THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOLUME IX.

M DCCC LXII.

CONTENTS

Underlined titles are in this
issue

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. IX.—JANUARY, 1862.—NO. LI.

METHODS OF STUDY
IN NATURAL HISTORY.

I.

It is my intention, in this series of papers, to give the
history of the progress in Natural History from the
beginning,—to show how men first approached Nature,—how
the facts of Natural History have been accumulated, and how those
facts have been converted into science. In so doing, I shall
present the methods employed in Natural History on a wider scale
and with broader generalizations than if I limited myself to the
study as it exists to-day. The history of humanity, in its efforts
to understand the Creation, resembles the development of any
individual mind engaged in the same direction. It has its infancy,
with the first recognition of surrounding objects; and, indeed, the
early observers seem to us like children in their first attempts to
understand the world in which they live. But these efforts, that
appear childish to us now, were the first steps in that field of
knowledge which is so extensive that all our progress seems only to
show us how much is left to do.

Aristotle is the representative of the learning of antiquity in
Natural Science. The great mind of Greece in his day, and a leader
in all the intellectual culture of his time, he was especially a
naturalist, and his work on Natural History is a record not only of
his own investigations, but of all preceding study in this
department. It is evident that even then much had been done, and,
in allusion to certain peculiarities of the human frame, which he
does not describe in full, he refers his readers to familiar works,
saying, that illustrations in point may be found in anatomical
text-books.¹1. See Aristotle’s
Zoölogy, Book I., Chapter xiv.

Strange that in Aristotle’s day, two thousand years ago,
such books should have been in general use, and that in our time we
are still in want of elementary text-books of Natural History,
having special reference to the animals of our own country, and
adapted to the use of schools. One fact in Aristotle’s
“History of Animals” is very striking, and makes it
difficult for us to understand much of its contents. It never
occurs to him that a time may come when the Greek
language—the language of all culture and science in his
time—would not be the language of all cultivated men. He
took, therefore, little pains to characterize the animals he
alludes to, otherwise than by their current names; and of his
descriptions of their habits and peculiarities, much is lost upon
us from their local character and expression. There is also a total
absence of systematic form, of any classification or framework to
express the divisions of the animal kingdom into larger or lesser
groups. His only divisions are genera and species: classes, orders,
and families, as we understand them now, are quite foreign to the
Greek conception of the animal kingdom. Fishes and birds, for
instance, they considered as genera, and their different
representatives as species. They grouped together quadrupeds also
in contradistinction to animals with legs and wings, and they
distinguished those that bring forth living young from those that
lay eggs. But though a system of Nature was not familiar even to
their great philosopher, and Aristotle had not arrived at the idea
of a classification on general principles, he yet stimulated a
search into the closer affinities among animals by the differences
he pointed out. He divided the animal kingdom into two groups,
which he called Enaima and Anaima, or animals
with blood and animals without blood. We must remember, however,
that by the word blood he designated only the red fluid
circulating in the higher animals; whereas a fluid akin to blood
exists in all animals, variously colored in some, but colorless in
a large number of others.

After Aristotle, a long period elapsed without any addition to
the information he left us. Rome and the Middle Ages gave us
nothing, and even Pliny added hardly a fact to those that Aristotle
recorded. And though the great naturalists of the sixteenth century
gave a new impulse to this study, their investigations were chiefly
directed towards a minute acquaintance with the animals they had an
opportunity of observing, mingled with commentaries upon the
ancients. Systematic Zoölogy was but little advanced by their
efforts.

We must come down to the last century, to Linnæus, before
we find the history taken up where Aristotle had left it, and some
of his suggestions carried out with new vigor and vitality.
Aristotle had distinguished only between genera and species;
Linnæus took hold of this idea, and gave special names to
other groups, of different weight and value. Besides species and
genera, he gives us orders and classes,—considering classes
the most comprehensive, then orders, then genera, then species. He
did not, however, represent these groups as distinguished by their
nature, but only by their range; they were still to him, as genera
and species had been to Aristotle, only larger or smaller groups,
not founded upon and limited by different categories of structure.
He divided the animal kingdom into six classes, which I give here,
as we shall have occasion to compare them with other
classifications:—Mammalia, Birds,
Reptiles, Fishes, Insects,
Worms.

That this classification should have expressed all that was
known in the last century of the most general relations among
animals only shows how difficult it is to generalize on such a
subject; nor should we expect to find it an easy task, when we
remember the vast number of species (about a quarter of a million)
already noticed by naturalists. Linnæus succeeded, however,
in finding a common character on which to unite most of his
classes; but the Mammalia, that group to which we ourselves belong,
remained very imperfect. Indeed, in the earlier editions of his
classification, he does not apply the name of Mammalia to this
class, but calls the higher animals Quadrupedia,
characterizing them as the animals with four legs and covered with
fur or hair, that bring forth living young and nurse them with
milk. In thus admitting external features as class characters, he
excluded many animals which by their mode of reproduction, as well
as by their respiration and circulation, belong to this class as
much as the Quadrupeds,—as, for instance, all the Cetaceans,
(Whales, Porpoises, and the like,) which, though they have not
legs, nor are their bodies covered with hair or fur, yet bring
forth living young, nurse them with milk, are warm-blooded and
air-breathing. As more was learned of these animals, there arose
serious discussion and criticism among contemporary naturalists
respecting the classification of Linnæus, all of which led to
a clearer insight into the true relations among animals.
Linnæus himself, in his last edition of the “Systema
Naturæ,” shows us what important progress he had made
since he first announced his views; for he there substitutes for
the name of Quadrupedia that of Mammalia,
including among them the Whales, which he characterizes as
air-breathing, warm-blooded, and bringing forth living young which
they nurse with milk. Thus the very deficiencies of his
classification stimulated naturalists to new criticism and
investigation into the true limits of classes, and led to the
recognition of one most important principle,—that such groups
are founded, not on external appearance, but on internal structure,
and that internal structure, therefore, is the thing to be studied.
The group of Quadrupeds was not the only defective one in this
classification of Linnæus; his class of Worms, also, was most
heterogeneous, for he included among them Shell-Fishes, Slugs,
Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins, and other animals that bear no relation
whatever to the class of Worms.

But whatever its defects, the classification of Linnæus
was the first attempt at grouping animals together according to
certain common structural characters. His followers and pupils
engaged at once in a scrutiny of the differences and similarities
among animals, which soon led to a great increase in the number of
classes: instead of six, there were presently nine, twelve, and
more. But till Cuvier’s time there was no great principle of
classification. Facts were accumulated and more or less
systematized, but they were not yet arranged according to law; the
principle was still wanting by which to generalize them and give
meaning and vitality to the whole. It was Cuvier who found the key.
He himself tells us how he first began, in his investigations upon
the internal organization of animals, to use his dissections with
reference to finding the true relations between animals, and how,
ever after, his knowledge of anatomy assisted him in his
classifications, and his classifications threw new light again on
his anatomical investigations,—each science thus helping to
fertilize the other. He was not one of those superficial observers
who are in haste to announce every new fact that they chance to
find, and his first paper²2. Sur
un nouveau rapprochement à établir entre les Classes
qui composent le Règne Animal. Ann. Mus., Vol.
XIX. specially devoted to classification gave to the world
the ripe fruit of years of study. This was followed by his great
work, “Le Règne Animal.” He said that animals
were united in their most comprehensive groups, not on special
characters, but on different plans of
structure,—moulds, he called them, in which all animals
had been cast. He tells us this in such admirable language that I
must, to do justice to his thought, give it in his own
words:—

“Si l’on considère le
règne animal d’après les principes que nous
venons de poser en se débarrassant des
préjugés établis sur les divisions
anciennement admises, en n’ayant égard
qu’à l’organisation et à la nature des
animaux, et non pas à leur grandeur, à leur
utilité, au plus ou moins de connaissance que nous en avons,
ni à toutes les autres circonstances accessoires, on
trouvera qu’il existe quatre formes principales, quatre plans
généraux, si l’on peut s’exprimer ainsi,
d’après lesquels tous les animaux semblent avoir
été modelés, et dont les divisions
ultérieures, de quelque titre que les naturalistes les aient
décorées, ne sont que des modifications assez
légères, fondées sur le développement
ou l’addition de quelques parties, qui ne changent rien
à l’essence du plan.”

The value of this principle was soon tested by its application
to facts already known, and it was found that animals whose
affinities had been questionable before were now at once referred
to their true relations with other animals by ascertaining whether
they were built on one or another of these plans. Of such plans or
structural conceptions Cuvier found in the whole animal kingdom
only four, which he called Vertebrates, Mollusks,
Articulates, and Radiates.

With this new principle as the basis of investigation, it was no
longer enough for the naturalist to know a certain amount of
features characteristic of a certain number of animals,—he
must penetrate deep enough into their organization to find the
secret of their internal structure. Till he can do this, he is like
the traveller in a strange city, who looks on the exterior of
edifices entirely new to him, but knows nothing of the plan of
their internal architecture. To be able to read in the finished
structure the plan on which the whole is built is now essential to
every naturalist.

There have been many criticisms on this division of
Cuvier’s, and many attempts to change it; but though some
improvements have been made in the details of his classification,
all departures from its great fundamental principle are errors, and
do but lead us away from the recognition of the true affinities
among animals.

Each of these plans may be stated in the most general terms. In
the Vertebrates there is a vertebral column terminating in
a prominent head; this column has an arch above and an arch below,
forming a double internal cavity. The parts are symmetrically
arranged on either side of the longitudinal axis of the body. In
the Mollusks, also, the parts are arranged according to a
bilateral symmetry on either side of the body, but the body has but
one cavity, and is a soft, concentrated mass, without a distinct
individualization of parts. In the Articulates there is
but one cavity, and the parts are here again arranged on either
side of the longitudinal axis, but in these animals the whole body
is divided from end to end into transverse rings or joints movable
upon each other. In the Radiates we lose sight of the
bilateral symmetry so prevalent in the other three, except as a
very subordinate element of structure; the plan of this lowest type
is an organic sphere, in which all parts bear definite relations to
a vertical axis.

It is not upon any special features, then, that these largest
divisions of the animal kingdom are based, but simply upon the
general structural idea. Striking as this statement was, it was
coldly received at first by contemporary naturalists: they could
hardly grasp Cuvier’s wide generalizations, and perhaps there
was also some jealousy of the grandeur of his views. Whatever the
cause, his principle of classification was not fully appreciated;
but it opened a new road for study, and gave us the keynote to the
natural affinities among animals. Lamarck, his contemporary, not
recognizing the truth of this principle, distributed the animal
kingdom into two great divisions, which he calls
Vertebrates and Invertebrates. Ehrenberg also, at
a later period, announced another division under two
heads,—those with a continuous solid nervous centre, and
those with merely scattered nervous
swellings.³3. For more details
upon the different systems of Zoölogy, see Agassiz’s Essay on
Classification in his Contributions to the Natural History of
the United States, Vol. I.

But there was no real progress in either of these latter
classifications, so far as the primary divisions are concerned; for
they correspond to the old division of Aristotle, under the head of
animals with or without blood, the Enaima and
Anaima. This coincidence between systems based on
different foundations may teach us that every structural
combination includes certain inherent necessities which will bring
animals together on whatever set of features we try to classify
them; so that the division of Aristotle, founded on the circulating
fluids, or that of Lamarck, on the absence or presence of a
backbone, or that of Ehrenberg, on the differences of the nervous
system, cover the same ground. Lamarck attempted also to use the
faculties of animals as a groundwork for division among them. But
our knowledge of the psychology of animals is still too imperfect
to justify any such use of it. His divisions into Apathetic,
Sensitive, and Intelligent animals are entirely theoretical. He
places, for instance, Fishes and Reptiles among the Intelligent
animals, as distinguished from Crustacea and Insects, which he
refers to the second division. But one would be puzzled to say how
the former manifest more intelligence than the latter, or why the
latter should be placed among the Sensitive animals. Again, some of
the animals that he calls Apathetic have been proved by later
investigators to show an affection and care for their young,
seemingly quite inconsistent with the epithet he has applied to
them. In fact, we know so little of the faculties of animals that
any classification based upon our present information about them
must be very imperfect.

Many modifications of Cuvier’s great divisions have been
attempted. Some naturalists, for instance, have divided off a part
of the Radiates and Articulates, insisting upon some special
features of structure, and mistaking these for the more important
and general characteristics of their respective plans. All
subsequent investigations of such would-be improvements show them
to be retrograde movements, only proving more clearly that Cuvier
detected in his four plans all the great structural ideas on which
the vast variety of animals is founded. This result is of greater
importance than may at first appear. Upon it depends the question,
whether all such classifications represent merely individual
impressions and opinions of men, or whether there is really
something in Nature that presses upon us certain divisions among
animals, certain affinities, certain limitations, founded upon
essential principles of organization. Are our systems the
inventions of naturalists, or only their reading of the Book of
Nature? and can that book have more than one reading? If these
classifications are not mere inventions, if they are not an attempt
to classify for our own convenience the objects we study, then they
are thoughts which, whether we detect them or not, are expressed in
Nature,—then Nature is the work of thought, the production of
intelligence carried out according to plan, therefore
premeditated,—and in our study of natural objects we are
approaching the thoughts of the Creator, reading His conceptions,
interpreting a system that is His and not ours.

All the divergence from the simplicity and grandeur of this
division of the animal kingdom arises from an inability to
distinguish between a plan and the execution, of a plan. We allow
the details to shut out the plan itself, which exists quite
independent of special forms. I hope we shall find a meaning in all
these plans that will prove them to be the parts of one great
conception and the work of one Mind.

II.

Proceeding upon the view that there is a close analogy between
the way in which every individual student penetrates into Nature
and the progress of science as a whole in the history of humanity,
I continue my sketch of the successive steps that have led to our
present state of knowledge. I began with Aristotle, and showed that
this great philosopher, though he prepared a digest of all the
knowledge belonging to his time, yet did not feel the necessity of
any system or of any scientific language differing from the common
mode of expression of his day. He presents his information as a man
with his eyes open narrates in a familiar style what he sees. As
civilization spread and science had its representatives in other
countries besides Greece, it became indispensable to have a common
scientific language, a technical nomenclature, combining many
objects under common names, and enabling every naturalist to
express the results of his observations readily and simply in a
manner intelligible to all other students of Natural History.

Linnæus devised such a system, and to him we owe a most
simple and comprehensive scientific mode of designating animals and
plants. It may at first seem no advantage to give up the common
names of the vernacular and adopt the unfamiliar ones, but a word
of explanation will make the object clear. Perceiving, for
instance, the close relations between certain members of the larger
groups, Linnæus gave to them names that should be common to
all, and which are called generic names,—as we speak of
Ducks, when we would designate in one word the Mallard, the
Widgeon, the Canvas-Back, etc.; but to these generic names he added
qualifying epithets, called specific names, to indicate the
different kinds in each group. For example, the Lion, the Tiger,
the Panther, the Domestic Cat constitute such a natural group,
which Linnæus called Felis, Cat, indicating the
whole genus; but the species he designates as Felis catus,
the Domestic Cat,—Felis leo, the
Lion,—Felis tigris, the Tiger,—Felis
panthera, the Panther. So he called all the Dogs
Canis; but for the different kinds we have Canis
familiaris, the Domestic Dog,—Canis lupus, the
Wolf,—Canis vulpes, the Fox, etc.

In some families of the vegetable kingdom we can appreciate
better the application of this nomenclature, because we have
something corresponding to it in the vernacular. We have, for
instance, one name for all the Oaks, but we call the different
kinds Swamp Oak, Red Oak, White Oak, Chestnut Oak, etc. So
Linnæus, in his botanical nomenclature, called all the Oaks
by the generic name Quercus, (characterizing them by their
fruit, the acorn, common to all,) and qualified them as Quercus
bicolor, Quercus rubra, Quercus alba,
Quercus castanea, etc., etc. His nomenclature, being so
easy of application, became at once exceedingly popular and made
him the great scientific legislator of his century. He insisted on
Latin names, because, if every naturalist should use his own
language, it must lead to great confusion, and this Latin
nomenclature of double significance was adopted by all. Another
advantage of this binominal Latin nomenclature consists in
preventing the confusion frequently arising from the use of the
same name to designate different animals in different parts of the
world,—as, for instance, the name of Robin, used in America
to designate a bird of the Thrush family, entirely different from
the Robin of the Old World,—or of different names for the
same animal, as Perch or Chogset or Burgall for our Cunner. Nothing
is more to be deprecated than an over-appreciation of
technicalities, valuing the name more highly than the thing; but
some knowledge of this nomenclature is necessary to every student
of Nature.

The improvements in science thus far were chiefly verbal. Cuvier
now came forward and added a principle. He showed that all animals
are built upon a certain number of definite plans. This momentous
step, the significance of which is not yet appreciated to its full
extent; for, had its importance been understood, the efforts of
naturalists would have been directed toward a further illustration
of the distinctive characteristics of all the plans,—instead
of which, the division of the animal kingdom into larger and
smaller groups chiefly attracted their attention, and has been
carried too far by some of them. Linnæus began with six
classes, Cuvier brought them up to nineteen, and at last the animal
kingdom was subdivided by subsequent investigators into
twenty-eight classes. This multiplication of divisions, however,
soon suggested an important question: How far are these divisions
natural or inherent in the objects themselves, and not dependent on
individual views?

While Linnæus pointed out classes, orders, genera, and
species, other naturalists had detected other divisions among
animals, called families. Lamarck, who had been a distinguished
botanist before he began his study of the animal kingdom, brought
to his zoölogical researches his previous methods of
investigation. Families in the vegetable kingdom had long been
distinguished by French botanists; and one cannot examine the
groups they call by this name, without perceiving, that, though
they bring them together and describe them according to other
characters, they have been unconsciously led to unite them from the
general similarity of their port and bearing. Take, for instance,
the families of Pines, Oaks, Beeches, Maples, etc., and you feel at
once, that, besides the common characters given in the technical
descriptions of these trees, there is also a general resemblance
among them that would naturally lead us to associate them together,
even if we knew nothing of the other features of their structure.
By an instinctive recognition of this family likeness between
plants, botanists have been led to seek for structural characters
on which to unite them, and the groups so founded generally
correspond with the combinations suggested by their appearance.

By a like process Lamarck combined animals into families. His
method was adopted by French naturalists generally, and found favor
especially with Cuvier, who was particularly successful in limiting
families among animals, and in naming them happily, generally
selecting names expressive of the features on which the groups were
founded, or borrowing them from familiar animals. Much, indeed,
depends upon the pleasant sound and the significance of a name; for
an idea reaches the mind more easily when well expressed, and
Cuvier’s names were both simple and significant. His
descriptions are also remarkable for their graphic
precision,—giving all that is essential, omitting all that is
merely accessory. He has given us the key-note to his progress in
his own expressive language:—

“Je dus donc, et cette obligation me prit un
temps considérable, je dus faire marcher de front
l’anatomie et la zoologie, les dissections et le classement;
chercher dans mes premières remarques sur
l’organisation des distributions meilleures; m’en
servir pour arriver à des remarques nouvelles; employer
encore ces remarques à perfectionner les distributions;
faire sortir enfin de cette fécondation mutuelle des deux
sciences, l’une par l’autre, un système
zoologique propre à servir d’introducteur et de guide
dans le champ de l’anatomie, et un corps de doctrine
anatomique propre à servir de développement et
d’explication au système zoologique.”

It is deeply to be lamented that so many naturalists have
entirely overlooked this significant advice of Cuvier’s, to
combine zoölogical and anatomical studies in order to arrive
at a clearer perception of the true affinities among animals. To
sum it up in one word, he tells us that the secret of his method is
“comparison,”—ever comparing and comparing
throughout the enormous range of his knowledge of the organization
of animals, and founding upon the differences as well as the
similarities those broad generalizations under which he has
included all animal structures. And this method, so prolific in his
hands, has also a lesson for us all. In this country there is a
growing interest in the study of Nature; but while there exist
hundreds of elementary works illustrating the native animals of
Europe, there are few such books here to satisfy the demand for
information respecting the animals of our land and water. We are
thus forced to turn more and more to our own investigations and
less to authority; and the true method of obtaining independent
knowledge is this very method of
Cuvier’s,—comparison.

Let us make the most common application of it to natural
objects. Suppose we see together a Dog, a Cat, a Bear, a Horse, a
Cow, and a Deer. The first feature that strikes us as common to any
two of them is the horn in the Cow and Deer. But how shall we
associate either of the others with these? We examine the teeth,
and find those of the Dog, the Cat, and the Bear sharp and cutting,
while those of the Cow, the Deer, and the Horse have flat surfaces,
adapted to grinding and chewing, rather than cutting and tearing.
We compare these features of their structure with the habits of
these animals, and find that the first are carnivorous, that they
seize and tear their prey, while the others are herbivorous or
grazing animals, living only on vegetable substances, which they
chew and grind. We compare farther the Horse and Cow, and find that
the Horse has front teeth both in the upper and lower jaw, while
the Cow has them only in the lower; and going still farther and
comparing the internal with the external features, we find this
arrangement of the teeth in direct relation to the different
structure of the stomach in the two animals,—the Cow having a
stomach with four pouches, adapted to a mode of digestion by which
the food is prepared for the second mastication, while the Horse
has a simple stomach. Comparing the Cow and the Deer, we find that
the digestive apparatus is the same in both; but though they both
have horns, in the Cow the horn is hollow, and remains through life
firmly attached to the bone, while in the Deer it is solid and is
shed every year. With these facts before us, we cannot hesitate to
place the Dog, the Cat, and the Bear in one division, as
carnivorous animals, and the other three in another division as
herbivorous animals,—and looking a little farther, we
perceive, that, in common with the Cow and the Deer, the Goat and
the Sheep have cloven feet, and that they are all ruminants, while
the Horse has a single hoof, does not ruminate, and must therefore
be separated from them, even though, like them, he is
herbivorous.

This is but the simplest illustration, taken from the most
familiar objects, of this comparative method; but the same process
is equally applicable to the most intricate problems in animal
structures, and will give us the clue to all true affinities
between animals. The education of a naturalist, now, consists
chiefly in learning how to compare. If he have any power of
generalization, when he has collected his facts, this habit of
mental comparison will lead him up to principles, to the great laws
of combination. It must not discourage us, that the process is a
slow and laborious one, and the results of one lifetime after all
very small. It might seem invidious, were I to show here how small
is the sum total of the work accomplished even by the great
exceptional men, whose names are known throughout the civilized
world. But I may at least be permitted to speak of my own efforts,
and to sum up in the fewest words the result of my life’s
work. I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet
a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown
that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in
geological times and the different stages of their growth in the
egg,—this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to
apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like
nature. But, such as it is, it has been reached by this system of
comparison, which, though I speak of it now in its application to
the study of Natural History, is equally important in every other
branch of knowledge. By the same process the most mature results of
scientific research in Philology, in Ethnology, and in Physical
Science are reached. And let me say that the community should
foster the purely intellectual efforts of scientific men as
carefully as they do their elementary schools and their practical
institutions, generally considered so much more useful and
important to the public. For from what other source shall we derive
the higher results that are gradually woven into the practical
resources of our life, except from the researches of those very men
who study science not for its uses, but for its truth? It is this
that gives it its noblest interest: it must be for truth’s
sake, and not even for the sake of its usefulness to humanity, that
the scientific man studies Nature. The application of science to
the useful arts requires other abilities, other qualities, other
tools than his; and therefore I say that the man of science who
follows his studies into their practical application is false to
his calling. The practical man stands ever ready to take up the
work where the scientific man leaves it, and to adapt it to the
material wants and uses of daily life.

The publication of Cuvier’s proposition, that the animal
kingdom is built on four plans, created an extraordinary excitement
throughout the scientific world. All naturalists proceeded to test
it, and many soon recognized in it a great scientific
truth,—while others, who thought more of making themselves
prominent than of advancing science, proposed poor amendments, that
were sure to be rejected on farther investigation. There were,
however, some of these criticisms and additions that were truly
improvements, and touched upon points overlooked by Cuvier.
Blainville, especially, took up the element of form among
animals,—whether divided on two sides, whether radiated,
whether irregular, etc. He, however, made the mistake of giving
very elaborate names to animals already known under simpler ones.
Why, for instance, call all animals with parts radiating in every
direction Actinomorpha or Actinozoaria, when they
had received the significant name of Radiates? It seemed,
to be a new system, when in fact it was only a new name. Ehrenberg,
likewise, made an important distinction, when he united the animals
according to the difference in their nervous systems; but he also
incumbered the nomenclature unnecessarily, when he added to the
names Anaima and Enaima of Aristotle those of
Myeloneura and Ganglioneura.

But it is not my object to give all the classifications of
different authors here, and I will therefore pass over many noted
ones, as those of Burmeister, Milne, Edwards, Siebold and Stannius,
Owen, Leuckart, Vogt, Van Beneden, and others, and proceed to give
some account of one investigator who did as much for the progress
of Zoölogy as Cuvier, though he is comparatively little known
among us. Karl Ernst von Baer proposed a classification based, like
Cuvier’s, upon plan; but he recognized what Cuvier failed to
perceive,—namely, the importance of distinguishing between
type (by which he means exactly what Cuvier means by plan) and
complication of structure,—in other words, between plan and
the execution of the plan. He recognized four types, which
correspond exactly to Cuvier’s four plans, though he calls
them by different names. Let us compare them.

Though perhaps less felicitous, the names of Baer express the
same ideas as those of Cuvier. By the Peripheric he
signified those in which all the parts converge from the periphery
or circumference of the animal to its centre. Cuvier only reverses
this definition in his name of Radiates, signifying the
animals in which all parts radiate from the centre to the
circumference. By Massive, Baer indicated those animals in
which the structure is soft and concentrated, without a very
distinct individualization of parts,—exactly the animals
included by Cuvier under his name of Mollusks, or
soft-bodied animals. In his selection of the epithet
Longitudinal, Baer was less fortunate; for all animals
have a longitudinal diameter, and this word was not, therefore,
sufficiently special. Yet his Longitudinal type answers
exactly to Cuvier’s Articulates,—animals in
which all parts are arranged in a succession of articulated joints
along a longitudinal axis. Cuvier has expressed this jointed
structure in the name Articulates; whereas Baer, in his
name of Longitudinal, referred only to the arrangement of
joints in longitudinal succession, in a continuous string, as it
were, one after another. For the Doubly Symmetrical type
his name is the better of the two; for Cuvier’s name of
Vertebrates alludes only to the backbone,—while
Baer, who is an embryologist, signifies in his their mode of growth
also. He knew what Cuvier did not know, that in its first formation
the germ of the Vertebrate divides in two folds: one turning up
above the backbone, to inclose all the sensitive Organs,—the
spinal marrow, the organs of sense, all those organs by which life
is expressed; the other turning down below the backbone, and
inclosing all those organs by which life is maintained,—the
organs of digestion, of respiration, of circulation, of
reproduction, etc. So there is in this type not only an equal
division of parts on either side, but also a division above and
below, making thus a double symmetry in the plan, expressed by Baer
in the name he gave it. Baer was perfectly original in his
conception of these four types, for his paper was published in the
very same year with that of Cuvier. But even in Germany, his native
land, his ideas were not fully appreciated: strange that it should
be so,—for, had his countrymen recognized his genius, they
might have claimed him as the compeer of the great French
naturalist.

Baer also founded the science of Embryology, under the guidance
of his teacher, Dollinger. His researches in this direction showed
him that animals were not only built on four plans, but that they
grew according to four modes of development. The Vertebrate arises
from the egg differently from the Articulate,—the Articulate
differently from the Mollusk,—the Mollusk differently from
the Radiate. Cuvier only showed us the four plans as they exist in
the adult; Baer went a step farther, and showed us the four plans
in the process of formation. But his greatest scientific
achievement is perhaps the discovery that all animals originate in
eggs, and that all these eggs are at first identical in substance
and structure. The wonderful and untiring research condensed into
this simple statement, that all animals arise from eggs and that
all those eggs are identical in the beginning, may well excite our
admiration. This egg consists of an outer envelope, the vitelline
membrane, containing a fluid more or less dense, the yolk; within
this is a second envelope, the so-called germinative vesicle,
containing a somewhat different and more transparent fluid, and in
the fluid of this second envelope float one or more so-called
germinative specks. At this stage of their growth all eggs are
microsopically small, yet each one has such tenacity of its
individual principle of life that no egg was ever known to swerve
from the pattern of the parent animal that gave it birth.

III.

From the time that Linnæus showed us the necessity of a
scientific system as a framework for the arrangement of scientific
facts in Natural History, the number of divisions adopted by
zoölogists and botanists increased steadily. Not only were
families, orders, and classes added to genera and species, but
these were further multiplied by subdivisions of the different
groups. But as the number of divisions increased, they lost in
precise meaning, and it became more and more doubtful how far they
were true to Nature. Moreover, these divisions were not taken in
the same sense by all naturalists: what were called families by
some were called orders by others, while the orders of some were
the classes of others, till it began to be doubted whether these
scientific systems had any foundation in Nature, or signified
anything more than that it had pleased Linnæus, for instance,
to call certain groups of animals by one name, while Cuvier had
chosen to call them by another.

These divisions are, first, the most comprehensive groups, the
primary divisions, called branches by some, types by others, and
divided by some naturalists into so-called sub-types, meaning only
a more limited circumscription of the same kind of group; next we
have classes, and these also have been divided into sub-classes,
then orders and sub-orders, families, sub-families, and tribes;
then genera, species, and varieties. With reference to the
question, whether these groups really exist in Nature or are merely
the expression of individual theories and opinions, it is worth
while to study the works of the early naturalists, in order to
trace the natural process by which scientific classification has
been reached; for in this, as in other departments of learning,
practice has always preceded theory. We do the thing before we
understand why we do it: speech precedes grammar, reason precedes
logic; and so a division of animals into groups, upon an
instinctive perception of their differences, has preceded all our
scientific creeds and doctrines. Let us, therefore, proceed to
examine the meaning of these names as adopted by naturalists.

When Cuvier proposed his four primary divisions of the animal
kingdom, he added his argument for their
adoption,—because, he said, they are constructed on
four different plans. All the progress in our science since his
time confirms this result; and I shall attempt to show that there
are really four, and only four, such structural ideas at the
foundation of the animal kingdom, and that all animals are included
under one or another of them. But it does not follow, that, because
we have arrived at a sound principle, we are therefore unerring in
our practice. From ignorance we may misplace animals, and include
them under the wrong division. This is a mistake, however, which a
better insight into their organization rectifies; and experience
constantly proves, that, whenever the structure of an animal is
perfectly understood, there is no hesitation as to the head under
which it belongs. We may consequently test the merits of these four
primary groups on the evidence furnished by investigation. It has
already been seen that these plans may be presented in the most
abstract manner without any reference to special animals.
Radiation expresses in one word the idea on which the
lowest of these types is based. In Radiates we have no
prominent bilateral symmetry, as in all other animals, but an
all-sided symmetry, in which there is no right and left, no
anterior and posterior extremity, no above and below. They are
spheroidal bodies; yet, though many of them remind us of a sphere,
they are by no means to be compared to a mathematical sphere, but
rather to an organic sphere, so loaded with life, as it were, as to
produce an infinite variety of radiate symmetry. The whole
organization is arranged around a centre toward which all the parts
converge, or, in a reverse sense, from which all the parts radiate.
In Mollusks there is a longitudinal axis and a bilateral
symmetry; but the longitudinal axis in these soft concentrated
bodies is not very prominent; and though the two ends of this axis
are distinct from each other, the difference is not so marked that
we can say at once, for all of them, which is the anterior and
which the posterior extremity. In this type, right and left have
the preponderance over the other diameters of the body. The sides
are the prominent parts,—they are charged with the important
organs, loaded with those peculiarities of the structure that give
it character. The Oyster is a good instance of this, with its
double valve, so swollen on one side, so flat on the other. There
is an unconscious recognition of this in the arrangement of all
collections of Mollusks; for, though the collectors do not put up
their specimens with any intention of illustrating this
peculiarity, they instinctively give them the position best
calculated to display their distinctive characteristics, and to
accomplish this they necessarily place them in such a manner as to
show the sides. In Articulates there is also a
longitudinal axis of the body and a bilateral symmetry in the
arrangement of parts; the head and tail are marked, and the right
and left sides are distinct. But the prominent tendency in this
type is the development of the dorsal and ventral region; here
above and below prevail over right and left. It is the back and the
lower side that have the preponderance over any other part of the
structure in Articulates. The body is divided from end to end by a
succession of transverse constrictions, forming movable rings; but
the character of the animal, its striking features, are always
above or below, and especially developed on the back. Any
collection of Insects or Crustacea is an evidence of this; being
always instinctively arranged in such a manner as to show the
predominant features, they uniformly exhibit the back of the
animal. The profile view of an Articulate has no significance;
whereas in a Mollusk, on the contrary, the profile view is the most
illustrative of the structural character. In the highest division,
the Vertebrates, so characteristically called by Baer the
Doubly Symmetrical type, a solid column runs through the
body with an arch above and an arch below, thus forming a double
internal cavity. In this type, the head is the prominent feature;
it is, as it were, the loaded end of the longitudinal axis, so
charged with vitality as to form an intelligent brain, and rising
in man to such predominance as to command and control the whole
organism. The structure is arranged above and below this axis, the
upper cavity containing all the sensitive organs, and the lower
cavity containing all those by which life is maintained.

While Cuvier and his followers traced these four distinct plans,
as shown in the adult animal, Baer opened to us a new field of
investigation in the embryology of the four types, showing that for
each there was a special mode of growth in the egg. Looking at them
from this point of view, we shall see that these four types, with
their four modes of growth, seem to fill out completely the plan or
outline of the animal kingdom, and leave no reason to expect any
further development or any other plan of animal life within these
limits. The eggs of all animals are spheres, such as I have
described them; but in the Radiate the whole periphery is
transformed into the germ, so that it becomes, by the liquefying of
the yolk, a hollow sphere. In the Mollusks, the germ lies above the
yolk, absorbing its whole substance through the under side, thus
forming a massive close body instead of a hollow one. In the
Articulate, the germ is turned in a position exactly opposite to
that of the Mollusk, and absorbs the yolk upon the back. In the
Vertebrate, the germ divides in two folds, one turning upward, the
other turning downward, above and below the central backbone. These
four modes of development seem to exhaust the possibilities of the
primitive sphere, which is the foundation of all animal life, and
therefore I believe that Cuvier and Baer were right in saying that
the whole animal kingdom is included under these four structural
ideas.

Leuckart proposed to subdivide the Radiates into two groups: the
Coelenterata, including Polyps and Acalephs or
Jelly-Fishes,—and Echinoderms, including Star-Fishes,
Sea-Urchins, and Holothurians. His reason for this distinction is
the fact that in the latter the organs are inclosed within walls of
their own, distinct from the body-wall; whereas in the former the
organs are formed by internal folds of the outer wall of the body,
as in the Polyps, or are hollowed out of the substance of the body,
as in Jelly-Fishes. This implies no difference in the plan, but
merely a difference in the execution of the plan. Both are equally
radiate in their structure; and when Leuckart separated them as
distinct primary types, he mistook a difference in the material
expression of the plan for a difference in the plan itself. So some
naturalists have distinguished Worms from the other Articulates as
a separate division. But the structural plan of this type is a body
divided by transverse constrictions or joints; and whether those
joints are uniformly arranged from one end of the body to the
other, as in the Worms, or whether the front joints are soldered
together so as to form two regions of the body, as in Crustacea, or
divided so as to form three regions of the body, as in winged
Insects, does not in the least affect the typical character of the
structure, which remains the same in all. Branches or types, then,
are natural groups of the animal kingdom, founded on plans of
structure or structural ideas.

