demonstrative step and voice; with hurry and rush. I confess to a love
of the serene, soft-stepping way in which Nature heralds in the day.
Soft skies, softer music; the gradual rolling up of night's mantle, and
the genial warmth which steals imperceptibly about us. Oh, that sweet,
quiet, devotional coming in of the new-born day! How I long for it, as
the blades of grass begin to grow green, between the pavement-stones
of the crazy city! How I tire of its quips and pranks and
circus-clown-tumblings. How stale grow its jests! How I pant for freedom
outside its artificial, heated walls! How disgusting is the road woman
must travel to secure all this happiness! Woollens and furs to be put
safely out of reach of moths. House-cleaning and carpet-shaking to be
done. Dresses to be bought, and horror! worse than all, to be fitted.
Trunks to be packed--writing to be done, weeks ahead. My brain spins to
think what a purgatory one must travel through, to reach that serene
heaven, the bird-peeping-morning-hour of the country; when nobody comes
to me with horrible questions about meat and butter. When as soon as my
shoes and stockings are on, and before the dew is off, or the lovely
mist done creeping off the mountains, Nature's cool hand is laid on my
temples, and I give _her_ the best of me. With my head on her bosom, I
forget all that is askew in life and rest there contented with the
present; like the babe who dreams not that its mother will presently
loose its hand from her neck, and disappear while yet the trance
continues.
If I am sentimental, forgive me; but sometimes I sigh to think how much
of life goes to consideration of food and clothes. Now, while I
sojourned in a tent on the James river, during the war, I used to lie in
my cot, and consider these things among others. There were just the cot,
a rough pine table, and my trunk, for furniture. I had only to wash my
face and hands in the tin basin of water that Sambo slipped under the
tent every morning, and all those bothering, small considerations were
disposed of for the day.
There was no carpet there to be swept--there were no pictures or china
to look after. Sambo made my bed, while I went into another tent to
breakfast; and the fighting was going on outside, which was to leave it
optional with Sambo about handing tin-basins of water to white folks.
All that suited me. Life under these circumstances seemed to have
something in it. I felt dignified to be alive, and thanked my father and
mother for it.
We have finished the war since then. I am not sorry for that, but life
in that tent has spoiled me for parlor fripperies. That's the worst of
it. I keep all the time asking everybody if they don't think we should
be a great deal happier without all these artificial wants, that so wear
our spirits and souls out. Bless you, they all say, yes; but they keep
going on all the same, and I suppose I shall.
* * * * *
A WOMAN'S MOTION.--I rise to make a proposition. It is this: that the
name and denomination, and the name of the pastor, of our respective
churches, should be neatly placed beside the principal entrance door,
that strangers may be able to find those churches they desire. Why not?
as well as the name of the sexton and his residence, which we find upon
nearly all our churches. I won't charge anything for the hint, provided
it is carried out. The thought came to me as I was touched upon the arm
by a stranger the other Sunday, in the porch of a New York church, and
asked, "Of what denomination is the pastor here?" I had to rub my head
to remember, for creeds and denominations find little lodgment there.
Provided I find Christianity, that's enough for me, and to my thinking,
no one church has the monopoly of that.
_WAIFS._
Did you ever try to rid yourself of a thing you did not want? An old
glove or a faded knot of ribbon, or a bit of lace? After Bettina has
picked it up, and with honest delight returned it as a missing valuable,
and every adult and minor in the house has taken his or her turn in
depositing it carefully on your table, were you ever driven "clean"
demented by the dust-man ringing the area bell, with the article in
question, thinking, deluded philanthropist, that he had performed a
virtuous action? Go where you may, can you rid yourself of it? Don't it
turn up between the covers of books, and stare at you from bureau
drawers, and appear simultaneously with your pocket-handkerchief on some
august occasion from your robe pocket? Will water quench it, or fire
burn it? Don't it always fly up chimney unharmed by the sparks, and
watch an opportunity to re-enter at the area door? When you go out,
don't it frisk along the gutter, timing itself to your steps, slow or
quick; or eddy round your head in a gust of wind, and finally get blown
back upon your door-step, where it persists in lodging, spite of brooms
and Bettys, till you get as nervous about it as if it were some
relentless enemy, dogging your every step? Perhaps all this while you
are hunting every nook and corner vainly to find some article you
_really_ want, and which persistently keeps out of your way, or at least
until you have given it up, and replaced it with a duplicate, when it
takes that occasion suddenly to appear, and innocently to confront you,
from a fold in an arm-chair, or sofa, or from the corner of a carpet.
