"--was, it has been said, characteristic of the

leading men at Oxford during this period. "It was not so much a part of

their teaching as a doctrine woven into their being." And while they

thus exercised a moral not less than an intellectual influence over

their contemporaries and their pupils, they themselves, according to

their various tempers and circumstances, were led on into new paths of

inquiry or of life. Some of them fell into the common temptations of

an English University career, and lost the freshness of energy and the

honesty of conviction which first inspired them; others, holding their

places in the established order of things, were able by happy faculties

of character to retain also the vigor and simplicity of their early

purposes; while others again, among whom was Clough, finding the

restraints of the University incompatible with independence, gave up

their positions at Oxford to seek other places in which they could more

freely search for the truth and express their own convictions.

It was not long after his return from Italy that he became Professor of

English Language and Literature at University College, London. He filled

this place, which was not in all respects suited to him, until 1852.

After resigning it, he took various projects into consideration, and

at length determined to come to America with the intention of settling

here, if circumstances should prove favorable. In November, 1852,

he arrived in Boston. He at once established himself at Cambridge,

proposing to give instruction to young men preparing for college, or to

take on in more advanced studies those who had completed the collegiate

course. He speedily won the friendship of those whose friendship

was best worth having in Boston and its neighborhood. His thorough

scholarship, the result of the best English training, and his intrinsic

qualities caused his society to be sought and prized by the most

cultivated and thoughtful men. He had nothing of insular narrowness, and

none of the hereditary prejudices which too often interfere with the

capacity of English travellers or residents among us to sympathize with

and justly understand habits of life and of thought so different from

those to which they have been accustomed. His liberal sentiments and his

independence of thought harmonized with the new social conditions in

which he found himself, and with the essential spirit of American life.

The intellectual freedom and animation of this country were congenial

to his disposition. From the beginning he took a large share in the

interests of his new friends. He contributed several remarkable articles

to the pages of the "North American Review" and of "Putnam's Magazine,"

and he undertook a work which was to occupy his scanty leisure for

several years, the revision of the so-called Dryden's Translation of

Plutarch's Lives. Although the work was undertaken simply as a revision,

it turned out to involve little less labor than a complete new

translation, and it was so accomplished that henceforth it must remain

the standard version of this most popular of the ancient authors.

But all that made the presence of such a man a great gain to his new

friends made his absence felt by his old ones as a great loss. In July,

1853, he received the announcement that a place had been obtained for

him by their efforts in the Education Department of the Privy Council,

and he was so strenuously urged to return to England, that, although

unwilling to give up the prospect of a final settlement in America,

he felt that it was best to go home for a time. Some months after his

return he was married to the granddaughter of the late Mr. William

Smith, M.P. for Norwich. He established himself in a house in London,

and settled down to the hard routine-work of his office. In a private

letter written not long after his return, he said,--"As for myself, whom

you ask about, there is nothing to tell about me. I live on contentedly

enough, but feel rather unwilling to be re-Englished, after once

attaining that higher transatlantic development. However, _il faut s'y

soumettre_, I presume,--though I fear I am embarked in the foundering

ship. I hope to Heaven you'll get rid of slavery, and then I shouldn't

fear but you would really 'go ahead' in the long run. As for us and our

inveterate feudalism, it is not hopeful."

In another letter about this time, he wrote,--"I like America all the

better for the comparison with England on my return. Certainly I think

you are more right than I was willing to admit, about the position of

the poorer classes here. Such is my first reimpression. However, it

will wear off soon enough, I dare say; so you must make the most of my

admissions."

Again, a little later, he wrote,--"I do truly hope that you will get the

North erelong thoroughly united against any further encroachments. I

don't by any means feel that the slave-system is an intolerable crime,

nor do I think that our system here is so much better; but it is clear

to me that the only safe ground to go upon is that of your Northern

States. I suppose the rich-and-poor difficulties must be creeping in at

New York, but one would fain hope that European analogies will not be

quite accepted even there."

His letters were reflections of himself,--full of thought, fancy, and

pleasant humor, as well as of affectionateness and true feeling. Their

character is hardly to be given in extracts, but a few passages may

serve to illustrate some of these qualities.

"Ambrose Philips, the Roman Catholic, who set up the new St. Bernard

Monastery at Charnwood Forest, has taken to spirit-rappings. He avers,

_inter alia_, that a Buddhist spirit in misery held communication with

him through the table, and entreated his confessor, Father Lorraine, to

say three masses for him. Pray, convey this to T---- for his warning.

For, moreover, it remains uncertain whether Father Lorraine did say the

masses; so that perhaps T----'s deceased co-religionist is still in the

wrong place."

Some time after his return, he wrote,--"Really, I may say I am only

just beginning to recover my spirits after returning from the young and

hopeful and humane republic, to this cruel, unbelieving, inveterate old

monarchy. There are deeper waters of ancient knowledge and experience

about one here, and one is saved from the temptation of flying off into

space; but I think you have, beyond all question, the happiest country

going. Still, the political talk of America, as one hears it here, is

not always true to the best intentions of the country, is it?"

Writing on a July day from his office in Whitehall, he says, after

speaking of the heat of the weather,--"Time has often been compared to

a river: if the Thames at London represent the stream of traditional

wisdom, the comparison will indeed be of an ill odor; the accumulated

wisdom of the past will be proved upon analogy to be as it were the

collected sewage of the centuries; and the great problem, how to get rid

of it."