What now are classes? Are they lesser divisions, differing only
in extent, or are they founded on special characters? I believe the
latter view to be the true one, and that class characters have a
significance quite different from that of their mere range or
extent. These divisions are founded on certain categories of
structure; and were there but one animal of a class in the world,
if it had those characters on which a class is founded, it would be
as distinct from all other animals as if its kind were counted by
thousands. Baer approached the idea of the classes when he
discriminated between plan of structure or type and the degree of
perfection in the structure. But while he understands the
distinction between a plan and its execution, his ideas respecting
the different features of structure are not quite so precise. He
does not, for instance, distinguish between the complication of a
given structure and the mode of execution of a plan, both of which
are combined in what he calls degrees of perfection. And yet,
without this distinction, the difference between classes and orders
cannot be understood; for classes and orders rest upon a just
appreciation of these two categories, which are quite distinct from
each other, and have by no means the same significance. Again,
quite distinct from both of these is the character of form, not to
be confounded either with complication of structure, on which
orders are based, or with the execution of the plan, on which
classes rest. An example will show that form is no guide for the
determination of classes or orders. Take, for instance, a
Beche-de-Mer, a member of the highest class of Radiates, and
compare it with a Worm. They are both long cylindrical bodies; but
one has parallel divisions along the length of the body, the other
has the body divided by transverse rings. Though in external form
they resemble each other, the one is a worm-like Radiate, the other
is a worm-like Articulate, each having the structure of its own
type; so that they do not even belong to the same great division of
the animal kingdom, much less to the same class. We have a similar
instance in the Whales and Fishes,—the Whales having been for
a long time considered as Fishes, on account of their form, while
their structural complication shows them to be a low order of the
class of Mammalia, to which we ourselves belong, that class being
founded upon a particular mode of execution of the plan
characteristic of the Vertebrates, while the order to which the
Whales belong depends upon their complication of structure, as
compared with other members of the same class. We may therefore say
that neither form nor complication of structure distinguishes
classes, but simply the mode of execution of a plan. In
Vertebrates, for instance, how do we distinguish the class of
Mammalia from the other classes of the type? By the peculiar
development of the brain, by their breathing through lungs, by
their double circulation, by their bringing forth living young and
nursing them with milk. In this class the beasts of prey form a
distinct order, superior to the Whales or the herbivorous animals,
on account of the higher complication of their structure; and for
the same reason we place the Monkeys above them all. But among the
beasts of prey we distinguish the Bears, as a family, from the
family of Dogs, Wolves, and Cats, on account of their different
form, which does not imply a difference either in the complication
of their structure or in the mode of execution of their plan.

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PENANCE.

The course of our story requires us to return to the Capuchin
convent, and to the struggles and trials of its Superior; for in
his hands is the irresistible authority which must direct the
future life of Agnes.

From no guilty compliances, no heedless running into temptation,
had he come to love her. The temptation had met him in the direct
path of duty; the poison had been breathed in with the perfume of
sweetest and most life-giving flowers: nor could he shun that
temptation, nor cease to inhale that fatal sweetness, without
confessing himself vanquished in a point where, in his view, to
yield was to be lost. The subtle and deceitful visit of Father
Johannes to his cell had the effect of thoroughly rousing him to a
complete sense of his position, and making him feel the immediate,
absolute necessity of bringing all the energy of his will, all the
resources of his nature to bear on its present difficulties. For he
felt, by a fine intuition, that already he was watched and
suspected;—any faltering step now, any wavering, any change
in his mode of treating his female penitents, would be maliciously
noted. The military education of his early days had still left in
his mind a strong residuum of personal courage and honor, which
made him regard it as dastardly to flee when he ought to conquer,
and therefore he set his face as a flint for victory.

But reviewing his interior world, and taking a survey of the
work before him, he felt that sense of a divided personality which
often becomes so vivid in the history of individuals of strong will
and passion. It seemed to him that there were two men within him:
the one turbulent, passionate, demented; the other vainly
endeavoring by authority, reason, and conscience to bring the rebel
to subjection. The discipline of conventual life, the extraordinary
austerities to which he had condemned himself, the monotonous
solitude of his existence, all tended to exalt the vivacity of the
nervous system, which, in the Italian constitution, is at all times
disproportionately developed; and when those weird harp-strings of
the nerves are once thoroughly unstrung, the fury and tempest of
the discord sometimes utterly bewilders the most practised
self-government.

But he felt that something must be done with himself,
and done immediately; for in a few days he must again meet Agnes at
the confessional. He must meet her, not with weak tremblings and
passionate fears, but calm as Fate, inexorable as the Judgment-Day.
He must hear her confession, not as man, but as God; he must
pronounce his judgments with a divine dispassionateness. He must
dive into the recesses of her secret heart, and, following with
subtile analysis all the fine courses of those fibres which were
feeling their blind way towards an earthly love, must tear them
remorselessly away. Well could he warn her of the insidiousness of
earthly affections; better than any one else he could show her how
a name that was blended with her prayers and borne before the
sacred shrine in her most retired and solemn hours might at last
come to fill all her heart with a presence too dangerously dear. He
must direct her gaze up those mystical heights where an unearthly
marriage awaited her, its sealed and spiritual bride; he must hurry
her footsteps onward to the irrevocable issue.

All this was before him. But ere it could be done, he must
subdue himself,—he must become calm and pulseless, in deadly
resolve; and what prayer, what penance might avail for this? If all
that he had already tried had so miserably failed, what hope? He
resolved to quit for a season all human society, and enter upon one
of those desolate periods of retreat from earthly converse well
known in the annals of saintship as most prolific in spiritual
victories.

Accordingly, on the day after the conversation with Father
Johannes, he startled the monks by announcing to them that he was
going to leave them for several days.

“My brothers,” he said, “the weight of a
fearful penance is laid upon me, which I must work out alone. I
leave you today, and charge you not to seek to follow my footsteps;
but, as you hope to escape hell, watch and wrestle for me and
yourselves during the time I am gone. Before many days I hope to
return to you with renewed spiritual strength.”

That evening, while Agnes and her uncle were sitting together in
their orange-garden, mingling their parting prayers and hymns,
scenes of a very different description surrounded the Father
Francesco.

One who looks on the flowery fields and blue seas of this
enchanting region thinks that the Isles of the Blest could scarcely
find on earth a more fitting image; nor can he realize, till
experience proves it to him, that he is in the immediate vicinity
of a weird and dreary region which might represent no less the
goblin horrors of the damned.

Around the foot of Vesuvius lie fair villages and villas
garlanded with roses and flushing with grapes whose juice gains
warmth from the breathing of its subterraneous fires, while just
above them rises a region more awful than can be created by the
action of any common causes of sterility. There, immense tracts
sloping gradually upward show a desolation so peculiar, so utterly
unlike every common solitude of Nature, that one enters upon it
with the shudder we give at that which is wholly unnatural. On all
sides are gigantic serpent convolutions of black lava, their
immense folds rolled into every conceivable contortion, as if, in
their fiery agonies, they had struggled and wreathed and knotted
together, and then grown cold and black with the imperishable signs
of those terrific convulsions upon them. Not a blade of grass, not
a flower, not even the hardiest lichen, springs up to relieve the
utter deathliness of the scene. The eye wanders from one black,
shapeless mass to another, and there is ever the same suggestion of
hideous monster life,—of goblin convulsions and strange
fiend-like agonies in some age gone by. One’s very footsteps
have an unnatural, metallic clink, and one’s garments
brushing over the rough surface are torn and fretted by its sharp,
remorseless touch,—as if its very nature were so pitiless and
acrid that the slightest contact revealed it.

The sun was just setting over the beautiful Bay of
Naples,—with its enchanted islands, its jewelled city, its
flowery villages, all bedecked and bedropped with strange shiftings
and flushes of prismatic light and shade, as if they belonged to
some fairy-land of perpetual festivity and singing,—when
Father Francesco stopped in his toilsome ascent up the mountain,
and, seating himself on ropy ridges of black lava, looked down on
the peaceful landscape.

Above his head, behind him, rose the black cone of the mountain,
over whose top the lazy clouds of thin white smoke were floating,
tinged with the evening light; around him the desolate convulsed
waste,—so arid, so supernaturally dreary; and below, like a
soft enchanted dream, the beautiful bay, the gleaming white villas
and towers, the picturesque islands, the gliding sails, flecked and
streaked and dyed with the violet and pink and purple of the
evening sky. The thin new moon and one glittering star trembled
through the rosy air.

The monk wiped from his brow the sweat that had been caused by
the toil of his hurried journey, and listened to the bells of the
Ave Maria pealing from the different churches of Naples, filling
the atmosphere with a soft tremble of solemn dropping sound, as if
spirits in the air took up and repeated over and over the angelic
salutation which a thousand earthly lips were just then uttering.
Mechanically he joined in the invocation which at that moment
united the hearts of all Christians, and as the words passed his
lips, he thought, with a sad, desolate longing, of the hour of
death of which they spake.

“It must come at last,” he said. “Life is but
a moment. Why am I so cowardly? why so unwilling to suffer and to
struggle? Am I a warrior of the Lord, and do I shrink from the
toils of the camp, and long for the ease of the court before I have
earned it? Why do we clamor for happiness? Why should we sinners be
happy? And yet, O God, why is the world made so lovely as it lies
there, why so rejoicing, and so girt with splendor and beauty, if
we are never to enjoy it? If penance and toil were all we were sent
here for, why not make a world grim and desolate as this around
me?—then there would be nothing to seduce us. But our path is
a constant fight; Nature is made only to be resisted; we must walk
the sharp blade of the sword over the fiery chasm to Paradise.
Come, then!—no shrinking!—let me turn my back on
everything dear and beautiful, as now on this landscape!”

He rose and commenced the perpendicular ascent of the cone,
stumbling and climbing over the huge sliding blocks of broken lava,
which grated and crunched beneath his feet with a harsh metallic
ring. Sometimes a broken fragment or two would go tinkling down the
rough path behind him, and sometimes it seemed as if the whole
loose black mass from above were about to slide, like an avalanche,
down upon his head;—he almost hoped it would. Sometimes he
would stop, overcome by the toil of the ascent, and seat himself
for a moment on a black fragment, and then his eye would wander
over the wide and peaceful panorama below. He seemed to himself
like a fly perched upon some little roughness of a perpendicular
wall, and felt a strange airy sense of pleasure in being thus
between earth and heaven. A sense of relief, of beauty, and
peacefulness would steal over him, as if he were indeed something
disfranchised and disembodied, a part of the harmonious and
beautiful world that lay stretched out beneath him; in a moment
more he would waken himself with a start, and resume his toilsome
journey with a sullen and dogged perseverance.

At last he gained the top of the mountain,—that weird,
strange region where the loose, hot soil, crumbling beneath his
feet, was no honest foodful mother earth, but an acrid mass of
ashes and corrosive minerals. Arsenic, sulphur, and many a sharp
and bitter salt were in all he touched, every rift in the ground
hissed with stifling steam, while rolling clouds of dun sullen
smoke, and a deep hollow booming, like the roar of an immense
furnace, told his nearness to the great crater. He penetrated the
sombre tabernacle, and stood on the very brink of a huge basin,
formed by a wall of rocks around a sunken plain, the midst of which
rose the black cone of the subterraneous furnace, which crackled
and roared and from time to time spit up burning stones and cinders
or oozed out slow ropy streams of liquid fire.

The sulphurous cliffs were dyed in many a brilliant shade of
brown and orange by the admixture of various ores, but their
brightness seemed strange and unnatural, and the dizzying whirls of
vapor, now enveloping the whole scene in gloom, now lifting in this
spot and now in that, seemed to magnify the dismal pit to an
indefinite size. Now and then there would come up from the very
entrails of the mountain a sort of convulsed sob of hollow sound,
and the earth would quiver beneath his feet, and fragments from the
surrounding rocks would scale off and fall with crashing
reverberations into the depth beneath; at such moments it would
seem as if the very mountain were about to crush in and bear him
down in its ruins.

Father Francesco, though blinded by the smoke and choked by the
vapor, could not be content without descending into the abyss and
exploring the very penetralia of its mysteries. Steadying
his way by means of a cord which he fastened to a firm projecting
rock, he began slowly and painfully clambering downward. The wind
was sweeping across the chasm from behind, bearing the noxious
vapors away from him, or he must inevitably have been stifled. It
took him some little time, however, to effect his descent; but at
length he found himself fairly landed on the dark floor of the
gloomy inclosure.

The ropy, pitch-black undulations of lava yawned here and there
in red-hot cracks and seams, making it appear to be only a crust
over some fathomless depth of molten fire, whose moanings and
boilings could be heard below. These dark congealed billows creaked
and bent as the monk stepped upon them, and burned his feet through
his coarse sandals; yet he stumbled on. Now and then his foot would
crush in, where the lava had hardened in a thinner crust, and he
would draw it suddenly back from the lurid red-hot metal beneath.
The staff on which he rested was constantly kindling into a light
blaze as it slipped into some heated hollow, and he was fain to
beat out the fire upon the cooler surface. Still he went on
half-stifled by the hot and pungent vapor, but drawn by that
painful, unnatural curiosity which possesses one in a nightmare
dream. The great cone in the centre was the point to which he
wished to attain,—the nearest point which man can gain to
this eternal mystery of fire. It was trembling with a perpetual
vibration, a hollow, pulsating undertone of sound like the surging
of the sea before a storm, and the lava that boiled over its sides
rolled slowly down with a strange creaking; it seemed the
condensed, intensified essence and expression of eternal fire,
rising and still rising from some inexhaustible fountain of
burning.

Father Francesco drew as near as he could for the stifling heat
and vapor, and, resting on his staff, stood gazing intently. The
lurid light of the fire fell with an unearthly glare on his pale,
sunken features, his wild, haggard eyes, and his torn and
disarranged garments. In the awful solitude and silence of the
night he felt his heart stand still, as if indeed he had touched
with his very hand the gates of eternal woe, and felt its fiery
breath upon his cheek. He half-imagined that the seams and clefts
which glowed in lurid lines between the dark billows would gape yet
wider and show the blasting secrets of some world of fiery despair
below. He fancied that he heard behind and around the mocking laugh
of fiends, and that confused clamor of mingled shrieks and
lamentations which Dante describes as filling the dusky approaches
to that forlorn realm where hope never enters.

“Ah, God,” he exclaimed, “for this vain life
of man! They eat, they drink, they dance, they sing, they marry and
are given in marriage, they have castles and gardens and villas,
and the very beauty of Paradise seems over it all,—and yet
how close by burns and roars the eternal fire! Fools that we are,
to clamor for indulgence and happiness in this life, when the
question is, to escape everlasting burnings! If I tremble at this
outer court of God’s wrath and justice, what must be the
fires of hell? These are but earthly fires; they can but burn the
body: those are made to burn the soul; they are undying as the soul
is. What would it be to be dragged down, down, down, into an abyss
of soul-fire hotter than this for ages on ages? This might bring
merciful death in time: that will have no end.”

The monk fell on his knees and breathed out piercing
supplications. Every nerve and fibre within him seemed tense with
his agony of prayer. It was not the outcry for purity and peace,
not a tender longing for forgiveness, not a filial remorse for sin,
but the nervous anguish of him who shrieks in the immediate
apprehension of an unendurable torture. It was the cry of a man
upon the rack, the despairing scream of him who feels himself
sinking in a burning dwelling. Such anguish has found an utterance
in Stradella’s celebrated “Pietà,
Signore,” which still tells to our ears, in its wild moans
and piteous shrieks, the religious conceptions of his day; for
there is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression
in its music.

When the oppression of the heat and sulphurous vapor became too
dreadful to be borne, the monk retraced his way and climbed with
difficulty up the steep sides of the crater, till he gained the
summit above, where a comparatively free air revived him. All night
he wandered up and down in that dreary vicinity, now listening to
the mournful roar and crackle of the fire, and now raising his
voice in penitential psalms or the notes of that terrific
“Dies Iræ” which sums up all the intense fear and
horror with which the religion of the Middle Ages clothed the idea
of the final catastrophe of humanity. Sometimes prostrating himself
with his face towards the stifling soil, he prayed with agonized
intensity till Nature would sink in a temporary collapse, and
sleep, in spite of himself, would steal over him.

So waned the gloomy hours of the night away, till the morning
broke in the east, turning all the blue wavering floor of the sea
to crimson brightness, and bringing up, with the rising breeze, the
barking of dogs, the lowing of kine, the songs of laborers and
boatmen, all fresh and breezy from the repose of the past
night.

Father Francesco heard the sound of approaching footsteps
climbing the lava path, and started with a nervous trepidation.
Soon he recognized a poor peasant of the vicinity, whose child he
had tended during a dangerous illness. He bore with him a little
basket of eggs, with a melon and a fresh green salad.

“Good morning, holy father,” he said, bowing humbly.
“I saw you coming this way last night, and I could hardly
sleep for thinking of you; and my good woman, Teresina, would have
it that I should come out to look after you. I have taken the
liberty to bring a little offering;—it was the best we
had.”

“Thank you, my son,” said the monk, looking
wistfully at the fresh, honest face of the peasant. “You have
taken too much trouble for such a sinner. I must not allow myself
such indulgences.”

“But your Reverence must live. Look you,” said the
peasant, “at least your Reverence will take an egg. See here,
how handily I can cook one,” he added, striking his stick
into a little cavity of a rock, from which, as from an
escape-valve, hissed a jet of hot steam,—“see here, I
nestle the egg in this little cleft, and it will be done in a
twinkling. Our good God gives us our fire for nothing
here.”

There was something wholesomely kindly and cheerful in the
action and expression of the man, which broke upon the overstrained
and disturbed musings of the monk like daylight on a ghastly dream.
The honest, loving heart sees love in everything; even the fire is
its fatherly helper, and not its avenging enemy.

Father Francesco took the egg, when it was done, with a silent
gesture of thanks.

“If I might make bold to say,” said the peasant,
encouraged, “your Reverence should have some care for
yourself. If a man will not feed himself, the good God will not
feed him; and we poor people have too few friends already to let
such as you die. Your hands are trembling, and you look worn out.
Surely you should take something more, for the very love of the
poor.”

“My son, I am bound to do a heavy penance, and to work out
a great conflict. I thank you for your undeserved kindness. Leave
me now to myself, and come no more to disturb my prayers. Go, and
God bless you!”

“Well,” said the peasant, putting down the basket
and melon, “I shall leave these things here, any way, and I
beg your Reverence to have a care of yourself. Teresina fretted all
night for fear something might come to you. The bambino that you
cured is grown a stout little fellow, and eats enough for
two,—and it is all of you; so she cannot forget it. She is a
busy little woman, is Teresina; and when she gets a thought in her
head, it buzzes, buzzes, like a fly in a bottle, and she will have
it your Reverence is killing yourself by inches, and says she,
‘What will all the poor do when he is gone?’ So your
Reverence must pardon us. We mean it all for the best.”

So saying, the man turned and began sliding and slipping down
the steep ashy sides of the mountain cone with a dexterity which
carried him to the bottom in a few moments; and on he went, sending
back after him a cheerful little air, the refrain of which is still
to be heard in our days in that neighborhood. A word or two of the
gay song fluttered back on the ear of the monk,—

So gay and airy it was in its ringing cadence that it seemed a
musical laugh springing from sunny skies, and came fluttering into
the dismal smoke and gloom of the mountain-top like a very
butterfly of sound. It struck on the sad, leaden ear of the monk
much as we might fancy the carol of a robin over a grave might
seem, could the cold sleeper below wake one moment to its
perception. If it woke one regretful sigh and drew one wandering
look downward to the elysian paradise that lay smiling at the foot
of the mountain, he instantly suppressed the feeling, and set his
face in its old deathly stillness.

CHAPTER XIX.

CLOUDS DEEPENING.

After the departure of her uncle to Florence, the life of Agnes
was troubled and harassed from a variety of causes.

First, her grandmother was sulky and moody, and though saying
nothing directly on the topic nearest her heart, yet intimating by
every look and action that she considered Agnes as a most
ungrateful and contumacious child. Then there was a constant
internal perplexity,—a constant wearying course of
self-interrogation and self-distrust, the pain of a sensitive
spirit which doubts at every moment whether it may not be falling
into sin. The absence of her kind uncle at this time took from her
the strongest support on which she had leaned in her perplexities.
Cheerful, airy, and elastic in his temperament, always full of
fresh-springing and beautiful thoughts, as an Italian dell is of
flowers, the charming old man seemed, while he stayed with Agnes,
to be the door of a new and fairer world, where she could walk in
air and sunshine, and find utterance for a thousand thoughts and
feelings which at all other times lay in cold repression in her
heart. His counsels were always so wholesome, his sympathies so
quick, his devotion so fervent and cheerful, that while with him
Agnes felt the burden of her life insensibly lifted and carried for
her as by some angel guide.

Now they had all come back upon her, heavier a thousand-fold
than ever they had been before. Never did she so much need counsel
and guidance,—never had she so much within herself to be
solved and made plain to her own comprehension; yet she thought
with a strange shiver of her next visit to her confessor. That
austere man, so chilling, so awful, so far above all conception of
human weaknesses, how should she dare to lay before him all the
secrets of her breast, especially when she must confess to having
disobeyed his most stringent commands? She had had another
interview with this forbidden son of perdition, but how it was she
knew not. How could such things have happened? Instead of shutting
her eyes and turning her head and saying prayers, she had listened
to a passionate declaration of love, and his last word had called
her his wife. Her heart thrilled every time she thought of it; and
somehow she could not feel sure that it was exactly a thrill of
penitence. It was all like a strange dream to her; and sometimes
she looked at her little brown hands and wondered if he really had
kissed them,—he, the splendid strange vision of a man, the
prince from fairyland! Agnes had never read romances, it is true,
but she had been brought up on the legends of the saints, and there
never was a marvel possible to human conception that had not been
told there. Princes had come from China and Barbary and Abyssinia
and every other strange out-of-the-way place, to kneel at the feet
of fair, obdurate saints who would not even turn the head to look
at them; but she had acted, she was conscious, after a much more
mortal fashion, and so made herself work for confession and
penance. Yet certainly she had not meant to do so; the interview
came on her so suddenly, so unexpectedly; and somehow he
would speak, and he would not go when she asked him to;
and she remembered how he looked when he stood right before her in
the doorway and told her she should hear him,—how
the color flushed up in his cheeks, what a fire there was in his
great dark eyes; he looked as if he were going to do something
desperate then; it made her hold her breath even now to think of
it.

“These princes and nobles,” she thought, “are
so used to command, it is no wonder they make us feel as if they
must have their will. I have heard grandmother call them wolves and
vultures, that are ready to tear us poor folk to pieces; but I am
sure he seems gentle. I’m sure it isn’t wicked or cruel
for him to want to make me his wife; and he couldn’t know, of
course, why it wasn’t right he should; and it really is
beautiful of him to love me so. Oh, if I were only a princess, and
he loved me that way, how glad I should be to give up everything
and go to him alone! And then we would pray together; and I really
think that would be much better than praying all alone. He said men
had so much more to tempt them. Ah, that is true! How can little
moles that grub in the ground know of the dangers of eagles that
fly to the very sun? Holy Mother, look mercifully upon him and save
his soul!”

Such were the thoughts of Agnes the day when she was preparing
for her confession; and all the way to church she found them
floating and dissolving and reappearing in new forms in her mind,
like the silvery smoke-clouds which were constantly veering and
sailing over Vesuvius.

Only one thing was firm and never changing, and that was the
purpose to reveal everything to her spiritual director. When she
kneeled at the confessional with closed eyes, and began her
whispered acknowledgments, she tried to feel as if she were
speaking in the ear of God alone,—that God whose spirit she
was taught to believe, for the time being, was present in His
minister before whom her inmost heart was to be unveiled.

He who sat within had just returned from his lonely retreat with
his mind and nerves in a state of unnatural tension,—a sort
of ecstatic clearness and calmness, which he mistook for victory
and peace. During those lonely days when he had wandered afar from
human converse, and was surrounded only by objects of desolation
and gloom, he had passed through as many phases of strange,
unnatural experience as there were flitting smoke-wreaths eddying
about him.

There are depths in man’s nature and his possibilities
which no plummet has ever sounded,—the wild, lonely joys of
fanatical excitement, the perfectly ravenous appetite for
self-torture, which seems able, in time, to reverse the whole human
system, and make a heaven of hell. How else can we understand the
facts related both in Hindoo and in Christian story, of those men
and women who have found such strange raptures in slow tortures,
prolonged from year to year, till pain became a habit of body and
mind? It is said, that, after the tortures of the rack, the
reaction of the overstrained nerves produces a sense of the most
exquisite relief and repose; and so when mind and body are
harrowed, harassed to the very outer verge of endurance, come wild
throbbings and transports, and strange celestial clairvoyance,
which the mystic hails as the descent of the New Jerusalem into his
soul.

It had seemed to Father Francesco, when he came down from the
mountain, that he had left his body behind him,—that he had
left earth and earthly things; his very feet touching the ground
seemed to tread not on rough, resisting soil, but upon elastic
cloud. He saw a strange excess of beauty in every flower, in every
leaf, in the wavering blue of the sea, in the red grottoed rocks
that overhung the shore, with their purple, green, orange, and
yellow hangings of flower-and-leaf-tapestry. The songs of the
fishermen on the beach, the peasant-girls cutting flowery fodder
for the cattle, all seemed to him to have an unnatural charm. As
one looking through a prism sees a fine bordering of rainbow on
every object, so he beheld a glorified world. His former self
seemed to him something forever past and gone. He looked at himself
as at another person, who had sinned and suffered, and was now
resting in beatified repose; and he fondly thought all this was
firm reality, and believed that he was now proof against all
earthly impressions, able to hear and to judge with the
dispassionate calmness of a disembodied spirit. He did not know
that this high-strung calmness, this fine clearness, were only the
most intense form of nervous sensibility, and as vividly
susceptible to every mortal impression as is the vitalized chemical
plate to the least action of the sun’s rays.

When Agnes began her confession, her voice seemed to him to pass
through every nerve; it seemed as if he could feel her presence
thrilling through the very wood of the confessional. He was
astonished and dismayed at his own emotion. But when she began to
speak of the interview with the cavalier, he trembled from head to
foot with uncontrollable passion. Nature long repressed came back
in a tempestuous reaction. He crossed himself again and again, he
tried to pray, and blessed those protecting shadows which concealed
his emotion from the unconscious one by his side. But he set his
teeth in deadly resolve, and his voice, as he questioned her, came
forth cutting and cold as ice crystals.

“Why did you listen to a word?”

“My father, it was so sudden. He wakened me from sleep. I
answered him before I thought.”

“You should not have been sleeping. It was a sinful
indolence.”

“Yes, my father.”

“See now to what it led. The enemy of your soul, ever
watching, seized this moment to tempt you.”

“Yes, my father.”

“Examine your soul well,” said Father Francesco, in
a tone of austere severity that made Agnes tremble. “Did you
not find a secret pleasure in his words?”

“My father, I fear I did,” said she, with a
trembling voice.

“I knew it! I knew it!” the priest muttered to
himself, while the great drops started on his forehead, in the
intensity of the conflict he repressed. Agnes thought the solemn
pause that followed was caused by the horror that had been inspired
by her own sinfulness.

“You did not, then, heartily and truly wish him to go from
you?” pursued the cold, severe voice.

“Yes, my father, I did. I wished him to go with all my
soul.”

“Yet you say you found pleasure in his being near
you,” said Father Francesco, conscious how every string of
his own being, even in this awful hour, was vibrating with a sort
of desperate, miserable joy in being once more near to her.

“Ah,” sighed Agnes, “that is true, my
father,—woe is me! Please tell me how I could have helped it.
I was pleased before I knew it.”

“And you have been thinking of what he said to you with
pleasure since?” pursued the confessor, with an intense
severity of manner, deepening as he spoke.

“I have thought of it,” faltered Agnes.

“Beware how you trifle with the holy sacrament! Answer
frankly. You have thought of it with pleasure. Confess
it.”

“I do not understand myself exactly,” said Agnes.
“I have thought of it partly with pleasure and partly with
pain.”

“Would you like to go with him and be his wife, as he
said?”

“If it were right, father,—not otherwise.”

“Oh, foolish child! oh, blinded soul! to think of right in
connection with an infidel and heretic! Do you not see that all
this is an artifice of Satan? He can transform himself into an
angel of light. Do you suppose this heretic would be brought back
to the Church by a foolish girl? Do you suppose it is your prayers
he wants? Why does, he not seek the prayers of the Church,—of
holy men who have power with God? He would bait his hook with this
pretence that he may catch your soul. Do you believe me?”

“I am bound to believe you, my father.”

“But you do not. Your heart is going after this wicked
man.”

“Oh, my father, I do not wish it should. I never wish or
expect to see him more. I only pray for him that his soul may not
be lost.”

“He has gone, then?”

“Yes, my father. And he went with my uncle, a most holy
monk, who has undertaken the work of his salvation. He listens to
my uncle, who has hopes of restoring him to the Church.”

“That is well. And now, my daughter, listen to me. You
must root out of your thought every trace and remembrance of these
words of sinful earthly love which he hath spoken. Such love would
burn your soul to all eternity with fire that never could be
quenched. If you can tear away all roots and traces of this from
your heart, if by fasting and prayer and penance you can become
worthy to be a bride of your divine Lord, then your prayers will
gain power, and you may prevail to secure his eternal salvation.
But listen to me, daughter,—listen and tremble! If ever you
should yield to his love and turn back from this heavenly marriage
to follow him, you will accomplish his damnation and your own; to
all eternity he will curse you, while the fire rages and consumes
him,—he will curse the hour that he first saw you.”

These words were spoken with an intense vehemence which seemed
almost supernatural. Agnes shivered and trembled; a vague feeling
of guilt overwhelmed and disheartened her; she seemed to herself
the most lost and abandoned of human beings.

“My father, I shall think no penance too severe that may
restore my soul from this sin. I have already made a vow to the
blessed Mother that I will walk on foot to the Holy City, praying
in every shrine and holy place; and I humbly ask your
approval.”

This announcement brought to the mind of the monk a sense of
relief and deliverance. He felt already, in the terrible storm of
agitation which this confession had aroused within him, that nature
was not dead, and that he was infinitely farther from the victory
of passionless calm than he had supposed. He was still a
man,—torn with human passions, with a love which he must
never express, and a jealousy which burned and writhed at every
word which he had wrung from its unconscious object. Conscience had
begun to whisper in his ear that there would be no safety to him in
continuing this spiritual dictatorship to one whose every word
unmanned him,—that it was laying himself open to a ceaseless
temptation, which in some blinded, dreary hour of evil might hurry
him into acts of horrible sacrilege; and he was once more feeling
that wild, stormy revolt of his inner nature that so distressed him
before he left the convent.

This proposition of Agnes’ struck him as a compromise. It
would take her from him only for a season, she would go under his
care and direction, and he would gradually recover his calmness and
self-possession in her absence. Her pilgrimage to the holy places
would be a most proper and fit preparation for the solemn
marriage-rite which should forever sunder her from all human ties
and make her inaccessible to all solicitations of human love.
Therefore, after an interval of silence, he answered,—

“Daughter, your plan is approved. Such pilgrimages have
ever been held meritorious works in the Church, and there is a
special blessing upon them.”

“My father,” said Agnes, “it has always been
in my heart from my childhood to be the bride of the Lord; but my
grandmother, who brought me up, and to whom I owe the obedience of
a daughter, utterly forbids me: she will not hear a word of it. No
longer ago than last Monday she told me I might as well put a knife
into her heart as speak of this.”

“And you, daughter, do you put the feelings of any earthly
friend before the love of your Lord and Creator who laid down His
life for you? Hear what He saith:—‘He that loveth
father or mother more than me is not worthy of
me.’”

“But my poor old grandmother has no one but me in the
world, and she has never slept a night without me; she is getting
old, and she has worked for me all her good days;—it would be
very hard for her to lose me.”

“Ah, false, deceitful heart! Has, then, thy Lord not
labored for thee? Has He not borne thee through all the years of
thy life? And wilt thou put the love of any mortal before
His?”

“Yes,” replied Agnes, with a sort of hardy
sweetness,—“but my Lord does not need me as grandmother
does; He is in glory, and will never be old or feeble; I cannot
work for Him and tend Him as I shall her. I cannot see my way clear
at present; but when she is gone, or if the saints move her to
consent, I shall then belong to God alone.”

“Daughter, there is some truth in your words; and if your
Lord accepts you, He will dispose her heart. Will she go with you
on this pilgrimage?”

“I have prayed that she might, father,—that her soul
may be quickened; for I fear me, dear old grandmamma has found her
love for me a snare,—she has thought too much of my interests
and too little of her own soul, poor grandmamma!”

“Well, child, I shall enjoin this pilgrimage on her as a
penance.”

“I have grievously offended her lately,” said Agnes,
“in rejecting an offer of marriage with a man on whom she had
set her heart, and therefore she does not listen to me as she is
wont to do.”

“You have done right in refusing, my daughter. I will
speak to her of this, and show her how great is the sin of opposing
a holy vocation in a soul whom the Lord calls to Himself, and
enjoin her to make reparation by uniting with you in this holy
work.”

Agnes departed from the confessional without even looking upon
the face of her director, who sat within listening to the rustle of
her dress as she rose,—listening to the soft fall of her
departing footsteps, and praying that grace might be given him not
to look after her: and he did not, though he felt as if his life
were going with her.

Agnes tripped round the aisle to a little side-chapel where a
light was always kept burning by her before a picture of Saint
Agnes, and, kneeling there, waited till her grandmother should be
through with her confession.

“Ah, sweet Saint Agnes,” she said, “pity me! I
am a poor ignorant young girl, and have been led into grievous sin;
but I did not mean to do wrong,—I have been trying to do
right; pray for me, that I may overcome as you did. Pray our dear
Lord to send you with us on this pilgrimage, and save us from all
wicked and brutal men who would do us harm. As the Lord delivered
you in sorest straits, keeping soul and body pure as a lily, ah,
pray Him to keep me! I love you dearly,—watch over me and
guide me.”

In those days of the Church, such addresses to the glorified
saints had become common among all Christians. They were not
regarded as worship, any more than a similar outpouring of
confidence to a beloved and revered friend yet in the body. Among
the hymns of Savonarola is one addressed to Saint Mary Magdalen,
whom he regarded with an especial veneration. The great truth, that
God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, that
all live to Him, was in those ages with the truly
religious a part of spiritual consciousness. The saints of the
Church Triumphant, having become one with Christ as he is one with
the Father, were regarded as invested with a portion of his
divinity, and as the ministering agency through which his
mediatorial government on earth was conducted; and it was thought
to be in the power of the sympathetic heart to attract them by the
outflow of its affections, so that their presence often
overshadowed the walks of daily life with a cloud of healing and
protecting sweetness.

If the enthusiasm of devotion in regard to these invisible
friends became extravagant and took the language due to God alone,
it was no more than the fervid Italian nature was always doing with
regard to visible objects of affection. Love with an Italian always
tends to become worship, and some of the language of the poets
addressed to earthly loves rises into intensities of expression due
only to the One, Sovereign, Eternal Beauty. One sees even in the
writings of Cicero that this passionate adoring kind of love is not
confined to modern times. When he loses the daughter in whom his
heart is garnered up, he finds no comfort except in building a
temple to her memory,—a blind outreaching towards the
saint-worship of modern times.