When I experience these trials, I no longer marvel at the clutching
fingers thrust through the grated windows of lunatic asylums, or the
unearthly howls of rage or peals of wild laughter with which these
unfortunates give vent to their feelings. I no longer smile at the
annoyed man who, waking one fine spring morning, and looking at the
fresh grass, exclaimed, "What! _Green again!_ and--_blue_--his brains
(?) out."
* * * * *
PARTIAL JUDGMENT.--How few people are gifted with the faculty of seeing
round a corner; in other words, looking at both sides of a question
before deciding! Those who have _not_ this gift are always sinning, and
always repenting; always asserting, and always retracting. They may have
many estimable qualities, and yet, their house being built on such a
sandy foundation, one hesitates before entering it; or, if he makes up
his mind to do so, it is with the deliberate expectation that he may
possibly be buried under its ruins.
_TACT._
I'm not particularly good at definitions, but I know what tact is not.
It is not tact to sit down by the side of a person grieving for the
dead, and tell them how much more comfortable life would now be to them,
did they not love so strongly; and how much wiser, could they only be
more diffusive in their attachments, and concentrate less; so that when
the crape flutters from the door, one could coolly say: "Yes, it is
true--he or she is dead and gone; and there's no help for it; let us
turn to something else and be jolly."
It is not tact to tell a mother, who has an idiotic or deformed child,
how smart, and sweet, and bright are your own; with what a zest they
enter into rollicksome sports; how apt they are to learn, and how
brilliant may be their own and your future.
It is not tact, if you have an acquaintance, who only by the most rigid
and painstaking economy can maintain a presentable appearance, to make a
call on such, in an elaborate toilet, with manners to match.
It is not tact to embarrass persons of limited education, and little
reading, by conversing upon topics of which they can by no possibility
know anything, save that you have the advantage of them in that regard.
It is not tact, in the presence of an invalid, to dilate upon savory
dishes, and the pleasures of the table. It is not tact to converse with
an editor upon a quiet, peaceful life; or with a compelled authoress
upon the safe and uninvaded sanctities of the fireside for women.
The most astounding instance of _tact_, is to listen, inwardly
crucified, with a pleased air, to an old--_old_ joke, and a poor one at
that: to improvise a laugh at the proper moment, and successfully to
resist the malicious instinct to flatter the narrator, at the close, by
saying: "Yes, I have heard that before."
* * * * *
ANSWER YOUR CHILDREN'S QUESTIONS.--Education is erroneously supposed
only to be had at schools. The most ignorant children often have been
constant in their attendance there, and there have been very intelligent
ones who never saw the inside of a school-room. The child who always
asks an explanation of terms or phrases it cannot understand, who is
never willing to repeat, parrot-like, that which is incomprehensible,
will far outstrip in "education" the ordinary routine scholar.
"Education" goes on with children at the fireside--on the street--at
church--at play--everywhere. Do not refuse to answer their proper
questions then. Do not check this natural intelligence, for which
_books_ can never compensate, though you bestowed whole libraries.