In March, 1854, he wrote,--"People talk a good deal about that book of

Whewell's on the Plurality of Worlds. I recommend Fields to pirate it.

Have you seen it? It is to show that Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, etc., are

all pretty certainly uninhabitable,--being (Jupiter, Saturn, etc., to

wit) strange washy limbos of places, where at the best only mollusks

(or, in the case of Venus, salamanders) could exist. Hence we conclude

we are the only rational creatures, which is highly satisfactory, and,

what is more, quite Scriptural. Owen, on the other hand, I believe,

and other scientific people, declare it a most presumptuous essay,--

conclusions audacious, and reasoning fallacious, though the facts are

allowed; and in that opinion I, on the ground that there are more things

in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the inductive philosophy,

incline to concur."

Of his work he wrote,--"Well, I go on in the office, _operose nihil

agenda_, very _operose_, and very _nihil_ too. For lack of news, I send

you a specimen of my labors."--"We are here going on much as usual,

--occupied with nothing else but commerce and the money-market. I do not

think any one is thinking audibly of anything else."--"I have read with

more pleasure than anything else that I have read lately Kane's Arctic

Explorations, i.e., his second voyage, which is certainly a wonderful

story. The whole narrative is, I think, very characteristic of the

differences between the English and the American-English habits of

command and obedience."

In the autumn of 1857, after speaking of some of the features of the

Sepoy revolt, he said,--"I don't believe Christianity can spread far in

Asia, unless it will allow men more than one wife,--which isn't likely

yet out of Utah. But I believe the old Brahmin 'Touch not and taste not,

and I am holier than thou, because I don't touch and taste,' may be got

rid of. As for Mahometanism, it is a crystallized monotheism, out of

which no vegetation can come. I doubt its being good even for the

Central negro."

March, 1859. "Excuse this letter all about my own concerns. I am pretty

busy, and have time for little else: such is our fate after forty. My

figure 40 stands nearly three months behind me on the roadway, unwept,

unhonored, and unsung, an _octavum lustrum_ bound up and laid on the

shelf. 'So-and-so is dead,' said a friend to Lord Melbourne of some

author. 'Dear me, how glad I am! Now I can bind him up.'"

It was not until 1859 that the translation of Plutarch, begun six years

before, was completed and published. It had involved much wearisome

study, and gave proof of patient, exact, and elegant scholarship.

Clough's life in the Council-Office was exceedingly laborious, and

for several years his work was increased by services rendered to Miss

Nightingale, a near relative of his wife. He employed "many hours, both

before and after his professional duties were over, to aid her in those

reforms of the military administration to which she has devoted the

remaining energies of her overtasked life." For this work he was the

better fitted from having acted, during a period of relief from his

regular employment, as Secretary to a Military Commission appointed by

Government shortly after the Crimean War to examine and report upon the

military systems of some of the chief Continental nations. But at length

his health gave way under the strain of continuous overwork. He had for

a long time been delicate, and early in 1861 he was obliged to give

up work, and was ordered to travel abroad. He went to Greece and

Constantinople, and enjoyed greatly the charms of scenery and of

association which he was so well fitted to appreciate. But the release

from work had come too late. He returned to England in July, his health

but little improved. In a letter written at that time he spoke of Lord

Campbell's death, which had just occurred. "Lord Campbell's death is

rather the characteristic death of the English political man. In the

Cabinet, on the Bench, and at a dinner-party, busy, animated, and full

of effort to-day, and in the early morning a vessel has burst. It is a

wonder they last so long." But of himself he says, in words of striking

contrast,--"My nervous energy is pretty nearly spent for to-day, so I

must come to a stop. I have leave till November, and by that time I hope

I shall be strong again for another good spell of work." After a happy

three weeks in England, he went abroad again, and spent some time

with his friends the Tennysons in Auvergne and among the Pyrenees. In

September he was joined by his wife in Paris, and thence went with her

through Switzerland to Italy. He had scarcely reached Florence before

he became alarmingly ill with symptoms of a low malaria fever. His

exhausted constitution never rallied against its attack. He sank

gradually away, and died on the 13th of November. "I have leave till

November, and by that time I hope I shall be strong again for another

good spell of work." That hope is accomplished;--

"For sure in the wide heaven there is room

For love, and pity, and for helpful deeds."

He was buried in the little Protestant cemetery at Florence, a fit

resting-place for a poet, the Protestant Santa Croce, where the tall

cypresses rise over the graves, and the beautiful hills keep guard

around.

"Every one who knew Clough even slightly," says one of his oldest

friends, "received the strongest impression of the unusual breadth

and massiveness of his mind. Singularly simple and genial, he was

unfortunately cast upon a self-questioning age, which led him to worry

himself with constantly testing the veracity of his own emotions. He has

delineated in four lines the impression which his habitual reluctance to

converse on the deeper themes of life made upon those of his friends who

were attracted by his frank simplicity. In one of his shorter poems he

writes,--

'I said, My heart is all too soft;

He who would climb and soar aloft

Must needs keep ever at his side

The tonic of a wholesome pride.'

That expresses the man in a very remarkable manner. He had a kind of

proud simplicity about him singularly attractive, and often singularly

disappointing to those who longed to know him well. He had a fear, which

many would think morbid, of leaning much on the approbation of the

world. And there is one remarkable passage in his poems in which he

intimates that men who live on the good opinion of others might even be

benefited by a crime which would rob them of that evil stimulant:--

'Why, so is good no longer good, but crime

Our truest, best advantage, since it lifts us

Out of the stifling gas of men's opinion

Into the vital atmosphere of Truth,

Where He again is visible, though in anger.'