Agnes rose from her devotions, and went with downcast eyes, her
lips still repeating prayers, to the font of holy water, which was
in a dim shadowy corner, where a painted window cast a gold and
violet twilight. Suddenly there was a rustle of garments in the
dimness, and a jewelled hand essayed to pass holy water to her on
the tip of its finger. This mark of Christian fraternity, common in
those times, Agnes almost mechanically accepted, touching her
slender finger to the one extended, and making the sign of the
cross, while she raised her eyes to see who stood there. Gradually
the haze cleared from her mind, and she awoke to the consciousness
that it was the cavalier! He moved to come towards her, with a
bright smile on his face; but suddenly she became pale as one who
has seen a spectre, and, pushing from her with both hands, she said
faintly, “Go, go!” and turned and sped up the aisle
silently as a sunbeam, joining her grandmother, who was coming from
the confessional with a gloomy and sullen brow.

Old Elsie had been enjoined to unite with her grandchild in this
scheme of a pilgrimage, and received the direction with as much
internal contumacy as would a thriving church-member of Wall Street
a proposition to attend a protracted meeting in the height of the
business season. Not but that pilgrimages were holy and gracious
works,—she was too good a Christian not to admit
that,—but why must holy and gracious works be thrust on her
in particular? There were saints enough who liked such things; and
people could get to heaven without,—if not with a
very abundant entrance, still in a modest way,—and
Elsie’s ambition for position and treasure in the spiritual
world was of a very moderate cast.

“Well, now, I hope you are satisfied,” she said to
Agnes, as she pulled her along with no very gentle hand;
“you’ve got me sent off on a pilgrimage,—and my
old bones must be rattling up and down all the hills between here
and Rome,—and who’s to see to the
oranges?—they’ll all be stolen, every one.”

“Grandmother,” began Agnes in a pleading
voice—

“Oh, you hush up! I know what you’re going to say:
‘The good Lord will take care of them.’ I wish He may!
He has His hands full, with all the people that go cawing and
psalm-singing like so many crows, and leave all their affairs to
Him!”

Agnes walked along disconsolate, with her eyes full of tears,
which coursed one another down her pale cheeks.

“There’s Antonio,” pursued Elsie, “would
perhaps look after things a little. He is a good fellow, and only
yesterday was asking if he couldn’t do something for us.
It’s you he does it for,—but little you care who loves
you, or what they do for you!”

At this moment they met old Jocunda, whom we have before
introduced to the reader as portress of the Convent. She had on her
arm a large square basket, which she was storing for its practical
uses.

“Well, well, Saint Agnes be praised, I have found you at
last,” she said. “I was wanting to speak about some of
your blood-oranges for conserving. An order has come down from our
dear gracious lady, the Queen, to prepare a lot for her own blessed
eating, and you may be sure I would get none of anybody but
you.—But what’s this, my little heart, my little
lamb?—crying?—tears in those sweet eyes? What’s
the matter now?”

“Matter enough for me!” said Elsie.
“It’s a weary world we live in. A body can’t turn
any way and not meet with trouble. If a body brings up a girl one
way, why, every fellow is after her, and one has no peace; and if a
body brings her up another way, she gets her head in the clouds,
and there’s no good of her in this world. Now look at that
girl,—doesn’t everybody say it’s time she were
married?—but no marrying for her! Nothing will do but we must
off to Rome on a pilgrimage,—and what’s the good of
that, I want to know? If it’s praying that’s to be
done, the dear saints know she’s at it from morning till
night,—and lately she’s up and down three or four times
a night with some prayer or other.”

“Well, well,” said Jocunda, “who started this
idea?”

“Oh, Father Francesco and she got it up between
them,—and nothing will do but I must go, too.”

“Well, now, after all, my dear,” said Jocunda,
“do you know, I made a pilgrimage once, and it isn’t so
bad. One gets a good deal by it, first and last. Everybody drops
something into your hand as you go, and one gets treated as if one
were somebody a little above the common; and then in Rome one has a
princess or a duchess or some noble lady who washes one’s
feet, and gives one a good supper, and perhaps a new suit of
clothes, and all that,—and ten to one there comes a pretty
little sum of money to boot, if one plays one’s cards well. A
pilgrimage isn’t bad, after all;—one sees a world of
fine things, and something new every day.”

“But who is to look after our garden and dress our
trees?”

“Ah, now, there’s Antonio, and old Meta his
mother,” said Jocunda, with a knowing wink at Agnes. “I
fancy there are friends there that would lend a hand to keep things
together against the little one comes borne. If one is going to be
married, a pilgrimage brings good luck in the family. All the
saints take it kindly that one comes so far to see them, and are
more ready to do a good turn for one when one needs it. The blessed
saints are like other folks,—they like to be treated with
proper attention.”

This view of pilgrimages from the material stand-point had more
effect on the mind of Elsie than the most elaborate appeals of
Father Francesco. She began to acquiesce, though with a reluctant
air.

Jocunda, seeing her words had made some impression, pursued her
advantage on the spiritual ground.

“To be sure,” she added, “I don’t know
how it is with you; but I know that I have, one way and
another, rolled up quite an account of sins in my life. When I was
tramping up and down with my old man through the country,—now
in this castle and then in that camp, and now and then in at the
sacking of a city or village, or something of the kind,—the
saints forgive us!—it does seem as if one got into things
that were not of the best sort, in such times. It’s true,
it’s been wiped out over and over by the priest; but then a
pilgrimage is a good thing to make all sure, in case one’s
good works should fall short of one’s sins at last. I can
tell you, a pilgrimage is a good round weight to throw into the
scale; and when it comes to heaven and hell, you know, my dear,
why, one cannot be too careful.”

“Well, that may be true enough,” said
Elsie,—“though, as to my sins, I have tried to keep
them regularly squared up and balanced as I went along. I have
always been regular at confession, and never failed a jot or tittle
in what the holy father told me. But there may be something in what
you say; one can’t be too sure; and so I’ll e’en
school my old bones into taking this tramp.”

That evening, as Agnes was sitting in the garden at sunset, her
grandmother bustling in and out, talking, groaning, and, hurrying
in her preparations for the anticipated undertaking, suddenly there
was a rustling in the branches overhead, and a bouquet of rose-buds
fell at her feet. Agnes picked it up, and saw a scrip of paper
coiled among the flowers. In a moment remembering the apparition of
the cavalier in the church in the morning, she doubted not from
whom it came. So dreadful had been the effect of the scene at the
confessional, that the thought of the near presence of her lover
brought only terror. She turned pale; her hands shook. She shut her
eyes, and prayed that she might not be left to read the paper; and
then, summoning all her resolution, she threw the bouquet with
force over the wall. It dropped down, down, down the gloomy,
shadowy abyss, and was lost in the damp caverns below.

The cavalier stood without the wall, waiting for some responsive
signal in reply to his missive. It had never occurred to him that
Agnes would not even read it, and he stood confounded when he saw
it thrown back with such apparent rudeness. He remembered her pale,
terrified look on seeing him in the morning. It was not
indifference or dislike, but mortal fear, that had been shown in
that pale face.

“These wretches are practising on her,” he said, in
wrath,—“filling her head with frightful images, and
torturing her sensitive conscience till she sees sin in the most
natural and innocent feelings.”

He had learned from Father Antonio the intention of Agnes to go
on a pilgrimage, and he longed to see and talk with her, that he
might offer her his protection against dangers which he understood
far better than she. It had never even occurred to him that the
door for all possible communication would be thus suddenly barred
in his face.

“Very well,” he said to himself, with a darkening
brow,—“let them have it their own way here. She must
pass through my dominions before she can reach Rome, and I will
find a place where I can be heard, without priest or
grandmother to let or hinder. She is mine, and I will care for
her.”

But poor Agnes had the woman’s share of the misery to
bear, in the fear and self-reproach and distress which every
movement of this kind cost her. The involuntary thrill at seeing
her lover, at hearing from him, the conscious struggle which it
cost her to throw back his gift, were all noted by her accusing
conscience as so many sins. The next day she sought again her
confessor, and began an entrance on those darker and more chilly
paths of penance, by which, according to the opinion of her times,
the peculiarly elect of the Lord were supposed to be best trained.
Hitherto her religion had been the cheerful and natural expression
of her tender and devout nature according to the more beautiful and
engaging devotional forms of her Church. During the year when her
confessor had been, unconsciously to himself, led by her instead of
leading, her spiritual food had been its beautiful old hymns and
prayers, which she found no weariness in often repeating. But now
an unnatural conflict was begun in her mind, directed by a
spiritual guide in whom every natural and normal movement of the
soul had given way before a succession of morbid and unhealthful
experiences. From that day Agnes wore upon her heart one of those
sharp instruments of torture which in those times were supposed to
be a means of inward grace,—a cross with seven steel points
for the seven sorrows of Mary. She fasted with a severity which
alarmed her grandmother, who in her inmost heart cursed the day
that ever she had placed her in the way of saintship.

“All this will just end in spoiling her
beauty,—making her as thin as a shadow,”—said
Elsie; “and she was good enough before.”

But it did not spoil her beauty,-it only changed its character.
The roundness and bloom melted away,—but there came in their
stead that solemn, transparent clearness of countenance, that
spiritual light and radiance, which the old Florentine painters
gave to their Madonnas.

It is singular how all religious exercises and appliances take
the character of the nature that uses them. The pain and penance,
which so many in her day bore as a cowardly expedient for averting
divine wrath, seemed, as she viewed them, a humble way of becoming
associated in the sufferings of her Redeemer. “Jesu
dulcis memoria,” was the thought that carried a
redeeming sweetness with every pain. Could she thus, by suffering
with her Lord, gain power like Him to save,—a power which
should save that soul so dear and so endangered! “Ah,”
she thought, “I would give my life-blood, drop by drop, if
only it might avail for his salvation!”

THE TRUE HEROINE.

JEFFERSON AND
SLAVERY.

Any one who feels deeply the truths in which our great men of
old founded this Democracy, and who sees clearly the great lines of
political architecture by which alone it shall stand firm or rise
high, finds in the direct plan and work the agency mainly of six
men.

These may be set in three groups.

First, three men, who, through a series of earnest
thoughts, taking shape sometimes in apt words, sometimes in bold
acts, did most to found the Republic: and these three are
Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.

Secondly, two men, who, as statesmen, by a healthful
division between the two great natural policies, and, as
politicians, by a healthful antagonism between the two great
natural parties, did most to build the Republic: and these
two are Jefferson and Hamilton.

Thirdly, three men, who, having a clear theory in their
heads, and a deep conviction in their hearts, working on the nation
by sermons, epistles, programmes, hints, quips, innuendoes, by
every form of winged word, have done most to get this people into
simple trains of humanitarian thought, and have therefore done most
to brace the Republic: and these three men are Franklin,
Jefferson, and Channing.

So, rising above the dust raised in our old quarrels, and taking
a broad view over this Democracy, we see Jefferson firmly placed in
each of these groups.

If we search in Jefferson’s writings and in the
contemporary records to ascertain what that power was which won him
these positions, we find that it was no personal skill in cajoling
friends or scaring enemies. No sound-hearted man ever rose from
talk with him with a tithe of the veneration felt by those who sat
at the feet of Washington or Hamilton or Channing. Neither was his
position due to oratory: he could deal neither in sweet words nor
in lofty words. Yet, in spite of these wants, he wrought on the
nation with immense power.

The real secret of this power was, first of all, that Jefferson
saw infinitely deeper into the principles of the rising Democracy,
and infinitely farther into its future working, than any other man
of his time. Those who earnestly read him will often halt astounded
at proofs of a foresight in him almost miraculous. Even in masses
of what men have called his puerility there are often germs of
immense worth,—taking years, perhaps, to show life, but sure
to be alive at last.

Take, as the latest examples of this, three germ-truths which
have recently come to full life, after having been trodden under
foot for fifty years.

Early in our national life Jefferson declared against the
usurpations of the national judiciary. Straightway his supporters
were divided, mainly between those who sorrowed and those who stood
silent; while his opponents were divided only between those who
laughed and those who cursed. But who laughs now? Jefferson foresaw
but too well. The usurpations of the national judiciary have come
in shapes most hideous,—in the obiter dicta of the
Dred Scott decision, and in the use of quibbles to entangle our
defenders and set loose our traitors.

Take an example of another kind. In his early career Jefferson
gave forth a scheme of harbor-defence by gun-boats and floating
batteries. This was partially carried out, and only partially; so
it failed. On these gun-boats and batteries his enemies never tired
of trying their wit, and certainly seemed to make a brilliant point
against his foresight and economy. But, in these latter years, many
Americans besides ourself, visiting Cronstadt during the blockade
by the Allied fleet, saw not only how the Allies failed of a
conquest, the first summer, for want of gun-boats, but how the
Russians protected themselves greatly, during the second summer, by
means of them. We were shown, too, that not only could good work be
done by those driven by steam, but that the greater number driven
by oarsmen were of much service, not only in vexing the enemy, but
in protecting the whole exposed coast. Here was Jefferson’s
scheme to the letter. Here was a despised thought of the past
become a proud fact of the present. Here had the Autocrat reared a
monument to our great Democrat,—gaining praise for Jefferson
long after his enemies and their factious laughter had died out
forever.

But take what the main body of cultured Americans have thought
Jefferson’s chronic whimsey,—his belief that the heart
of England must be ever set against all our liberty and prosperity.
As we now breast the terrific storm which English reasonings and
taunts had encouraged us to brave, and hear, swelling above the
faint English God-speed, misstatements, gibes, reproofs, malignant
prophecies, who of us shall say that the English character and
policy of 1861 were not better foreknown by Jefferson in 1820 than
by ourselves In 1860?

So much for Jefferson’s insight and foresight. But there
was yet a greater quality which gave him a place in each of these
three great groups,—his faith in Democracy.

At a time when the French Revolution had scared even Burke, and
when the British Constitution was thought by many to have seduced
even Washington, Jefferson held fast to his great faith in the
rights and capacities of the people. The only effect on him of the
shocks and failures of that period was to make his anxiety
sometimes morbid, and his action sometimes spasmodic. Hence much
that to many men has seemed unjust suspicion of Adams, and
persecution of Hamilton, and disrespect for Washington. Yet all
this was but the jarring of that strong mind in the struggle and
crash of his times,—mere spasms of bigotry which prove the
vigor of his faith in Democracy.

Jefferson, then, known of all men not fettered by provincial
traditions as invested with this foresight and this faith, is
become to a vast party an idol, and from his writings issue
oracles. But the priests at his shrines, having waxed fat in
honors, have at last so befogged his sentiments and wrested his
arguments, that thousands of true men regard him sorrowfully as the
promoter of that Slavery-Despotism which to-day blooms in treason.
It is worth our while, therefore, to seek to know whether Jefferson
the god of the Oligarchs is Jefferson the Democrat. Let us, by the
simplest and fairest process possible, try to come at his real
opinions on Slavery,—just as they grew when he did so much to
found the Republic,—just as they flourished when he did so
much to build the Republic,—just as they were re-wrought and
polished when he did so much to brace the Republic.

The whole culture of Jefferson’s youth was, of all things
in the world, least likely to make him support slavery or apologize
for it. The man who did most to work into his mind ideas of moral
and political science was Dr. William Small, a liberal Scotchman;
the man who did most to direct his studies in law, and his
grappling with social problems, was George Wythe. To both of these
Jefferson confessed the deepest debt for their efforts to
strengthen his mind and make his footing firm. Now, of all men in
this country at that time, these two were least likely to support
pro-slavery theories or tolerate pro-slavery cant. For while to
Small’s soundness there is abundance of general testimony,
there is to Wythe’s soundness testimony the most pointed. We
have but to take the first volume of Jefferson’s Works,
published by order of Congress, and we find Jefferson’s
anti-slavery letter to Dr. Price, written in 1785, urging the
Doctor to work against pro-slavery ideas in the young men, and to
exhort the young men of Virginia to the “redress of the
enormity.” Incidentally he speaks of Mr. Wythe as already
doing great good in this direction among these same young men, and
declares him “one of the most virtuous of characters, and
whose sentiments on the subject of slavery are
unequivocal.”

So much for the direct influences on Jefferson’s
early culture.

Studying, next, the indirect influences on his early
culture, we see that the reform literature of that time was coming
almost entirely from France. Active, earnest men everywhere were
grasping the theories and phrases of Voltaire and Rousseau and
Montesquieu, to wield them against every tyranny. Terrible weapons
these,—often searing and scarring frightfully those who
brandished them,—yet there was not one chance in a thousand
that any man who had once made any considerable number of these
ideas his own could ever support slavery. Whoever, at that time,
studied the “Contrat Social,” or the defence of Jean
Calas, whatever other sins he might commit, was no more likely to
advocate systematic oppression than are they who now read with
reverence Dr. Arnold and Charles Kingsley; and whoever, at that
time, read earnestly “The Spirit of the Laws” was as
sure to fight slavery as any man who to-day reveres Channing or
Theodore Parker. Those French thinkers threw such heat and light
into Jefferson’s young mind, that every filthy weed of
tyrannic quibble or pro-slavery paradox must have been
shrivelled.

And the young statesman grew under this influence as we should
expect. In his twenty-seventh year he sat in the Virginia House of
Burgesses, and his first effort in legislation was, in his own
words, “an effort for the permission of the emancipation of
slaves, which was rejected, and, indeed, during the regal
government nothing liberal could expect success.” His whole
career in those years, whether as public man or private man, shows
that his hatred of slavery was bitter. But there was such a press
of other work during this founding period, that this hatred took
shape not so much in a steady siege as in a series of pitched
battles. The work to be done was immense, and Jefferson bore the
bulk of it. He took upon himself one-third of the revising and
codifying of the Virginia laws, and did even more than this. He
undertook, in his own words, “a distinct series of labors
which formed a system by which every fibre would be eradicated
of ancient or future aristocracy.” He effected the
repeal of the laws of entail, and this prevented an aristocratic
absorption of the soil; he effected the abolition of primogeniture,
and this destroyed all chance of rebuilding feudal families; he
effected a restoration of the rights of conscience, and this
overthrew all hope of an Established Church; he forced on the bill
for general education,—for thus, he said, would the people be
“qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and
to exercise with intelligence their parts in
self-government.” In all this work his keen common sense
always cut his way through questions at which other men stopped or
stumbled. Thus, in the discussion on primogeniture, when Isaac
Pendleton proposed, as a compromise, that they should adopt the
Hebrew principle and give a double portion to the eldest son,
Jefferson cut at once into the heart of the question. As he himself
relates,—“I observed, that, if the eldest son could eat
twice as much, or do double work, it might be a natural evidence of
his right to a double portion; but being on a par in his powers and
wants with his brothers and sisters, he should be on a par also in
the partition of the patrimony. And such was the decision of the
other members.”

But such fierceness against the bulwarks of aristocracy, and
such keenness in cutting through its heavy arguments, carried him
farther. Logic forced him to pass from the attack on aristocracy to
the attack on slavery, just as logic forces the Confederate
oligarchs of to-day to pass from the defence of slavery to the
defence of aristocracy. He was sure to fight this vilest of
tyrannies, and he gave quick thrusts and heavy blows. In 1778 he
brought in a bill to prevent the further importation of slaves into
Virginia. “This,” he says, “passed without
opposition, and stopped the increase of the evil by importation,
leaving to future efforts its final eradication.” Years
afterward he wrote as follows:—“I have sometimes asked
myself whether my country is better for my having lived at all: I
do not know that it is. I have been the instrument of doing the
following things.” Of these things there were just ten. Just
ten great worthy deeds in a life like Jefferson’s!—and
one of these he declares “the act prohibiting the importation
of slaves.”

Close upon this followed a fiercer grapple,—his third
great legislative attack on slavery. In his revision of the
Virginia laws he reported “a bill to emancipate all slaves
born after the passing of the act.” Attached to this was a
plan for the instruction of the young negroes thus set free.

To follow Jefferson and understand him, we must bear in mind
that the Virginia which educated him was not behind a dozen smaller
States in fertility, enterprise, and republican feeling. Its best
men were haters of slavery. The efforts of its leaders were
directed to other things than plans for taxing oysters or filching
the gains of free negroes. Forth from the Virginia of that time
were hurled against negro slavery the thrilling invectives of
Patrick Henry, the startling prophecies of Madison, and the
declaration of Washington, “For the abolition of slavery by
law my vote shall not be wanting.”

For a mirror of that Virginia statesmanship, in its dealings
with human rights, take the “Dissertation on Slavery with a
Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it in the State of Virginia,
written by St. George Tucker, Professor of Law in the University of
William and Mary, and one of the Judges of the General Court in
Virginia,” published in 1791. It proves, that, between the
passage of the act of 1782 allowing manumission and the year 1791,
more than ten thousand slaves had been set free. One is tempted to
believe that the new Massachusetts school caught its fire from this
old Virginia school; for this friend of Jefferson speaks of
“the inconsistency of invoking God for liberty in our
Revolution and imposing on our fellow-men who differ from us in
complexion a slavery ten thousand times more cruel than the
grievances and oppressions of which we complained.” Such was
the utterance of the Virginia school of statesmanship in which
Jefferson was trained.

And his views progressed, as we should expect. On the occasion
of a call for instructions to the first Virginia delegates to
Congress respecting an address to the King, Jefferson drew up a
paper, which, though greatly admired, was thought too bold. In one
passage he goes beyond his masters, and says,—“For the
most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reasons at
all, his Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency.
The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire
in these Colonies, where it was unhappily introduced in their
infant state. But, previous to the enfranchisement of the
slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations
from Africa. Yet our repeated efforts to effect this, by
prohibiting and by imposing duties which might amount to
prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his Majesty’s
negative,—thus preferring the advantages of a few British
corsairs to the lasting interests of the American States, and to
the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous
practice.”

These words are hot and bright, but they are mere sparkles
compared to the full-flaming orb of freedom which our statesman
gave afterward. For, take the Declaration of Independence, as it
issued from Carpenter’s Hall, after slavery-loving planters
of the South and money-loving ship-owners of the North had, as they
thought, made it neutral, and we all, North and South, recognize in
it the boldest anti-slavery document extant. Why else do Northern
demagogues ridicule it, and Southern demagogues revile it? Yet
Jefferson made it far stronger and sharper against negro slavery
than it is now. Look closely at the well-known
fac-simile:—

There stands to this day that precious original,—hot
first-thoughts and cold second-thoughts, all in Jefferson’s
own hand. Look for a moment at the rich current of internal
evidence running through that rough draught, and through all its
erasures, changes, and emphatic markings,—evidence of the
deepest hatred not only of all tyranny, but of all slavery. Thus,
after he had written the passage, “determined to keep open a
market where MEN should be bought & sold,” the idea
continues hot in his mind; for, after smouldering a few moments, it
flames forth again, is written again in the same phrasing, with the
same show of emphasis, before he bethinks himself to erase it.
Then, too, the words Christian and MEN are the only words
emphasized by careful pen-printing in large letters;—and this
labored movement of his pen marks the injury which he deemed the
greater; for the largest letters and deepest emphasis are reserved
for MEN. Evidently, that word points out the wrong which, as
Jefferson thought, “a candid world” would forever
regard as the supreme wrong.

We have now noted Jefferson’s battle against slavery in
the founding of the Republic: let us go on to his work in the
building of the Republic.

In 1782 he gave forth the “Notes on Virginia.” His
opposition to slavery is as fierce here as of old, but it takes
various phases,—sometimes sweeping against the hated system
with a torrent of facts,—sometimes battering it with a hard,
cold logic,—sometimes piercing it with deadly queries and
suggestions,—and sometimes, with his blazing hate of all
oppression, biting and burning through every pro-slavery
theory.

But in taking up the “Notes,” we must understand the
relation of Jefferson’s way of thinking to his way of
working. In his thinking, the slave system was evidently a
violation of the whole body of good principles, for he calls it an
“evil”;—a violation of morality, for he
calls it an “enormity”;—a violation of
justice, for he calls it a “wrong”;—a
violation of republican pretensions, for he calls it a
“hideous blot”;—a violation of the
healthy action of our institutions, for he calls it a
“disease”;—a violation of our whole
public happiness, for he calls it a “curse.”
But his way of working was more calm and cool,—often
displeasing those whose plans of action are formed far from any
direct entanglement in the slave system.

This union of fervent thought and cool action has, of course,
brought upon Jefferson the invectives of two great classes. One
class have looked merely at his thinking, and have distrusted him
as a dreamer. To these he is a dealer in oracles, at second-hand,
from Voltaire and Diderot. The other class have studied his plans
of practical philanthropy, with all his shrewd researches and
homely discussions in agriculture, finance, mechanics, and
architecture, and have ridiculed him as a tinker. To such Jefferson
seems a grandmotherly sort of person,—riding about in a gig
arranged to register the length of his rides,—walking about
in boots arranged to register the length of his
walks,—weatherwise, and profound in dealing with smoky
chimneys and sheep-breeding.

But whether men have cavilled at him for a dreamer or laughed at
him for a tinker, they have been mainly foolish, for they have
cavilled and laughed at the very combination which made him
powerful. In no other American have been so happily blended highest
skill in theory and highest strength in practice.

The remarks, in the “Notes on Virginia,” on the
colored race are clear and fair. He studied carefully and stated
fully all that could be learned in his time. On the whole, his
examination greatly encourages those who hope good things for that
race. But one distinction must be made. As to those profound views
of the character and destiny of the race which come only by
observation of a long historic development, in a wide range of
climate, in great variety of social position, Jefferson could, as
he confesses, know almost nothing,—for the same reason that
the keenest observer of William the Conqueror’s Norman
robbers and Saxon swineherds would have failed to foretell the
great dominant race which has come from them by free growth and
good culture. But, on the other hand, of all that comes by
observation of the daily life of the black race, as it then was, he
knew almost everything.

He declares that the black race is inferior to the white in
mind, but not in heart. The poems of black Phillis Wheatley seem to
him to prove not much; but the letters of black Ignatius Sancho he
praises for depth of feeling, happy turn of thought, and ease of
style, though he finds no depth of reasoning. He does not praise
the mental capacity of the race, but, at last, as if conscious,
that, if developed under a free system, it might be far better, he
quotes the Homeric lines,—

And shortly after, he declares it “a suspicion
only that the blacks are inferior in the endowments of body or
mind,”—that “in memory they are equal to the
whites,”—that “in music they are more generally
gifted than the whites with accurate ears for time and
tune.”

But there is one statement which we especially commend to those
in search of an effective military policy in the present crisis.
Jefferson declares of the negroes, that they are “at least as
brave as the whites, and more adventuresome.” May not this
truth account for the fact that one of the most daring deeds in the
present war was done by a black man?

Still later, Jefferson says,—“Whether further
observation will or will not verify the conjecture that Nature has
been less bountiful to them in the endowments of the head, I
believe that in those of the heart she will be found to have done
them justice. That disposition to theft with which they have been
branded must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any
depravity of the moral sense. The man in whose favor no laws of
property exist probably feels himself less bound to respect those
made in favor of others. When arguing for ourselves, we lay it down
as fundamental, that laws, to be just, must give reciprocation of
right,—that, without this, they are mere arbitrary rules of
conduct, founded in force, and not in conscience; and it is a
problem which I give to the master to solve, whether the religious
precepts against the violation of property were not framed for him
as well as his slave,—and whether the slave may not as
justifiably take a little from one who has taken all from him as he
may slay one who would slay him. That a change in the relations in
which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and
wrong is neither new, nor peculiar to the color of the
blacks.”

Here Jefferson puts forth that very idea for which Gerrit Smith,
a few years ago, was threatened with the penalties of treason.

But to quote further from the same source:—

“Notwithstanding these considerations, which
must weaken their respect for the laws of property, we find among
them numerous instances of the most rigid integrity, and as many as
among their instructed masters, of benevolence, gratitude, and
unshaken fidelity. The opinion that they are inferior in the
faculties of reason and imagination must be hazarded with great
diffidence.”

The old hot thought blazes forth again in the chapter on
“Particular Manners and Customs.” Can men speak against
the proclamations of Abolition Conventions after such fiery words
from Jefferson?

“The whole commerce between master and slave
is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most
unremitting despotism, on the one part, and degrading submission on
the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man
is an imitative animal. If a parent could find no motive either in
his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance
of passion toward his slave, it should always be a sufficient one
that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The
parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath,
puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a
loose rein to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and
daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by its odious
peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners
and morals undepraved by such circumstances.” (Here fire
begins to flicker up around the words.) “And with what
execration should a statesman be loaded, who, permitting one half
the citizens” (note the word) “to trample on
the rights” (note the word) “of the other,
transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the
morals of the one and the amor patriae of the other! And
can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have
removed their only firm basis,—a conviction in the minds of
the people that their liberties are the gifts of God, that they are
not to be violated but with His wrath?” (Now bursts forth
prophecy. The whole page flames in a moment.) “Indeed, I
tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His
justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature,
and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of Fortune, an
exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become
probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no
attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

Well may Jefferson say, immediately after this, that “it
is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through
the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural
and civil.” For no Abolitionist ever branded the slave-system
with words more fiery.

In 1784 Jefferson drew up the ordinance for the government of
the Western Territory. One famous clause runs thus:—

“After the year 1800 of the Christian era
there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of
the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the
party shall have been convicted to be personally guilty.”

In Randall’s “Life of Jefferson,” a work in
many respects admirable, this clause is glossed with the
declaration that Jefferson intended merely to prevent an immense
new importation of slaves from Africa to fill the Territory; but
Mr. Randall would have shown far greater insight, had he added to
this half-truth, that the idea of legally grasping and strangling
this curse flows from the ideas of the “Notes” as hot
metal flows from fiery furnace,—that the Ordinance of 1784
was but a minting of that true metal drawn from those old glowing
thoughts and words.

But Jefferson’s hatred of slavery is not less fierce in
his letters.

Dr. Price writes a pamphlet in England against slavery, and
straightway Jefferson seizes his pen to urge him to write more, and
more clearly for America, and more directly at American young men,
saying, in encouragement,—“Northward of the Chesapeake
you may find, here and there, an opponent to your doctrine, as you
may find, here and there, a murderer.” He speaks hopefully of
the disposition in Virginia to “redress this
enormity,”—calls the fight against slavery “the
interesting spectacle of justice in conflict with avarice and
oppression,”—speaks of the side hostile to slavery as
“the sacred side.” The date is 1785.

This welcome to Dr. Price’s onslaught will serve as
antidote to Mr. Randall’s poisonous declaration, that
Jefferson was opposed to interference with slave institutions by
those living outside of Slave States.

In 1786 Jefferson wrote to correct M. de Meusnier’s
statement of the efforts already made for emancipation; and,
referring to the holding of slaves by a people who had clamored
loudly and fought bravely for freedom, he says,—

“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible
machine is man,—who can endure toil, famine, stripes,
imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty,
and, in the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power
supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men
a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than
ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose!”

Here, in Jefferson himself, then, is the source of that venom
with which earnest men, throughout the land, are stinging to death
the organization which stole his name to destroy his ideas.

In 1788, Jefferson, being Minister at Paris, receives a note
from M. de Warville tendering him membership in the Society for the
Abolition of the Slave-Trade. Jefferson is forced by his peculiar
position to decline, but he takes pains to say,—“You
know that nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition not only
of the trade, but of the condition of slavery.”

Here is no non-committalism, no wistful casting about for
loop-holes, no sly putting out of hooks to catch backers, not the
feeblest germ of quibble or lie. The man answers more than he is
asked. Is there not, in the present dearth, something refreshing in
this old candor?

But some have thought Jefferson’s later expressions
against slavery wanting in heartiness. Let us examine.

The whole world knows, that, when a wrong stings a man, making
him fierce and loud, his direct expressions have often
small value; but that his parenthetical expressions often
have great value. This is one of the simplest principles in homely
every-day criticism, serving truth-seekers, wherever wordy war
rages, whether among statesmen or hackmen.

Now, in Jefferson’s letter to Dr. Gordon,—written in
1788,—he is greatly stirred by his own recital of the
shameful ravages on his property by the British army. Just at the
moment when his indignation was at the hottest, there shot out of
his heart, and off his pen, one of these side-thoughts, one of
these fragments of the man’s ground-idea, which, at such
moments, truth-seekers always watch for. Jefferson says of
Cornwallis,—

“He destroyed all my growing crops of corn
and tobacco; he burned all my barns containing the same articles of
the last year, having first taken what corn he wanted; he used, as
was to be expected, all my stock of cattle, sheep, and hogs, for
the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable
of service,—of those too young for service he cut the
throats; and he burned all the fences in the plantation, so as to
make it an absolute waste. He carried off also about thirty
slaves. Had this been to give them their freedom, he would have
done right.”

But we turn to a seeming discrepancy between these thousand
earnest declarations of Jefferson the private citizen, and the
cold, formal tone of Jefferson the Secretary of State. In this high
office he reclaims slaves from the Spanish power in Florida, and
demands compensation for slaves carried off by the British at the
evacuation of New York. For a moment that transition from personal
warmth to diplomatic coolness is as the Russian plunge from
steam-bath to snow-heap.

Yet, if truth-seekers do not stop to moan, they may easily find
a complete explanation. As private citizen, in a State, dealing
with his home Government, Jefferson had the right to move heaven
and earth against slavery, and bravely he did it; but, as public
servant of the nation, dealing with foreign Governments, his rights
and duties were different, and his tone must be different. As a
private person, writing for man as man, Jefferson forgot readily
enough all differences of nation. He wrote as readily and fully of
the hideousness of slavery to Meusnier and Warville in France, or
to Price and Priestley in England, as to any of his neighbors; but,
as public servant of the nation, writing to Hammond or Viar,
representatives of foreign powers, he made no apology for our
miseries. England might be ready enough to act the part of Dives,
but Jefferson was not the statesman to put America in the attitude
of Lazarus,—begging, and showing sores.

But we have to note yet another change in Jefferson’s
modes of work and warfare.

As he wrought and fought in this second period, which, for easy
reference, we call the building period, he was forced into new
methods. In the former period we saw him thinking and speaking and
working against every effort to found pro-slavery theories or
practices. Eagerness was then the best quality for work, and
quickness the best quality for fight. But now the case was
different. An institution which Jefferson hated had, in spite of
his struggles, been firmly founded. The land was full of the towers
of the slave aristocracy. He saw that his mode of warfare must be
changed. His old way did well in the earlier days, for
tower-builders may be driven from their work by a sweeping charge
or sudden volley; but towers, when built, must be treated with
steady battering and skilful mining.

In 1797, Jefferson, writing to St. George Tucker, speaks of the
only possible emancipation as “a compromise between the
passions, prejudices, and real difficulties, which will each have
their weight in the operation.” Afterwards, in his letters to
Monroe and Rufus King, he advocates a scheme of colonization to
some point not too distant. But let no man, on this account, claim
Jefferson as a supporter of the do-nothing school of Northern
demagogues, or of the mad school of Southern fanatics who proclaim
this ulcerous mass a beauty, and who howl at all who refuse its
infection. For, note, in that same letter to St. George Tucker, the
fervor of the Jeffersonian theory: bitter as Tucker’s
pamphlet against slavery was, he says,—“You know my
subscription to its doctrines.” Note also the vigor of the
Jeffersonian practice: speaking of emancipation, he
says,—“The sooner we put some plan under way, the
greater hope there is that it may be permitted to proceed peaceably
to its ultimate effect.” And now bursts forth prophecy again.
“But if something is not done, and soon done, we shall be
the murderers of our own children.” “If we had
begun sooner, we might probably have been allowed a lengthier
operation to clear ourselves; but every day’s delay lessens
the time we may take for emancipation.”