_THE INFIRMITIES OF GENIUS._
"Poor Burns!" all exclaim after reading his life and his poems. Poor
Burns! _I_ too say; and the next minute I ask, impatiently, why _he_, so
conscious of his God-given powers, should have miserably shortened his
life one-half by ill-governed appetites and excesses. Why, if coining
his brain into dollars, for the widow and fatherless, proved impossible,
he should become so disgusted with manual labor, that even his filial,
fraternal, and conjugal love could not dignify its repulsive features,
since it needs _must be_. Why, with a loving, prudent, industrious,
faithful wife to help him, he could not emulate her everyday but sublime
heroism, not by paroxysms of effort, only to show us how well he _might_
have done, but that steady, determined persistence which seldom fails of
success. Why he, at once so great and so little, took pleasure and pride
in wallowing in the mire, merely because strait-laced hypocrisy stepped
daintily over it with white-sandalled feet. There was no greatness in
this. It was but the angry kick of the impatient urchin upon the chair
over which he had stumbled. Did his ambition to be written down a
publican and a sinner lessen the ranks of the Pharisee? Could he look
into the trusting faces of his innocent children, and feel no secret
pang that for so petty and unworthy a motive he was content to hazard or
forego their future respect? Had he none but himself to consult in such
unworthy disposition of his time and talents? Was it _manly_ in the
midst of that loving group coolly to look forward to the possibility of
an old age of beggary, and toleration by chance firesides, in the
undignified character of jester or clown? Because a man is a "genius,"
must one indorse these things and write them down as "eccentricities"
inseparable from it and to be lightly passed over? Must intellect
_necessarily_ be at variance with principle?
And yet--and yet--because I can say this, I do not fall a whit behind
the most ardent admirer of his genius. But I _do_ hold that he is to be
held as accountable for his errors as the most ordinary farmer's boy who
is unable to spell the name of the plough which he guides. Nor does this
interfere with the heart-aching pity with which I look upon the soiled
wings, so capable of soaring into a pure atmosphere, yet trailing their
beauty in the dust. Nor does this keep my eyes from overflowing when
some lofty or beautiful sentiment of his shines out diamond-like from
the rubbish.
_How could he? Why did he?_
Softly--reverently let us answer. We so full of faults--always
sinning--sometimes repenting. Softly let us answer. We who have not
sinned only because we were not tempted. Softly--we whom _pride_, not
_principle_, has saved. Softly--we whose lives the world writes fair,
and perhaps God's eye leprously foul.
* * * * *
COUNTRY MATINS.--He who sleeps at early dawn in the country, stops his
ears to the prayers of Nature. That early tuneful waking! What can
compare with it? Evening is soothing and sweet, with its stars and its
calm; but the gradual brightness of the new day, softly stealing upon
us, as the tints deepen and the songs strengthen, till the full
orchestra is complete, oh! this is soul strengthening and sublime! We
were weak of purpose, we were dispirited, the night before. Yesterday
had overlapped its cares, and our tired shoulders shrank from the coming
burden. But this bright resurrection heralded so thrillingly by soulless
creatures! Shall _we_ immortals only be thankless and dumb? We join the
chorus! Care sits lightly at this blessed hour. All things for that day
are possible to us--hard duty sweet. Blessed be God, then, for the sweet
dawning of each new day!
_A TRIP TO THE CAATSKILLS._
Well--I've "done" the Caatskills! I've tugged up that steep mountain,
one of the hottest days in which a quadruped or a biped ever perspired,
packed to suffocation, with other gasping sufferers, in that crucifying
institution called a stage-coach, until I became resignedly indifferent,
whether it reached its destination, or rolled head over heels--or rather
head over wheels--over the precipice. Landing at last at the hotel, I
was conscious of only one want--a bedroom; which, when obtained, was
close enough, and which I shared with three other jaded mortals. The
next morning, thanks to a good Providence and the landlord, I emigrated
into unexceptionable quarters.
Ah--now I breathe! now I remember no more that purgatorial reeling
stage-coach, and its protracted jigglings--wriggling--joltings and
bumpings. Now I am repaid--now I gaze--oh, how _can_ I gaze with only
one pair of eyes, on all this beauty and magnificence? This vast plain
spread out so far below our feet like an immense garden, with its
luxuriant foliage--its little cottages, smaller than a child's toy: its
noble river, specked with white sails, lessened by distance to a silver
thread, winding through the meadows; and beyond--still other plains,
other streams, other mountains--on--on--stretching far beyond the dizzy
ken, till the eye fills, and the heart swells, and leaning in an ecstasy
of happiness on the bosom of "Our Father," we cry, "Oh! what is man that
Thou art mindful of him?"