"So eager was his craving for reality and perfect sincerity, so morbid

his dislike even for the unreal conventional forms of life, that a mind

quite unique in simplicity and truthfulness represents _itself_ in his

poems as

'Seeking in vain, in all my store,

One feeling based on truth.'

"Indeed, he wanted to reach some guaranty for simplicity deeper than

simplicity itself. We remember his principal criticism on America,

after returning from his residence in Massachusetts, was, that the

New-Englanders were much simpler than the English, and that this was

the great charm of New-England society. His own habits were of the same

kind, sometimes almost austere in their simplicity. Luxury he disliked,

and sometimes his friends thought him even ascetic.

"This almost morbid craving for a firm base on the absolute realities

of life was very wearing in a mind so self-conscious as Clough's, and

tended to paralyze the expression of a certainly great genius. He heads

some of his poems with a line from Wordsworth's great ode, which depicts

perfectly the expression often written in the deep furrows which

sometimes crossed and crowded his massive forehead:--

'Blank misgivings of a creature moving about

in worlds not realized.'

"Nor did Clough's great powers ever realize themselves to his

contemporaries by any outward sign at all commensurate with the profound

impression which they produced in actual life. But if his powers did

not, there was much in his character that did produce its full effect

upon all who knew him. He never looked, even in time of severe trial, to

his own interest or advancement. He never flinched from the worldly loss

which his deepest convictions brought on him. Even when clouds were

thick over his own head, and the ground beneath his feet seemed

crumbling away, he could still bear witness to an eternal light behind

the cloud, and tell others that there is solid ground to be reached in

the end by the weary feet of all who will wait to be strong. Let him

speak his own farewell:--

'Say not the struggle nought availeth,

The labor and the wounds are vain,

The enemy faints not nor faileth,

And as things have been things remain.

'Though hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;

It may be, in yon smoke concealed,

Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,

And but for you possess the field.

'For though the tired wave, idly breaking,

Seems here no tedious inch to gain,

Far back, through creek and inlet making,

Came, silent flooding in, the main.

'And not through eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light;

In front the sun climbs slow,--how slowly!

But westward--look! the land is bright.'"

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THEM?

We have many precedents upon the part of the "Guardian of Civilization,"

which may or may not guide us. Not to return to that age "whereunto the

memory of man runneth not to the contrary," "the day of King Richard our

grandfather," and to the Wars of the Roses, we will begin with the happy

occasion of the Restoration of King Charles of merry and disreputable

fame. Since he came back to his kingdoms on sufferance and as a

convenient compromise between anarchy and despotism, he could hardly

afford the luxury of wholesale proscription. What the returning

Royalists could, they did. It was obviously unsafe, as well as

ungrateful, to hang General Monk in presence of his army, many of whom

had followed the "Son of the Man" from Worcester Fight in hot pursuit,

and had hunted him from thicket to thicket of Boscobel Wood. But to dig

up the dead Cromwell and Ireton, to suspend them upon the gallows, to

mark out John Milton, old and blind, for poverty and contempt, was both

safe and pleasant. And civilization was guarded accordingly. One little

bit of comfort, however, was permitted. Scotland had been the Virginia

of his day, and Charles had the satisfaction of hearing that the Whigs,

who had betrayed and sold his father, and who had (a far worse offence)

made himself listen to three-hours' sermons, were chased like wild

beasts among the hills, after the defeat of Bothwell Brigg. But what

Charles could not do was permitted to his brother. After the rebellion

of Monmouth was put down, the West of England was turned to mourning.

From the princely bastard who sued in agony and vain humiliation, to the

clown of Devon forced into the rebel ranks,--from the peer who plotted,

to the venerable and Christian woman whose sole crime was sheltering the

houseless and starving fugitive, there was given to the vanquished no

mercy but the mercy of Jeffreys, no tenderness but the tenderness of

Kirk.

But the House of Stuart was not always to represent the side of victory.

Thirty years after the Rout of Sedgemoor, the son of James, whose name

was clouded by rumor with the same stain of spuriousness as that of his

unfortunate cousin, was proclaimed by the Earl of Mar. The Jacobites

were forced to drink to the dregs the cup of bitterness they had so

gladly administered to others. Over Temple Bar and London Bridge the

heads of the defeated rebels bore witness to the guardianship of

civilization as understood in the eighteenth century.

Another thirty years brings us to the landing of Moidart, the rising

of the clans, the fall of Edinburgh and Carlisle, the "Bull's Run" at

Prestonpans, and the panic of London. If we are anxious to guard our

civilization according to Hanoverian precedents, there is one name

commonly given to the Commander-in-chief at Culloden which Congress

should add to the titles it is preparing against McClellan's successful

advance. The "Butcher Cumberland" not only hounded on his troops with

the tempting price of thirty thousand pounds for the Pretender _dead or

alive_, but every adherent of the luckless Jefferson Davis of that day

was in peril of life and wholesale confiscation. The House of Hanover

not only broke the backbone of the Rebellion, but mangled without mercy

its remains.