Here is no trace of the theory inflicting a present certain evil
on a great white population in order to do a future doubtful good
to a smaller black population. And this has been nowhere better
understood than among the slave oligarchs of his own time. Note one
marked example.

In 1801, Jefferson was elected to the Presidency on the
thirty-sixth ballot. Thirty-five times Delaware, Maryland, and
South Carolina voted against him. The following year Mr. Rutledge
of South Carolina, feeling an itching to specify to Congress his
interests in Buncombe and his relations to the universe, palavered
in the usual style, but let out one truth, for which, as
truth-searchers, we thank him. He said,—

“Permit me to state, that, beside the
objections common to my friend from Delaware and myself, there was
a strong one which I felt with peculiar force. It resulted from a
firm belief that the gentleman in question [Jefferson] held
opinions respecting a certain description of property in my State
which, should they obtain generally, would endanger
it.”⁴4. Benton’s
Abridgment, Vol. II. p. 636.

We come now to Jefferson’s Presidency. In this there was
no great chance to deal an effective blow at slavery; but some have
grown bitter over a story that he favored the schemes to break the
slavery-limitation in Ohio. Such writers have not stopped to
consider that it is more probable that a few Southern members,
eager to drum in recruits, falsely claimed the favor of the
President, than that Jefferson broke the slavery-limitation which
he himself planned. Then, too, came the petitions of the abolition
societies against slavery in Louisiana; and Hildreth blames
Jefferson for his slowness to assist; but ought we not here to take
some account of the difficulties of the situation? Ought not some
weight to be given to Jefferson’s declaration to Kerchival,
that in his administration his “efforts in relation to peace,
slavery, and religious freedom were all in accordance with
Quakerism”?

We pass now to the third great period, in which, as thinker and
writer, he did so much to brace the Republic.

First of all, in this period we see him revising the translation
and arranging the publication of De Tracy’s
“Commentaire sur l’Esprit des Lois.” He takes
endless pains to make its hold firm on America; engages his old
companion in abolitionism, St. George Tucker, to circulate it;
makes it a text-book in the University of Virginia; tells his
friend Cabell to read it, for it is “the best book on
government in the world.” Now this “best book on
government” is killing to every form of tyranny or slavery;
its arguments pierce all their fallacies and crush all their
sophistries. That famous plea which makes Alison love Austria and
Palmer love Louisiana—the plea that a people can be best
educated for freedom and religion by dwarfing their minds and tying
their hands—is, in this book, shivered by argument and burnt
by invective.

As we approach the last years of Jefferson’s life we find
several letters of his on slavery. Some have thought them mere
heaps of ashes,—poor remains of the flaming thoughts and
words of earlier years. This mistake is great. Touch the seeming
heap of ashes, and those thoughts and words dart forth, fiery as of
old.

In 1814, Edward Coles attacks slavery vigorously, and calls on
the great Democrat to destroy it. Jefferson’s approving reply
is the complete summary of his matured views on slavery. Take a few
declarations as specimens.⁵5.
Randall, Vol. III., Appendix.

“The sentiments breathed through the whole
do honor both to the head and heart of the writer. Mine, on the
subject of the slavery of negroes, have long since been in
possession of the public, and time has only served to give them
stronger proof. The love of justice and the love of country plead
equally the cause of these people, and it is a mortal reproach to
us that they should have pleaded so long in vain.”

“The hour of emancipation is advancing in
the march of time. It will come; and whether brought on by the
generous energy of our own minds or by the bloody process of St.
Domingo … is a leaf of our history not yet turned
over.”

“As to the method by which this difficult
work is to be effected, if permitted to be done by ourselves, I
have seen no proposition so expedient, on the whole, as that of
emancipation of those born after a given day.”

“This enterprise is for the young,—for
those who can follow it up and bear it through to its consummation.
It shall have all my prayers.”

No wonder that this letter of Jefferson to Coles seems to have
been carefully suppressed by Southern editors of the Jeffersonian
writings.

Take also the letters to Mr. Barrows and to Dr. Humphreys of
1815-17. Disappointment is expressed at the want of a more general
anti-slavery feeling among the young men; hope is expressed that
“time will soften down the master and educate the
slave”; faith is expressed that slavery will yield,
“because we are not in a world ungoverned by the laws and
power of a Supreme Agent.”

Entering now the stormy period of the Missouri Debate, we have
one declaration from Jefferson which, at first, surprises and pains
us,—the opinion given in a letter to Lafayette, that
spreading slavery will “dilute the evil everywhere, and
facilitate the means of getting rid of it.” The mistake is
gross indeed. To all of us, with the political knowledge forced
upon us by events since Jefferson’s death, it seems
atrocious. But unpardonable as such a theory is now, was
it so then?

Jefferson had not before him the experience of these last forty
years of weakness and poverty and barbarism in our new Slave
States,—and of that tenacity of life which slavery shares
with so many other noxious growths. Hastily, then, he broached this
opinion. Let it stand; and let the remark on “geographical
lines,” and the two or three severe criticisms of Northern
men, wrested from him in the excitement of the Missouri struggle,
be tied to it and given to the Oligarchs. These expressions were
drawn from him in his old age,—in his vexation at unfair
attacks,—in his depression at the approach of
poverty,—in his suffering under the encroachments of disease.
Any one of those bold declarations in the vigor of his manhood will
forever efface all memory of them.

The opinion expressed by Jefferson, at the same period, that
“the General Government cannot interfere with slavery in the
States,” all our parties now accept—as a peace
policy; but if we are forced into an opposite war policy,
let our generals remember Jefferson’s declaration as to the
taking of his slaves by Cornwallis: “Had this been to
give them their freedom, he would have done right.”

But there is one letter which all Northern statesmen should
ponder. It warns them solemnly, for it was written a very short
time before Jefferson’s death;—it warns them sharply,
for it struck one whom the North has especially honored. This son
of the North had made a well-known unfortunate speech in Congress,
and had sent it to Jefferson. In his answer the old statesman
declares,—

“On the question of the lawfulness of
slavery, that is, of the right of one man to appropriate to
himself the faculties of another without his consent, I certainly
retain my early opinions. On that, however, of third persons
to interfere between the parties, and the effect of Constitutional
modifications of that pretension, we are probably nearer
together.”

There was a blow well dealt,—though at one now greatly
honored. We may refuse the subordinate idea in the letter, but we
will glory in that main confession of political faith, in the last
year of Jefferson’s life; and we will not forget that the
last of his letters on slavery chastised the worst sin of Northern
statesmanship.

Jefferson, then, in dealing with slavery, was a real political
seer and giver of oracles,—always sure to say
something; whereas the “leading men” who in
these latter days have usurped his name are neither political seers
nor givers of oracles, but mere political fakirs,—striving,
their lives long, to enter political blessedness by solemnly doing
and seeing and saying—nothing.

Jefferson was a true political warrior, and his battle for human
rights compares with the Oligarchist battle against them as the
warfare of Cortés compares with Aztec warfare. He is the man
full of strong thought backed by civilization: they, the men trying
to keep up their faith in idols, trying to scare with war-paint,
trying to startle with war-whoop, trying to vex with showers of
poor Aztec arrows.

Jefferson was an orator,—not in that he fed petty
assemblages with narcotic words to stupefy conscience, or corrosive
words to kill conscience, but in that he gave to the world those
decisive, true words which shall yet pierce all tyranny and
slavery.

Jefferson was the founder of a democratic system, strong and
full-orbed: “leading men” have fastened his name to an
aristocratic system with mobocratic cries.

This great tree of Liberty which we are all trying to plant
will, of course, not grow as we will, but as God and
Nature will. Some branches will be exuberant through too great
wealth of sunshine,—others gnarled and awry through too great
fury of storms. We need find no fault with any growth, but we may
admire some branches and prize some fruits more than others. Some
grafts set by noblest hands have often blossomed in bad temper and
borne fruit bitter and sour. Some fruitage has been of that poor
Dead-Sea sort,—splendid in coating, but inwardly
ashes,—wretched “protective” schemes and the
like. The world may yet see that the limbs of toughest fibre and
fruit of richest flavor have come from grafts set by just such
strong men in theory and in practice as Thomas Jefferson.

A STORY OF TO-DAY.

PART IV.

An hour after, the evening came on sultry, the air murky,
opaque, with yellow trails of color dragging in the west: a sullen
stillness in the woods and farms; only, in fact, that dark,
inexplicable hush that precedes a storm. But Lois, coming down the
hill-road, singing to herself, and keeping time with her whip-end
on the wooden measure, stopped when she grew conscious of it. It
seemed to her blurred fancy more than a deadening sky: a something
solemn and unknown, hinting of evil to come. The dwarf-pines on the
road-side scowled weakly at her through the gray; the very silver
minnows in the pools she passed flashed frightened away, and
darkened into the muddy niches. There was a vague dread in the
sudden silence. She called to the old donkey, and went faster down
the hill, as if escaping from some overhanging peril, unseen. She
saw Margaret coming up the road. There was a phaëton behind
her, and some horsemen: she jolted the cart off into the stones to
let them pass, seeing Mr. Holmes’s face in the carriage as
she did so. He did not look at her; had his head turned towards the
gray distance. Lois’s vivid eye caught the full meaning of
the woman beside him. The face hurt her: not fair, as Polston
called it: vapid and cruel. She was dressed in yellow: the color
seemed jeering and mocking to the girl’s sensitive instinct,
keenly alive to every trifle. She did not know that it is the color
of shams, and that women like this are the most deadly of shams. As
the phaëton went slowly down, Margaret came nearer, meeting it
on the road-side, the dust from the wheels stifling the air. Lois
saw her look up, and then suddenly stand still, holding to the
fence, as they met her. Holmes’s cold, wandering eye turned
on the little dusty figure standing there, poor and despised.
Polston called his eyes hungry: it was a savage hunger that sprang
into them now; a gray shadow creeping over his set face, as he
looked at her, in that flashing moment. The phaëton was gone
in an instant, leaving her alone in the muddy road. One of the men
looked back, and then whispered something to the lady with a laugh.
She turned to Holmes, when he had finished, fixing her light,
confusing eyes on his face, and softening her voice.

“Fred swears that woman we passed was your first love.
Were you, then, so chivalric? Was it to have been a second romaunt
of ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’?”

He met her look, and saw the fierce demand through the softness
and persiflage. He gave it no answer, but, turning to her, kindled
into the man whom she was so proud to show as her capture,—a
man far off from Stephen Holmes. Brilliant she called
him,—frank, winning, generous. She thought she knew him well;
held him a slave to her fluttering hand. Being proud of her slave,
she let the hand flutter down now somehow with some flowers it held
until it touched his hard fingers, her cheek flushing into rose.
The nerveless, spongy hand,—what a death-grip it had on his
life! He did not look back once at the motionless, dusty figure on
the road. What was that Polston had said about starving to death
for a kind word? Love? He was sick of the sickly
talk,—crushed it out of his heart with a savage scorn. He
remembered his father, the night he died, had said in his weak
ravings that God was love. Was He? No wonder, then, He was the God
of women, and children, and unsuccessful men. For him, he was done
with it. He was here with stronger purpose than to yield to
weaknesses of the flesh. He had made his choice,—a straight,
hard path upwards; he was deaf now and forever to any word of
kindness or pity. As for this woman beside him, he would be just to
her, in justice to himself: she never should know the loathing in
his heart: just to her as to all living creatures. Some little,
mean doubt kept up a sullen whisper of bought and
sold,—sold,—but he laughed it down. He sat there with
his head steadily turned towards her: a kingly face, she called it,
and she was right,—it was a kingly face: with the same
shallow, fixed smile on his mouth,—no weary cry went up to
God that day so terrible in its pathos, I think: with the same dull
consciousness that this was the trial night of his life,—that
with the homely figure on the road-side he had turned his back on
love and kindly happiness and warmth, on all that was weak and
useless in the world. He had made his choice; he would abide by
it,—he would abide by it. He said that over and over again,
dulling down the death-gnawing of his outraged heart.

Miss Herne was quite contented, sitting by him, with herself,
and the admiring world. She had no notion of trial nights in life.
Not many temptations pierced through her callous, flabby
temperament to sting her to defeat or triumph. There was for her no
under-current of conflict, in these people whom she passed, between
self and the unseen power that Holmes sneered at, whose name was
love; they were nothing but movables, pleasant or ugly to look at,
well- or ill-dressed. There were no dark iron bars across her life
for her soul to clutch and shake madly,—nothing “in the
world amiss, to be unriddled by-and-by.” Little Margaret,
sitting by the muddy road, digging her fingers dully into the
clover-roots, while she looked at the spot where the wheels had
passed, looked at life differently, it may be;—or old Joe
Yare by the furnace-fire, his black face and gray hair bent over a
torn old spelling-book Lois had given him. The night perhaps was
going to be more to them than so many rainy hours for
sleeping,—the time to be looked back on through coming lives
as the hour when good and ill came to them, and they made their
choice, and, as Holmes said, did abide by it.

It grew cool and darker. Holmes left the phaëton before
they entered town, and turned back. He was going to see this
Margaret Howth, tell her what he was going to do. Because he was
going to leave a clean record. No one should accuse him of want of
honor. This girl alone of all living beings had a right to see him
as he stood, justified to himself. Why she had this right, I do not
think he answered to himself. Besides, he must see her, if only on
business. She must keep her place at the mill: he would not begin
his new life by an act of injustice, taking the bread out of
Margaret’s mouth. Little Margaret! He stopped
suddenly, looking down into a deep pool of water by the road-side.
What madness of weariness crossed his brain just then I do not
know. He shook it off. Was he mad? Life was worth more to him than
to other men, he thought; and perhaps he was right. He went slowly
through the cool dusk, looking across the fields, up at the pale,
frightened face of the moon hooded in clouds: he did not dare to
look, with all his iron nerve, at the dark figure beyond him on the
road. She was sitting there just where he had left her: be knew she
would be. When he came closer, she got up, not looking towards him;
but he saw her clasp her hands behind her, the fingers plucking
weakly at each other. It was an old, childish fashion of hers, when
she was frightened or hurt. It would only need a word, and he could
be quiet and firm,—she was such a child compared to him: he
always had thought of her so. He went on up to her slowly, and
stopped; when she looked at him, he untied the linen bonnet that
hid her face, and threw it back. How thin and tired the little face
had grown! Poor child! He put his strong arm kindly about her, and
stooped to kiss her hand, but she drew it away. God! what did she
do that for? Did not she know that he could put his head beneath
her foot then, he was so mad with pity for the woman he had
wronged? Not love, he thought, controlling himself,—it was
only justice to be kind to her.

“You have been ill, Margaret, these two years, while I was
gone?”

He could not hear her answer; only saw that she looked up with a
white, pitiful smile. Only a word it needed, he thought,—very
kind and firm: and he must be quick,—he could not bear this
long. But he held the little worn fingers, stroking them with an
unutterable tenderness.

“You must let these fingers work for me, Margaret,”
he said, at last, “when I am master in the mill.”

“It is true, then, Stephen?”

“It is true,—yes.”

She lifted her hand to her head, uncertainly: he held it
tightly, and then let it go. What right had he to touch the dust
upon her shoes,—he, bought and sold? She did not speak for a
time; when she did, it was a weak and sick voice.

“I am glad. I saw her, you know. She is very
beautiful.”

The fingers were plucking at each other again; and a strange,
vacant smile on her face, trying to look glad.

“You love her, Stephen?”

He was quiet and firm enough now.

“I do not. Her money will help me to become what I ought
to be. She does not care for love. You want me to succeed,
Margaret? No one ever understood me as you did, child though you
were.”

Her whole face glowed.

“I know! I know! I did understand you!”

She said, lower, after a little while,—

“I knew you did not love her.”

“There is no such thing as love in real life,” he
said, in his steeled voice. “You will know that, when you
grow older. I used to believe in it once, myself.”

She did not speak, only watched the slow motion of his lips, not
looking into his eyes,—as she used to do in the old time.
Whatever secret account lay between the souls of this man and woman
came out now, and stood bare on their faces.

“I used to think that I, too, loved,” he went on, in
his low, hard tone. “But it kept me back, Margaret,
and”—

He was silent.

“I know, Stephen. It kept you back”—

“And I put it away. I put it away to-night,
forever.”

She did not speak; stood quite quiet, her head bent on her
breast. His conscience was quite clear now. But he almost wished he
had not said it, she was such a weak, sickly thing. She sat down at
last, burying her face in her hands, with a shivering sob. He dared
not trust himself to speak again.

“I am not proud,—as a woman ought to be,” she
said, wearily, when he wiped her clammy forehead.

“You loved me, then?” he whispered.

Her face flashed at the unmanly triumph; her puny frame started
up, away from him.

“I did love you, Stephen. I love you now,—as you
might be, not as you are,—not with those cold, inhuman eyes.
I do understand you,—I do. I know you for a better man than
you know yourself this night.”

She turned to go. He put his hand on her arm; something we have
never seen on his face struggled up,—the better soul that she
knew.

“Come back,” he said, hoarsely; “don’t
leave me with myself. Come back, Margaret.”

She did not come; stood leaning, her sudden strength gone,
against the broken wall. There was a heavy silence. The night
throbbed slow about them. Some late bird rose from the sedges of
the pool, and with a frightened cry flapped its tired wings, and
drifted into the dark. His eyes, through the gathering shadow,
devoured the weak, trembling body, met the soul that looked at him,
strong as his own. Was it because it knew and trusted him that all
that was pure and strongest in his crushed nature struggled madly
to be free? He thrust it down; the self-learned lesson of years was
not to be conquered in a moment.

“There have been times,” he said, in a smothered,
restless voice, “when I thought you belonged to me. Not here,
but before this life. My soul and body thirst and hunger for you,
then, Margaret.”

She did not answer; her hands worked feebly together.

He came nearer, and held up his arras to where she
stood,—the heavy, masterful face pale and wet.

“I need you, Margaret. I shall be nothing without you,
now. Come, Margaret, little Margaret!”

She came to him, and put her hands in his.

“No, Stephen,” she said.

If there were any pain in her tone, she kept it down, for his
sake.

“Never, I could never help you,—as you are. It might
have been, once. Good-bye, Stephen.”

Her childish way put him in mind of the old days when this girl
was dearer to him than his own soul. She was so yet. He held her,
looking down into her eyes. She moved uneasily; she dared not trust
her resolution.

“You will come?” he said. “It might have
been,—it shall be again.”

“It may be,” she said, humbly. “God is good.
And I believe in you, Stephen. I will be yours some time: we cannot
help it, if we would: but not as you are.”

“You do not love me?” he said, flinging off her
hand.

She said nothing, gathered her damp shawl around her, and turned
to go. Just a moment they stood, looking at each other. If the dark
square figure standing there had been an iron fate trampling her
young life down into hopeless wretchedness, she forgot it now.
Women like Margaret are apt to forget. His eye never abated in its
fierce question.

“I will wait for you yonder, if I die first,” she
whispered.

He came closer, waiting for an answer.

“And—I love you, Stephen.”

He gathered her in his arms, and put his cold lips to hers,
without a word; then turned and left her slowly.

She made no sign, shed no tear, as she stood watching him go. It
was all over: she had willed it, herself, and yet—he could
not go! God would not suffer it! Oh, he could not leave
her,—he could not!—He went down the hill, slowly. If it
were a trial of life and death for her, did he know or
care?—He did not look back. What if he did not? his heart was
true; he suffered in going; even now he walked wearily. God forgive
her, if she had wronged him!—What did it matter, if he were
hard in this life, and it hurt her a little? It would come
right,—beyond, some time. But life was long.—She would
not sit down, sick as she was: he might turn, and it would vex him
to see her suffer.—He walked slowly; once he stopped to pick
up something. She saw the deep-cut face and half-shut eyes. How
often those eyes had looked into her soul, and it had answered!
They never would look so any more.—There was a tree by the
place where the road turned into town. If he came back, he would be
sure to turn there.—How tired he walked, and slow!—If
he was sick, that beautiful woman could be near him,—help
him.—She never would touch his hand again,—never again,
never,—unless he came back now.—He was near the tree:
she closed her eyes, turning away. When she looked again, only the
bare road lay there, yellow and wet. It was over, now.

How long she sat there she did not know. She tried once or twice
to go to the house, but the lights seemed so far off that she gave
it up and sat quiet, unconscious except of the damp stones her head
leaned on and the stretch of muddy road. Some time, she knew not
when, there was a heavy step beside her, and a rough hand shook
hers where she stooped feebly tracing out the lines of mortar
between the stones. It was Knowles. She looked up, bewildered.

“Hunting catarrhs, eh?” he growled, eying her
keenly. “Got your father on the Bourbons, so took the chance
to come and find you. He’ll not miss me for an hour.
That man has a natural hankering after treason against the people.
Lord, Margaret! what a stiff old head he’d have carried to
the guillotine! How he’d have looked at the
canaille!”

He helped her up gently enough.

“Your bonnet’s like a wet rag,”—with a
furtive glance at the worn-out face. A hungry face always, with her
life unfed by its stingy few crumbs of good; but to-night it was
vacant with utter loss.

She got up, trying to laugh cheerfully, and went beside him down
the road.

“You saw that painted Jezebel to-night,
and”—stopping abruptly.

She had not heard him, and he followed her doggedly, with an
occasional snort or grunt or other inarticulate damn at the
obstinate mud. She stopped at last, with a quick gasp. Looking at
her, he chafed her limp hands,—his huge, uncouth face growing
pale. When she was better, he said, gravely,—

“I want you, Margaret. Not at home, child. I want to show
you something.”

He turned with her suddenly off the main road into a by-path,
helping her along, watching her stealthily, but going on with his
disjointed, bearish growls. If it stung her from her pain, vexing
her, he did not care.

“I want to show you a bit of hell: outskirt. You’re
in a fit state: it’ll do you good. I’m minister there.
The clergy can’t attend to it just now: they’re too
busy measuring God’s truth by the States’-Rights
doctrine or the Chicago Platform. Consequence, religion yields to
majorities. Are you able? It’s only a step.”

She went on indifferently. The night was breathless and dark.
Black, wet gusts dragged now and then through the skyless fog,
striking her face with a chill. The Doctor quit talking, hurrying
her, watching her anxiously. They came at last to the
railway-track, with long trains of empty freight-cars.

“We are nearly there,” he whispered.
“It’s time you knew your work, and forgot your
weakness. The curse of pampered generations. ‘High Norman
blood,’—pah!”

There was a broken gap in the fence. He led her through it into
a muddy yard. Inside was one of those taverns you will find in the
suburbs of large cities, haunts of the lowest vice. This one was a
smoky frame standing on piles over an open space where hogs were
rooting. Half a dozen drunken Irishmen were playing poker with a
pack of greasy cards in an out-house. He led her up the rickety
ladder to the one room, where a flaring tallow-dip threw a saffron
glare into the darkness. A putrid odor met them at the door. She
drew back, trembling.

“Come here!” he said, fiercely, clutching her hand.
“Women as fair and pure as you have come into dens like
this,—and never gone away. Does it make your delicate breath
faint? And you a follower of the meek and lowly Jesus! Look here!
and here!”

The room was swarming with human life. Women, idle trampers,
whiskey-bloated, filthy, lay half-asleep or smoking on the floor,
and set up a chorus of whining begging when they entered.
Half-naked children crawled about in rags. On the damp, mildewed
walls there was hung a picture of the Benicia Boy, and close by Pio
Nono, crook in hand, with the usual inscription, “Feed my
sheep.” The Doctor looked at it.

”’Tu es Petrus, et super
hanc‘—Good God! what is truth?” he muttered,
bitterly.

He dragged her closer to the women, through the darkness and
foul smell.

“Look in their faces,” he whispered. “There is
not one of them that is not a living lie. Can they help it? Think
of the centuries of serfdom and superstition through which their
blood has crawled. Come closer,—here.”

In the corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the
underground railroad to Canada. Stolid, sensual wretches, with here
and there a broad, melancholy brow and desperate jaws. One little
pickaninny rubbed its sleepy eyes and laughed at them.

“So much flesh and blood out of the market,
unweighed!”

Margaret took up the child, kissing its brown face. Knowles
looked at her.

“Would you touch her? I forgot you were born down South.
Put it down, and come on.”

They went out of the door. Margaret stopped, looking back.

“Did I call it a bit of hell? It’s only a glimpse of
the under-life of America,—God help us!—where all men
are born free and equal.”

The air in the passage grew fouler. She leaned back faint and
shuddering. He did not heed her. The passion of the man, the
terrible pity for these people, came out of his soul now, whitening
his face and dulling his eyes.

“And you,” he said, savagely, “you sit by the
road-side, with help in your hands, and Christ in your heart, and
call your life lost, quarrel with your God, because that mass of
selfishness has left you,—because you are balked in your puny
hope! Look at these women. What is their loss, do you think? Go
back, will you, and drone out your life whimpering over your lost
dream, and go to Shakspeare for tragedy when you want it? Tragedy!
Come here,—let me hear what you call this.”

He led her through the passage, up a narrow flight of stairs. An
old woman in a flaring cap sat at the top, nodding,—wakening
now and then, to rock herself to and fro, and give the shrill Irish
keen.

“You know that stoker who was killed in the mill a month
ago? Of course not,—what are such people to you? There was a
girl who loved him,-you know what that is? She’s dead now,
here. She drank herself to death,—a most unpicturesque
suicide. I want you to look at her. You need not blush for her life
of shame, now; she’s dead.—Is Hetty here?”

The woman got up.

“She is, Zur. She is, Mem. She’s lookin’ foine
in her Sunday suit. Shrouds is gone out, Mem, they say.”

She went tipping over the floor to something white that lay on a
board, a candle at the head, and drew off the sheet. A girl of
fifteen, almost a child, lay underneath, dead,—her lithe,
delicate figure decked out in a barred plaid skirt, and stained,
faded velvet bodice,—her neck and arms bare. The small face
was purely cut, haggard, patient in its sleep,—the soft, fair
hair gathered off the tired forehead. Margaret leaned over her
shuddering, pinning her handkerchief about the child’s dead
neck.

“How young she is!” muttered Knowles.
“Merciful God, how young she is!—What is that you
say?” sharply, seeing Margaret’s lips move.

“‘He that is without sin among you, let him first
cast a stone at her.’”

“Ah, child, that is old-time philosophy. Put your hand
here, on her dead face. Is your loss like hers?” he said
lower, looking into the dull pain in her eyes. Selfish pain he
called it.

“Let me go,” she said. “I am tired.”

He took her out into the cool, open road, leading her tenderly
enough,—for the girl suffered, he saw.

“What will you do?” he asked her then. “It is
not too late,—will you help me save these people?”

She wrung her hands helplessly.

“What do you want with me?” she cried, weakly.
“I have enough to bear.”

The burly black figure before her seemed to tower and
strengthen; the man’s face in the wan light showed a terrible
life-purpose coming out bare.

“I want you to do your work. It is hard; it will wear out
your strength and brain and heart. Give yourself to these people.
God calls you to it. There is none to help them. Give up love, and
the petty hopes of women. Help me. God calls you to the
work.”

She went on blindly: he followed her. For years he had set apart
this girl to help him in his scheme: he would not be balked now. He
had great hopes from his plan: he meant to give all he had: it was
the noblest of aims. He thought some day it would work like leaven
through the festering mass under the country he loved so well, and
raise it to a new life. If it failed,—if it failed, and saved
one life, his work was not lost. But it could not fail.

“Home!” he said, stopping her as she reached the
stile,—“oh, Margaret, what is home? There is a cry
going up night and day from homes like that den yonder, for
help,—and no man listens.”

She was weak; her brain faltered.

“Does God call me to this work? Does He call me?”
she moaned.

He watched her eagerly.

“He calls you. He waits for your answer. Swear to me that
you will help His people. Give up father and mother and love, and
go down as Christ did. Help me to give liberty and truth and
Jesus’ love to these wretches on the brink of hell. Live with
them, raise them with you.”

She looked up, white; she was a weak, weak woman, sick for her
natural food of love.

“Is it my work?”

“It is your work. Listen to me, Margaret,” softly.
“Who cares for you? You stand alone to-night. There is not a
single human heart that calls you nearest and best. Shiver, if you
will,—it is true. The man you wasted your soul on left you in
the night and cold to go to his bride,—is sitting by her now,
holding her hand in his.”

He waited a moment, looking down at her, until she should
understand.

“Do you think you deserved this of God? I know that yonder
on the muddy road you looked up to Him, and knew it was not just;
that you had done right, and this was your reward. I know that for
these two years you have trusted in the Christ you worship to make
it right, to give you your heart’s desire. Did He do it? Did
He hear your prayer? Does He care for your weak love, when the
nations of the earth are going down? What is your poor hope to Him,
when the very land you live in is a wine-press that will be trodden
some day by the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God? O
Christ!—if there be a Christ,—help me to save
it!”

He looked up,—his face white with pain. After a time he
said to her,—

“Help me, Margaret! Your prayer was selfish; it was not
heard. Give up your idle hope that Christ will aid you. Swear to
me, this night when you have lost all, to give yourself to this
work.”

The storm had been dark and windy: it cleared now slowly, the
warm summer rain falling softly, the fresh blue stealing broadly
from behind the gray. It seemed to Margaret like a blessing; for
her brain rose up stronger, more healthful.

“I will not swear,” she said, weakly. “I think
He heard my prayer. I think He will answer it. He was a man, and
loved as we do. My love is not selfish; it is the best gift God has
given me.”

Knowles went slowly with her to the house. He was not baffled.
He knew that the struggle was yet to come; that, when she was
alone, her faith in the far-off Christ would falter; that she would
grasp at this work, to fill her empty hands and starved heart, if
for no other reason,—to stifle by a sense of duty her
unutterable feeling of loss. He was keenly read in woman’s
heart, this Knowles. He left her silently, and she passed through
the dark passage to her own room.

Putting her damp shawl off, she sat down on the floor, leaning
her head on a low chair,—one her father had given her for a
Christmas gift when she was little. How fond Holmes and her father
used to be of each other! Every Christmas he spent with them. She
remembered them all now. “He was sitting by her now, holding
her hand in his.” She said that over to herself, though it
was not hard to understand.

After a long time, her mother came with a candle to the
door.

“Good-night, Margaret. Why, your hair is wet,
child!”

For Margaret, kissing her good-night, had laid her head down a
minute on her breast. She stroked the hair a moment, and then
turned away.

“Mother, could you stay with me to-night?”

“Why, no, Maggie,—your father wants me to read to
him.”

“Oh, I know. Did he miss me
to-night,—father?”

“Not much; we were talking old times over,—in
Virginia, you know.”

“I know; good-night.”

She went back to the chair. Tige was there,—for he used to
spend half of his time on the farm. She put her arm about his head.
God knows how lonely the poor child was when she drew the dog so
warmly to her heart: not for his master’s sake alone; but it
was all she had. He grew tired at last, and whined, trying to get
out.

“Will you go, Tige?” she said, and opened the
window.

He jumped out, and she watched him going towards town. Such a
little thing, it was! But not even a dog “called her nearest
and best.”

Let us be silent; the story of the night is not for us to read.
Do you think that He, who in the far, dim Life holds the worlds in
His hand, knew or cared how alone the child was? What if she wrung
her thin hands, grew sick with the slow, mad, solitary
tears?—was not the world to save, as Knowles said?

He, too, had been alone; He had come unto His own, and His own
received him not: so, while the struggling world rested,
unconscious, in infinite calm of right, He came close to her with
human eyes that had loved, and not been loved, and had suffered
with that pain. And, trusting Him, she only said, “Show me my
work! Thou that takest away the pain of the world, have mercy upon
me!”

For that night, at least, Holmes swept his soul clean of doubt
and indecision; one of his natures was conquered,—finally, he
thought. Polston, if he had seen his face as he paced the street
slowly home to the mill, would have remembered his mother’s
the day she died. How the stern old woman met death half-way! why
should she fear? she was as strong as he. Wherein had she failed of
duty? her hands were clean: she was going to meet her just
reward.

It was different with Holmes, of course, with his self-existent
soul. It was life he accepted to-night, he thought,—a life of
growth, labor, achievement,—eternal.

“Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast,”—favorite
words with him. He liked to study the nature of the man who spoke
them; because, I think, it was like his own,—a Titan strength
of endurance, an infinite capability of love and hate and
suffering, and over all (the peculiar identity of the man) a cold,
speculative eye of reason, that looked down into the passion and
depths of his growing self, and calmly noted them, a lesson for all
time.

“Ohne Hast.” Going slowly through the
night, he strengthened himself by marking how all things in Nature
accomplish a perfected life through slow, narrow fixedness of
purpose,—each life complete in itself: why not his own, then?
The windless gray, the stars, the stone under his feet, stood alone
in the universe, each working out its own soul into deed. If there
were any all-embracing harmony, one soul through all, he did not
see it. Knowles—that old skeptic—believed in it, and
called it Love. Even Goethe himself, what was it he said?
“Der Allumfasser, der Allerhalter, fasst und erhält
er nicht dich, mich, sich selbst?”

There was a curious power in the words, as he lingered over
them, like half-comprehended music,—as simple and tender as
if they had come from the depths of a woman’s heart: it
touched him deeper than his power of control. Pah! it was a dream
of Faust’s; he, too, had his Margaret; he fell, through that
love.

He went on slowly to the mill. If the name or the words woke a
subtile remorse or longing, he buried them under restful composure.
Whether they should ever rise like angry ghosts of what might have
been, to taunt the man, only the future could tell.

Going through the gas-lit streets, Holmes met some cordial
greeting at every turn. What a just, clever fellow he was! people
said: one of those men improved by success: just to the defrauding
of himself: saw the true worth of everybody, the very lowest:
hadn’t one spark of self-esteem: despised all humbug and
show, one could see, though he never said it: when he was a boy, he
was moody, with passionate likes and dislikes; but success had
improved him, vastly. So Holmes was popular, though the beggars
shunned him, and the lazy Italian organ-grinders never held their
tambourines up to him.

The mill street was dark; the building threw its great shadow
over the square. It was empty, he supposed; only one hand generally
remained to keep in the furnace-fires. Going through one of the
lower passages, he heard voices, and turned aside to examine. The
management was not strict, and in case of a fire the mill was not
insured: like Knowles’s carelessness.

It was Lois and her father,—Joe Yare being feeder that
night. They were in one of the great furnace-rooms in the
cellar,—a very comfortable place that stormy night. Two or
three doors of the wide brick ovens were open, and the fire threw a
ruddy glow over the stone floor, and shimmered into the dark
recesses of the shadows, very home-like after the rain and mud
without. Lois seemed to think so, at any rate, for she had made a
table of a store-box, put a white cloth on it, and was busy getting
up a regular supper for her father,—down on her knees before
the red coals, turning something on an iron plate, while some
slices of ham sent up a cloud of juicy, hungry smell.

The old stoker had just finished slaking the out-fires, and was
putting some blue plates on the table, gravely straightening them.
He had grown old, as Polston said,—Holmes saw, stooped much,
with a low, hacking cough; his coarse clothes were curiously clean:
that was to please Lois, of course. She put the ham on the table,
and some bubbling coffee, and then, from a hickory board in front
of the fire, took off, with a jerk, brown, flaky slices of Virginia
johnny-cake.

