IT was one of the very brightest and breeziest of summer mornings that
the Doctor and myself walked homeward from the town poor-house, where
he had always one or more patients, and where his coming was always
welcomed by the poor, diseased, and age-stricken inmates. Dark,
miserable faces of lonely and unreverenced age, written over with the
grim records of sorrow and sin, seemed to brighten at his approach as
with an inward light, as if the good man's presence had power to call
the better natures of the poor unfortunates into temporary ascendency.
Weary, fretful women--happy mothers in happy homes, perchance, half a
century before--felt their hearts warm and expand under the influence of
his kind salutations and the ever-patient good-nature with which he
listened to their reiterated complaints of real or imaginary suffering.
However it might be with others, he never forgot the man or the woman in
the pauper. There was nothing like condescension or consciousness in
his charitable ministrations; for he was one of the few men I have ever
known in whom the milk of human kindness was never soured by contempt
for humanity in whatever form it presented itself. Thus it was that his
faithful performance of the duties of his profession, however repulsive
and disagreeable, had the effect of Murillo's picture of St. Elizabeth
of Hungary binding up the ulcered limbs of the beggars. The moral
beauty transcended the loathsomeness of physical evil and deformity.
Our nearest route home lay across the pastures and over Blueberry Hill,
just at the foot of which we encountered Elder Staples and Skipper
Evans, who had been driving their cows to pasture, and were now
leisurely strolling back to the village. We toiled together up the hill
in the hot sunshine, and, just on its eastern declivity, were glad to
find a white-oak tree, leaning heavily over a little ravine, from the
bottom of which a clear spring of water bubbled up and fed a small
rivulet, whose track of darker green might be traced far down the hill
to the meadow at its foot.
A broad shelf of rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses,
afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded
black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on
his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his
sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse
stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his
keen gray eyes, flashing under their dark penthouse, happily relieved by
the softer lines of his mouth, indicative of his really genial and
generous nature. A small, sinewy figure, half doubled up, with his chin
resting on his rough palms, Skipper Evans sat on a lower projection of
the rock just beneath him, in an attentive attitude, as at the feet of
Gatnaliel. Dark and dry as one of his own dunfish on a Labrador flake,
or a seal-skin in an Esquimaux hut, he seemed entirely exempt from one
of the great trinity of temptations; and, granting him a safe
deliverance from the world and the devil, he had very little to fear
from the flesh.
We were now in the Doctor's favorite place of resort, green, cool,
quiet, and sightly withal. The keen light revealed every object in the
long valley below us; the fresh west wind fluttered the oakleaves above;
and the low voice of the water, coaxing or scolding its way over bare
roots or mossy stones, was just audible.
"Doctor," said I, "this spring, with the oak hanging over it, is, I
suppose, your Fountain of Bandusia. You remember what Horace says of
his spring, which yielded such cool refreshment when the dog-star had
set the day on fire. What a fine picture he gives us of this charming
feature of his little farm!"
The Doctor's eye kindled. "I'm glad to see you like Horace; not merely
as a clever satirist and writer of amatory odes, but as a true lover of
Nature. How pleasant are his simple and beautiful descriptions of his
yellow, flowing Tiber, the herds and herdsmen, the harvesters, the grape
vintage, the varied aspects of his Sabine retreat in the fierce summer
heats, or when the snowy forehead of Soracte purpled in winter sunsets!
Scattered through his odes and the occasional poems which he addresses
to his city friends, you find these graceful and inimitable touches of
rural beauty, each a picture in itself."
"It is long since I have looked at my old school-day companions, the
classics," said Elder Staples; "but I remember Horace only as a light,
witty, careless epicurean, famous for his lyrics in praise of Falernian
wine and questionable women."
"Somewhat too much of that, doubtless," said the Doctor; "but to me
Horace is serious and profoundly suggestive, nevertheless. Had I laid
him aside on quitting college, as you did, I should perhaps have only
remembered such of his epicurean lyrics as recommended themselves to the
warns fancy of boyhood. Ah, Elder Staples, there was a time when the
Lyces and Glyceras of the poet were no fiction to us. They played
blindman's buff with us in the farmer's kitchen, sang with us in the
meeting-house, and romped and laughed with us at huskings and quilting-
parties. Grandmothers and sober spinsters as they now are, the change
in us is perhaps greater than in them."
"Too true," replied the Elder, the smile which had just played over his
pale face fading into something sadder than its habitual melancholy.
"The living companions of our youth, whom we daily meet, are more
strange to us than the dead in yonder graveyard. They alone remain
unchanged!"
