"But what is Congress? It is the echo of the country at home,--the
weathercock, that denotes and answers the shifting wind,--a thing of
tail, nearly all tail, moved by the tail and by the wind, with small
heading, and that corresponding implicitly in movement with the broad
sail-like stern, which widens out behind to catch the rum-fraught breath
of 'the Brotherhood.' As that turns, it turns; when that stops, it stops;
and in calmish weather looks as steadfast and firm as though it was
riveted to the centre. The wind blows, and the little popularity-hunting
head dodges this way and that, in endless fluctuation. Such is Congress,
or a great portion of it. It will point to the northwest heavens of
Liberty, whenever the breezes bear down irresistibly upon it, from the
regions of political fair weather. It will abolish slavery at the
Capitol, when it has already been doomed to abolition and death
everywhere else in the country. 'It will be in at the death.'"
Replying to the charge that the Abolitionists of the North were "secret"
in their movements and designs, he says:--
"'In secret!' Why, our movements have been as prominent and open as the
house-tops from the beginning. We have striven from the outset to write
the whole matter cloud-high in the heavens, that the utmost South might
read it. We have cast an arc upon the horizon, like the semicircle of
the polar lights, and upon it have bent our motto, 'Immediate
Emancipation,' glorious as the rainbow. We have engraven it there, on
the blue table of the cold vault, in letters tall enough for the reading
of the nations. And why has the far South not read and believed before
this? Because a steam has gone up--a fog--from New England's pulpit and
her degenerate press, and hidden the beaming revelation from its vision.
The Northern hierarchy and aristocracy have cheated the South."
He spoke at times with severity of slaveholders, but far oftener of those
who, without the excuse of education and habit, and prompted only by a
selfish consideration of political or sectarian advantage, apologized for
the wrong, and discountenanced the anti-slavery movement. "We have
nothing to say," said he, "to the slave. He is no party to his own
enslavement,--he is none to his disenthralment. We have nothing to say
to the South. The real holder of slaves is not there. He is in the
North, the free North. The South alone has not the power to hold the
slave. It is the character of the nation that binds and holds him. It
is the Republic that does it, the efficient force of which is north of
Mason and Dixon's line. By virtue of the majority of Northern hearts and
voices, slavery lives in the South!"
In 1840, he spent a few weeks in England, Ireland, and Scotland. He has
left behind a few beautiful memorials of his tour. His Ride over the
Border, Ride into Edinburgh, Wincobank hall, Ailsa Craig, gave his paper
an interest in the eyes of many who had no sympathy with his political
and religious views.
Scattered all over his editorials, like gems, are to be found beautiful
images, sweet touches of heartfelt pathos,--thoughts which the reader
pauses over with surprise and delight. We subjoin a few specimens, taken
almost at random from the book before us:--
"A thunder-storm,--what can match it for eloquence and poetry? That rush
from heaven of the big drops, in what multitude and succession, and how
they sound as they strike! How they play on the old home roof and the
thick tree-tops! What music to go to sleep by, to the tired boy, as he
lies under the naked roof! And the great, low bass thunder, as it rolls
off over the hills, and settles down behind them to the very centre, and
you can feel the old earth jar under your feet!"
"There was no oratory in the speech of the _Learned Blacksmith_, in the
ordinary sense of that word, no grace of elocution, but mighty thoughts
radiating off from his heated mind, like sparks from the glowing steel of
his own anvil."
"The hard hands of Irish labor, with nothing in them,--they ring like
slabs of marble together, in response to the wild appeals of O'Connell,
and the British stand conquered before them, with shouldered arms.
Ireland is on her feet, with nothing in her hands, impregnable,
unassailable, in utter defencelessness,--the first time that ever a
nation sprung to its feet unarmed. The veterans of England behold them,
and forbear to fire. They see no mark. It will not do to fire upon men;
it will do only to fire upon soldiers. They are the proper mark of the
murderous gun, but men cannot be shot."
"It is coming to that (abolition of war) the world over; and when it does
come to it, oh what a long breath of relief the tired world will draw, as
it stretches itself for the first time out upon earth's greensward, and
learns the meaning of repose and peaceful sleep!"
"He who vests his labor in the faithful ground is dealing directly with
God; human fraud or weakness do not intervene between him and his
requital. No mechanic has a set of customers so trustworthy as God and
the elements. No savings bank is so sure as the old earth."
"Literature is the luxury of words. It originates nothing, it does
nothing. It talks hard words about the labor of others, and is reckoned
more meritorious for it than genius and labor for doing what learning can
only descant upon. It trades on the capital of unlettered minds. It
struts in stolen plumage, and it is mere plumage. A learned man
resembles an owl in more respects than the matter of wisdom. Like that
solemn bird, he is about all feathers."
"Our Second Advent friends contemplate a grand conflagration about the
first of April next. I should be willing there should be one, if it
could be confined to the productions of the press, with which the earth
is absolutely smothered. Humanity wants precious few books to read, but
the great living, breathing, immortal volume of Providence. Life,--real
life,--how to live, how to treat one another, and how to trust God in
matters beyond our ken and occasion,--these are the lessons to learn, and
you find little of them in libraries."