“Ther’ yoh are, father, hot ‘n’
hot,” with her face on
fire,—“ther’—yoh—are,—coaxin’
to be eatin’.—Why, Mr. Holmes! Father! Now, ef yoh
jes’ hedn’t hed yer supper?”

She came up, coaxingly. What brooding brown eyes the poor
cripple had! Not many years ago he would have sat down with the two
poor souls and made a hearty meal of it: he had no heart for such
follies now.

Old Yare stood in the background, his hat in his hand, stooping
in his submissive negro fashion, with a frightened watch on
Holmes.

“Do you stay here, Lois?” he asked, kindly, turning
his back on the old man.

“On’y to bring his supper. I couldn’t bide all
night ’n th’ mill,”—the old shadow coming
on her face,—“I couldn’t, yoh know. He
doesn’t mind it.”

She glanced quickly from one to the other in the silence, seeing
the fear on her father’s face.

“Yoh know father, Mr. Holmes? He’s back now. This is
him.”

The old man came forward, humbly.

“It’s me, Master Stephen.”

The sullen, stealthy face disgusted Holmes. He nodded,
shortly.

“Yoh’ve been kind to my little girl while I was
gone,” he said, catching his breath. “I thank yoh,
master.”

“You need not. It was for Lois.”

“’Twas fur her I comed back hyur. ’Twas a
resk,”—with a dumb look of entreaty at
Holmes,—“but fur her I thort I’d try it. I know
’twas a resk; but I thort them as cared fur Lo wud be
merciful. She’s a good girl, Lo. She’s all I
hev.”

Lois brought a box over, lugging it heavily.

“We hevn’t chairs; but yoh’ll sit down, Mr.
Holmes?” laughing as she covered it with a cloth.
“It’s a warrm place, here. Father studies ‘n his
watch, ‘n’ I’m teacher,”—showing the
torn old spelling-book.

The old man came eagerly forward, seeing the smile flicker on
Holmes’s face.

“It’s slow work, master,—slow. But Lo’s
a good teacher, ’n’ I’m
tryin’,—I’m tryin’ hard.”

“It’s not slow, Sir, seein’ father
hedn’t ’dvantages, like me. He was a”—

She stopped, lowering her voice, a hot flush of shame on her
face.

“I know.”

“Ben’t that ’n ’xcuse, master,
seein’ I knowed noght at the beginnin’? Thenk o’
that, master. I’m tryin’ to be a different man. Fur Lo.
I am tryin’.”

Holmes did not notice him.

“Good-night, Lois,” he said, kindly, as she lighted
his lamp.

He put some money on the table.

“You must take it,” as she looked uneasy. “For
Tiger’s board, say. I never see him now. A bright new frock,
remember.”

She thanked him, her eyes brightening, looking at her
father’s patched coat.

The old man followed Holmes out.

“Master Holmes”—

“Have done with this,” said Holmes, sternly.
“Whoever breaks law abides by it. It is no affair of
mine.”

The old man clutched his hands together fiercely, struggling to
be quiet.

“Ther’s none knows it but yoh,” he said, in a
smothered voice. “Fur God’s sake be merciful!
It’ll kill my girl,—it’ll kill her. Gev me a
chance, master.”

“You trouble me. I must do what is just.”

“It’s not just,” he said, savagely.
“What good’ll it do me to go back ther’? I was
goin’ down, down, an’ bringin’ th’ others
with me. What good’ll it do you or the rest to hev me
ther’? To make me afraid? It’s poor learnin’ frum
fear. Who taught me what was right? Who cared? No man cared fur my
soul, till I thieved ’n’ robbed; ‘n’ then
judge ’n’ jury ’n’ jailers was glad to
pounce on me. Will yoh gev me a chance? will yoh?”

It was a desperate face before him; but Holmes never knew
fear.

“Stand aside,” he said, quietly. “To-morrow I
will see you. You need not try to escape.”

He passed him, and went slowly up through the vacant mill to his
chamber.

The man sat down on the lower step a few moments, quite quiet,
crushing his hat up in a slow, steady way, looking up at the mouldy
cobwebs on the wall. He got up at last, and went in to Lois. Had
she heard? The old scarred face of the girl looked years older, he
thought,—but it might be fancy. She did not say anything for
a while, moving slowly, with a new gentleness, about him; her very
voice was changed, older. He tried to be cheerful, eating his
supper: she need not know until to-morrow. He would get out of the
town to-night, or—There were different ways to escape. When
he had done, he told her to go; but she would not.

“Let me stay th’ night,” she said. “I
ben’t afraid o’ th’ mill.”

“Why, Lo,” he said, laughing, “yoh used to say
yer death was hid here, somewheres.”

“I know. But ther’s worse nor death. But it’ll
come right,” she said, persistently, muttering to herself, as
she leaned her face on her knees,
watching,—“it’ll come right.”

The glimmering shadows changed and faded for an hour. The man
sat quiet. There was not much in the years gone to soften his
thought, as it grew desperate and cruel: there was oppression and
vice heaped on him, and flung back out of his bitter heart. Nor
much in the future: a blank stretch of punishment to the end. He
was an old man: was it easy to bear? What if he were black? what if
he were born a thief? what if all the sullen revenge of his nature
had made him an outcast from the poorest poor? Was there no latent
good in this soul for which Christ died, that a kind hand might not
have brought to life? None? Something, I think, struggled up in the
touch of his hand, catching the skirt of his child’s dress,
when it came near him, with the timid tenderness of a mother
touching her dead baby’s hair,—as something holy, far
off, yet very near: something in his old crime-marked face,—a
look like this dog’s, putting his head on my knee,—a
dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the slow memory of a wrong
done to his soul in a day long past. A wrong to both, you say,
perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and never to be recompensed.
Never?

“Yoh must go, my little girl,” he said at last.

Whatever he did must be done quickly. She came up, combing the
thin gray hairs through her fingers.

“Father, I dunnot understan’ what it is, rightly.
But stay with me,—stay, father!”

“Yoh’ve a many frien’s, Lo,” he said,
with a keen flash of jealousy. “Ther’s none like
yoh,—none.”

She put her misshapen head and scarred face down on his hand,
where he could see them. If it had ever hurt her to be as she was,
if she had ever compared herself bitterly with fair, beloved women,
she was glad now and thankful for every fault and deformity that
brought her nearer to him, and made her dearer.

“They’re kind, but ther’s not many loves me
with true love, like yoh. Stay, father! Bear it out, whatever it
be. Th’ good time’ll come, father.”

He kissed her, saying nothing, and went with her down the
street. When he left her, she waited, and, creeping back, hid near
the mill. God knows what vague dread was in her brain; but she came
back to watch and help.

Old Yare wandered through the great loom-rooms of the mill with
but one fact clear in his cloudy, faltering perception,—that
above him the man lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than
death on him to-morrow. Up and down, aimlessly, with his
stoker’s torch in his hand, going over the years gone and the
years to come, with the dead hatred through all of the pitiless man
above him,—with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought
of things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,—of the
corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in “th’
Alabam’,”—of the scow his young master gave him
once, the first thing he really owned: he was almost as proud of it
as he was of Lois when she was born. Most of all remembering the
good times in his life, he went back to Lois. It was all good,
there, to go back to. What a little chub she used to be!
Remembering, with bitter remorse, how all his life he had meant to
try and do better, on her account, but had kept putting off and
putting off until now. And now—Did nothing lie before him but
to go back and rot yonder? Was that the end, because he never had
learned better, and was a “dam’ nigger”?

“I’ll not leave my girl!” he
muttered, going up and down,—“I’ll not
leave my girl!”

If Holmes did sleep above him, the trial of the day, of which we
have seen nothing, came back sharper in sleep. While the strong
self in the man lay torpid, whatever holier power was in him came
out, undaunted by defeat, and unwearied, and took the form of
dreams, those slighted messengers of God, to soothe and charm and
win him out into fuller, kindlier life. Let us hope that they did
so win him; let us hope that even in that unreal world the better
nature of the man triumphed at last, and claimed its reward before
the terrible reality broke upon him.

Lois, over in the damp, fresh-smelling lumber-yard, sat coiled
up in one of the creviced houses made by the jutting boards. She
remembered how she used to play in them, before she went into the
mill. The mill,—even now, with the vague dread of some
uncertain evil to come, the mill absorbed all fear in its old hated
shadow. Whatever danger was coming to them lay in it, came from it,
she knew, in her confused, blurred way of thinking. It loomed up
now, with the square patch of ashen sky above, black, heavy with
years of remembered agony and loss. In Lois’s hopeful, warm
life this was the one uncomprehended monster. Her crushed brain,
her unwakened powers, resented their wrong dimly to the mass of
iron and work and impure smells, unconscious of any remorseless
power that wielded it. It was a monster, she thought, through the
sleepy, dreading night,—a monster that kept her wakeful with
a dull, mysterious terror.

When the night grew sultry and deepest, she started from her
half-doze to see her father come stealthily out and go down the
street. She must have slept, she thought, rubbing her eyes, and
watching him out of sight,—and then, creeping out, turned to
glance at the mill. She cried out, shrill with horror. It was a
live monster now,—in one swift instant, alive with
fire,—quick, greedy fire, leaping like serpents’
tongues out of its hundred jaws, hungry sheets of flame maddening
and writhing towards her, and under all a dull and hollow roar that
shook the night. Did it call her to her death? She turned to fly,
and then—He was alone, dying! He had been so kind to her! She
wrung her hands, standing there a moment. It was a brave hope that
was in her heart, and a prayer on her lips never left unanswered,
as she hobbled, in her lame, slow way, up to the open black door,
and, with one backward look, went in.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.

The publication, now brought to a close, of a new edition of the
novels of Cooper⁶6. We refer to
the new edition of the novels of Cooper by Messrs. W.A. Townsend
& Co., with illustrations by Darley. gives us a fair
occasion for discharging a duty which Maga has too long neglected,
and saying something upon the genius of this great writer, and,
incidentally, upon the character of a man who would have been a
noticeable, not to say remarkable person, had he never written a
line. These novels stand before us in thirty-two goodly duodecimo
volumes, well printed, gracefully illustrated, and, in all external
aspects, worthy of generous commendation. With strong propriety,
the publishers dedicate this edition of the “first American
novelist” to “the American People.” No one of our
great writers is more thoroughly American than Cooper; no one has
caught and reproduced more broadly and accurately the spirit of our
institutions, the character of our people, and even the aspects of
Nature in this our Western world. He was a patriot to the very core
of his heart; he loved his country with a fervid, but not an
undiscerning love: it was an intelligent, vigilant, discriminating
affection that bound his heart to his native land; and thus, while
no man defended his country more vigorously when it was in the
right, no one reproved its faults more courageously, or gave
warning and advice more unreservedly, where he felt that they were
needed.

This may be one reason why Cooper has more admirers, or at least
fewer disparagers, abroad than at home. On the Continent of Europe
his novels are everywhere read, with an eager, unquestioning
delight. His popularity is at least equal to that of Scott; and we
think a considerable amount of testimony could be collected to
prove that it is even greater. But the fact we have above stated is
not the only explanation of this. He was the first writer who made
foreign nations acquainted with the characters and incidents of
American frontier and woodland life; and his delineations of Indian
manners and traits were greatly superior in freshness and power, if
not in truth, to any which had preceded them. His novels opened a
new and unwrought vein of interest, and were a revelation of
humanity under aspects and influences hitherto unobserved by the
ripe civilization of Europe. The taste which had become cloyed with
endless imitations of the feudal and mediaeval pictures of Scott
turned with fresh delight to such original figures—so full of
sylvan power and wildwood grace—as Natty Bumppo and Uncas.
European readers, too, received these sketches with an unqualified,
because an ignorant admiration. We, who had better knowledge, were
more critical, and could see that the drawing was sometimes faulty,
and the colors more brilliant than those of life.

The acute observer can detect a parallel between the relation of
Cooper to America and that of Scott to Scotland. Scott was as
hearty a Scotchman as Cooper an American: but Scott was a Tory in
politics and an Episcopalian in religion; and the majority of
Scotchmen are Whigs in politics and Presbyterians in religion. In
Scott, as in Cooper, the elements of passion and sympathy were so
strong that he could not be neutral or silent on the great
questions of his time and place. Thus, while the Scotch are proud
of Scott, as they well may be,—while he has among his own
people most intense and enthusiastic admirers,—the proportion
of those who yield to his genius a cold and reluctant homage is
probably greater in Scotland than in any other country in
Christendom. “The rest of mankind recognize the essential
truth of his delineations, and his loyalty to all the primal
instincts and sympathies of humanity”; but the Scotch cannot
forget that he opposed the Reform Bill, painted the Covenanters
with an Episcopalian pencil, and made a graceful and heroic image
of the detested Claverhouse.

The novels of Cooper, in the dates of their publication, cover a
period of thirty years: beginning with “Precaution,” in
1820, and ending with “The Ways of the Hour,” in 1850.
The production of thirty-two volumes in thirty years is honorable
to his creative energy, as well as to the systematic industry of
his habits. But even these do not constitute the whole of his
literary labors during these twenty-nine years. We must add five
volumes of naval history and biography, ten volumes of travels and
sketches in Europe, and a large amount of occasional and
controversial writings, most of which is now hidden away in that
huge wallet wherein Time puts his alms for Oblivion. His literary
productions other than his novels would alone be enough to save him
from the reproach of idleness. In estimating a writer’s
claims to honor and remembrance, the quantity as well as the
quality of his work should surely be taken into account; and in
summing up the case of our great novelist to the jury of posterity,
this point should be strongly put.

Cooper’s first novel, “Precaution,” was
published when he was in his thirty-first year. It owed its
existence to an accident, and was but an ordinary production, as
inferior to the best of his subsequent works as Byron’s
“Hours of Idleness” to “Childe Harold.” It
was a languid and colorless copy of exotic forms: a mere scale
picked from the surface of the writer’s mind, with neither
beauty nor vital warmth to commend it. We speak from the vague
impressions which many long years have been busy in effacing; and
we confess that it would require the combined forces of a long
voyage and a scanty library to constrain us to the task of reading
it anew.

And yet, such as it was, it made a certain impression at the
time of its appearance. The standard by which it was tried was very
unlike that which would now be applied to it: there was all the
difference between the two that there is between strawberries in
December and strawberries in June. American literature was then
just beginning to “glint forth” like Burns’s
mountain daisy, and rear its tender form above the parent earth.
The time had, indeed, gone by—which a friend of ours, not yet
venerable, affirms he can well remember—when school-boys and
collegians, zealous for the honor of indigenous literature, were
obliged to cite, by way of illustration, such works as
Morse’s Geography and Hannah Adams’s “History of
the Jews”; but it was only a faint, crepuscular light, that
streaked the east, and gave promise of the coming day. Irving had
just completed his “Sketch-Book,” which was basking in
the full sunshine of unqualified popularity. Dana, in the
thoughtful and meditative beauty of “The Idle Man,” was
addressing a more limited public. Percival had just before
published a small volume of poems; Halleck’s
“Fanny” had recently appeared; and so had a small
duodecimo volume by Bryant, containing “The Ages,” and
half a dozen smaller poems. Miss Sedgwick’s “New
England Tale” was published about the same time. But a large
proportion of those who are now regarded as our ablest writers were
as yet unknown, or just beginning to give sign of what they were.
Dr. Channing was already distinguished as an eloquent and powerful
preacher, but the general public had not yet recognized in him that
remarkable combination of loftiness of thought with magic charm of
style, which was soon to be revealed in his essays on Milton and
Napoleon Bonaparte. Ticknor and Everett were professors in Harvard
College, giving a new impulse to the minds of the students by their
admirable lectures; and the latter was also conducting the
“North American Review.” Neither had as yet attained to
anything more than a local reputation. Prescott, a gay and
light-hearted young man,—gay and light-hearted, in spite of
partial blindness,—the darling of society and the idol of his
home, was silently and resolutely preparing himself for his chosen
function by a wide and thorough course of patient study. Bancroft
was in Germany, and working like a German. Emerson was a Junior in
College. Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Poe were
school-boys; Mrs. Stowe was a school-girl; Whipple and Lowell were
in the nursery, and Motley and the younger Dana had not long been
out of it.

“Precaution,” though an indifferent novel, was yet a
novel; of the orthodox length, with plot, characters, and
incidents; and here and there a touch of genuine power, as in the
forty-first chapter, where the scene is on board a man-of-war
bringing her prizes into port. It found many readers, and excited a
good deal of curiosity as to who the author might be.

“Precaution” was published on the 25th of August,
1820, and “The Spy” on the 17th of September, 1821. The
second novel was a great improvement upon the first, and fairly
took the public by storm. We are old enough to remember its first
appearance; the eager curiosity and keen discussion which it
awakened; the criticism which it called forth; and, above all, the
animated delight with which it was received by all who were young
or not critical. Distinctly, too, can we recall the breathless
rapture with which we hung over its pages, in those happy days when
the mind’s appetite for books was as ravenous as the
body’s for bread-and-butter, and a novel, with plenty of
fighting in it, was all we asked at a writer’s hands. In
order to qualify ourselves for the task which we have undertaken in
this article, we have read “The Spy” a second time; and
melancholy indeed was the contrast between the recollections of the
boy and the impressions of the man. It was the difference between
the theatre by gas-light and the theatre by day-light: the gold was
pinchbeck, the gems were glass, the flowers were cambric and
colored paper, the goblets were gilded pasteboard. Painfully did
the ideal light fade away, and the well-remembered scene stand
revealed in disenchanting day. With incredulous surprise, with a
constant struggle between past images and present revelations, were
we forced to acknowledge the improbability of the story, the
clumsiness of the style, the awkwardness of the dialogue, the want
of Nature in many of the characters, the absurdity of many of the
incidents, and the painfulness of some of the scenes. But with all
this, a candid, though critical judgment could not but admit that
these grave defects were attended by striking merits, which pleaded
in mitigation of literary sentence. It was stamped with a truth,
earnestness, and vital power, of which its predecessor gave no
promise. Though the story was improbable, it seized upon the
attention with a powerful grasp from the very start, and the hold
was not relaxed till the end. Whatever criticism it might
challenge, no one could call it dull: the only offence in a book
which neither gods nor men nor counters can pardon. If the
narrative flowed languidly at times, there were moments in which
the incidents flashed along with such vivid rapidity that the
susceptible reader held his breath over the page. The character of
Washington was an elaborate failure, and the author, in his later
years, regretted that he had introduced this august form into a
work of fiction; but Harvey Birch was an original sketch, happily
conceived, and, in the main, well sustained. His mysterious figure
was recognized as a new accession to the repertory of the novelist,
and not a mere modification of a preëxisting type. And, above
all, “The Spy” had the charm of reality; it tasted of
the soil; it was the first successful attempt to throw an
imaginative light over American history, and to do for our country
what the author of “Waverley” had done for Scotland.
Many of the officers and soldiers of the Revolutionary War were
still living, receiving the reward of their early perils and
privations in the grateful reverence which was paid to them by the
contemporaries of their children and grandchildren. Innumerable
traditionary anecdotes of those dark days of suffering and
struggle, unrecorded in print, yet lingered in the memories of the
people, and were told in the nights of winter around the farm-house
fire; and of no part of the country was this more true than of the
region in which the scene of the novel is laid. The enthusiasm with
which it was there read was the best tribute to the substantial
fidelity of its delineations. All over the country, it enlisted in
its behalf the powerful sentiment of patriotism; and whatever the
critics might say, the author had the satisfaction of feeling that
the heart of the people was with him.

Abroad, “The Spy” was received with equal favor. It
was soon translated into most of the languages of Europe; and even
the “gorgeous East” opened for it its rarely moving
portals. In 1847, a Persian version was published in Ispahan; and
by this time it may have crossed the Chinese wall, and be
delighting the pig-tailed critics and narrow-eyed beauties of
Pekin.

The success of “The Spy” unquestionably determined
Cooper’s vocation, and made him a man of letters. But he had
not yet found where his true strength lay. His training and
education had not been such as would seem to be a good preparation
for a literary career. His reading had been desultory, and not
extensive; and the habit of composition had not been formed in
early life. Indeed, in mere style, in the handling of the tools of
his craft, Cooper never attained a master’s ease and power.
In his first two novels the want of technical skill and literary
accomplishment was obvious; and the scenery, subjects, and
characters of these novels did not furnish him with the opportunity
of turning to account the peculiar advantages which had come to him
from the events of his childhood and youth. In his infancy he was
taken to Cooperstown, a spot which his father had just begun to
reclaim from the dominion of the wilderness. Here his first
impressions of the external world, as well as of life and manners,
were received. At the age of sixteen he became a midshipman in the
United States navy, and remained in the service for six years. A
father who, in training up his son for the profession of letters,
should send him into the wilderness in his infancy and to sea at
sixteen, would seem to be shooting very wide of the mark; but in
this, as in so many things, there is a divinity that shapes our
rough-hewn ends. Had Cooper enjoyed the best scholastic advantages
which the schools and colleges of Europe could have furnished, they
could not have fitted him for the work he was destined to do so
well as the apparently untoward elements we have above adverted to;
for Natty Bumppo was the fruit of his woodland experience, and Long
Tom Coffin of his sea-faring life.

“The Pioneers” and “The Pilot” were both
published in 1823; “Lionel Lincoln” in 1825; and
“The Last of the Mohicans” in 1826. We may put
“Lionel Lincoln” aside, as one of his least successful
productions; but the three others were never surpassed, and rarely
equalled, by any of his numerous subsequent works. All the
powerful, and nearly all the attractive, qualities of his genius
were displayed in these three novels, in their highest degree and
most ample measure. Had he never written any more,—though we
should have missed many interesting narratives, admirable pictures,
and vigorously drawn characters,—we are not sure that his
fame would not have been as great as it is now. From these, and
“The Spy,” full materials may be drawn for forming a
correct estimate of his merits and his defects. In these, his
strength and weakness, his gifts and deficiencies, are amply shown.
Here, then, we may pause, and, without pursuing his literary
biography any farther, proceed to set down our estimate of his
claims as a writer. Any critic who dips his pen in ink and not in
gall would rather praise than blame; therefore we will dispose of
the least gracious part of our task first, and begin with his
blemishes and defects.

A skilful construction of the story is a merit which the public
taste no longer demands, and it is consequently fast becoming one
of the lost arts. The practice of publishing novels in successive
numbers, so that one portion is printed before another is written,
is undoubtedly one cause of this. But English and American readers
have not been accustomed to this excellence in the works of their
best writers of fiction; and therefore they are not sensitive to
the want of it. This is certainly not one of Scott’s strong
points. Fielding’s “Tom Jones” is, in this
respect, superior to any of the “Waverley Novels,” and
without an equal, so far as we know, in English literature. But, in
sitting in judgment upon a writer of novels, we cannot waive an
inquiry into his merits on this point. Are his stories, simply as
stories, well told? Are his plots symmetrically constructed and
harmoniously evolved? Are his incidents probable? and do they all
help on the catastrophe? Does he reject all episodical matter which
would clog the current of the narrative? Do his novels have unity
of action? or are they merely a series of sketches, strung together
without any relation of cause and effect? Cooper, tried by these
rules, can certainly command no praise. His plots are not carefully
or skilfully constructed. His incidents are not probable in
themselves, nor do they succeed each other in a natural and
dependent progression. His characters get into scrapes from which
the reasonable exercise of common faculties should have saved them;
and they are rescued by incredible means and impossible
instruments. The needed man appears as unaccountably and
mysteriously as if he had dropped from the clouds, or emerged from
the sea, or crept up through a fissure in the earth. The winding up
of his stories is often effected by devices nearly as improbable as
a violation of the laws of Nature. His personages act without
adequate motives; they rush into needless dangers; they trust their
fate, with unsuspecting simplicity, to treacherous hands.

In works of fiction the skill of the writer is most
conspicuously shown when the progress of the story is secured by
natural and probable occurrences. Many events take place in history
and in common life which good taste rejects as inadmissible in a
work of imagination. Sudden death by disease or casualty is no very
uncommon occurrence in real life; but it cannot be used in a novel
to clear up a tangled web of circumstance, without betraying
something of a poverty of invention in the writer. He is the best
artist who makes least use of incidents which lie out of the beaten
path of observation and experience. In constructive skill
Cooper’s rank is not high; for all his novels are more or
less open to the criticism that too frequent use is made in them of
events very unlikely to have happened. He leads his characters into
such formidable perils that the chances are a million to one
against their being rescued. Such a run is made upon our credulity
that the fund is soon exhausted, and the bank stops payment.

For illustration of the above strictures we will refer to a
single novel, “The Last of the Mohicans,” which
everybody will admit to be one of the most interesting of his
works,—full of rapid movement, brilliant descriptions,
hair-breadth escapes, thrilling adventures,—which young
persons probably read with more rapt attention than any other of
his narratives. In the opening chapter we find at Fort Edward, on
the head-waters of the Hudson, the two daughters of Colonel Munro,
the commander of Fort William Henry, on the shores of Lake George;
though why they were at the former post, under the protection of a
stranger, and not with their father, does not appear. Information
is brought of the approach of Montcalm, with a hostile army of
Indians and Frenchmen, from the North; and the young ladies are
straightway hurried off to the more advanced, and consequently more
dangerous post, when prudence and affection would have dictated
just the opposite course. Nor is this all. General Webb, the
commander of Fort Edward, at the urgent request of Colonel Munro,
sends him a reinforcement of fifteen hundred men, who march off
through the woods, by the military road, with drums beating and
colors flying; and yet, strange to say, the young ladies do not
accompany the troops, but set off, on the very same day, by a
by-path, attended by no other escort than Major Heyward, and guided
by an Indian whose fidelity is supposed to be assured by his having
been flogged for drunkenness by the orders of Colonel Munro. The
reason assigned for conduct so absurd that in real life it would
have gone far to prove the parties having a hand in it not to be
possessed of that sound and disposing mind and memory which the law
requires as a condition precedent to making a will is, that hostile
Indians, in search of chance scalps, would be hovering about the
column of troops, and so leave the by-path unmolested. But the
servants of the party follow the route of the column: a measure, we
are told, dictated by the sagacity of the Indian guide, in order to
diminish the marks of their trail, if, haply, the Canadian savages
should be prowling about so far in advance of their army!
Certainly, all the sagacity of the fort would seem to have been
concentrated in the person of the Indian. How much of this
improbability might have been avoided, if the action had been
reversed, and the young ladies, in view of the gathering cloud of
war, had been sent from the more exposed and less strongly guarded
point of Fort William Henry to the safe fortress of Fort Edward!
Then the smallness of the escort and the risks of the journey would
have been explained and excused by the necessity of the case; and
the subsequent events of the novel might have been easily
accommodated to the change we have indicated.

One of the best of Cooper’s novels—as a work of art
perhaps the very best—is “The Bravo.” But the
character of Jacopo Frontoni is a sort of moral impossibility, and
the clearing up of the mystery which hangs over his life and
conduct, which is skilfully reserved to the last moment, is
consequently unsatisfactory. He is represented as a young man of
the finest qualities and powers, who, in the hope of rescuing a
father who had been falsely imprisoned by the Senate, consents to
assume the character, and bear the odium, of a public bravo, or
assassin, though entirely innocent. This false position gives rise
to many most effective scenes and incidents, and the character is
in many respects admirably drawn. But when the end comes, we lay
down the book and say,—“This could never have been: a
virtuous and noble young man could not for years have been believed
to be the most hateful of mankind; the laws of Nature and the laws
of the human mind forbid it: so vast a web of falsehood could not
have been woven without a flaw: we can credit much of the organized
and pitiless despotism of Venice, but could it work
miracles?”

Further illustrations of this same defect might easily be cited,
if the task were not ungracious. Neither books, nor pictures, nor
men and women should be judged by their defects. It is enough to
say that Cooper never wrote a novel in regard to which the reader
must not lay aside his critical judgment upon the structure of the
story and the interdependence of the incidents, and let himself be
borne along by the rapid flow of the narrative, without questioning
too curiously as to the nature of the means and instruments
employed to give movement to the stream.

In the delineation of character, Cooper may claim great, but not
unqualified praise. This is a vague statement; and to draw a
sharper line of discrimination, we should say that he is generally
successful—sometimes admirably so—in drawing personages
in whom strong primitive traits have not been effaced by the
attritions of artificial life, and generally unsuccessful when he
deals with those in whom the original characteristics are less
marked, or who have been smoothed by education and polished by
society. It is but putting this criticism in another form to say
that his best characters are persons of humble social position. He
wields his brush with a vigorous hand, but the brush itself has not
a fine point. Of all the children of his brain, Natty Bumppo is the
most universal favorite,—and herein the popular judgment is
assuredly right. He is an original conception,—and not more
happily conceived than skilfully executed. It was a hazardous
undertaking to present the character backwards, and let us see the
closing scenes of his life first,—like a Hebrew Bible, of
which the beginning is at the end; but the author’s genius
has triumphed over the perils of the task, and given us a
delineation as consistent and symmetrical as it is striking and
vigorous. Ignorant of books, simple, and credulous, guileless
himself, and suspecting no evil in others, with moderate
intellectual powers, he commands our admiration and respect by his
courage, his love of Nature, his skill in woodland lore, his
unerring moral sense, his strong affections, and the veins of
poetry that run through his rugged nature like seams of gold in
quartz. Long Tom Coffin may be described as Leatherstocking
suffered a sea-change,—with a harpoon instead of a rifle, and
a pea-jacket instead of a hunting-shirt. In both the same primitive
elements may be discerned: the same limited intellectual range
combined with professional or technical skill; the same generous
affections and unerring moral instincts; the same religious
feeling, taking the form at times of fatalism or superstition. Long
Tom’s love of the sea is like Leatherstocking’s love of
the woods; the former’s dislike of the land is like the
latter’s dislike of the clearings. Cooper himself, as we are
told by his daughter, was less satisfied, in his last years, with
Long Tom Coffin than most of his readers,—and, of the two
characters, considered that of Boltrope the better piece of
workmanship. We cannot assent to this comparative estimate; but we
admit that Boltrope has not had full justice done to him in popular
judgment. It is but a slight sketch, but it is extremely well done.
His death is a bit of manly and genuine pathos; and in his
conversations with the chaplain there is here and there a touch of
true humor, which we value the more because humor was certainly not
one of the author’s best gifts.

Antonio, the old fisherman, in “The Bravo,” is
another very well drawn character, in which we can trace something
of a family likeness to the hunter and sailor above mentioned. The
scene in which he is shrived by the Carmelite monk, in his boat,
under the midnight moon, upon the Lagoons, is one of the finest we
know of in the whole range of the literature of fiction, leaving
upon the mind a lasting impression of solemn and pathetic beauty.
In “The Chainbearer,” the Yankee squatter,
Thousandacres, is a repulsive figure, but drawn with a powerful
pencil. The energy of character, or rather of action, which is the
result of a passionate love of money, is true to human nature. The
closing scenes of his rough and lawless life, in which his latent
affection for his faithful wife throws a sunset gleam over his hard
and selfish nature, and prevents it from being altogether hateful,
are impressively told, and are touched with genuine tragic
power.

On the other hand, Cooper generally fails when he undertakes to
draw a character which requires for its successful execution a nice
observation and a delicate hand. His heroes and heroines are apt to
abuse the privilege which such personages have enjoyed, time out of
mind, of being insipid. Nor can he catch and reproduce the easy
grace and unconscious dignity of high-bred men and women. His
gentlemen, whether young or old, are apt to be stiff, priggish, and
commonplace; and his ladies, especially his young ladies, are as
deficient in individuality as the figures and faces of a
fashion-print. Their personal and mental charms are set forth with
all the minuteness of a passport; but, after all, we cannot but
think that these fine creatures, with hair, brow, eyes, and lips of
the most orthodox and approved pattern, would do very little
towards helping one through a rainy day in a country-house. Judge
Temple, in “The Pioneers,” and Colonel Howard, in
“The Pilot,” are highly estimable and respectable
gentlemen, but, in looking round for the materials of a pleasant
dinner-party, we do not think they would stand very high on the
list. They are fair specimens of their class,—the educated
gentleman in declining life,—many of whom are found in the
subsequent novels. They are wanting in those natural traits of
individuality by which, in real life, one human being is
distinguished from another. They are obnoxious to this one general
criticism, that the author is constantly reminding us of the
qualities of mind and character on which he rests their claims to
favor, without causing them to appear naturally and unconsciously
in the course of the narrative. The defect we are adverting to may
be illustrated by comparing such personages of this class as Cooper
has delineated with Colonel Talbot, in “Waverley,”
Colonel Mannering and Counsellor Pleydell, in “Guy
Mannering,” Monkbarns, in “The Antiquary,” and
old Osbaldistone, in “Rob Roy.” These are all old men:
they are all men of education, and in the social position of
gentlemen; but each has certain characteristics which the others
have not: each has the distinctive individual flavor-perceptible,
but indescribable, like the savor of a fruit—which is wanting
in Cooper’s well-dressed and well-behaved lay-figures.

In the delineation of female loveliness and excellence Cooper is
generally supposed to have failed,—at least, comparatively
so. But in this respect full justice has hardly been done him; and
this may be explained by the fact that it was from the heroines of
his earlier novels that this unfavorable judgment was drawn.
Certainly, such sticks of barley-candy as Frances Wharton, Cecilia
Howard, and Alice Munro justify the common impression. But it would
be as unfair to judge of what he can do in this department by his
acknowledged failures as it would be to form an estimate of the
genius of Michel Angelo from the easel-picture of the Virgin and
Child in the Tribune at Florence. No man ever had a juster
appreciation of, and higher reverence for, the worth of woman than
Cooper. Towards women his manners were always marked by chivalrous
deference, blended as to those of his own household with the most
affectionate tenderness. His own nature was robust, self-reliant,
and essentially masculine: such men always honor women, but they
understand them better as they grow older. There is so much
foundation for the saying, that men are apt to love their first
wives best, but to treat their second wives best. Thus the reader
who takes up his works in chronological order will perceive that
the heroines of his later novels have more spirit and character,
are drawn with a more discriminating touch, take stronger hold upon
the interest, than those of his earlier. Ursula Malbone is a finer
girl than Cecilia Howard, or even Elizabeth Temple. So when he has
occasion to delineate a woman who, from her position in life, or
the peculiar circumstances into which she is thrown, is moved by
deeper springs of feeling, is obliged to put forth sterner
energies, than are known to females reared in the sheltered air of
prosperity and civilization,—when he paints the heart of
woman roused by great perils, overborne by heavy sorrows, wasted by
strong passions,—we recognize the same master-hand which has
given us such powerful pictures of character in the other sex. In
other words, Cooper is not happy in representing those shadowy and
delicate graces which belong exclusively to woman, and distinguish
her from man; but he is generally successful in sketching in woman
those qualities which are found in both sexes. In “The
Bravo,” Donna Violetta, the heroine, a rich and high-born
young lady, is not remarkable one way or the other; but Gelsomina,
the jailer’s daughter, born in an inferior position, reared
in a sterner school of discipline and struggle, is a beautiful and
consistent creation, constantly showing masculine energy and
endurance, yet losing nothing of womanly charm. Ruth, in “The
Wept of the Wish-ton-Wish,” Hetty Hutter, the weak-minded and
sound-hearted girl, in “The Deerslayer,” Mabel Dunham,
and the young Indian woman, “Dew of June,” in
“The Pathfinder,” are further cases in point. No one
can read the books in which these women are represented and say
that Cooper was wanting in the power of delineating the finest and
highest attributes of womanhood,

Cooper cannot be congratulated upon his success in the few
attempts he has made to represent historical personages.
Washington, as shown to us in “The Spy,” is a formal
piece of mechanism, as destitute of vital character as
Maelzel’s automaton trumpeter. This, we admit, was a very
difficult subject, alike from the peculiar traits of Washington,
and from the reverence in which his name and memory are held by his
countrymen. But the sketch, in “The Pilot,” of Paul
Jones, a very different person, and a much easier subject, is
hardly better. In both cases, the failure arises from the fact that
the author is constantly endeavoring to produce the legitimate
effect of mental and moral qualities by a careful enumeration of
external attributes. Harper, under which name Washington is
introduced, appears in only two or three scenes; but, during these,
we hear so much of the solemnity and impressiveness of his manner,
the gravity of his brow, the steadiness of his gaze, that we get
the notion of a rather oppressive personage, and sympathize with
the satisfaction of the Whartons, when he retires to his own room,
and relieves them of his tremendous presence. Mr. Gray, who stands
for Paul Jones, is more carefully elaborated, but the result is far
from satisfactory. We are so constantly told of his calmness and
abstraction, of his sudden starts and bursts of feeling, of his low
voice, of his fits of musing, that the aggregate impression is that
of affectation and self-consciousness, rather than of a simple,
passionate, and heroic nature. Mr. Gray does not seem to us at all
like the rash, fiery, and dare-devil Scotchman of history. His
conduct and conversation, as recounted in the fifth chapter of the
novel, are unnatural and improbable; and we cannot wonder that the
first lieutenant did not know what to make of so melodramatic and
sententious a gentleman, in the guise of a pilot.