"Speaking of Horace," continued the Doctor, in a voice slightly husky
with feeling, "he gives us glowing descriptions of his winter circles of
friends, where mirth and wine, music and beauty, charm away the hours,
and of summer-day recreations beneath the vine-wedded elms of the Tiber
or on the breezy slopes of Soracte; yet I seldom read them without a
feeling of sadness. A low wail of inappeasable sorrow, an undertone of
dirges, mingles with his gay melodies. His immediate horizon is bright
with sunshine; but beyond is a land of darkness, the light whereof is
darkness. It is walled about by the everlasting night. The skeleton
sits at his table; a shadow of the inevitable terror rests upon all his
pleasant pictures. He was without God in the world; he had no clear
abiding hope of a life beyond that which was hastening to a close. Eat
and drink, he tells us; enjoy present health and competence; alleviate
present evils, or forget them, in social intercourse, in wine, music,
and sensual indulgence; for to-morrow we must die. Death was in his
view no mere change of condition and relation; it was the black end of
all. It is evident that he placed no reliance on the mythology of his
time, and that he regarded the fables of the Elysian Fields and their
dim and wandering ghosts simply in the light of convenient poetic
fictions for illustration and imagery. Nothing can, in my view, be
sadder than his attempts at consolation for the loss of friends.
Witness his Ode to Virgil on the death of Quintilius. He tells his
illustrious friend simply that his calamity is without hope,
irretrievable and eternal; that it is idle to implore the gods to
restore the dead; and that, although his lyre may be more sweet than
that of Orpheus, he cannot reanimate the shadow of his friend nor
persuade 'the ghost-compelling god' to unbar the gates of death. He
urges patience as the sole resource. He alludes not unfrequently to his
own death in the same despairing tone. In the Ode to Torquatus,--one of
the most beautiful and touching of all he has written,--he sets before
his friend, in melancholy contrast, the return of the seasons, and of
the moon renewed in brightness, with the end of man, who sinks into the
endless dark, leaving nothing save ashes and shadows. He then, in the
true spirit of his philosophy, urges Torquatus to give his present hour
and wealth to pleasures and delights, as he had no assurance of
to-morrow."
"In something of the same strain," said I, "Moschus moralizes on the
death of Bion:--
Our trees and plants revive; the rose
In annual youth of beauty glows;
But when the pride of Nature dies,
Man, who alone is great and wise,
No more he rises into light,
The wakeless sleeper of eternal night.'"
"It reminds me," said Elder Staples, "of the sad burden of
Ecclesiastes, the mournfulest book of Scripture; because, while the
preacher dwells with earnestness upon the vanity and uncertainty of the
things of time and sense, he has no apparent hope of immortality to
relieve the dark picture. Like Horace, he sees nothing better than to
eat his bread with joy and drink his wine with a merry heart. It seems
to me the wise man might have gone farther in his enumeration of the
folly and emptiness of life, and pronounced his own prescription for the
evil vanity also. What is it but plucking flowers on the banks of the
stream which hurries us over the cataract, or feasting on the thin crust
of a volcano upon delicate meats prepared over the fires which are soon
to ingulf us? Oh, what a glorious contrast to this is the gospel of Him
who brought to light life and immortality! The transition from the
Koheleth to the Epistles of Paul is like passing from a cavern, where
the artificial light falls indeed upon gems and crystals, but is
everywhere circumscribed and overshadowed by unknown and unexplored
darkness, into the warm light and free atmosphere of day."
"Yet," I asked, "are there not times when we all wish for some clearer
evidence of immortal life than has been afforded us; when we even turn
away unsatisfied from the pages of the holy book, with all the
mysterious problems of life pressing about us and clamoring for
solution, till, perplexed and darkened, we look up to the still heavens,
as if we sought thence an answer, visible or audible, to their
questionings? We want something beyond the bare announcement of the
momentous fact of a future life; we long for a miracle to confirm our
weak faith and silence forever the doubts which torment us."
"And what would a miracle avail us at such times of darkness and strong
temptation?" said the Elder. "Have we not been told that they whom
Moses and the prophets have failed to convince would not believe
although one rose from the dead? That God has revealed no more to
us is to my mind sufficient evidence that He has revealed enough."
"May it not be," queried the Doctor, "that Infinite Wisdom sees that a
clearer and fuller revelation of the future life would render us less
willing or able to perform our appropriate duties in the present
condition? Enchanted by a clear view of the heavenly hills, and of our
loved ones beckoning us from the pearl gates of the city of God, could
we patiently work out our life-task here, or make the necessary
exertions to provide for the wants of these bodies whose encumbrance
alone can prevent us from rising to a higher plane of existence?"
"I reckon," said the Skipper, who had been an attentive, although at
times evidently a puzzled, listener, "that it would be with us pretty
much as it was with a crew of French sailors that I once shipped at the
Isle of France for the port of Marseilles. I never had better hands
until we hove in sight of their native country, which they had n't seen
for years. The first look of the land set 'em all crazy; they danced,
laughed, shouted, put on their best clothes; and I had to get new hands
to help me bring the vessel to her moorings."
"Your story is quite to the point, Skipper," said the Doctor. "If
things had been ordered differently, we should all, I fear, be disposed
to quit work and fall into absurdities, like your French sailors, and so
fail of bringing the world fairly into port."
"God's ways are best," said the Elder; "and I don't see as we can do
better than to submit with reverence to the very small part of them
which He has made known to us, and to trust Him like loving and dutiful
children for the rest."