"That accursed drum and fife! How they have maddened mankind! And the
deep bass boom of the cannon, chiming in in the chorus of battle, that
trumpet and wild charging bugle,--how they set the military devil in a
man, and make him into a soldier! Think of the human family falling upon
one another at the inspiration of music! How must God feel at it, to see
those harp-strings he meant should be waked to a love bordering on
divine, strung and swept to mortal hate and butchery!"
"Leave off being Jews," (he is addressing Major Noah with regard to his
appeal to his brethren to return to Judaea,) "and turn mankind. The
rocks and sands of Palestine have been worshipped long enough.
Connecticut River or the Merrimac are as good rivers as any Jordan that
ever run into a dead or live sea, and as holy, for that matter. In
Humanity, as in Christ Jesus, as Paul says, 'there is neither Jew nor
Greek.' And there ought to be none. Let Humanity be reverenced with the
tenderest devotion; suffering, discouraged, down-trodden, hard-handed,
haggard-eyed, care-worn mankind! Let these be regarded a little. Would
to God I could alleviate all their sorrows, and leave them a chance to
laugh! They are, miserable now. They might be as happy as the blackbird
on the spray, and as full of melody."
"I am sick as death at this miserable struggle among mankind for a
living. Poor devils! were they born to run such a gauntlet after the
means of life? Look about you, and see your squirming neighbors,
writhing and twisting like so many angleworms in a fisher's bait-box, or
the wriggling animalculae seen in the vinegar drop held to the sun. How
they look, how they feel, how base it makes them all!"
"Every human being is entitled to the means of life, as the trout is to
his brook or the lark to the blue sky. Is it well to put a human 'young
one' here to die of hunger, thirst, and nakedness, or else be preserved
as a pauper? Is this fair earth but a poor-house by creation and intent?
Was it made for that?--and these other round things we see dancing in
the firmament to the music of the spheres, are they all great shining
poor-houses?"
"The divines always admit things after the age has adopted them. They
are as careful of the age as the weathercock is of the wind. You might
as well catch an old experienced weathercock, on some ancient Orthodox
steeple, standing all day with its tail east in a strong out wind, as the
divines at odds with the age."
But we must cease quoting. The admirers of Jean Paul Richter might find
much of the charm and variety of the "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces" in
this newspaper collection. They may see, perhaps, as we do, some things
which they cannot approve of, the tendency of which, however intended, is
very questionable. But, with us, they will pardon something to the
spirit of liberty, much to that of love and humanity which breathes
through all.
Disgusted and heart-sick at the general indifference of Church and clergy
to the temporal condition of the people,--at their apologies for and
defences of slavery, war, and capital punishment,--Rogers turned
Protestant, in the full sense of the term. He spoke of priests and
"pulpit wizards" as freely as John Milton did two centuries ago,
although with far less bitterness and rasping satire. He could not
endure to see Christianity and Humanity divorced. He longed to see the
beautiful life of Jesus--his sweet humanities, his brotherly love, his
abounding sympathies--made the example of all men. Thoroughly
democratic, in his view all men were equal. Priests, stripped of their
sacerdotal tailoring, were in his view but men, after all. He pitied
them, he said, for they were in a wrong position,--above life's comforts
and sympathies,--"up in the unnatural cold, they had better come down
among men, and endure and enjoy with them." "Mankind," said he, "want
the healing influences of humanity. They must love one another more.
Disinterested good will make the world as it should be."
His last visit to his native valley was in the autumn of 1845. In a
familiar letter to a friend, he thus describes his farewell view of the
mountain glories of his childhood's home:--
"I went a jaunt, Thursday last, about twenty miles north of this valley,
into the mountain region, where what I beheld, if I could tell it as I
saw it, would make your outlawed sheet sought after wherever our Anglo-
Saxon tongue is spoken in the wide world. I have been many a time among
those Alps, and never without a kindling of wildest enthusiasm in my
woodland blood. But I never saw them till last Thursday. They never
loomed distinctly to my eye before, and the sun never shone on them from
heaven till then. They were so near me, I could seem to hear the voice
of their cataracts, as I could count their great slides, streaming adown
their lone and desolate sides,--old slides, some of them overgrown with
young woods, like half-healed scars on the breast of a giant. The great
rains had clothed the valleys of the upper Pemigewasset in the darkest
and deepest green. The meadows were richer and more glorious in their
thick 'fall feed' than Queen Anne's Garden, as I saw it from the windows
of Windsor Castle. And the dark hemlock and hackmatack woods were yet
darker after the wet season, as they lay, in a hundred wildernesses, in
the mighty recesses of the mountains. But the peaks,--the eternal, the
solitary, the beautiful, the glorious and dear mountain peaks, my own
Moosehillock and my native Haystacks,--these were the things on which eye
and heart gazed and lingered, and I seemed to see them for the last time.