Cooper, as we need hardly say, has drawn copiously upon Indian
life and character for the materials of his novels; and among
foreign nations much of his reputation is due to this fact.
Civilized men and women always take pleasure in reading about the
manners and habits of savage life; and those in whom the shows of
things are submitted to the desires of the mind delight to invest
them with those ideal qualities which they do not find, or think
they do not, in the artificial society around them. Cooper had
enjoyed no peculiar opportunities of studying by personal
observation the characteristics of the Indian race, but he had
undoubtedly read everything he could get hold of in illustration of
the subject. No one can question the vividness and animation of his
sketches, or their brilliant tone of color. He paints with a pencil
dipped in the glow of our sunset skies and the crimson of our
autumn maples. Whenever he brings Indians upon the stage, we may be
sure that scenes of thrilling interest are before us: that rifles
are to crack, tomahawks to gleam, and arrows to dart like sunbeams
through the air; that a net of peril is to be drawn around his hero
or heroine, from the meshes of which he or she is to be extricated
by some unexpected combination of fortunate circumstances. We
expect a succession of startling incidents, and a rapid course of
narrative without pauses or languid intervals. We do not object to
his idealizing his Indians: this is the privilege of the novelist,
time out of mind. He may make them swift of foot, graceful in
movement, and give them a form like the Apollo’s; he may put
as much expression as he pleases into their black eyes; he may
tessellate their speech as freely as he will with poetical and
figurative expressions, drawn from the aspects of the external
world: for all this there is authority, and chapter and verse may
be cited in support of it. But we have a right to ask that he shall
not transcend the bounds of reason and possibility, and represent
his red men as moved by motives and guided by sentiments which are
wholly inconsistent with the inexorable facts of the case. We
confess to being a little more than skeptical as to the Indian of
poetry and romance: like the German’s camel, he is evolved
from the depth of the writer’s own consciousness. The poet
takes the most delicate sentiments and the finest emotions of
civilization and cultivation, and grafts them upon the best
qualities of savage life; which is as if a painter should represent
an oak-tree bearing roses. The life of the North-American Indian,
like that of all men who stand upon the base-line of civilization,
is a constant struggle, and often a losing struggle, for mere
subsistence. The sting of animal wants is his chief motive of
action, and the full gratification of animal wants his highest
ideal of happiness. The “noble savage,” as sketched by
poets, weary of the hollowness, the insincerity, and the meanness
of artificial life, is really a very ignoble creature, when seen in
the “open daylight” of truth. He is selfish, sensual,
cruel, indolent, and impassive. The highest graces of character,
the sweetest emotions, the finest sensibilities,—which make
up the novelist’s stock in trade,—are not and cannot be
the growth of a so-called state of Nature, which is an essentially
unnatural state. We no more believe that Logan ever made the speech
reported by Jefferson, in so many words, than we believe that
Chatham ever made the speech in reply to Walpole which begins with,
“The atrocious crime of being a young man”; though we
have no doubt that the reporters in both cases had something fine
and good to start from. We accept with acquiescence, nay, with
admiration, such characters as Magua, Chingachgook, Susquesus,
Tamenund, and Canonchet; but when we come to Uncas, in “The
Last of the Mohicans,” we pause and shake our heads with
incredulous doubt. That a young Indian chief should fall in love
with a handsome quadroon like Cora Munro—for she was neither
more nor less than that—is natural enough; but that he should
manifest his passion with such delicacy and refinement is
impossible. We include under one and the same name all the
affinities and attractions of sex, but the appetite of the savage
differs from the love of the educated and civilized man as much as
charcoal differs from the diamond. The sentiment of love, as
distinguished from the passion, is one of the last and best results
of Christianity and civilization: in no one thing does savage life
differ from civilized more than in the relations between man and
woman, and in the affections that unite them. Uncas is a graceful
and beautiful image; but he is no Indian.

We turn now to a more gracious part of our task, and proceed to
say something of the many striking excellences which distinguish
Cooper’s writings, and have given him such wide popularity.
Popularity is but one test of merit, and not the
highest,—gauging popularity by the number of readers, at any
one time, irrespective of their taste and judgment. In this sense,
“The Scottish Chiefs” and “Thaddeus of
Warsaw” were once as popular as any of the Waverley Novels.
But Cooper’s novels have enduring merit, and will surely keep
their place in the literature of the language. The manners, habits,
and costumes of England have greatly changed during the last
hundred years; but Richardson and Fielding are still read. We must
expect corresponding changes in this country during the next
century; but we may confidently predict that in the year 1962 young
and impressible hearts will be saddened at the fate of Uncas and
Cora, and exult when Captain Munson’s frigate escapes from
the shoals.

A few pages back we spoke of Cooper’s want of skill in the
structure of his plots, and his too frequent recurrence to
improbable incidents to help on the course of his stories. But most
readers care little about this defect, provided the writer betrays
no poverty of invention, and succeeds in making his narratives
interesting. Herein Cooper never lays himself open to that
instinctive and unconscious criticism, which is the only kind an
author need dread, because from it there is no appeal. It is bad to
have a play hissed down, but it is worse to have it yawned down.
But over Cooper’s pages his readers never yawn. They never
break down in the middle of one of his stories. The fortunes of his
characters are followed with breathless and accumulating interest
to the end. In vain does the dinner-bell sound, or the clock strike
the hour of bed-time: the book cannot be laid down till we know
whether Elizabeth Temple is to get out of the woods without being
burned alive, or solve the mystery that hangs over the life of
Jacopo Frontoni. He has in ample measure that paramount and
essential merit in a novelist of fertility of invention. The
resources of his genius, alike in the devising of incidents and the
creation of character, are inexhaustible. His scenes are laid on
the sea and in the forest,—in Italy, Germany, Switzerland,
and Spain,—amid the refinements and graces of civilization
and the rudeness and hardships of frontier and pioneer life; but
everywhere he moves with an easy and familiar tread, and
everywhere, though there may be the motive and the cue for minute
criticism, we recognize the substantial truth of his pictures. In
all his novels the action is rapid and the movement animated: his
incidents may not be probable, but they crowd upon each other so
thickly that we have not time to raise the question: before one
impression has become familiar, the scene changes, and new objects
enchain the attention. All rapid motion is exhilarating alike to
mind and body; and in reading Cooper’s novels we feel a
pleasure analogous to that which stirs the blood when we drive a
fast horse or sail with a ten-knot breeze. This fruitfulness in the
invention of incidents is nearly as important an element in the
composition of a novelist as a good voice in that of a singer. A
powerful work of fiction may be produced by a writer who has not
this gift; but such works address a comparatively limited public.
To the common mind no faculty in the novelist is so fascinating as
this. “Caleb Williams” is a story of remarkable power;
but “Ivanhoe” has a thousand readers to its one.

In estimating novelists by the number and variety of characters
with which they have enriched the repertory of fiction,
Cooper’s place, if not the highest, is very high. The
fruitfulness of his genius in this regard is kindred to its
fertility in the invention of incidents. We can pardon in a
portrait-gallery of such extent here and there an ill-drawn figure
or a face wanting in expression. With the exception of Scott, and
perhaps of Dickens, what writer of prose fiction has created a
greater number of characters such as stamp themselves upon the
memory so that an allusion to them is well understood in cultivated
society? Fielding has drawn country squires, and Smollett has drawn
sailors; but neither has intruded upon the domain of the other, nor
could he have made the attempt without failure. Some of our living
novelists have a limited list of characters; they have half a dozen
types which we recognize as inevitably as we do the face and voice
of an actor in the king, the lover, the priest, or the bandit: but
Cooper is not a mere mannerist, perpetually copying from himself.
His range is very wide: it includes white men, red men, and black
men,—sailors, hunters, and soldiers,—lawyers, doctors,
and clergymen,—past generations and present,—Europeans
and Americans,—civilized and savage life. All his
delineations are not successful; some are even unsuccessful: but
the aberrations of his genius must be viewed in connection with the
extent of the orbit through which it moves. The courage which led
him to expose himself to so many risks of failure is itself a proof
of conscious power.

Cooper’s style has not the ease, grace, and various power
of Scott’s,—or the racy, idiomatic character of
Thackeray’s,—or the exquisite purity and transparency
of Hawthorne’s: but it is a manly, energetic style, in which
we are sure to find good words, if not the best. It has certain
wants, but it has no marked defects; if it does not always command
admiration, it never offends. It has not the highest finish; it
sometimes betrays carelessness: but it is the natural garb in which
a vigorous mind clothes its conceptions. It is the style of a man
who writes from a full mind, without thinking of what he is going
to say; and this is in itself a certain kind of merit. His
descriptive powers are of a high order. His love of Nature was
strong; and, as is generally the case with intellectual men, it
rather increased than diminished as he grew older. It was not the
meditative and self-conscious love of a sensitive spirit, that
seeks in communion with the outward world a relief from the burdens
and struggles of humanity, but the hearty enjoyment of a thoroughly
healthy nature, the schoolboy’s sense of a holiday dwelling
in a manly breast. His finest passages are those in which he
presents the energies and capacities of humanity in combination
with striking or beautiful scenes in Nature. His genius, which
sometimes moves with “compulsion and laborious flight”
when dealing with artificial life and the manners and speech of
cultivated men, and women, here recovers all its powers, and sweeps
and soars with victorious and irresistible wing. The breeze from
the sea, the fresh air and wide horizon of the prairies, the
noonday darkness of the forest are sure to animate his drooping
energies, and breathe into his mind the inspiration of a fresh
life. Here he is at home, and in his congenial element: he is the
swan on the lake, the eagle in the air, the deer in the woods. The
escape of the frigate, in the fifth chapter of “The
Pilot,” is a well-known passage of this kind; and nothing can
be finer. The technical skill, the poetical feeling, the rapidity
of the narrative, the distinctness of the details, the vividness of
the coloring, the life, power, and animation which breathe and burn
in every line, make up a combination of the highest order of
literary merit. It is as good a sea-piece as the best of
Turner’s; and we cannot give it higher praise. We hear the
whistling of the wind through the rigging, and the roar of the
pitiless sea, bellowing for its prey; we see the white caps of the
waves flashing with spectral light through the darkness, and the
gallant ship whirled along like a bubble by the irresistible
current; we hold our breath as we read of the expedients and
manoeuvres which most of us but half understand, and heave a long
sigh of relief when the danger is past, and the ship reaches the
open sea. A similar passage, though of more quiet and gentler
beauty, is the description of the deer-chase on the lake, in the
twenty-seventh chapter of “The Pioneers.” Indeed, this
whole novel is full of the finest expressions of the author’s
genius. Into none of his works has he put more of the warmth of
personal feeling and the glow of early recollection. His own heart
beats through every line. The fresh breezes of the morning of life
play round its pages, and its unexhaled dew hangs upon them. It is
colored throughout with the rich hues of sympathetic emotion. All
that is attractive in pioneer life is reproduced with substantial
truth; but the pictures are touched with those finer lights which
time pours over the memories of childhood. With what spirit and
power all the characteristic incidents and scenes of a new
settlement are described,—pigeon-shooting, bass-fishing,
deer-hunting, the making of maple-sugar, the turkey-shooting at
Christmas, the sleighing-parties in winter! How distinctly his
landscapes are painted,—the deep, impenetrable forest, the
gleaming lake, the crude aspect and absurd architecture of the
new-born village! How full of poetry in the ore is the conversation
of Leatherstocking! The incongruities and peculiarities of social
life which are the result of a sudden rush of population into the
wilderness are also well sketched; though with a pencil less free
and vivid than that with which he paints the aspects of Nature and
the movements of natural man. As respects the structure of the
story, and the probability of the incidents, the novel is open to
criticism; but such is the fascination that hangs over it, that it
is impossible to criticize. To do this would be as ungracious as to
correct the language and pronunciation of an old friend who revives
by his conversation the fading memories of school-boy and college
life.

Cooper would have been a better writer, if he had had more of
the quality of humor, and a keener sense of the ridiculous; for
these would have saved him from his too frequent practice of
introducing both into his narrative and his conversations, but more
often into the latter, scraps of commonplace morality, and bits of
sentiment so long worn as to have lost all their gloss. In general,
his genius does not appear to advantage in dialogue. His characters
have not always a due regard to the brevity of human life. They
make long speeches, preach dull sermons, and ventilate very
self-evident propositions with great solemnity of utterance. Their
discourse wants not only compression, but seasoning. They are
sometimes made to talk in such a way that the force of caricature
can hardly go farther. For instance, in “The Pioneers,”
Judge Temple, coming into a room in his house, and seeing a fire of
maple-logs, exclaims to Richard Jones, his kinsman and
factotum,—“How often have I forbidden the use of the
sugar-maple in my dwelling! The sight of that sap, as it
exudes with the heat, is painful to me, Richard.”
And in another place, he is made to say to his
daughter,—“Remember the heats of July, my daughter; nor
venture farther than thou canst retrace before the
meridian.” We may be sure that no man of woman born, in
finding fault about the burning of maple-logs, ever talked of the
sap’s “exuding”; or, when giving a daughter a
caution against walking too far, ever translated getting home
before noon into “retracing before the meridian.” This
is almost as bad as Sir Piercie Shafton’s calling the cows
“the milky mothers of the herds.”

So, too, a lively perception of the ludicrous would have saved
Cooper from certain peculiarities of phrase and awkwardnesses of
expression, frequently occurring in his novels, such as might
easily slip from the pen in the rapidity of composition, but which
we wonder should have been overlooked in the proof-sheet. A few
instances will illustrate our meaning. In the elaborate description
of the personal charms of Cecilia Howard, in the tenth chapter of
“The Pilot,” we are told of “a small hand which
seemed to blush at its own naked beauties.” In
“The Pioneers,” speaking of the head and brow of Oliver
Edwards, he says,—“The very air and manner with which
the member haughtily maintained itself over the coarse and
even wild attire,” etc. In “The Bravo,” we
read,—“As the stranger passed, his glittering
organs rolled over the persons of the gondolier and his
companion,” etc.; and again, in the same
novel,—“The packet was received calmly, though the
organ which glanced at its seal,” etc. In “The
Last of the Mohicans,” the complexion of Cora appears
“charged with the color of the rich blood that seemed
ready to burst its bounds.” These are but trivial
faults; and if they had not been so easily corrected, it would have
been hypercriticism to notice them.

Every author in the department of imaginative literature,
whether of prose or verse, puts more or less of his personal traits
of mind and character into his writings. This is very true of
Cooper; and much of the worth and popularity of his novels is to be
ascribed to the unconscious expressions and revelations they give
of the estimable and attractive qualities of the man. Bryant, in
his admirably written and discriminating biographical sketch,
originally pronounced as a eulogy, and now prefixed to
“Precaution” in Townsend’s edition, relates that
a distinguished man of letters, between whom and Cooper an unhappy
coolness had for some time existed, after reading “The
Pathfinder,” remarked,—“They may say what they
will of Cooper, the man who wrote this book is not only a great
man, but a good man.” This is a just tribute; and the
impression thus made by a single work is confirmed by all.
Cooper’s moral nature was thoroughly sound, and all his moral
instincts were right. His writings show in how high regard he held
the two great guardian virtues of courage in man and purity in
woman. In all his novels we do not recall a single expression of
doubtful morality. He never undertakes to enlist our sympathies on
the wrong side. If his good characters are not always engaging, he
never does violence to virtue by presenting attractive qualities in
combination with vices which in real life harden the heart and
coarsen the taste. We do not find in his pages those moral monsters
in which the finest sensibilities, the richest gifts, the noblest
sentiments are linked to heartless profligacy, or not less
heartless misanthropy. He never palters with right; he enters into
no truce with wrong; he admits of no compromise on such points. How
admirable in its moral aspect is the character of Leatherstocking!
he is ignorant, and of very moderate intellectual range or grasp;
but what dignity, nay, even grandeur, is thrown around him from his
noble moral qualities,—his undeviating rectitude, his
disinterestedness, his heroism, his warm affections! No writer
could have delineated such a character so well who had not an
instinctive and unconscious sympathy with his intellectual
offspring. Praise of the same kind belongs to Long Tom Coffin, and
Antonio, the old fisherman. The elements of character—truth,
courage, and affection—are the same in all. Harvey Birch and
Jacopo Frontoni are kindred conceptions: both are in a false
relation to those around them; both assume a voluntary load of
obloquy; both live and move in an atmosphere of suspicion and
distrust; but in both the end sanctifies and exalts the means; the
element of deception in both only adds to the admiration finally
awakened. The carrying out of conceptions like these—the
delineation of a character that perpetually weaves a web of
untruth, and yet through all maintains our respect, and at last
secures our reverence—was no easy task; but Cooper’s
success is perfect.

Cooper was fortunate in having been born with a vigorous
constitution, and in having kept through life the blessing of
robust health. He never suffered from remorse of the stomach or
protest of the brain; and his writings are those of a man who
always digested his dinner and never had a headache. His novels,
like those of Scott, are full of the breeze and sunshine of health.
They breathe of manly tastes, active habits, sound sleep, a relish
for simple pleasures, temperate enjoyments, and the retention in
manhood of the fresh susceptibilities of youth. His genius is
thoroughly masculine. He is deficient in acute perception, in
delicate discrimination, in fine analysis, in the skill to seize
and arrest exceptional peculiarities; but he has in large measure
the power to present the broad characteristics of universal
humanity. It is to this power that he owes his wide popularity. At
this moment, in every public and circulating library in England or
America, the novels of Cooper will be found to be in constant
demand. He wrote for the many, and not for the few; he hit the
common mind between wind and water; a delicate and fastidious
literary appetite may not be attracted to his productions, but the
healthy taste of the natural man finds therein food alike
convenient and savory.

In a manly, courageous, somewhat impulsive nature like
Cooper’s we should expect to find prejudices; and he was a
man of strong prejudices. Among others, was an antipathy to the
people of New England. His characters, male and female, are
frequently Yankees, but they are almost invariably caricatures;
that is, they have all the unamiable characteristics and
unattractive traits which are bestowed upon the people of New
England by their ill-wishers. Had he ever lived among them, with
his quick powers of observation and essentially kindly judgment of
men and life, he could not have failed to correct his
misapprehensions, and to perceive that he had taken the reverse
side of the tapestry for the face.

Cooper, with a very keen sense of injustice, conscious of
inexhaustible power, full of vehement impulses, and not largely
endowed with that safe quality called prudence, was a man likely to
get involved in controversies. It was his destiny, and he never
could have avoided it, to be in opposition to the dominant public
sentiment around him. Had he been born in Russia, he could hardly
have escaped a visit to Siberia; had he been born in Austria, he
would have wasted some of his best years in Spielberg. Under a
despotic government he would have been a vehement Republican; in a
Catholic country he would have been the most uncompromising of
Protestants. He had full faith in the institutions of his own
country; and his large heart, hopeful temperament, and robust soul
made him a Democrat; but his democracy had not the least tinge of
radicalism. He believed that man had a right to govern himself, and
that he was capable of self-government; but government, the
subordination of impulse to law, he insisted upon as rigorously as
the veriest monarchist or aristocrat in Christendom. He would have
no authority that was not legitimate; but he would tolerate no
resistance to legitimate authority. All his sentiments, impulses,
and instincts were those of a gentleman; and vulgar manners, coarse
habits, and want of respect for the rights of others were highly
offensive to him. When in Europe, he resolutely, and at no little
expense of time and trouble, defended America from unjust
imputations and ignorant criticism; and when at home, with equal
courage and equal energy, he breasted the current of public Opinion
where he deemed it to be wrong, and resisted those most formidable
invasions of right, wherein the many combine to oppress the one.
His long controversy with the press was too important an episode in
his life to be passed over by us without mention; though our limits
will not permit us to make anything more than a passing allusion to
it. The opinion which will be formed upon Cooper’s course in
this matter will depend, in a considerable degree, upon the
temperament of the critic. Timid men, cautious men, men who love
their ease, will call him Quixotic, rash, imprudent, to engage in a
controversy in which he had much to lose and little to gain; but
the reply to such suggestions is, that, if men always took counsel
of indolence, timidity, and selfishness, no good would ever be
accomplished, and no abuses ever be reformed. Cooper may not have
been judicious in everything he said and did; but that he was right
in the main, both in motive and conduct, we firmly believe. He
acted from a high sense of duty; there was no alloy of
vindictiveness or love of money in the impulses which moved him.
Criticism the most severe and unsparing he accepted as perfectly
allowable, so long as it kept within the limits of literary
judgment; but any attack upon his personal character, especially
any imputation or insinuation involving a moral stain, he would not
submit to. He appealed to the laws of the land to vindicate his
reputation and punish his assailants. Long and gallant was the
warfare he maintained,—a friendless, solitary
warfare,—and all the hydra-heads of the press hissing and
ejaculating their venom upon him,—with none to stand by his
side and wish him God-speed. But he persevered, and, what is more,
he succeeded: that, is to say, he secured all the substantial
fruits of success. He vindicated the principle for which he
contended: he compelled the newspapers to keep within the pale of
literary criticism; he confirmed the saying of President Jackson,
that “desperate courage makes one a majority.”

Two of his novels, “Homeward Bound” and “Home
as Found,” bear a strong infusion of the feelings which led
to his contest with the press. After the publication of these, he
became much interested in the well-known Anti-Rent agitation by
which the State of New York was so long shaken; and three of his
novels, “Satanstoe,” “The Chainbearer,” and
“The Redskins,” forming one continuous narrative, were
written with reference to this subject. Many professed
novel-readers are, we suspect, repelled from these books, partly
because of this continuity of the story, and partly because they
contain a moral; but we assure them, that, if on these grounds they
pass them by, they lose both pleasure and profit. They are written
with all the vigor and spirit of his prime; they have many powerful
scenes and admirably drawn characters; the pictures of colonial
life and manners in “Satanstoe” are animated and
delightful; and in all the legal and ethical points for which the
author contends he is perfectly right. In his Preface to “The
Chainbearer” he says,—“In our view, New York is
at this moment a disgraced State; and her disgrace arises from the
fact that her laws are trampled under foot, without any
efforts—at all commensurate with the object—being made
to enforce them.” That any commonwealth is a disgraced State
against which such charges can with truth be made no one will deny;
and any one who is familiar with the history of that wretched
business will agree, that, at the time it was made, the charge was
not too strong. Who can fail to admire the courage of the man who
ventured to write and print such a judgment as the above against a
State of which he was a native, a citizen, and a resident, and in
which the public sentiment was fiercely the other way? Here, too,
Cooper’s motives were entirely unselfish: he had almost no
pecuniary interest in the question of Anti-Rentism; he wrote all in
honor, unalloyed by thrift. His very last novel, “The Ways of
the Hour,” is a vigorous exposition of the defects of the
trial by jury in cases where a vehement public sentiment has
already tried the question, and condemned the prisoner. The story
is improbable, and the leading character is an impossible being;
but the interest is kept up to the end,—it has many most
impressive scenes,—it abounds with shrewd and sound
observations upon life, manners, and politics,—and all the
legal portion is stamped with an acuteness and fidelity to truth
which no professional reader can note without admiration.

Cooper’s character as a man is the more admirable to us
because it was marked by strong points which are not common in our
country, and which the institutions of our country do not foster.
He had the courage to defy the majority: he had the courage to
confront the press: and not from the sting of ill-success, not from
mortified vanity, not from wounded self-love, but from an heroic
sense of duty. How easy a life might he have purchased by the cheap
virtues of silence, submission, and acquiescence! Booksellers would
have enriched him; society would have caressed him; political
distinction would have crowned him: he had only to watch the course
of public sentiment, and so dispose himself that he should seem to
lead where he only followed, and all comfortable things would have
been poured into his lap. But he preferred to breast the stream, to
speak ungrateful truths. He set a wholesome example in this
respect; none the less valuable because so few have had the
manliness and self-reliance to imitate him. More than twenty years
ago De Tocqueville said,—“I know of no country in which
there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of
discussion as in America”: words which we fear are not less
true to-day than when they were written. Cooper’s dauntless
courage would have been less admirable, had he been hard, cold,
stern, and impassive: but he was none of these. He was full of warm
affections, cordial, sympathetic, and genial; he had a
woman’s tenderness of heart; he was the most faithful of
friends; and in his own home no man was ever more gentle, gracious,
and sweet. The blows he received fell upon a heart that felt them
keenly; but he bared his breast none the less resolutely to the
contest because it was not protected by an armor of
insensibility.

But we must bring this long paper to a close. We cannot give to
it the interest which comes from personal recollections. We saw
Cooper once, and but once. This was the very year before he died,
in his own home, and amid the scenes which his genius has made
immortal. It was a bright midsummer’s day, and we walked
together about the village, and around the shores of the lake over
which the canoe of Indian John had glided. His own aspect was as
sunny as that of the smiling heavens above us; age had not touched
him with its paralyzing finger: his vigorous frame, elastic step,
and animated glance gave promise of twenty years more of energetic
life. His sturdy figure, healthy face, and a slight bluffness of
manner reminded one more of his original profession than of the
life and manners of a man of letters. He looked like a man who had
lived much in the open air,—upon whom the rain had fallen,
and against whom the wind had blown. His conversation was hearty,
spontaneous, and delightful from its frankness and fulness, but it
was not pointed or brilliant; you remembered the healthy ring of
the words, but not the words themselves. We recollect, that, as we
were standing together on the shores of the lake,—shores
which are somewhat tame, and a lake which can claim no higher
epithet than that of pretty,—he said: “I suppose it
would be patriotic to say that this is finer than Como, but we know
that it is not.” We found a chord of sympathy in our common
impressions of the beauty of Sorrento, about which, and his
residence there, he spoke with contagious animation. Who could have
thought that that rich and abundant life was so near its close?
Nothing could be more thoroughly satisfying than the impression he
left in this brief and solitary interview. His air and movement
revealed the same manly, brave, true-hearted, warm-hearted man that
is imaged in his books. Grateful are we for the privilege of having
seen, spoken with, and taken by the hand the author of “The
Pathfinder” and “The Pilot”: “it is a
pleasure to have seen a great man.” Distinctly through the
gathering mists of years do his face and form rise up before the
mind’s eye: an image of manly self-reliance, of frank
courage, of generous impulse; a frank friend, an open enemy; a man
whom many misunderstood, but whom no one could understand without
honoring and loving.

PER TENEBRAS, LUMINA.

LOVE AND SKATES.

IN TWO PARTS.

PART I.

CHAPTER I.

A KNOT AND A MAN TO CUT IT.

Consternation! Consternation in the back office of Benjamin
Brummage, Esq., banker in Wall Street.

Yesterday down came Mr. Superintendent Whiffler, from
Dunderbunk, up the North River, to say, that, “unless
something be done, at once, the Dunderbunk Foundry and
Iron-Works must wind up.” President Brummage forthwith
convoked his Directors. And here they sat around the green table,
forlorn as the guests at a Barmecide feast.

Well they might be forlorn! It was the rosy summer solstice, the
longest and fairest day of all the year. But rose-color and
sunshine had fled from Wall Street. Noisy Crisis towing black
Panic, as a puffing steam-tug drags a three-decker cocked and
primed for destruction, had suddenly sailed in upon Credit.

As all the green inch-worms vanish on the tenth of every June,
so on the tenth of that June all the money in America had buried
itself and was as if it were not. Everybody and everything was
ready to fail. If the hindmost brick went, down would go the whole
file.

There were ten Directors of the Dunderbunk Foundry.

Now, not seldom, of a Board of ten Directors, five are wise and
five are foolish: five wise, who bag all the Company’s funds
in salaries and commissions for indorsing its paper; five foolish,
who get no salaries, no commissions, no dividends,—nothing,
indeed, but abuse from the stockholders, and the reputation of
thieves. That is to say, five of the ten are pick-pockets; the
other five, pockets to be picked.

It happened that the Dunderbunk Directors were all honest and
foolish but one. He, John Churm, honest and wise, was off at the
West, with his Herculean shoulders at the wheels of a dead-locked
railroad. These honest fellows did not wish Dunderbunk to fail for
several reasons. First, it was not pleasant to lose their
investment. Second, one important failure might betray Credit to
Crisis with Panic at its heels, whereupon every investment would be
in danger. Third, what would become of their Directorial
reputations? From President Brummage down, each of these gentlemen
was one of the pockets to be picked in a great many companies. Each
was of the first Wall-Street fashion, invited to lend his name and
take stock in every new enterprise. Any one of them might have
walked down town in a long patchwork toga made of the newspaper
advertisements of boards in which his name proudly figured. If
Dunderbunk failed, the toga was torn, and might presently go to
rags beyond repair. The first rent would inaugurate universal
rupture. How to avoid this disaster?—that was the
question.

“State the case, Mr. Superintendent Whiffler,” said
President Brummage, in his pompous manner, with its pomp a little
collapsed, pro tempore.

Inefficient Whiffler whimpered out his story.

The confessions of an impotent executive are sorry stuff to
read. Whiffler’s long, dismal complaint shall not be
repeated. He had taken a prosperous concern, had carried on things
in his own way, and now failure was inevitable. He had bought raw
material lavishly, and worked it badly into half-ripe material,
which nobody wanted to buy. He was in arrears to his hands. He had
tried to bully them, when they asked for their money. They had
insulted him, and threatened to knock off work, unless they were
paid at once. “A set of horrid ruffians,” Whiffler
said,—“and his life wouldn’t be safe many days
among them.”

“Withdraw, if you please, Mr. Superintendent,”
President Brummage requested. “The Board will discuss
measures of relief.”

The more they discussed, the more consternation. Nobody said
anything to the purpose, except Mr. Sam Gwelp, his late
father’s lubberly son and successor.

“Blast!” said he; “we shall have to let it
slide!”

Into this assembly of imbeciles unexpectedly entered Mr. John
Churm. He had set his Western railroad trains rolling, and was just
returned to town. Now he was ready to put those Herculean shoulders
at any other bemired and rickety no-go-cart.

Mr. Churm was not accustomed to be a Director in feeble
companies. He came into Dunderbunk recently as executor of his
friend Damer, a year ago bored to death by a silly wife.

Churm’s bristly aspect and incisive manner made him a
sharp contrast to Brummage. The latter personage was flabby in
flesh, and the oppressively civil counter-jumper style of his youth
had grown naturally into a deportment of most imposing
pomposity.

The Tenth Director listened to the President’s recitative
of their difficulties, chorused by the Board.

“Gentlemen,” said Director Churm, “you want
two things. The first is Money!”

He pronounced this cabalistic word with such magic power that
all the air seemed instantly filled with a cheerful flight of gold
American eagles, each carrying a double eagle on its back and a
silver dollar in its claws; and all the soil of America seemed to
sprout with coin, as after a shower a meadow sprouts with the
yellow buds of the dandelion.

“Money! yes, Money!” murmured the Directors.

It seemed a word of good omen, now.

“The second thing,” resumed the newcomer, “is
a Man!”

The Directors looked at each other and did not see such a
being.

“The actual Superintendent of Dunderbunk is a
dunderhead,” said Churm.

“Pun!” cried Sam Gwelp, waking up from a snooze.

Several of the Directors, thus instructed, started a
complimentary laugh.

“Order, gentlemen! Orrderr!” said the President,
severely, rapping with a paper-cutter.

“We must have a Man, not a Whiffler!” Churm
continued. “And I have one in my eye.”

Everybody examined his eye.

“Would you be so good as to name him?” said Old
Brummage, timidly.

He wanted to see a Man, but feared the strange creature might be
dangerous.

“Richard Wade,” says Churm. They did not know him.
The name sounded forcible.

“He has been in California,” the nominator said.

A shudder ran around the green table. They seemed to see a
frowzy desperado, shaggy as a bison, in a red shirt and jackboots,
hung about the waist with an assortment of six-shooters and
bowie-knives, and standing against a background of mustangs,
monte-banks, and lynch-law.

“We must get Wade,” Churm says, with authority.
“He knows Iron by heart. He can handle Men. I will back him
with my blank check, to any amount, to his order.”

Here a murmur of applause, swelling to a cheer, burst from the
Directors.

Everybody knew that the Geological Bank deemed Churm’s
deposits the fundamental stratum of its wealth. They lay there in
the vaults, like underlying granite. When hot times came, they
boiled up in a mountain to buttress the world.

Churm’s blank check seemed to wave in the air like an
oriflamme of victory. Its payee might come from Botany Bay; he
might wear his beard to his knees, and his belt stuck full of
howitzers and boomerangs; he might have been repeatedly hung by
Vigilance Committees, and as often cut down and revived by
galvanism; but brandishing that check, good for anything less than
a million, every Director in Wall Street was his slave, his friend,
and his brother.

“Let us vote Mr. Wade in by acclamation,” cried the
Directors.

“But, gentlemen,” Churm interposed, “if I give
him my blank check, he must have carte blanche, and no one
to interfere in his management.”

Every Director, from President Brummage down, drew a long face
at this condition.

It was one of their great privileges to potter in the Dunderbunk
affairs and propose ludicrous impossibilities.

“Just as you please,” Churm continued. “I name
a competent man, a gentleman and fine fellow. I back him with all
the cash he wants. But he must have his own way. Now take him, or
leave him!”

Such despotic talk had never been heard before in that
Directors’ Room. They relucted a moment. But they thought of
their togas of advertisements in danger. The blank check shook its
blandishments before their eyes.

“We take him,” they said, and Richard Wade was the
new Superintendent unanimously.

“He shall be at Dunderbunk to take hold to-morrow
morning,” said Churm, and went off to notify him.

Upon this, Consternation sailed out of the hearts of Brummage
and associates.

They lunched with good appetites over the green table, and the
President confidently remarked,—

“I don’t believe there is going much of a crisis,
after all.”

CHAPTER II.

BARRACKS FOR THE HERO.

Wade packed his kit, and took the Hudson-River train for
Dunderbunk the same afternoon.

He swallowed his dust, he gasped for his fresh air, he wept over
his cinders, he refused his “lozengers,” he was admired
by all the pretty girls and detested by all the puny men in the
train, and in good time got down at his station.

He stopped on the platform to survey the land—and
water-privileges of his new abode.