We come now, in another thirty years, to the next struggle of England

with a portion of her people. It is impossible, as well as unfair,

to say what might have been done with "Mr. Washington, the Virginia

colonel," and Mr. Franklin, the Philadelphia printer, had they not been

able to determine their own destiny. We can only surmise, by referring

to two well-known localities in New York, the "Old Sugar-House" and the

"Jersey Prison-Ship," how paternally George III was disposed then to

resume his rights. And without disposition to press historic parallels,

we cannot but compare Arnold and Tryon's raid along the south shore of

Connecticut with a certain sail recently made up the Tennessee River to

the foot of the Muscle Shoals by the command of a modern Connecticut

officer.

But as we were spared the necessity of testing the royal clemency to the

submitted Provinces of North America, we had better pass on twenty years

to the era of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland. In

this country the Irishman need not "fear to speak of '98," and in this

country he still treasures the memory of the whippings and pitch-caps of

Major Beresford's riding-house, and other pleasant souvenirs of the way

in which, sixty years ago, loyalty dealt with rebellion. There is no

inherent proneness to treason in the Hibernian nature, as Corcoran and

the Sixty-Ninth can bear witness; nor is Pat so fond of a riot that he

cannot with fair play be a--well, a good citizen. Yet at home he has

been so "civilized" by his British guardian as to be in a chronic state

of discontent and fretfulness.

We must, however, hasten to our latest precedent,--England in India.

The Sepoy Rebellion had some features in common with our own. It was

inaugurated by premeditated military treachery. It seized upon a large

quantity of Government munitions of war. It only asked "to be let

alone." It found the Government wholly unprepared. But it was the

uprising of a conquered people. The rebels were in circumstances, as in

complexion, much nearer akin to that portion of our Southern citizens

which has _not_ rebelled, and which has lost no opportunity of seeking

our lines "to take the oath of allegiance" or any other little favor

which could be found there. We do not defend their atrocities, although

a plea in mitigation might be put in, that these "were wisely planned to

break the spell which British domination had woven over the native mind

of India," and that they were part of that decided and desperate policy

which was designed to forever bar the way of reconstruction. But toward

the recaptured rebels there was used a course for which the only

precedent, so far as we know, was furnished by that highly civilized

guardian, the Dey of Algiers. These prisoners of war were in cold blood

tied to the muzzles of cannon and blown into fragments. The illustrated

papers of that most Christian land which is overcome with the barbarity

of sinking old hulks in a channel through which privateers were wont to

escape our blockade furnished effective engravings "by our own artist"

of the scene. Wholesale plunder and devastation of the chief city of the

revolt followed. The rebellion was put down, and put down, we may say,

without any unnecessary tenderness, any womanish weakness for the

rebels.

We have thus established what we believe is called by theologians a

_catena_ of precedents, coming down from the days of the Commonwealth to

our own time. It covers about the whole period of New England history.

And we next propose to ask the question, how far it may be desirable to

be bound by such indisputable authority.

Is it too late to reopen the question, and to retry the issue between

sovereign and rebel, less with respect to ancient and immemorial usage,

and more according to eternal principle? We answer, No. The same power

that enables us to master this rebellion will give us original and final

jurisdiction over it.

But one principle asserts itself out of the uniform coarse of history.

The restoration of the lawful authority over rebels does not restore

them to their old _status_. They are at the pleasure of the conquering

power. Rights of citizenship, having been abjured, do not return

with the same coercion which demands duties of citizenship. Thus, to

illustrate on an individual scale, every wrong-doer is _ipso facto_ a

rebel. He forfeits, according to due course of law, a measure of his

privileges, while constrained to the same responsibility of obedience.

His property is not exempt from taxes because he is in prison, but his

right of voting is gone; he cannot bear arms, but he must keep the

peace, he must labor compulsorily, and attend such worship as the State

provides. In short, he becomes a ward of the State, while not ceasing to

be a member. His inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness were inalienable only so long as he remained obedient and true

to the sovereign. Now this is equally true on the large scale as on the

small. The only difficulty is to apply it to broad masses of men and to

States.

It may not be expedient to try South Carolina collectively, but we

contend that the application of the principle gives us the right.

Corporate bodies have again and again been punished by suspension of

franchise, while held to allegiance and duties.

The simple question for us is, What will it be best to do? The South

may save us the trouble of deciding for the present a part of the many

questions that occur. We may put down the Confederate Government, and

take military occupation. We cannot compel the Southerners to hold

elections and resume their share in the Government. It can go on without

them. The same force which reopens the Mississippi can collect taxes or

exact forfeitures along its banks. If Charleston is sullen, the National

Government, having restored its flag to Moultrie and Sumter, can take

its own time in the matter of clearing out the channel and rebuilding

the light-houses. If a secluded neighborhood does not receive a

Government postmaster, but is disposed to welcome him with tarry hands

to a feathery bed, it can be left without the mails. The rebel we can

compel to return to his duties; if necessary, we can leave him to get

back his rights as he best may.

But we are the representatives of a great political discovery. The

American Union is founded on a fact unknown to the Old World. That fact

is the direct ratio of the prosperity of the parts to the prosperity of

the whole. It is the principle upon which in every community our life

is built. We cannot, therefore, afford to have any part of the land

languishing and suffering. We are fighting, not for conquest, for we

mean to abjure our power the moment we safely can,--not for vengeance,

for those with whom we fight are our brethren. We are compelled by a

necessity, partly geographical and partly social, into restoring a Union

politically which never for a day has actually ceased.