It was on my way back that I halted and turned to look at them from a
high point on the Thornton road. It was about four in the afternoon. It
had rained among the hills about the Notch, and cleared off. The sun,
there sombred at that early hour, as towards his setting, was pouring his
most glorious light upon the naked peaks, and they casting their mighty
shadows far down among the inaccessible woods that darken the hollows
that stretch between their bases. A cloud was creeping up to perch and
rest awhile on the highest top of Great Haystack. Vulgar folks have
called it Mount Lafayette, since the visit of that brave old Frenchman in
1825 or 1826. If they had asked his opinion, he would have told them the
names of mountains couldn't be altered, and especially names like that,
so appropriate, so descriptive, and so picturesque. A little hard white
cloud, that looked like a hundred fleeces of wool rolled into one, was
climbing rapidly along up the northwestern ridge, that ascended to the
lonely top of Great Haystack. All the others were bare. Four or five of
them,--as distinct and shapely as so many pyramids; some topped out with
naked cliff, on which the sun lay in melancholy glory; others clothed
thick all the way up with the old New Hampshire hemlock or the daring
hackmatack,--Pierpont's hackmatack. You could see their shadows
stretching many and many a mile, over Grant and Location, away beyond the
invading foot of Incorporation,--where the timber-hunter has scarcely
explored, and where the moose browses now, I suppose, as undisturbed as
he did before the settlement of the State. I wish our young friend and
genius, Harrison Eastman, had been with me, to see the sunlight as it
glared on the tops of those woods, and to see the purple of the
mountains. I looked at it myself almost with the eye of a painter. If a
painter looked with mine, though, he never could look off upon his canvas
long enough to make a picture; he would gaze forever at the original.
"But I had to leave it, and to say in my heart, Farewell! And as I
travelled on down, and the sun sunk lower and lower towards the summit of
the western ridge, the clouds came up and formed an Alpine range in the
evening heavens above it,--like other Haystacks and Moosehillocks,--so
dark and dense that fancy could easily mistake them for a higher Alps.
There were the peaks and the great passes; the Franconia Notches among
the cloudy cliffs, and the great White Mountain Gap."
His health, never robust, had been gradually failing for some time
previous to his death. He needed more repose and quiet than his duties
as an editor left him; and to this end he purchased a small and pleasant
farm in his loved Pennigewasset valley, in the hope that he might there
recruit his wasted energies. In the sixth month of the year of his
death, in a letter to us, he spoke of his prospects in language which
even then brought moisture to our eyes:--
"I am striving to get me an asylum of a farm. I have a wife and seven
children, every one of them with a whole spirit. I don't want to be
separated from any of them, only with a view to come together again. I
have a beautiful little retreat in prospect, forty odd miles north, where
I imagine I can get potatoes and repose,--a sort of haven or port. I am
among the breakers, and 'mad for land.' If I get this home,--it is a mile
or two in among the hills from the pretty domicil once visited by
yourself and glorious Thompson,--I am this moment indulging the fancy
that I may see you at it before we die. Why can't I have you come and
see me? You see, dear W., I don't want to send you anything short of a
full epistle. Let me end as I begun, with the proffer of my hand in
grasp of yours extended. My heart I do not proffer,--it was yours
before,--it shall be yours while I am N. P. ROGERS."
Alas! the haven of a deeper repose than he had dreamed of was close at
hand. He lingered until the middle of the tenth month, suffering much,
yet calm and sensible to the last. Just before his death, he desired his
children to sing at his bedside that touching song of Lover's, _The
Angel's Whisper_. Turning his eyes towards the open window, through
which the leafy glory of the season he most loved was visible, he
listened to the sweet melody. In the words of his friend Pierpont,--
"The angel's whisper stole in song upon his closing ear;
From his own daughter's lips it came, so musical and clear,
That scarcely knew the dying man what melody was there--
The last of earth's or first of heaven's pervading all the air."
He sleeps in the Concord burial-ground, under the shadow of oaks; the
very spot he would have chosen, for he looked upon trees with something
akin to human affection. "They are," he said, "the beautiful handiwork
and architecture of God, on which the eye never tires. Every one is
a feather in the earth's cap, a plume in her bonnet, a tress on her
forehead,--a comfort, a refreshing, and an ornament to her." Spring has
hung over him her buds, and opened beside him her violets. Summer has
laid her green oaken garland on his grave, and now the frost-blooms of
autumn drop upon it. Shall man cast a nettle on that mound? He loved
humanity,--shall it be less kind to him than Nature? Shall the bigotry
of sect, and creed, and profession, drive its condemnatory stake into his
grave? God forbid. The doubts which he sometimes unguardedly expressed
had relation, we are constrained to believe, to the glosses of
commentators and creed-makers and the inconsistency of professors, rather
than to those facts and precepts of Christianity to which he gave the
constant assent of his practice. He sought not his own. His heart
yearned with pity and brotherly affection for all the poor and suffering
in the universe. Of him, the angel of Leigh Hunt's beautiful allegory
might have written, in the golden book of remembrance, as he did of the
good Abou Ben Adhem, "He loved his fellow-men."