“The June sunshine is unequalled,” he soliloquized,
“the river is splendid, the hills are pretty, and the
Highlands, north, respectable; but the village has gone to seed.
Place and people look lazy, vicious, and ashamed. I suppose those
chimneys are my Foundry. The smoke rises as if the furnaces were
ill-fed and weak in the lungs. Nothing, I can see, looks alive,
except that queer little steamboat coming in,—the ‘I.
Ambuster,’—jolly name for a boat!”

Wade left his traps at the station, and walked through the
village. All the gilding of a golden sunset of June could not make
it anything but commonplace. It would be forlorn on a gray day, and
utterly dismal in a storm.

“I must look up a civilized house to lodge in,”
thought the stranger. “I cannot possibly camp at the tavern.
Its offence is rum, and smells to heaven.”

Presently our explorer found a neat, white, two-story, home-like
abode on the upper street, overlooking the river.

“This promises,” he thought. “Here are roses
on the porch, a piano, or at least a melodeon, by the
parlor-window, and they are insured in the Mutual, as the
Mutual’s plate announces. Now, if that nice-looking person in
black I see setting a table in the back-room is a widow, I will
camp here.”

Perry Purtett was the name on the door, and opposite the sign of
an omnium-gatherum country-store hinted that Perry was
deceased. The hint was a broad one. Wade read, “Ringdove,
Successor to late P. Purtett.”

“It’s worth a try to get in here out of the pagan
barbarism around. I’ll propose—as a lodger—to the
widow.”

So said Wade, and rang the bell under the roses. A pretty, slim,
delicate, fair-haired maiden answered.

“This explains the roses and the melodeon,” thought
Wade, and asked, “Can I see your mother?”

Mamma came. “Mild, timid, accustomed to depend on the late
Perry, and wants a friend,” Wade analyzed, while he bowed. He
proposed himself as a lodger.

“I didn’t know it was talked of generally,”
replied the widow, plaintively; “but I have said that we felt
lonesome, Mr. Purtett bein’ gone, and if the new
minister”—

Here she paused. The cut of Wade’s jib was unclerical. He
did not stoop, like a new minister. He was not pallid, meagre, and
clad in unwholesome black, like the same. His bronzed face was
frank and bold and unfamiliar with speculations on Original Sin or
Total Depravity.

“I am not the new minister,” said Wade, smiling
slightly over his moustache; “but a new Superintendent for
the Foundry.”

“Mr. Whiffler is goin’?” exclaimed Mrs.
Purtett.

She looked at her daughter, who gave a little sob and ran out of
the room.

“What makes my daughter Belle feel bad,” says the
widow, “is, that she had a friend,—well, it isn’t
too much to say that they was as good as engaged,—and he was
foreman of the Foundry finishin’-shop. But somehow Whiffler
spoilt him, just as he spoils everything he touches; and last
winter, when Belle was away, William Tarbox—that’s his
name, and his head is runnin’ over with inventions—took
to spreein’ and liquor, and got ashamed of himself, and let
down from a foreman to a hand, and is all the while lettin’
down lower.”

The widow’s heart thus opened, Wade walked in as consoler.
This also opened the lodgings to him. He was presently installed in
the large and small front-rooms up-stairs, unpacking his traps, and
making himself permanently at home.

Superintendent Whiffler came over, by-and-by, to see his
successor. He did not like his looks. The new man should have
looked mean or weak or rascally, to suit the outgoer.

“How long do you expect to stay?” asks Whiffler,
with a half-sneer, watching Wade hanging a map and a print
vis-à-vis.

“Until the men and I, or the Company and I, cannot pull
together.”

“I’ll give you a week to quarrel with both, and
another to see the whole concern go to everlasting smash. And now,
if you’re ready, I’ll go over the accounts with you and
prove it.”

Whiffler himself, insolent, cowardly, and a humbug, if not a
swindler, was enough, Wade thought, to account for any failure. But
he did not mention this conviction.

CHAPTER III.

HOW TO BEHEAD A HYDRA!

At ten next morning, Whiffler handed over the safe-key to Wade,
and departed to ruin some other property, if he could get one to
ruin. Wade walked with him to the gate.

“I’m glad to be out of a sinking ship,” said
the ex-boss. “The Works will go down, sure as shooting. And I
think myself well out of the clutches of these men. They’re a
bullying, swearing, drinking set of infernal ruffians. Foremen are
just as bad as hands. I never felt safe of my life with
‘em.”

“A bad lot, are they?” mused Wade, as he returned to
the office. “I must give them a little sharp talk by way of
Inaugural.”

He had the bell tapped and the men called together in the main
building.

Much work was still going on in an inefficient, unsystematic
way.

While hot fires were roaring in the great furnaces, smoke rose
from the dusty beds where Titanic castings were cooling. Great
cranes, manacled with heavy chains, stood over the furnace-doors,
ready to lift steaming jorums of melted metal, and pour out, hot
and hot, for the moulds to swallow.

Raw material in big heaps lay about, waiting for the fire to
ripen it. Here was a stack of long, rough, rusty pigs, clumsy as
the shillelabs of the Anakim. There was a pile of short, thick
masses, lying higgledy-piggledy, stuff from the neighboring mines,
which needed to be crossed with foreign stock before it could be of
much use in civilization.

Here, too, was raw material organized: a fly-wheel, large enough
to keep the knobbiest of asteroids revolving without a wabble; a
cross-head, cross-tail, and piston-rod, to help a great sea-going
steamer breast the waves; a light walking-beam, to whirl the
paddles of a fast boat on the river; and other members of machines,
only asking to be put together and vivified by steam and they would
go at their work with a will.

From the black rafters overhead hung the heavy folds of a dim
atmosphere, half dust, half smoke. A dozen sunbeams, forcing their
way through the grimy panes of the grimy upper windows, found this
compound quite palpable and solid, and they moulded out of it a
series of golden bars set side by side aloft, like the pipes of an
organ out of its perpendicular.

Wade grew indignant, as he looked about him and saw so much good
stuff and good force wasting for want of a little will and skill to
train the force and manage the stuff. He abhorred bankruptcy and
chaos.

“All they want here is a head,” he thought.

He shook his own. The brain within was well developed with
healthy exercise. It filled its case, and did not rattle like a
withered kernel, or sound soft like a rotten one. It was a
vigorous, muscular brain. The owner felt that he could trust it for
an effort, as he could his lungs for a shout, his legs for a leap,
or his fist for a knock-down argument.

At the tap of the bell, the “bad lot” of men came
together. They numbered more than two hundred, though the Foundry
was working short. They had been notified that “that gonoph
of a Whiffler was kicked out, and a new feller was in, who looked
cranky enough, and wanted to see ‘em and tell ‘em
whether he was a damn’ fool or not.”

So all hands collected from the different parts of the Foundry
to see the head.

They came up with easy and somewhat swaggering bearing,—a
good many roughs, with here and there a ruffian. Several, as they
approached, swung and tossed, for mere overplus of strength, the
sledges with which they had been tapping at the bald shiny pates of
their anvils. Several wielded their long pokers like lances.

Grimy chaps, all with their faces streaked, like Blackfeet in
their warpaint. Their hairy chests showed, where some men parade
elaborate shirt-bosoms. Some had their sleeves pushed up to the
elbow to exhibit their compact flexors and extensors. Some had
rolled their flannel up to the shoulder, above the bulging muscles
of the upper arm. They wore aprons tied about the neck, like the
bibs of our childhood,—or about the waist, like the
coquettish articles which young housewives affect. But there was no
coquetry in these great flaps of leather or canvas, and they were
besmeared and rust-stained quite beyond any bib that ever suffered
under bread-and-molasses or mud-pie treatment.

They lounged and swaggered up, and stood at ease, not without
rough grace, in a sinuous line, coiled and knotted like a
snake.

Ten feet back stood the new Hercules who was to take down that
Hydra’s two hundred crests of insubordination.

They inspected him, and he them as coolly. He read and ticketed
each man, as he came up,—good, bad, or on the
fence,—and marked each so that he would know him among a
myriad.

The Hands faced the Head. It was a question whether the two
hundred or the one would be master in Dunderbunk.

Which was boss? An old question.

It has to be settled whenever a new man claims power, and there
is always a struggle until it is fought out by main force of brain
or muscle.

Wade had made up his mind on this subject. He waited a moment
until the men were still. He was a Saxon six-footer of thirty. He
stood easily on his pins, as if he had eyed men and facts before.
His mouth looked firm, his brow freighted, his nose
clipper,—that the hands could see. But clipper noses are not
always backed by a stout hull. Seemingly freighted brows sometimes
carry nothing but ballast and dunnage. The firmness may be all in
the moustache, while the mouth hides beneath, a mere silly slit.
All which the hands knew.

Wade began, short and sharp as a trip-hammer, when it has a bar
to shape.

“I’m the new Superintendent. Richard Wade is my
name. I rang the bell because I wanted to see you and have you see
me. You know as well as I do that these Works are in a bad way.
They can’t stay so. They must come up and pay you regular
wages and the Company profits. Every man of you has got to be here
on the spot when the bell strikes, and up to the mark in his work.
You haven’t been,—and you know it. You’ve turned
out rotten iron,—stuff that any honest shop would be ashamed
of. Now there’s to be a new leaf turned over here.
You’re to be paid on the nail; but you’ve got to earn
your money. I won’t have any idlers or shirkers or rebels
about me. I shall work hard myself, and every man of you will, or
he leaves the shop. Now, if anybody has a complaint to make,
I’ll hear him before you all.”

The men were evidently impressed with Wade’s Inaugural. It
meant something. But they were not to be put down so easily, after
long misrule. There began to be a whisper,—

“B’il in, Bill Tarbox! and talk up to
him!”

Presently Bill shouldered forward and faced the new ruler.

Since Bill took to drink and degradation, he had been the
butt-end of riot and revolt at the Foundry. He had had his own way
with Whiffler. He did not like to abdicate and give in to this new
chap without testing him.

In a better mood, Bill would have liked Wade’s looks and
words; but today he had a sore head, a sour face, and a bitter
heart from last night’s spree. And then he had heard—it
was as well known already in Dunderbunk as if the town-crier had
cried it—that Wade was lodging at Mrs. Purtett’s, where
poor Bill was excluded. So Bill stepped forward as spokesman of the
ruffianly element, and the immoral force gathered behind and backed
him heavily.

Tarbox, too, was a Saxon six-footer of thirty. But he had sagged
one inch for want of self-respect. He had spoilt his color and dyed
his moustache. He wore foxy-black pantaloons tucked into red-topped
boots, with the name of the maker on a gilt shield. His red flannel
shirt was open at the neck and caught with a black handkerchief.
His damaged tile was in permanent crape for the late lamented
Poole.

“We allow,” says Bill, in a tone halfway between
Lablache’s De profundis and a burglar’s
bull-dog’s snarl, “that we’ve did our work as
good as need to be did. We ‘xpect we know our rights. We
ha’n’t ben treated fair, and I’m damned if
we’re go’n’ to stan’ it.”

“Stop!” says Wade. “No swearing in this
shop!”

“Who the Devil is go’n’ to stop it?”
growled Tarbox.

“I am. Do you step back now, and let some one come out who
can talk like a gentleman!”

“I’m damned if I stir till I’ve had my say
out,” says Bill, shaking himself up and looking
dangerous.

“Go back!”

Wade moved close to him, also looking dangerous.

“Don’t tech me!” Bill threatened, squaring
off.

He was not quick enough. Wade knocked him down flat on a heap of
moulding-sand. The hat in mourning for Poole found its place in a
puddle.

Bill did not like the new Emperor’s method of compelling
kotou. Round One of the mill had not given him enough.

He jumped up from his soft bed and made a vicious rush at Wade.
But he was damaged by evil courses. He was fighting against law and
order, on the side of wrong and bad manners.

The same fist met him again, and heavier.

Up went his heels! Down went his head! It struck the ragged edge
of a fresh casting, and there he lay stunned and bleeding on his
hard black pillow.

“Ring the bell to go to work!” said Wade, in a tone
that made the ringer jump. “Now, men, take hold and do your
duty and everything will go smooth!”

The bell clanged in. The line looked at its prostrate champion,
then at the new boss standing there, cool and brave, and not afraid
of a regiment of sledge-hammers.

They wanted an Executive. They wanted to be well governed, as
all men do. They wanted disorder out and order in. The new man
looked like a man, talked fair, hit hard. Why not all hands give in
with a good grace and go to work like honest fellows?

The line broke up. The hands went off to their duty. And there
was never any more insubordination at Dunderbunk.

This was June.

Skates in the next chapter.

Love in good time afterward shall glide upon the scene.

CHAPTER IV.

A CHRISTMAS GIFT.

The pioneer sunbeam of next Christmas morning rattled over the
Dunderbunk hills, flashed into Richard Wade’s eyes, waked
him, and was off, ricochetting across the black ice of the
river.

Wade jumped up, electrified and jubilant. He had gone to bed,
feeling quite too despondent for so healthy a fellow. Christmas
Eve, the time of family-meetings, reminded him how lonely he was.
He had not a relative in the world, except two little
nieces,—one as tall as his knee, the other almost up to his
waist; and them he had safely bestowed in a nook of New England, to
gain wit and virtues as they gained inches.

“I have had a stern and lonely life,” thought Wade,
as he blew out his candle last night, “and what has it
profited me?”

Perhaps the pioneer sunbeam answered this question with a
truism, not always as applicable as in this case,—“A
brave, able, self-respecting manhood is fair profit for any
man’s first thirty years of life.”

But, answered or not, the question troubled Wade no more. He
shot out of bed in tip-top spirits; shouted “Merry
Christmas!” at the rising disk of the sun; looked over the
black ice; thrilled with the thought of a long holiday for skating;
and proceeded to dress in a knowing suit of rough clothes, singing,
“Ah, non giunge!” as he slid into them.

Presently, glancing from his south window, he observed several
matinal smokes rising from the chimneys of a country-house a mile
away, on a slope fronting the river.

“Peter Skerrett must be back from Europe at last,”
he thought. “I hope he is as fine a fellow as he was ten
years ago. I hope marriage has not made him a muff, and wealth a
weakling.”

Wade went down to breakfast with an heroic appetite. His
“Merry Christmas” to Mrs. Purtett was followed up by a
ravished kiss and the gift of a silver butter-knife. The good widow
did not know which to be most charmed with. The butter-knife was
genuine, shining, solid silver, with her initials, M.B.P., Martha
Bilsby Purtett, given in luxuriant flourishes; but then the kiss
had such a fine twang, such an exhilarating titillation! The late
Perry’s kisses, from first to last, had wanted point. They
were, as the Spanish proverb would put it, unsavory as unsalted
eggs, for want of a moustache. The widow now perceived, with mild
regret, how much she had missed when she married “a man all
shaven and shorn.” Her cheek, still fair, though forty,
flushed with novel delight, and she appreciated her lodger more
than ever.

Wade’s salutation to Belle Purtett was more distant. There
must be a little friendly reserve between a handsome young man and
a pretty young woman several grades lower in the social scale,
living in the same house. They were on the most cordial terms,
however; and her gift—of course embroidered
slippers—and his to her—of course “The
Illustrated Poets,” in Turkey morocco—were exchanged
with tender good-will on both sides.

“We shall meet on the ice, Miss Belle,” said Wade.
“It is a day of a thousand for skating.”

“Mr. Ringdove says you are a famous skater,” Belle
rejoined. “He saw you on the river yesterday
evening.”

“Yes; Tarbox and I were practising to exhibit to-day; but
I could not do much with my dull old skates.”

Wade breakfasted deliberately, as a holiday morning allowed, and
then walked down to the Foundry. There would be no work done
to-day, except by a small gang keeping up the fires. The
Superintendent wished only to give his First Semi-Annual Report an
hour’s polishing, before he joined all Dunderbunk on the
ice.

It was a halcyon day, worthy of its motto, “Peace on
earth, good-will to men.” The air was electric, the sun
overflowing with jolly shine, the river smooth and sheeny from the
hither bank to the snowy mountains opposite.

“I wish I were Rembrandt, to paint this grand shadowy
interior,” thought Wade, as he entered the silent, deserted
Foundry. “With the gleam of the snow in my eyes, it looks
deliciously warm and chiaroscuro. When the men are here
and ‘fervet opus,’—the pot
boils,—I cannot stop to see the picturesque.”

He opened his office, took his Report and began to complete it
with ,s, ;s, and .s in the right places.

All at once the bell of the Works rang out loud and clear.
Presently the Superintendent became aware of a tramp and a bustle
in the building. By-and-by came a tap at the office-door.

“Come in,” said Wade, and, enter young Perry
Purtett.

Perry was a boy of fifteen, with hair the color of fresh
sawdust, white eyebrows, and an uncommonly wide-awake look.
Ringdove, his father’s successor, could never teach Perry the
smirk, the grace, and the seductiveness of the counter, so the boy
had found his place in the finishing-shop of the Foundry.

“Some of the hands would like to see you for half a jiff,
Mr. Wade,” said he. “Will you come along, if you
please?”

There was a good deal of easy swagger about Perry, as there is
always in boys and men whose business is to watch the lunging of
steam-engines. Wade followed him. Perry led the way with a jaunty
air that said,—

“Room here! Out of the way, you lubberly bits of
cast-iron! Be careful, now, you big derricks, or I’ll walk
right over you! Room now for Me and My suite!”

This pompous usher conducted the Superintendent to the very spot
in the main room of the Works where, six months before, the
Inaugural had been pronounced and the first Veto spoken and
enacted.

And there, as six months before, stood the Hands awaiting their
Head. But the aprons, the red shirts, and the grime of working-days
were off, and the whole were in holiday rig,—as black and
smooth and shiny from top to toe as the members of a Congress of
Undertakers.

Wade, following in the wake of Perry, took his stand facing the
rank, and waited to see what he was summoned for. He had not long
to wait.

To the front stepped Mr. William Tarbox, foreman of the
finishing-shop, no longer a boy, but an erect, fine-looking fellow,
with no nitrate in his moustache, and his hat permanently out of
mourning for the late Mr. Poole.

“Gentlemen,” said Bill, “I move that this
meeting organize by appointing Mr. Smith Wheelwright Chairman. As
many as are in favor of this motion, please to say
‘Aye.’”

“Aye!” said the crowd, very loud and big. And then
every man looked at his neighbor, a little abashed, as if he
himself had made all the noise.

“This is a free country,” continues Bill.
“Every woter has a right to a fair shake. Contrary minds,
‘No.’”

No contrary minds. The crowd uttered a great silence. Every man
looked at his neighbor, surprised to find how well they agreed.

“Unanimous!” Tarbox pronounced. “No fractious
minorities here, to block the wheels of
legislation!”

The crowd burst into a roar at this significant remark, and,
again abashed, dropped portcullis on its laughter, cutting off the
flanks and tail of the sound.

“Mr. Purtett, will you please conduct the Chairman to the
Chair,” says Bill, very stately.

“Make way here!” cried Perry, with the manner of a
man seven feet high. “Step out now, Mr. Chairman!”

He took a big, grizzled, docile-looking fellow patronizingly by
the arm, led him forward, and chaired him on a large cylinder-head,
in the rough, just hatched out of its mould.

“Bang away with that, and sing out,
‘Silence!’” says the knowing boy, handing
Wheelwright an iron bolt, and taking his place beside him, as
prompter.

The docile Chairman obeyed. At his breaking silence by hooting
“Silence!” the audience had another mighty bob-tailed
laugh.

“Say, ‘Will some honorable member state the object
of this meeting?’” whispered the prompter.

“Will some honorable mumbler state the subject of this
‘ere meetin’?” says Chair, a little bashful and
confused.

Bill Tarbox advanced, and, with a formal bow, began,—

“Mr. Chairman”—

“Say, ‘Mr. Tarbox has the floor,’” piped
Perry.

“Mr. Tarbox has the floor,” diapasoned the
Chair.

“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen”—Bill began, and
stopped.

“Say, ‘Proceed, Sir!’” suggested Perry,
which the senior did, magnifying the boy’s whisper a dozen
times.

Again Bill began and stopped.

“Boys,” said he, dropping grandiloquence,
“when I accepted the office of Orator of the Day at our
primary, and promised to bring forward our Resolutions in honor of
Mr. Wade with my best speech, I didn’t think I was going to
have such a head of steam on that the walves would get stuck and
the piston jammed and I couldn’t say a word.

“But,” he continued, warming up, “when I think
of the Indian powwow we had in this very spot six months
ago,—and what a mean bloat I was, going to the stub-tail dogs
with my hat over my eyes,—and what a hard lot we were all
round, livin’ on nothing but argee whiskey, and rampin’
off on benders, instead of makin’ good iron,—and how
the Works was flat broke,—and how Dunderbunk was full of
women crying over their husbands and mothers ashamed of their
sons,—boys, when I think how things was, and see how they
are, and look at Mr. Wade standing there like a”—

Bill hesitated for a comparison.

“Like a thousand of brick,” Perry Purtett suggested,
sotto voce.

The Chairman took this as a hint to himself.

“Like a thousand of brick,” he said, with the voice
of a Stentor.

Here the audience roared and cheered, and the Orator got a fresh
start.

“When you came, Mr. Wade,” he resumed, “we was
about sick of putty-heads and sneaks that didn’t know enough
or didn’t dare to make us stand round and bone in. You walked
in, b’ilin’ over with grit. You took hold as if you
belonged here. You made things jump like a two-headed tarrier. All
we wanted was a live man, to say, ‘Here, boys, all together
now! You’ve got your stint, and I’ve got mine.
I’m boss in this shop,—but I can’t do the first
thing, unless every man pulls his pound. Now, then, my hand is on
the throttle, grease the wheels, oil the walves, poke the fires,
hook on, and let’s yank her through with a
will!’”

At this figure the meeting showed a tendency to cheer.
“Silence!” Perry sternly suggested.
“Silence!” repeated the Chair.

“Then,” continued the Orator, “you
wasn’t one of the uneasy kind, always fussin’ and
cussin’ round. You wasn’t always spyin’ to see we
didn’t take home a cross-tail or a hundred-weight of
cast-iron in our pants’ pockets, or go to swiggin’ hot
metal out of the ladles on the sly.”

Here an enormous laugh requited Bill’s joke. Perry
prompted, the Chair banged with his bolt and cried,
“Order!”

“Well, now, boys,” Tarbox went on, “what has
come of having one of the right sort to be boss? Why, this. The
Works go ahead, stiddy as the North River. We work full time and
full-handed. We turn out stuff that no shop needs to be ashamed of.
Wages is on the nail. We have a good time generally. How is that,
boys,—Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen?”

“That’s so!” from everybody.

“And there’s something better yet,” Bill
resumed. “Dunderbunk used to be full of crying women.
They’ve stopped crying now.”

Here the whole assemblage, Chairman and all, burst into an
irrepressible cheer.

“But I’m making my speech as long as a
lightning-rod,” said the speaker. “I’ll put on
the brakes, short. I guess Mr. Wade understands pretty well, now,
how we feel; and if he don’t, here it all is in shape, in
this document, with ‘Whereas’ at the top and
‘Resolved’ entered along down in five places. Mr.
Purtett, will you hand the Resolutions to the
Superintendent?”

Perry advanced and did his office loftily, much to the amusement
of Wade and the workmen.

“Now,” Bill resumed, “we wanted, besides, to
make you a little gift, Mr. Wade, to remember the day by. So we got
up a subscription, and every man put in his dime. Here’s the
present,—hand ‘em over, Perry!

“There, Sir, is THE BEST PAIR OF SKATES to be had in York
City, made for work, and no nonsense about ‘em. We Dunderbunk
boys give ‘em to you, one for all, and hope you’ll like
‘em and beat the world skating, as you do in all the things
we’ve knowed you try.

“Now, boys,” Bill perorated, “before I retire
to the shades of private life, I motion we give Three
Cheers—regular Toplifters—for Richard Wade!”

“Hurrah! Wade and Good Government!” “Hurrah!
Wade and Prosperity!” “Hurrah! Wade and the
Women’s Tears Dry!”

Cheers like the shout of Achilles! Wielding sledges is good for
the bellows, it appears. Toplifters! Why, the smoky black rafters
overhead had to tug hard to hold the roof on. Hurrah! From every
corner of the vast building came back rattling echoes. The Works,
the machinery, the furnaces, the stuff, all had their voice to add
to the verdict.

Magnificent music! and our Anglo-Saxon is the only race in the
world civilized enough to join in singing it. We are the only
hurrahing people,—the only brood hatched in a
“Hurrah’s nest.”

Silence restored, the Chairman, prompted by Perry, said,
“Gentlemen, Mr. Wade has the floor for a few
remarks.”

Of course Wade had to speak, and did. He would not have been an
American in America else. But his heart was too full to say more
than a few hearty and earnest words of good feeling.

“Now, men,” he closed, “I want to get away on
the river and see if my skates will go as they look; so I’ll
end by proposing three cheers for Smith Wheelwright, our Chairman,
three for our Orator, Tarbox, three for Old
Dunderbunk,—Works, Men, Women, and Children; and one big
cheer for Old Father Iron, as rousing a cheer as ever was
roared.”

So they gave their three times three with enormous enthusiasm.
The roof shook, the furnaces rattled, Perry Purtett banged with the
Chairman’s hammer, the great echoes thundered through the
Foundry.

And when they ended with one gigantic cheer for IRON, tough and
true, the weapon, the tool, and the engine of all
civilization,—it seemed as if the uproar would never cease
until Father Iron himself heard the call in his smithy away under
the magnetic pole, and came clanking up, to return thanks in
person.

CHAPTER V.

SKATING AS A FINE ART.

Of all the plays that are played by this playful world on its
play-days, there is no play like Skating.

To prepare a board for the moves of this game of games, a panel
for the drawings of this Fine Art, a stage for the
entrechats and pirouettes of its graceful adepts,
Zero, magical artificer, had been, for the last two nights, sliding
at full speed up and down the North River.

We have heard of Midas, whose touch made gold, and of the virgin
under whose feet sprang roses; but Zero’s heels and toes were
armed with more precious influences. They left a diamond way, where
they slid,—a hundred and fifty miles of diamond, half a mile
wide and six inches thick.

Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain it.
Zero’s product, finer even than diamond, was filled—at
the rate of a million to the square foot—with bubbles
immeasurably little, and yet every one big enough to comprise the
entire sun in small, but without alteration or abridgment. When the
sun rose, each of these wonderful cells was ready to catch the tip
of a sunbeam and house it in a shining abode.

Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along shore, with
exquisite marquetry of leaves, brown and evergreen, of sprays and
twigs, reeds and grasses. No parquet in any palace from
Fontainebleau to St. Petersburg could show such delicate patterns,
or could gleam so brightly, though polished with all the wax in
Christendom.

On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes to Spuyten
Duyvil, Jubilee was sliding without friction, the Christmas morning
of these adventures.

Navigation was closed. Navigators had leisure. The sloops and
schooners were frozen in along shore, the tugs and barges were laid
up in basins, the floating palaces were down at New York,
deodorizing their bar-rooms, regilding their bridal chambers, and
enlarging their spittoon accommodations alow and aloft, for next
summer. All the population was out on the ice, skating, sliding,
sledding, slipping, tumbling, to its heart’s content.

One person out of every Dunderbunk family was of course at home,
roasting Christmas turkey. The rest were already at high jinks on
Zero’s Christmas present, when Wade and the men came down,
from the meeting.

Wade buckled on his new skates in a jiffy. He stamped to settle
himself, and then flung off half a dozen circles on the right leg,
half a dozen with the left, and the same with either leg
backwards.

The ice, traced with these white peripheries, showed like a
blackboard where a school has been chalking diagrams of Euclid, to
point at with the “slow unyielding finger” of
demonstration.

“Hurrah!” cries Wade, halting in front of the men,
who, some on the Foundry wharf, some on the deck of our first
acquaintance at Dunderbunk, the tug “L Ambuster,” were
putting on their skates or watching him, “Hurrah! the skates
are perfection! Are you ready, Bill?”

“Yes,” says Tarbox, whizzing off rings, as exact as
Giotto’s autograph.

“Now, then,” Wade said, “we’ll give
Dunderbunk a laugh, as we practised last night.”

They got under full headway, Wade backwards, Bill forwards,
holding hands. When they were near enough to the merry throng out
in the stream, both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left
knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched out parallel to
the ice and fitting compactly by the other man’s leg. In this
queer figure they rushed through the laughing crowd.

Then all Dunderbunk formed a ring, agog for a grand show of

SKATING AS A FINE ART.

The world loves to see Great Artists, and expects them to do
their duty.

It is hard to treat of this Fine Art by the Art of Fine Writing.
Its eloquent motions must be seen.

To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a Soul, each of the
First Order; otherwise you will never get out of coarse art and
skating in one syllable. So much for yourself, the motive power.
And your machinery,—your smooth-bottomed rockers, the same
shape stem and stern,—this must be as perfect as the man it
moves, and who moves it.

Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics will say,
“See! this athlete docs his work as Church paints, as Darley
draws, as Palmer chisels, as Wittier strikes the lyre, and
Longfellow the dulcimer; he is as terse as Emerson, as clever as
Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as calm as Seward, as keen as
Phillips, as stalwart as Beecher; be is Garibaldi, he is Kit
Carson, he is Blondin; he is as complete as the steamboat
Metropolis, as Steers’s yacht, as Singer’s
sewing-machine, as Colt’s revolver, as the steam-plough, as
Civilization.” You wish to be so ranked among the people and
things that lead the age;—consider the qualities you must
have, and while you consider, keep your eye on Richard Wade, for he
has them all in perfection.

First,—of your physical qualities. You must have lungs,
not bellows; and an active heart, not an assortment of sluggish
auricles and ventricles. You must have legs, not shanks. Their
shape is unimportant, except that they must not interfere at the
knee. You must have muscles, not flabbiness; sinews like wire;
nerves like sunbeams; and a thin layer of flesh to cushion the
gable-ends, where you will strike, if you tumble,—which, once
for all be it said, you must never do. You must be all
momentum, and no inertia. You must be one part
grace, one force, one agility, and the rest caoutchouc, Manila
hemp, and watch-spring. Your machine, your body, must be thoroughly
obedient. It must go just so far and no farther. You have got to be
as unerring as a planet holding its own, emphatically, between
forces centripetal and centrifugal. Your aplomb must be as
absolute as the pounce of a falcon.

So much for a few of the physical qualities necessary to be a
Great Artist in Skating. See Wade, how be shows them!

Now for the moral and intellectual. Pluck is the first;—it
always is the first quality. Then enthusiasm. Then patience. Then
pertinacity. Then a fine aesthetic faculty,—in short, good
taste. Then an orderly and submissive mind, that can consent to act
in accordance with the laws of Art. Circumstances, too, must have
been reasonably favorable. That well-known skeptic, the King of
tropical Bantam, could not skate, because he had never seen ice and
doubted even the existence of solid water. Widdrington, after the
Battle of Chevy Chace, could not have skated, because he had no
legs,—poor fellow!

But granted the ice and the legs, then if you begin in the
elastic days of youth, when cold does not sting, tumbles do not
bruise, and duckings do not wet; if you have pluck and ardor enough
to try everything; if you work slowly ahead and stick to it; if you
have good taste and a lively invention; if you are a man, and not a
lubber;—then, in fine, you may become a Great Skater, just as
with equal power and equal pains you may put your grip on any kind
of Greatness.

The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of the great feats,
the Big Things, have admitted names. If I attempted to catalogue
Wade’s achievements, this chapter might become an
unintelligible rhapsody. A sheet of paper and a pen-point cannot
supply the place of a sheet of ice and a skate-edge. Geometry must
have its diagrams, Anatomy its corpus to carve. Skating
also refuses to be spiritualized into a Science; it remains an Art,
and cannot be expressed in a formula.

Skating has its Little Go, its Great Go, its Baccalaureate, its
M.A., its F.S.D., (Doctor of Frantic Skipping,) its A.G.D., (Doctor
of Airy Gliding,) its N.T.D., (Doctor of No Tumbles,) and finally
its highest degree, U.P. (Unapproachable Podographer).

Wade was U.P.

There were a hundred of Dunderbunkers who had passed their
Little Go and could skate forward and backward easily. A
half-hundred, perhaps, were through the Great Go; these could do
outer edge freely. A dozen had taken the Baccalaureate, and were
proudly repeating the pirouettes and spread-eagles of that degree.
A few could cross their feet, on the edge, forward and backward,
and shift edge on the same foot, and so were Magistri
Artis.

Wade, U.P., added to these an indefinite list of combinations
and fresh contrivances. He spun spirals slow, and spirals neck or
nothing. He pivoted on one toe, with the other foot cutting rings,
inner and outer edge, forward and back, He skated on one foot
better than the M.A.s could on both. He ran on his toes; he slid on
his heels; he cut up shines like a sunbeam on a bender; he swung,
light as if he could fly, if he pleased, like a wing-footed
Mercury; he glided as if will, not muscle, moved him; he tore about
in frenzies; his pivotal leg stood firm, his balance leg flapped
like a graceful pinion; he turned somersets; he jumped, whirling
backward as he went, over a platoon of boys laid flat on the
ice;—the last boy winced, and thought he was amputated; but
Wade flew over, and the boy still holds together as well as most
boys. Besides this, he could write his name, with a flourish at the
end, like the rubrica of a Spanish hidalgo. He
could podograph any letter, and multitudes of ingenious curlicues
which might pass for the alphabets of the unknown tongues. He could
not tumble.

It was Fine Art.

Bill Tarbox sometimes pressed the champion hard. But Bill
stopped just short of Fine Art, in High Artisanship.

How Dunderbunk cheered this wondrous display! How delighted the
whole population was to believe they possessed the best skater on
the North River! How they struggled to imitate! How they tumbled,
some on their backs, some on their faces, some with dignity like
the dying Caesar, some rebelliously like a cat thrown out of a
garret, some limp as an ancient acrobate! How they laughed at
themselves and at each other!

“It’s all in the new skates,” says Wade,
apologizing for his unapproachable power and finish.

“It’s suthin’ in the man,” says Smith
Wheelwright.

“Now chase me, everybody,” said Wade.

And, for a quarter of an hour, he dodged the merry crowd, until
at last, breathless, he let himself be touched by pretty Belle
Purtett, rosiest of all the Dunderbunk bevy of rosy maidens on the
ice.

“He rayther beats Bosting,” says Captain Isaac
Ambuster to Smith Wheelwright. “It’s so cold there that
they can skate all the year round; but he beats them, all the
same.”

The Captain was sitting in a queer little bowl of a skiff on the
deck of his tug, and rocking it like a cradle, as he talked.

“Bosting’s always hard to beat in anything,”
rejoined the ex-Chairman. “But if Bosting is to be beat,
here’s the man to do it.”

And now, perhaps, gentle reader, you think I have said enough in
behalf of a limited fraternity, the Skaters.

The next chapter, then, shall take up the cause of the Lovers, a
more numerous body, and we will see whether True Love, which never
makes “smooth running,” can help its progress by a
skate-blade.

CHAPTER VI.

“GO NOT, HAPPY DAY, TILL THE MAIDEN YIELDS.”

Christmas noon at Dunderbunk. Every skater was in galloping
glee,—as the electric air, and the sparkling sun, and the
glinting ice had a right to expect that they all should be.

Belle Purtett, skating simply and well, had never looked so
pretty and graceful. So thought Bill Tarbox.

He had not spoken to her, nor she to him, for more than six
months. The poor fellow was ashamed of himself and penitent for his
past bad courses. And so, though he longed to have his old flame
recognize him again, and though he was bitterly jealous and
miserably afraid he should lose her, he had kept away and consumed
his heart like a true despairing lover.