Let us advert to one fact very patent and significant. We have heard

of nearly all our successes through Rebel sources. Even where it made

against them, they could not help telling us (we do not say the _truth_,

for that is rather strong, but) the _news_. Never did two nations at war

know one-tenth part as much of each other's affairs. Like husband and

wife, the two parts of the country cannot keep secrets from one another,

let them try ever so hard. And the end of all will be that we shall know

and respect one another a great deal better for our sharp encounter.

But this necessity of union demands of the Government, imperatively

demands, that it take whatever step is necessary to its own

preservation. It is as with a ship at sea,--all must pull together, or

somebody must go overboard. There can be no such order of things as an

_agreed state of mutiny_,--forecastle seceding from cabin, and steerage

independent of both.

Not only is rebellion to be put down, therefore, but to be kept from

coming up again. It is obvious to every one, not thoroughly blinded by

party, how it did come up. The Gulf States were coaxed out, the Border

States were bullied or conjured out. A few leading men, who had made

the science of political management their own, got the control of the

popular mind. One great secret of their success was their constant

assumption that what was to be done had been done already. It is the

very art of the veteran seducer, who ever persuades his victim that

return is impossible, in order that he may actually make it so. North

Carolina, as one expressively said, "found herself out of the Union she

hardly knew how." Virginia was dragged out. Tennessee was forced out.

Missouri was declared out. Kentucky was all but out. Maryland hung in

the crisis of life and death under the guns of Fort McHenry. In South

Carolina alone can it be said that any fair expression of the popular

will was on the Secession side. The Rebellion was the work of a

governing class, all whose ideas and hopes were the aggrandizement of

their own order. Terrorism opened the way, reckless lying made the game

sure. If any one is inclined to doubt this, let him look at the sway

which Robespierre and his few associates exercised in Paris. Some

seventy executions delivered that great city from its nightmare agony of

months. A dozen resolute, united men, with arms and without scruples,

could seize almost any New England village for a time, provided they

knew just what they wanted to do. Decision and energy are master-keys to

almost most all doors not fortified by Hobbs's patent locks. A party of

tipsy Americans one night stormed a Parisian guard-house, disarmed the

sentry, and sent the guard flying in desperate fear, thinking that a

general _émente_ was in progress. Now one issue of the Rebellion must

be to put down, not only this governing class, but also the system from

which it springs. We have no such class at the North. We can have no

such class. The very collision of interests, the rivalries of trade, the

thousand-and-one social relations, all neutralize each other, are checks

and counterchecks, which, like the particles in a vessel of water,

always tend toward the level of an equilibrium. Two men meet in their

lodge as Odd-Fellows, but they are opponents on "town-meeting day." Two

partners in business are, one the most bitter of Calvinists, and the

other the most progressive of Universalists. Dr. A. and the Rev. Mr. B.

pull asunder the men whom 'Change unites. But with the Southerner of the

governing class it is not so. One sympathy, more potent than any other

can be, leagues them all. All are masters of the Helot race upon which

their success and station are built. It is a living relation, the most

powerful and vital which can bind men together, that sense of authority

borne by the few over the many.

The Norman barons after the Conquest, the Spanish conquerors in Mexico

and Peru, the Englishmen of the days of Clive and Hastings in India, are

all examples of that thorough concentration of strength which must arise

in the conflicts of races. Republics have fallen through their standing

armies. The proprietary class at the South was the most dangerous of

standing armies, for it was disciplined to the use of power night and

day. The overthrow of the Rebellion will to a great degree ruin this

class. But since it is one not founded on birth or culture, but simply

on white blood and circumstance, (for no Secessionist is so fierce as

your converted Northerner,) it cannot fall like the Norman nobility in

the Wars of the Roses, or waste by operation of climate like the

masters of Mexico and Hindostan. It renews itself whenever it touches

slave-soil. That gives it life. We contend that Government must for its

own preservation go to the root of the matter. And we cannot see that

there is any Constitutional difficulty. There are probably not ten

slave-proprietors in the South whom it has not the right to arrest, try,

and hang, for high-treason. Of course, every one can see the practical

difficulty, as well as the manifest folly, of doing this. But if it has

that right toward these individuals, it certainly may say, by Act of

Congress, if we choose, that it will not waive it except upon conditions

which shall secure it from any further trouble. It seems to us fully

within our power. And we will use an illustration that may help to show

what we mean. President Lincoln has no right to require of any citizen

of the United States that he take the temperance-pledge. But suppose a

murderer who has taken life in a fit of drunkenness applies for pardon

to the Executive. The Executive, Governor or President, as the case may

be, may surely then impose that condition before commuting the sentence

or releasing the prisoner. Now the Nation stands toward the Rebels in a

like attitude. It may be good policy to take them back as fast as they

submit, it may be Christian magnanimity to make the way as easy as

possible for their return, but they have no right to come back to

anything but a prison and hard labor for life. Many of them have trebly

forfeited their lives,--as traitors, as deserters from the naval and

military service, and as paroled prisoners who have broken their parole.

And therefore we say, since we cannot deal with all the individuals,

we must deal with the masses, and that in their corporate capacity. If

South Carolina is a sovereign State, is in the Union as a feudal chief

in his king's court, with power to carry from York to Lancaster and from

Lancaster to York his subject vassals, then South Carolina has dared the

hazard of rebellion, and her political head is forfeit.