Now--as if the scene were too gorgeous for mortal sight, nature gently,
compassionately drops a silvery veil of mist before it, veiling, yet not
hiding--withdrawing, yet not removing--giving us now sunshine, now
shadow; bringing out now the vivid green of a meadow, now the silver
sheen of the river; now the bold outline of a pine-girdled mountain. And
now--the scene changes, and fleets of clouds sail slowly--glide ghostly,
round the mountain's base; winding-sheets wrapped round the shapely
trees, from which they burst with a glorious resurrection; while over
and above all arches the blue heavens, smiling that it canopies a scene
so fair. See--village after village, like specks in the distance--where
human hearts throb to human joys and sorrows; where restless ambition
flutters against the barred cage of necessity, pining for the
mountain-top of freedom; when, gained, oh, weary traveller, to lose its
distant golden splendor, and wrap thee in the chill vapors of
discontent. What matter--if thou but accept this proof of thy
immortality? Yes--village after village; farmers plodding on, as farmers
too often will, turning up the soil for dollars and cents, seeing only
in the clouds the filter for their crops; in the lakes the refrigerator
for their fish; in the glorious trees their fuel; in the waving grass
and sloping meadows, feed for their cattle; in the sweet sunrise an
alarm bell to labor, in the little bird's vespers but a call to feed and
sleep.
Now--twilight steals upon the mountains, calm as heaven. The bright
valleys sleep in their deepening shadows, while on the mountain-tops
lingers the glory, as if loath to fade into the perfumed night. With a
graceful sweep the little bird mounts to the clouds, takes his last
circling flight, and sings his evening hymn, sweet and soft as the rapt
soul's whispered farewell to earth. And yet--O God!--this is but the
porch to the temple, before whose dazzling splendors even Thy seraphs
veil their sinless eyes.
In an article in a late weekly, I was shocked at a flippant and
unfeeling allusion to "the yellow invalids one meets at
watering-places." Surely, the sight of such, wandering forth with feeble
step and faded eyes, taking their last look at this beautiful earth,
side by side with the rosy cheek and bounding pulse of health, should
excite in us only feelings of tenderest love and compassion. Some such I
met; but I would not, if I could, that their pale faces should have been
banished from our merry circle. It was no damper on my enjoyment to gaze
at their drooping eyelids, and listlessly crossed hands. I would but
have yielded them the cosiest corner on the sofa, or the most
comfortable arm-chair, or the sunniest nook on the piazza, or tempted
their failing appetite with the daintiest bit at the table. I would like
to have taken their transparent hands in my healthy palm, and given them
a kindly grasp, by which they would recognize me in that better land,
which every day dawns clearer on my sight. It is well that we should
have such in our midst; and surely none whose hearts are drawn by
yearning, but invisible cords, to the dear ones who _once_ made sunlight
in our homes, can fail to recognize and respond to the tacit claims of
the stranger-invalid upon our tenderest sympathies.
And while upon this subject, I would speak a word, which, it seems to
me, needs to be spoken--upon a courteous recognition of the lonely,
unobtrusive traveller, who, for the time, makes one of the same family
under a hotel roof. It is easy for all to pay court to the
distinguished, the handsome, or the agreeable; to seek an introduction
to such, or manufacture a pretext for speaking. It is for the
unattractive I would plead, and the aged--for those who have nothing to
recommend them to notice, save that they are unnoticed. It seems to me
that one need study no book of etiquette to find out, that a passing
salutation to such, a kind inquiry after their health, an offer of a
flower--when one has been rambling where their weary feet may not go--is
the true politeness. One feels like spurning the civility received at
the hands of those who see not in these disregarded ones the lineaments
of the same Father. It gives me pleasure to say that I have witnessed
some noble examples of courtesy to such, extended with a graceful ease,
which would seem less to confer a favor than to receive one by their
acceptance.