It is next to be asked, what these conditions are to be. And that is

not to be answered in a breath. That they can have but one result,

emancipation, is a foregone conclusion; but the mode of reaching it is

not so easily determined. A cotton-loaded ship took fire at sea. It

would have been easy to pump in water enough to drown the fire. But the

captain said, "No," for that would swell the bales to such an extent

as to open every seam and start every timber. So with, the ship now

carrying King Cotton: you may indeed quench the fire, but you may

possibly turn the ship inside out into the bargain.

But something we have a right to insist on. We have it, over and above

the Constitutional right shown just now, upon the broad principle of

necessity. Slavery has proved itself a nuisance. Just as we say to the

owner of a bone-boiling establishment, "You poison the air; we cannot

live here; you must go farther off,"--and if a fever break out which can

be clearly traced to that source, we say it emphatically: so now Slavery

having proved itself pestilential, we say, "March!"

We are not disposed, _à la_ Staten Island, to burn down our

yellow-feverish neighbor's house. We will give everybody time to pack

up. We will make up a little purse for any specially hard case which the

removal may show. But stay and be plague-stricken we will no longer; nor

are we disposed to spend our whole income in burning sulphur, saltpetre,

and charcoal to keep out infection. And certainly, when by neglect to

pay ground-rent, or other illegality, the owner of our nuisance has

_forfeited_ his right to stay, no mortal can blame us for taking the

strictest and most decisive steps known to the law to remove him.

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE SAINT'S REST.

Agnes entered the city of Rome in a trance of enthusiastic emotion,

almost such as one might imagine in a soul entering the heavenly

Jerusalem above. To her exalted ideas she was approaching not only the

ground hallowed by the blood of apostles and martyrs, not merely the

tombs of the faithful, but the visible "general assembly and church of

the first-born which are written in heaven." Here reigned the appointed

representative of Jesus,--and she imagined a benignant image of a prince

clothed with honor and splendor, who was yet the righter of all wrongs,

the redresser of all injuries, the friend and succorer of the poor and

needy; and she was firm in a secret purpose to go to this great and

benignant father, and on her knees entreat him to forgive the sins of

her lover, and remove the excommunication that threatened at every

moment his eternal salvation. For she trembled to think of it,--a sudden

accident, a thrust of a dagger, a fall from his horse might put him

forever beyond the pale of repentance,--he might die unforgiven, and

sink to eternal pain.

If any should wonder that a Christian soul could preserve within itself

an image so ignorantly fair, in such an age, when the worldliness and

corruption in the Papal chair were obtruded by a thousand incidental

manifestations, and were alluded to in all the calculations of simple

common people, who looked at facts with a mere view to the guidance of

their daily conduct, it is necessary to remember the nature of Agnes's

religious training, and the absolute renunciation of all individual

reasoning which from infancy had been laid down before her as the first

and indispensable prerequisite of spiritual progress. To believe,--to

believe utterly and blindly,--not only without evidence, but against

evidence,--to reject the testimony even of her senses, when set against

the simple affirmation of her superiors,--had been the beginning,

middle, and end of her religious instruction. When a doubt assailed her

mind on any point, she had been taught to retire within herself and

repeat a prayer; and in this way her mental eye had formed the habit

of closing to anything that might shake her faith as quickly as the

physical eye closes at a threatened blow. Then, as she was of a poetic

and ideal nature, entirely differing from the mass of those with whom

she associated, she had formed that habit of abstraction and mental

reverie which prevented her hearing or perceiving the true sense of a

great deal that went on around her. The conversations that commonly

were carried on in her presence had for her so little interest that

she scarcely heard them. The world in which she moved was a glorified

world,--wherein, to be sure, the forms of every-day life appeared,

but appeared as different from what they were in reality as the old

mouldering daylight view of Rome is from the warm translucent glory of

its evening transfiguration.

So in her quiet, silent heart she nursed this beautiful hope of finding

in Rome the earthly image of her Saviour's home above, of finding in the

head of the Church the real image of her Redeemer,--the friend to whom

the poorest and lowliest may pour out their souls with as much freedom

as the highest and noblest. The spiritual directors who had formed the

mind of Agnes in her early days had been persons in the same manner

taught to move in an ideal world of faith. The Mother Theresa had never

seen the realities of life, and supposed the Church on earth to be all

that the fondest visions of human longing could paint it. The hard,

energetic, prose experience of old Jocunda, and the downright way with

which she sometimes spoke of things as a trooper's wife must have seen

them, were repressed and hushed, down, as the imperfect faith of a

half-reclaimed worldling,--they could not be allowed to awaken her

from the sweetness of so blissful a dream. In like manner, when Lorenzo

Sforza became Father Francesco, he strove with earnest prayer to bury

his gift of individual reason in the same grave with his family name

and worldly experience. As to all that transpired in the real world, he

wrapped himself in a mantle of imperturbable silence; the intrigues of

popes and cardinals, once well known to him, sank away as a forbidden

dream; and by some metaphysical process of imaginative devotion he

enthroned God in the place of the dominant powers, and taught himself to

receive all that came from them in uninquiring submission, as proceeding

from unerring wisdom. Though he had begun his spiritual life under the

impulse of Savonarola, yet so perfect had been his isolation from all

tidings of what transpired in the external world that the conflict which

was going on between that distinguished man and the Papal hierarchy

never reached his ear. He sought and aimed as much as possible to make

his soul like the soul of one dead, which adores and worships in ideal

space, and forgets forever the scenes and relations of earth; and he

had so long contemplated Rome under the celestial aspects of his faith,

that, though the shock of his first confession there had been painful,

still it was insufficient to shake his faith. It had been God's will, he

thought, that where he looked for aid he should meet only confusion,

and he bowed to the inscrutable will, and blindly adored the mysterious

revelation. If such could be the submission and the faith of a strong

and experienced man, who can wonder at the enthusiastic illusions of an

innocent, trustful child?

Agnes and her grandmother entered the city of Rome just as the twilight

had faded into night; and though Agnes, full of faith and enthusiasm,

was longing to begin immediately the ecstatic vision of shrines and holy

places, old Elsie commanded her not to think of anything further that

night. They proceeded, therefore, with several other pilgrims who had

entered the city, to a church specially set apart for their reception,

connected with which were large dormitories and a religious order whose

business was to receive and wait upon them, and to see that all their

wants were supplied. This religious foundation is one of the oldest in

Rome; and it is esteemed a work of especial merit and sanctity among the

citizens to associate themselves temporarily in these labors in Holy

Week. Even princes and princesses come, humble and lowly, mingling with

those of common degree, and all, calling each other brother and sister,

vie in kind attentions to these guests of the Church.

When Agnes and Elsie arrived, several of these volunteer assistants were

in waiting. Agnes was remarked among all the rest of the company for her

peculiar beauty and the rapt enthusiastic expression of her face.

Almost immediately on their entrance into the reception-hall connected

with the church, they seemed to attract the attention of a tall lady

dressed in deep mourning, and accompanied by a female servant, with whom

she was conversing on those terms of intimacy which showed confidential

relations between the two.

"See!" she said, "my Mona, what a heavenly face is there!--that sweet

child has certainly the light of grace shining through her. My heart

warms to her."

"Indeed," said the old servant, looking across, "and well it

may,--dear lamb come so far! But, Holy Virgin, how my head swims! How

strange!--that child reminds me of some one. My Lady, perhaps, may think

of some one whom she looks like."

"Mona, you say true. I have the same strange impression that I have seen

a face like hers, but who or where I cannot say."

"What would my Lady say, if I said it was our dear Prince?--God rest his

soul!"

"Mona, it _is_ so,--yes," added the lady, looking more intently,--"how

singular!--the very traits of our house in a peasant-girl! She is of

Sorrento, I judge, by her costume,--what a pretty one it is! That old

woman is her mother, perhaps. I must choose her for my care,--and, Mona,

you shall wait on her mother."

So saying, the Princess Paulina crossed the hall, and, bending affably

over Agnes, took her hand and kissed her, saying,--

"Welcome, my dear little sister, to the house of our Father!"

Agnes looked up with strange, wondering eyes into the face that was bent

to hers. It was sallow and sunken, with deep lines of ill-health and

sorrow, but the features were noble, and must once have been, beautiful;

the whole action, voice, and manner were dignified and impressive.

Instinctively she felt that the lady was of superior birth and breeding

to any with whom she had been in the habit of associating.

"Come with me," said the lady; "and this--your mother"--she added.

"She is my grandmother," said Agnes.

"Well, then, your grandmother, sweet child, shall be attended by my good

sister Mona here."

The Princess Paulina drew the hand of Agnes through her arm, and, laying

her hand affectionately on it, looked down and smiled tenderly on her.

"Are you very tired, my dear?"

"Oh, no! no!" said Agnes,--"I am so happy, so blessed to be here!"

"You have travelled a long way?"

"Yes, from Sorrento; but I am used to walking,--I did not feel it to be

long,--my heart kept me up,--I wanted to come home so much."

"Home?" said the Princess.

"Yes, to my soul's home,--the house of our dear Father the Pope."

The Princess started, and looked incredulously down for a moment; then

noticing the confiding, whole-hearted air of the child, she sighed and

was silent.

"Come with me above," she said, "and let me attend a little to your

comfort."

"How good you are, dear lady!" said Agnes.

"I am not good, my child,--I am only your unworthy sister in Christ";

and as the lady spoke, she opened the door into a room where were a

number of other female pilgrims seated around the wall, each attended by

a person whose peculiar care she seemed to be.

At the feet of each was a vessel of water, and when the seats were all

full, a cardinal in robes of office entered, and began reading prayers.

Each lady present, kneeling at the feet of her chosen pilgrim, divested

them carefully of their worn and travel-soiled shoes and stockings, and

proceeded to wash them. It was not a mere rose-water ceremony, but a

good hearty washing of feet that for the most part had great need of the

ablution. While this service was going on, the cardinal read from the

Gospel how a Greater than they all had washed the feet of His disciples,

and said, "If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also

ought to wash one another's feet." Then all repeated in concert the

Lord's Prayer, while each humbly kissed the feet she had washed, and

proceeded to replace the worn and travel-soiled shoes and stockings with

new and strong ones, the gift of Christian love. Each lady then led her

charge into a room where tables were spread with a plain and wholesome

repast of all such articles of food as the season of Lent allowed. Each

placed her _protégée_ at table, and carefully attended to all her wants

at the supper, and afterwards dormitories were opened for their repose.