It was very pleasant to see little children at the Caatskills; but they
were all too few. Children are generally supposed to be bad travellers:
this is a mistake. They have often more self-denial, fortitude, and
endurance than half your grown people. I can answer at least for one
little girl under my charge from whom no amount of burning sun, hunger,
or fatigue, extorted a syllable of complaint; in fact, I once saw her
endure a car collision with the same commendable philosophy, while men
old enough to be her father were frantic with affright. "Render unto
children their due," is on the fly-leaf of _my_ Bible.
Yes, it is good for them to go out of cities. A city child is a cruel,
wicked, shapeless, one-sided abortion. 'Tis a pale shoot of a plant,
struggling bravely for its little day of life in some rayless corner,
all unblest by the warm sunshine which God intended to give to it color,
strength, and fragrance. What wonder that the blight falls on it? Do you
say, Pshaw? Do you suppose a child, for instance, could appreciate the
scenery at the Caatskills? I ask you, do all the _adults_ who flock
there to gaze, appreciate it? Do you not hear the words
"divine,"--"enchanting,"--"beautiful,"--"magnificent,"--applied by them,
as often to costume as to clouds? Give me a child's appreciation of such
a scene, before that of two-thirds of the adult gazers. Its thought may
be half-fledged, and given with lisping utterance, but it _is_ a
thought. The eyes, while speaking, may suddenly change their look of
wondering awe, for one of elfish fun; what matter! The feeling was
sincere, though fleeting--genuine, though fragmentary. By and by that
little child, leaving its sports, will come back again to my side as I
sit upon the rocks; and any gray-haired philosopher who can, may answer
the question with which she seals my lips; any poet who can, may coin a
phrase which, more fitly than her's, symbols nature's beauty. Now she's
off to play again--leaving the deep question unanswered, but not for
that reason to be forgotten--no more than the rock, or mountain, or
river, which called it forth, and which is hung up like a cabinet
picture in that childish memory, to be clouded over, it may be, by the
dust and discolorations of after years, but never destroyed--waiting
quietly that master touch, which obliterating all else, as if trivial or
unworthy, restores only to the fading eye of age, in freshened beauty,
the glowing pictures of childhood.
The great charm of the Caatskills is its constant variety; look where
you may, you shall never see twice the same effect of light and shade.
Again, and again I said to myself, How, amid such prodigal, changeful
beauty, shall the artist choose? Life were all too short for the
decision. Ever the busy finger of Omnipotence, silently showing us
wonder upon wonder. "Silently," did I say? Ah, no; ever writing, on
cloud and valley, rock, mountain, and river--"all these as a scroll
shall be rolled away, but My Word shall never pass away."
I have not spoken of the lovely rides in the vicinity of the Caatskills,
of which we were not slow to avail ourselves. Turn which way we would,
all was beauty. And yet, not all--I must not forget among these
magnificent mountains the hateful, bare, desolate, treeless, vineless,
old-fashioned school-house, resembling a covered pound for stray calves.
What a sight it was, to be sure, to see the weary children swarm out
into the warm sunshine, shouting for very joy that they _might_ shout,
and trying their poor cramped limbs to see if they had not actually lost
the use of them in those inquisitorially devised seats. Alas! what an
alphabet might a teacher who was a _child-lover_ have deciphered,
_outside_ those purgatorial walls, on trees, and flowers, and mountains;
the teaching of which would have needed no quickening ferule, cramped no
restless limbs, overtasked and diseased no forming brain! What streams
of knowledge, waiting only the divining rod of the lover of God, and His
representatives--_little children_--to freshen and to beautify
wheresoever they should flow!
Yes--it was good to see those children kicking their reprieved heels in
the air--I only wish they could have kicked over that desolate old
school-house. _They_ didn't know why I nodded to them such a merry good
day; they never will know, poor victims, how royally well I sympathized
with their somersets on the grass--they thought, perhaps, that I knew
the "school-marm;"--Heaven forbid--I would rather know the incendiary
who should set fire to her school-house!
In one neighborhood--which is so small that an undertaker must be sorely
puzzled to find subjects--I noticed a hideous picture of a coffin stuck
on the front of a small dwelling-house, with a repulsive ostentation
that outdid even New York. This, to an invalid visiting the Caatskills
for health (and there are many such), must be an inspiriting sight!