The Princess Paulina performed all these offices for Agnes with a tender

earnestness which won upon her heart. The young girl thought herself

indeed in that blessed society of which she had dreamed, where the

high-born and the rich become through Christ's love the servants of the

poor and lowly,--and through all the services she sat in a sort of dream

of rapture. How lovely this reception into the Holy City! how sweet thus

to be taken to the arms of the great Christian family, bound together in

the charity which is the bond of perfectness!

"Please tell me, dear lady," said Agnes, after supper, "who is that holy

man that prayed with us?"

"Oh, he--he is the Cardinal Capello," said the Princess.

"I should like to have spoken with him," said Agnes.

"Why, my child?"

"I wanted to ask him when and how I could get speech with our dear

Father the Pope,--for there is somewhat on my mind that I would lay

before him."

"My poor little sister," said the Princess, much perplexed, "you do not

understand things. What you speak of is impossible. The Pope is a great

king."

"I know he is," said Agnes,--"and so is our Lord Jesus,--but every soul

may come to him."

"I cannot explain to you now," said the Princess,--"there is not time

to-night. But I shall see you again. I will send for you to come to my

house, and there talk with you about many things which you need to know.

Meanwhile, promise me, dear child, not to try to do anything of the kind

you spoke of until I have talked with you."

"Well, I will not," said Agnes, with a glance of docile affection,

kissing the hand of the Princess.

The action was so pretty,--the great, soft, dark eyes looked so

fawn-like and confiding in their innocent tenderness, that the lady

seemed much moved.

"Our dear Mother bless thee, child!" she said, laying her hand on her

head, and stooping to kiss her forehead.

She left her at the door of the dormitory.

The Princess and her attendant went out of the church-door, where her

litter stood in waiting. The two took their seats in silence, and

silently pursued their way through the streets of the old dimly-lighted

city and out of one of its principal gates to the wide Campagna beyond.

The villa of the Princess was situated on an eminence at some distance

from the city, and the night-ride to it was solemn and solitary. They

passed along the old Appian Way over pavements that had rumbled under

the chariot-wheels of the emperors and nobles of a by-gone age, while

along their way, glooming up against the clear of the sky, were vast

shadowy piles,--the tombs of the dead of other days. All mouldering and

lonely, shaggy and fringed with bushes and streaming wild vines through

which the night-wind sighed and rustled, they might seem to be pervaded

by the restless spirits of the dead; and as the lady passed them, she

shivered, and, crossing herself, repeated an inward prayer against

wandering demons that walk in desolate places.

Timid and solitary, the high-born lady shrank and cowered within herself

with a distressing feeling of loneliness. A childless widow in delicate

health, whose paternal family had been for the most part cruelly robbed,

exiled, or destroyed by the reigning Pope and his family, she felt her

own situation a most unprotected and precarious one, since the least

jealousy or misunderstanding might bring upon her, too, the ill-will

of the Borgias, which had proved so fatal to the rest of her race. No

comfort in life remained to her but her religion, to whose practice she

clung as to her all; but even in this her life was embittered by facts

to which, with the best disposition in the world, she could not shut her

eyes. Her own family had been too near the seat of power not to see all

the base intrigues by which that sacred and solemn position of Head of

the Christian Church had been traded for as a marketable commodity. The

pride, the indecency, the cruelty of those who now reigned in the name

of Christ came over her mind in contrast with the picture painted by

the artless, trusting faith of the peasant-girl with whom she had just

parted. Her mind had been too thoroughly drilled in the non-reflective

practice of her faith to dare to put forth any act of reasoning upon

facts so visible and so tremendous,--she rather trembled at herself for

seeing what she saw and for knowing what she knew, and feared somehow

that this very knowledge might endanger her salvation; and so she rode

homeward cowering and praying like a frightened child.

"Does my Lady feel ill?" said the old servant, anxiously.

"No, Mona, no,--not in body."

"And what is on my Lady's mind now?"

"Oh, Mona, it is only what is always there. To-morrow is Palm Sunday,

and how can I go to see the murderers and robbers of our house in holy

places? Oh, Mona, what can Christians do, when such men handle holy

things? It was a comfort to wash the feet of those poor simple pilgrims,

who tread in the steps of the saints of old; but how I felt when that

poor child spoke of wanting to see the Pope!"

"Yes," said Mona, "it's like sending the lamb to get spiritual counsel

of the wolf."

"See what sweet belief the poor infant has! Should not the head of the

Christian Church be such as she thinks? Ah, in the old days, when the

Church here in Rome was poor and persecuted, there were popes who were

loving fathers and not haughty princes."

"My dear Lady," said the servant, "pray, consider, the very stones have

ears. We don't know what day we may be turned out, neck and heels, to

make room for some of their creatures."

"Well, Mona," said the lady, with some spirit, "I'm sure I haven't said

any more than you have."

"Holy Mother! and so you haven't, but somehow things look more dangerous

when other people say them.--A pretty child that was, as you say; but

that old thing, her grandmother, is a sharp piece. She is a Roman,

and lived here in her early days. She says the little one was born

hereabouts; but she shuts up her mouth like a vice, when one would get

more out of her."

"Mona, I shall not go out to-morrow; but you go to the services, and

find the girl and her grandmother, and bring them out to me. I want to

counsel the child."

"You may be sure," said Mona, "that her grandmother knows the ins and

outs of Rome as well as any of us, for all she has learned to screw up

her lips so tight"

"At any rate, bring her to me, because she interests me."

"Well, well, it shall be so," said Mona.