But to-day Bill was a lion, only second to Wade, the
unapproachable lion-in-chief. Bill was reinstated in public esteem,
and had won back his standing in the Foundry. He had to-day made a
speech which Perry Purtett gave everybody to understand “none
of Senator Bill Seward’s could hold the tallow to.”
Getting up the meeting and presenting Wade with the skates was
Bill’s own scheme, and it had turned out an eminent success.
Everything began to look bright to him. His past life drifted out
of his mind like the rowdy tales he used to read in the Sunday
newspapers.

He had watched Belle Purtett all the morning, and saw that she
distinguished nobody with her smiles, not even that coq du
village, Ringdove. He also observed that she was furtively
watching him.

By-and-by she sailed out of the crowd, and went off a little way
to practise.

“Now,” said he to himself, “sail in, Bill
Tarbox!”

Belle heard the sharp strokes of a powerful skater coming after
her. Her heart divined who this might be. She sped away like the
swift Camilla, and her modest drapery showed just enough and
“ne quid nimis” of her ankles.

Bill admired the grace and the ankles immensely. But his hopes
sank a little at the flight,—for he thought she perceived his
chase and meant to drop him. Bill had not bad a classical
education, and knew nothing of Galatea in the Eclogue,—how
she did not hide, until she saw her swain was looking fondly
after.

“She wants to get away,” he thought “But she
sha’n’t,—no, not if I have to follow her to
Albany.”

He struck out mightily. Presently the swift Camilla let herself
be overtaken.

“Good morning, Miss Purtett.” (Dogged air.)

“Good morning, Mr. Tarbox.” (Taken-by-surprise
air.)

“I’ve been admiring your skating,” says Bill,
trying to be cool.

“Have you?” rejoins Belle, very cool and
distant.

“Have you been long on the ice?” he inquired,
hypocritically.

“I came on two hours ago with Mr. Ringdove and the
girls,” returned she, with a twinkle which said, “Take
that, Sir, for pretending you did not see me.”

“You’ve seen Mr. Wade skate, then,” Bill said,
ignoring Ringdove.

“Yes; isn’t it splendid?” Belle replied,
kindling.

“Tip-top!”

“But then he does everything better than
anybody.”

“So he does!” Bill said,—true to his friend,
and yet beginning to be jealous of this enthusiasm. It was not the
first time he had been jealous of Wade; but he had quelled his
fears, like a good fellow.

Belle perceived Bill’s jealousy, and could have cried for
joy. She had known as little of her once lover’s heart as he
of hers. She only knew that he stopped coming to see her when he
fell, and had not renewed his visits now that he was risen again.
If she had not been charmingly ruddy with the brisk air and
exercise, she would have betrayed her pleasure at Bill’s
jealousy with a fine blush.

The sense of recovered power made her wish to use it again. She
must tease him a little. So she continued, as they skated on in
good rhythm,—

“Mother and I wouldn’t know what to do without Mr.
Wade. We like him so much,”—said ardently.

What Bill feared was true, then, he thought. Wade, noble fellow,
worthy to win any woman’s heart, had fascinated his
landlady’s daughter.

“I don’t wonder you like him,” said he.
“He deserves it.”

Belle was touched by her old lover’s forlorn tone.

“He does indeed,” she said. “He has helped and
taught us all so much. He has taken such good care of Perry. And
then”—here she gave her companion a little look and a
little smile—“he speaks so kindly of you, Mr.
Tarbox.”

Smile, look, and words electrified Bill. He gave such a spring
on his skates that he shot far ahead of the lady. He brought
himself back with a sharp turn.

“He has done kinder than he can speak,” says Bill.
“He has made a man of me again, Miss Belle.”

“I know it. It makes me very happy to hear you able to say
so of yourself.” She spoke gravely.

“Very happy”—about anything that concerned
him? Bill had to work off his overjoy at this by an exuberant
flourish. He whisked about Belle,—outer edge backward. She
stopped to admire. He finished by describing on the virgin ice,
before her, the letters B.P., in his neatest style of
podography,—easy letters to make, luckily.

“Beautiful!” exclaimed Belle. “What are those
letters? Oh! B.P.! What do they stand for?”

“Guess!”

“I’m so dull,” said she, looking bright as a
diamond. “Let me think! B.P.? British Poets,
perhaps.”

“Try nearer home!”

“What are you likely to be thinking of that begins with
B.P.?—Oh, I know! Boiler Plates!”

She looked at him,—innocent as a lamb. Bill looked at her,
delighted with her little coquetry. A woman without coquetry is
insipid as a rose without scent, as Champagne without bubbles, or
as corned beef without mustard.

“It’s something I’m thinking of most of the
time,” says he; “but I hope it’s softer than
Boiler Plates. B.P. stands for Miss Isabella Purtett.”

“Oh!” says Belle, and she skated on in silence.

“You came down with Alonzo Ringdove?” Bill asked,
suddenly, aware of another pang after a moment of peace.

“He came with me and his sisters,” she replied.

Yes; poor Ringdove had dressed himself in his shiniest black,
put on his brightest patent-leather boots, with his new swan-necked
skates newly strapped over them, and wore his new dove-colored
overcoat with the long skirts, on purpose to be lovely in the eyes
of Belle on this occasion. Alas, in vain!

“Mr. Ringdove is a great friend of yours, isn’t
he?”

“If you ever came to see me now, you would know who my
friends are, Mr. Tarbox.”

“Would you be my friend again, if I came, Miss
Belle?”

“Again? I have always been so,—always,
Bill.”

“Well, then, something more than my friend,—now that
I am trying to be worthy of more, Belle?”

“What more can I be?” she said, softly.

“My wife.”

She curved to the right. He followed. To the left. He was not to
be shaken off.

“Will you promise me not to say walves instead of
valves, Bill?” she said, looking pretty and saucy as
could be. “I know, to say W for V is fashionable in the iron
business; but I don’t like it.”

“What a thing a woman is to dodge!” says Bill.
“Suppose I told you that men brought up inside of boilers,
hammering on the inside against twenty hammering like Wulcans on
the outside, get their ears so dumfounded that they can’t
tell whether they are saying valves or walves,
wice or virtue,—suppose I told you
that,—what would you say, Belle?”

“Perhaps I’d say that you pronounce virtue
so well, and act it so sincerely, that I can’t make any
objection to your other words. If you’d asked me to be your
vife, Bill, I might have said I didn’t understand;
but wife I do understand, and I say”—

She nodded, and tried to skate off. Bill stuck close to her
side.

“Is this true, Belle?” he said, almost
doubtfully.

“True as truth!”

She put out her hand. He took it, and they skated on
together,—hearts beating to the rhythm of their movements.
The uproar and merriment of the village came only faintly to them.
It seemed as if all Nature was hushed to listen to their plighted
troth, their words of love renewed, more earnest for long
suppression. The beautiful ice spread before them, like their life
to come, a pathway untouched by any sorrowful or weary footstep.
The blue sky was cloudless. The keen air stirred the pulses like
the vapor of frozen wine. The benignant mountains westward kindly
surveyed the happy pair, and the sun seemed created to warm and
cheer them.

“And you forgive me, Belle?” said the lover.
“I feel as if I had only gone bad to make me know how much
better going right is.”

“I always knew you would find it out. I never stopped
hoping and praying for it.”

“That must have been what brought Mr. Wade
here.”

“Oh, I did hate him so, Bill, when I heard of something
that happened between you and him! I thought him a brute and a
tyrant. I never could get over it, until he told mother that you
were the best machinist he ever knew, and would some time grow to
be a great inventor.”

“I’m glad you hated him. I suffered rattlesnakes and
collapsed flues for fear you’d go and love him.”

“My affections were engaged,” she said, with simple
seriousness.

“Oh, if I’d only thought so long ago! How lovely you
are!” exclaims Bill, in an ecstasy. “And how refined!
And how good! God bless you!”

He made up such a wishful mouth,—so wishful for one of the
pleasurable duties of mouths, that Belle blushed, laughed, and
looked down, and as she did so saw that one of her straps was
trailing.

“Please fix it, Bill,” she said, stopping and
kneeling.

Bill also knelt, and his wishful mouth immediately took its
chance.

A manly smack and sweet little feminine chirp sounded as their
lips met.

Boom! twanging gay as the first tap of a marriage-bell, a loud
crack in the ice rang musically for leagues up and down the river.
“Bravo!” it seemed to say. “Well done, Bill
Tarbox! Try again!” Which the happy fellow did, and the happy
maiden permitted.

“Now,” said Bill, “let us go and hug Mr.
Wade!”

“What! Both of us?” Belle protested. “Mr.
Tarbox, I am ashamed of you!”

LIGHT LITERATURE.

Though the smallest boulder is heavy, and even the merest pebble
has a perceptible weight, yet the entire planet, toward which both
gravitate, floats more lightly than any feather. In literature
somewhat analogous may be observed. Here also are found the
insignificant lightness of the pebble and the mighty lightness of
the planet; while between them range the weighty masses, superior
to the petty ponderability of the one, and unequal to the
firmamental float of the other. Accordingly, setting out from the
mote-and-pebble extreme, you find, that, up to a certain point,
increasing values of thought are commonly indicated by increasing
gravity, by more and more of state-paper weightiness; but beyond
this the rule is reversed, and lightness becomes the sign and
measure of excellence. Bishop Butler and Richard
Hooker—especially the latter, the first book of whose
“Ecclesiastical Polity” is a truly noble piece of
writing—stand, perhaps, at the head of the weighty class of
writers in our language; but going beyond these to the
“Areopagitica” of Milton, or even to the powerful prose
of Raleigh, you pass the boundary-line, and are touched with the
buoyant influences of the Muse. Shakspeare and Plato are lighter
than levity; they are lifting forces, and weigh less than
nothing. The novelette of the season, or any finest and flimsiest
gossamer that is fabricated in our literary looms, compares with
“Lear,” with “Prometheus Bound,” with any
supreme work, only as cobwebs and thistle-down, that are easily
borne by the breeze, may compare with sparrows and thrushes, that
can fly and withal sing.

There is a call for “light reading,” and I for one
applaud the demand. A lightening influence is the best that books
or men can bestow upon us. Information is good, but invigoration is
a thousand times better. Cheer, cheer and vigor for the
world’s heart! It is because man’s hope is so low, and
his imaginations so poor, that he is earthly and evil. Wings for
these unfledged hearts! Transformation for these grubs! Give us
animation, inspiration, joy, faith! Give us enlivening, lightsome
airs, to which our souls shall, on a sudden, begin to dance,
keeping step with the angels! What else is worth having? Each one
of these sordid sons of men—is he not a new-born Apollo, who
waits only for the ambrosia from Olympus, to spring forth in
divineness of beauty and strength?

Nevertheless, I know not of any reading so hopelessly heavy as
large portions of that which claims the name of light. Light
writing it may be; but, considered as reading, one would be unjust
to charge upon it any lack of avoirdupois. It is like the bran of
wheat, which, though of little weight in the barrel, is heavy
enough in the stomach,—Dr. Sylvester Graham to the contrary
notwithstanding. It is related of an Italian culprit, that, being
required, in punishment of his crime, to make choice between lying
in prison for a term of years and reading the history of
Guicciardini, he chose the latter, but, after a brief trial,
petitioned for leave to reverse his election. I never attempted
Guicciardini; but I did once attempt Pope’s
“Dunciad.” And was it really the doom of a generation
of readers to find delight in this book? One must suppose so. There
are those in our day whose hard fate it is to read and to like
James’s and Bulwer’s novels. But greatly mistaken is
the scholar who, for relief from severe studies, goes to an empty
or insincere book. It is like saying money, after large and worthy
expenditures, by purchasing at a low price that which is worth
nothing,—buying “gold” watches at a mock-auction
room.

Indeed, no book, however witty, lively, saltatory, can have the
volant effects we covet, if it want substance and seriousness.
Substance, however, is to be widely distinguished from
ponderability. Oxygen is not so ponderous as lead or granite, but
it is far more substantial than either, and, as every one knows,
infinitely more serviceable to life. The distinction is equally
valid when applied to books and to men. The “airy
nothings” of imagination prove to be the most enduring
somethings of the world’s literature; and the last lightness
of heart may go with the purest truth of soul and the most precious
virtue of intelligence. All expressions carry the perpetual savors
of their origin; and as brooks that dance and frolic with the
sunbeams and murmur to the birds, light-hearted forever, will yet
bear sands of gold, if they flow from auriferous hills, so any
bubble and purl of laughter, proceeding from a wise and wealthy
soul, will bear a noble significance. In point of fact, some of the
merriest books in the world are among the most richly freighted.
And as airy and mirthful books may be substantial and serious, so
it is an effect very similar to that of noble and significant mirth
that is produced upon us by the grandest pieces of serious writing.
Thus, he who rightly reads the “Phaedon” or
“Phaedrus” of Plato smiles through all the depths of
his brain, though no pronounced smile show on his face; and he who
rightly reads the book of Cervantes, though the laughters plunge,
as it were, in cascades from his lips, is earnest at heart, and
full of sound and tender meditations.

If now, setting aside all books, whether pretending to gayety or
gravity, that are simply empty and ineffectual, we inquire for the
prime distinction between books light in a worthy and unworthy
sense, it will appear to be the distinction between inspiration and
alcohol,—between effects divinely real and effects illusory
and momentary. The drunkard dreams of flying, and fancies the stars
themselves left below him, while he is really lying in the gutter.
There are those, and numbers of those, who in reading seek no more
than to be cheated in a similar way. Indeed, to acknowledge a
disagreeable fact, there is a very great deal of reading in our day
that is simply a substitute for the potations and
“heavy-handed revel” of our Saxon ancestors. In both
cases it is a spurious exaltation of feeling that is sought; in
both cases those who for a moment seem to themselves larks
ascending to meet the sun are but worms eating earth.

This celestial lightness, which constitutes the last praise and
causes the purest benefit of books, comes not of any manner of
writing; no mere vivacity, though that of a French writer of
memoirs, though that of Arsène Houssaye himself, can compass
it; by no knack or talents is it to be attained. Perfect style has,
indeed, many allurements, and is of exceeding price; but it is no
chariot of Elijah, nevertheless. Was ever style more delightful, of
its kind, than Dryden’s? Was ever style more heavy and
monotonous than that of Swedenborg in his theological works? But I
have read Dryden, not indeed without pleasure in his masterly
exquisite ease and sureness of statement and his occasional touches
of admirable good sense, yet with no slightest liberation of
spirit, with no degree, greater or less, of that magical and
marvellous evocation, of inward resource, whose blessed surprise
now and then in life makes for us angelic moments, and feelingly
persuades us that our earth also is a star and in the sky. On the
other hand, I once read Swedenborg’s “Angelic Wisdom
concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom” with such
enticement, such afflatus, such quickening and heightening of soul,
as I cannot describe without seeming excessive. Until half through
the book, I turned every page with the feeling that before another
page I might see the chasm between the real and phenomenal worlds
fairly bridged over. Of course, it disappointed me in the end; but
what of that? To have kindled and for a time sustained the
expectation which should render possible such disappointment was a
benefit that a whole Bodleian Library might fail to confer. These
benefits come to us not from the writer as such, but from the man
behind the writer. He who dwells aloft amid the deathless orient
imaginations of the human race, easily inhabiting their atmosphere
as his native element,—about him, and him only, are the halos
and dawns of immortal youth; and his speech, though with many
babyish or barbarous fancies, many melancholies and vices of the
blood compounded, carries nevertheless some refrain of divine
hilarity, that beguiles men of their sordidness, their sullenness,
and low cares, they know not how nor why.

PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON.

We set out at a little past eleven, and made our first stage to
Manchester. We were by this time sufficiently Anglicized to reckon
the morning a bright and sunny one; although the May sunshine was
mingled with water, as it were, and distempered with a very bitter
east-wind.

Lancashire is a dreary county, (all, at least, except its hilly
portions,) and I have never passed through it without wishing
myself anywhere but in that particular spot where I then happened
to be. A few places along our route were historically interesting;
as, for example, Bolton, which was the scene of many remarkable
events in the Parliamentary War, and in the market-square of which
one of the Earls of Derby was beheaded. We saw, along the way-side,
the never-failing green fields, hedges, and other monotonous
features of an ordinary English landscape. There were little
factory villages, too, or larger towns, with their tall chimneys,
and their pennons of black smoke, their uglinesses of brick-work,
and their heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which seems to
be the only kind of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself
and resolve into the elements, when man has thrown it aside. These
hillocks of waste and effete mineral always disfigure the
neighborhood of ironmongering towns, and, even after a considerable
antiquity, are hardly made decent with a little grass.

At a quarter to two we left Manchester by the Sheffield and
Lincoln Railway. The scenery grew rather better than that through
which we had hitherto passed, though still by no means very
striking; for (except in the show-districts, such as the Lake
country, or Derbyshire) English scenery is not particularly well
worth looking at, considered as a spectacle or a picture. It has a
real, homely charm of its own, no doubt; and the rich verdure, and
the thorough finish added by human, art, are perhaps as attractive
to an American eye as any stronger feature could be. Our journey,
however, between Manchester and Sheffield was not through a rich
tract of country, but along a valley walled in by bleak, ridgy
hills extending straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands
with here and there a plantation of trees. Sometimes there were
long and gradual ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying the
very impression which the reader gets from many passages of Miss
Bronté’s novels, and still more from those of her two
sisters. Old stone or brick farm-houses, and, once in a while, an
old church-tower, were visible: but these are almost too common
objects to be noticed in an English landscape.

On a railway, I suspect, what little we do see of the country is
seen quite amiss, because it was never intended to be looked at
from any point of view in that straight line; so that it is like
looking at the wrong side of a piece of tapestry. The old highways
and footpaths were as natural as brooks and rivulets, and adapted
themselves by an inevitable impulse to the physiognomy of the
country; and, furthermore, every object within view of them had
some subtile reference to their curves and undulations: but the
line of a railway is perfectly artificial, and puts all precedent
things at sixes-and-sevens. At any rate, be the cause what it may,
there is seldom anything worth seeing—within the scope of a
railway traveller’s eye; and if there were, it requires an
alert marksman to take a flying shot at the picturesque.

At one of the stations, (it was near a village of ancient
aspect, nestling round a church, on a wide Yorkshire moor,) I saw a
tall old lady in black, who seemed to have just alighted from the
train. She caught my attention by a singular movement of the head,
not once only, but continually repeated, and at regular intervals,
as if she were making a stern and solemn protest against some
action that developed itself before her eyes, and were foreboding
terrible disaster, if it should be persisted in. Of course, it was
nothing more than a paralytic or nervous affection; yet one might
fancy that it had its origin in some unspeakable wrong, perpetrated
half a lifetime ago in this old gentlewoman’s presence,
either against herself or somebody whom she loved still better. Her
features had a wonderful sternness, which, I presume, was caused by
her habitual effort to compose and keep them quiet, and thereby
counteract the tendency to paralytic movement. The slow, regular,
and inexorable character of the motion,—her look of force and
self-control, which had the appearance of rendering it voluntary,
while yet it was so fateful,—have stamped this poor
lady’s face and gesture into my memory; so that, some dark
day or other, I am afraid she will reproduce herself in a dismal
romance.

The train stopped a minute or two, to allow the tickets to be
taken, just before entering the Sheffield station, and thence I had
a glimpse of the famous town of razors and penknives, enveloped in
a cloud of its own diffusing. My impressions of it are extremely
vague and misty,—or, rather, smoky: for Sheffield seems to me
smokier than Manchester, Liverpool, or Birmingham,—smokier
than all England besides, unless Newcastle be the exception. It
might have been Pluto’s own metropolis, shrouded in
sulphurous vapor; and, indeed, our approach to it had been by the
Valley of the Shadow of Death, through a tunnel three miles in
length, quite traversing the breadth and depth of a mountainous
hill.

After passing Sheffield, the scenery became softer, gentler, yet
more picturesque. At one point we saw what I believe to be the
utmost northern verge of Sherwood Forest,—not consisting,
however, of thousand-year oaks, extant from Robin Hood’s
days, but of young and thriving plantations, which will require a
century or two of slow English growth to give them much breadth of
shade. Earl Fitzwilliam’s property lies in this neighborhood,
and probably his castle was hidden among some soft depth of foliage
not far off. Farther onward the country grew quite level around us,
whereby I judged that we must now be in Lincolnshire; and shortly
after six o’clock we caught the first glimpse of the
Cathedral towers, though they loomed scarcely huge enough for our
preconceived idea of them. But, as we drew nearer, the great
edifice began to assert itself, making us acknowledge it to be
larger than our receptivity could take in.

At the railway-station we found no cab, (it being an unknown
vehicle in Lincoln,) but only an omnibus belonging to the
Saracen’s Head, which the driver recommended as the best
hotel in the city, and took us thither accordingly. It received us
hospitably, and looked comfortable enough; though, like the hotels
of most old English towns, it had a musty fragrance of antiquity,
such as I have smelt in a seldom-opened London church where the
broad-aisle is paved with tombstones. The house was of an ancient
fashion, the entrance into its interior court-yard being through an
arch, in the side of which is the door of the hotel. There are long
corridors, an intricate arrangement of passages, and an up-and-down
meandering of staircases, amid which it would be no marvel to
encounter some forgotten guest who had gone astray a hundred years
ago, and was still seeking for his bed-room while the rest of his
generation were in their graves. There is no exaggerating the
confusion of mind that seizes upon a stranger in the bewildering
geography of a great old-fashioned English inn.

This hotel stands in the principal street of Lincoln, and within
a very short distance of one of the ancient city-gates, which is
arched across the public way, with a smaller arch for
foot-passengers on either side; the whole, a gray, time-gnawn,
ponderous, shadowy structure, through the dark vista of which you
look into the Middle Ages. The street is narrow, and retains many
antique peculiarities; though, unquestionably, English domestic
architecture has lost its most impressive features, in the course
of the last century. In this respect, there are finer old towns
than Lincoln: Chester, for instance, and Shrewsbury,—which
last is unusually rich in those quaint and stately edifices where
the gentry of the shire used to make their winter-abodes, in a
provincial metropolis. Almost everywhere, nowadays, there is a
monotony of modern brick or stuccoed fronts, hiding houses that are
older than ever, but obliterating the picturesque antiquity of the
street.

Between seven and eight o’clock (it being still broad
daylight in these long English days) we set out to pay a
preliminary visit to the exterior of the Cathedral. Passing through
the Stone Bow, as the city-gate close by is called, we ascended a
street which grew steeper and narrower as we advanced, till at last
it got to be the steepest street I ever climbed,—so steep
that any carriage, if left to itself, would rattle downward much
faster than it could possibly be drawn up. Being almost the only
hill in Lincolnshire, the inhabitants seem disposed to make the
most of it. The houses on each side had no very remarkable aspect,
except one with a stone portal and carved ornaments, which is now a
dwelling-place for poverty-stricken people, but may have been an
aristocratic abode in the days of the Norman kings, to whom its
style of architecture dates back. This is called the Jewess’s
House, having been inhabited by a woman of that faith who was
hanged six hundred years ago.

And still the street grew steeper and steeper. Certainly, the
Bishop and clergy of Lincoln ought not to be fat men, but of very
spiritual, saint-like, almost angelic habit, if it be a frequent
part of their ecclesiastical duty to climb this hill; for it is a
real penance, and was probably performed as such, and groaned over
accordingly, in monkish times. Formerly, on the day of his
installation, the Bishop used to ascend the hill barefoot, and was
doubtless cheered and invigorated by looking upward to the grandeur
that was to console him for the humility of his approach. We,
likewise, were beckoned onward by glimpses of the Cathedral towers,
and, finally, attaining an open square on the summit, we saw an old
Gothic gateway to the left hand, and another to the right. The
latter had apparently been a part of the exterior defences of the
Cathedral, at a time when the edifice was fortified. The west front
rose behind. We passed through one of the side-arches of the Gothic
portal, and found ourselves in the Cathedral Close, a wide, level
space, where the great old Minster has fair room to sit, looking
down on the ancient structures that surround it, all of which, in
former days, were the habitations of its dignitaries and officers.
Some of them are still occupied as such, though others are in too
neglected and dilapidated a state to seem worthy of so splendid an
establishment. Unless it be Salisbury Close, however, (which is
incomparably rich as regards the old residences that belong to it,)
I remember no more comfortably picturesque precincts round any
other cathedral. But, in, truth, almost every cathedral close, in
turn, has seemed to me the loveliest, coziest, safest, least
wind-shaken, most decorous, and most enjoyable shelter that ever
the thrift and selfishness of mortal man contrived for himself. How
delightful, to combine all this with the service of the temple!

Lincoln Cathedral is built of a yellowish brown-stone, which
appears either to have been largely restored, or else does not
assume the hoary, crumbly surface that gives such a venerable
aspect to most of the ancient churches and castles in England. In
many parts, the recent restorations are quite evident; but other,
and much the larger portions, can scarcely have been touched for
centuries: for there are still the gargoyles, perfect, or with
broken noses, as the case may be, but showing that variety and
fertility of grotesque extravagance which no modern imitation can
effect. There are innumerable niches, too, up the whole height of
the towers, above and around the entrance, and all over the walls:
most of them empty, but a few containing the lamentable remnants of
headless saints and angels. It is singular what a native animosity
lives in the human heart against carved images, insomuch that,
whether they represent Christian saint or Pagan deity, all
unsophisticated men seize the first safe opportunity to knock off
their heads! In spite of all dilapidations, however, the effect of
the west front of the Cathedral is still exceedingly rich, being
covered from massive base to airy summit with the minutest details
of sculpture and carving: at least, it was so once; and even now
the spiritual impression of its beauty remains so strong, that we
have to look twice to see that much of it has been obliterated. I
have seen a cherry-stone carved all over by a monk, so minutely
that it must have cost him half a lifetime of labor; and this
cathedral front seems to have been elaborated in a monkish spirit,
like that cherry-stone. Not that the result is in the least petty,
but miraculously grand, and all the more so for the faithful beauty
of the smallest details.

An elderly man, seeing us looking up at the west front, came to
the door of an adjacent house, and called to inquire if we wished
to go into the Cathedral; but as there would have been a dusky
twilight beneath its roof, like the antiquity that has sheltered
itself within, we declined for the present. So we merely walked
round the exterior, and thought it more beautiful than that of
York; though, on recollection, I hardly deem it so majestic and
mighty as that. It is vain to attempt a description, or seek even
to record the feeling which the edifice inspires. It does not
impress the beholder as an inanimate object, but as something that
has a vast, quiet, long-enduring life of its own,—a creation
which man did not build, though in some way or other it is
connected with him, and kindred to human nature. In short, I fall
straightway to talking nonsense, when I try to express my inner
sense of this and other cathedrals.

While we stood in the close, at the eastern end of the Minster,
the clock chimed the quarters; and then Great Tom, who hangs in the
Rood Tower, told us it was eight o’clock, in far the sweetest
and mightiest accents that I ever heard from any bell,—slow,
and solemn, and allowing the profound reverberations of each stroke
to die away before the next one fell. It was still broad daylight
in that upper region of the town, and would be so for some time
longer; but the evening atmosphere was getting sharp and cool. We
therefore descended the steep street,—our younger companion
running before us, and gathering such headway that I fully expected
him to break his head against some projecting wall.

In the morning we took a fly, (an English term for an
exceedingly sluggish vehicle,) and drove up to the Minster by a
road rather less steep and abrupt than the one we had previously
climbed. We alighted before the west front, and sent our charioteer
in quest of the verger; but, as he was not immediately to be found,
a young girl let us into the nave. We found it very grand, it is
needless to say, but not so grand, methought, as the vast nave of
York Cathedral, especially beneath the great central tower of the
latter. Unless a writer intends a professedly architectural
description, there is but one set of phrases in which to talk of
all the cathedrals in England, and elsewhere. They are alike in
their great features: an acre or two of stone flags for a pavement;
rows of vast columns supporting a vaulted roof at a dusky height;
great windows, sometimes richly bedimmed with ancient or modern
stained glass; an elaborately carved screen between the nave and
chancel, breaking the vista that might else be of such glorious
length, and which is further choked up by a massive organ,—in
spite of which obstructions, you catch the broad, variegated
glimmer of the painted east window, where a hundred saints wear
their robes of transfiguration. Within the screen are the carved
oaken stalls of the Chapter and Prebendaries, the Bishop’s
throne, the pulpit, the altar, and whatever else may furnish out
the Holy of Holies. Nor must we forget the range of chapels, (once
dedicated to Catholic saints, but which have now lost their
individual consecration,) nor the old monuments of kings, warriors,
and prelates, in the side-aisles of the chancel. In close
contiguity to the main body of the Cathedral is the Chapter-House,
which, here at Lincoln, as at Salisbury, is supported by one
central pillar rising from the floor, and putting forth branches
like a tree, to hold up the roof. Adjacent to the Chapter-House are
the cloisters, extending round a quadrangle, and paved with
lettered tombstones, the more antique of which have had their
inscriptions half obliterated by the feet of monks taking their
noontide exercise in these sheltered walks, five hundred years ago.
Some of these old burial-stones, although with ancient crosses
engraved upon them, have been made to serve as memorials to dead
people of very recent date.

In the chancel, among the tombs of forgotten bishops and
knights, we saw an immense slab of stone purporting to be the
monument of Catherine Swineferd, wife of John of Gaunt; also, here
was the shrine of the little Saint Hugh, that Christian child who
was fabled to have been crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. The
Cathedral is not particularly rich in monuments; for it suffered
grievous outrage and dilapidation, both at the Reformation and in
Cromwell’s time. This latter iconoclast is in especially bad
odor with the sextons and vergers of most of the old churches which
I have visited. His soldiers stabled their steeds in the nave of
Lincoln Cathedral, and hacked and hewed the monkish sculptures, and
the ancestral memorials of great families, quite at their wicked
and plebeian pleasure. Nevertheless, there are some most exquisite
and marvellous specimens of flowers, foliage, and grape-vines, and
miracles of stone-work twined about arches, as if the material had
been as soft as wax in the cunning sculptor’s
hands,—the leaves being represented with all their veins, so
that you would almost think it petrified Nature, for which he
sought to steal the praise of Art. Here, too, were those grotesque
faces which always grin at you from the projections of monkish
architecture, as if the builders had gone mad with their own deep
solemnity, or dreaded such a catastrophe, unless permitted to throw
in something ineffably absurd.

Originally, it is supposed, all the pillars of this great
edifice, and all these magic sculptures, were polished to the
utmost degree of lustre; nor is it unreasonable to think that the
artists would have taken these further pains, when they had already
bestowed so much labor in working out their conceptions to the
extremest point. But, at present, the whole interior of the
Cathedral is smeared over with a yellowish wash, the very meanest
hue imaginable, and for which somebody’s soul has a bitter
reckoning to undergo.

In the centre of the grassy quadrangle about which the cloisters
perambulate is a small, mean, brick building, with a locked door.
Our guide,—I forgot to say that we had been captured by a
verger, in black, and with a white tie, but of a lusty and jolly
aspect,—our guide unlocked this door, and disclosed a flight
of steps. At the bottom appeared what I should have taken to be a
large square of dim, worn, and faded oil-carpeting, which might
originally have been painted of a rather gaudy pattern. This was a
Roman tessellated pavement, made of small colored bricks, or pieces
of burnt clay. It was accidentally discovered here, and has not
been meddled with, further than by removing the superincumbent
earth and rubbish.

Nothing else occurs to me, just now, to be recorded about the
interior of the Cathedral, except that we saw a place where the
stone pavement had been worn away by the feet of ancient pilgrims
scraping upon it, as they knelt down before a shrine of the
Virgin.

Leaving the Minster, we now went along a street of more
venerable appearance than we had heretofore seen, bordered with
houses, the high, peaked roofs of which were covered with red
earthen tiles. It led us to a Roman arch, which was once the
gateway of a fortification, and has been striding across the
English street ever since the latter was a faint village-path, and
for centuries before. The arch is about four hundred yards from the
Cathedral; and it is to be noticed that there are Roman remains in
all this neighborhood, some above ground, and doubtless innumerable
more beneath it; for, as in ancient Rome itself, an inundation of
accumulated soil seems to have swept over what was the surface of
that earlier day. The gateway which I am speaking about is probably
buried to a third of its height, and perhaps has as perfect a Roman
pavement (if sought for at the original depth) as that which runs
beneath the Arch of Titus. It is a rude and massive structure, and
seems as stalwart now as it could have been two thousand years ago;
and though Time has gnawed it externally, he has made what amends
he could by crowning its rough and broken summit with grass and
weeds, and planting tufts of yellow flowers on the projections up
and down the sides.

There are the ruins of a Norman castle, built by the Conqueror,
in pretty close proximity to the Cathedral; but the old gateway is
obstructed by a modern door of wood, and we were denied admittance
because some part of the precincts are used as a prison. We now
rambled about on the broad back of the hill, which, besides the
Minster and ruined castle, is the site of some stately and queer
old houses, and of many mean little hovels. I suspect that all or
most of the life of the present day has subsided into the lower
town, and that only priests, poor people, and prisoners dwell in
these upper regions. In the wide, dry moat at the base of the
castle-wall are clustered whole colonies of small houses, some of
brick, but the larger portion built of old stones which once made
part of the Norman keep, or of Roman structures that existed before
the Conqueror’s castle was ever dreamed about. They are like
toadstools that spring up from the mould of a decaying tree. Ugly
as they are, they add wonderfully to the picturesqueness of the
scene, being quite as valuable, in that respect, as the great,
broad, ponderous ruin of the castle-keep, which rose high above our
heads, heaving its huge gray mass out of a bank of green foliage
and ornamental shrubbery, such as lilacs and other
flowering-plants, in which its foundations were completely
hidden.

After walking quite round the castle, I made an excursion
through the Roman gateway, along a pleasant and level road bordered
with dwellings of various character. One or two were houses of
gentility, with delightful and shadowy lawns before them; many had
those high, red-tiled roofs, ascending into acutely pointed gables,
which seem to belong to the same epoch as some of the edifices in
our own earlier towns; and there were pleasant-looking cottages,
very sylvan and rural, with hedges so dense and high, fencing them
in, as almost to hide them up to the eaves of their thatched roofs.
In front of one of these I saw various images, crosses, and relics
of antiquity, among which were fragments of old Catholic
tombstones, disposed by way of ornament.

We now went home to the Saracen’s Head; and as the weather
was very unpropitious, and it sprinkled a little now and then, I
would gladly have felt myself released from further thraldom to the
Cathedral. But it had taken possession of me, and would not let me
be at rest; so at length I found myself compelled to climb the hill
again, between daylight and dusk. A mist was now hovering about the
upper height of the great central tower, so as to dim and half
obliterate its battlements and pinnacles, even while I stood in the
close beneath it. It was the most impressive view that I had had.
The whole lower part of the structure was seen with perfect
distinctness; but at the very summit the mist was so dense as to
form an actual cloud, as well denned as ever I saw resting on a
mountain-top. Really and literally, here was a “cloud-capt
tower.”

The entire Cathedral, too, transfigured itself into a richer
beauty and more imposing majesty than ever. The longer I looked,
the better I loved it. Its exterior is certainly far more beautiful
than that of York Minster; and its finer effect is due, I think, to
the many peaks in which the structure ascends, and to the pinnacles
which, as it were, repeat and re-echo them into the sky. York
Cathedral is comparatively square and angular in its general
effect; but here there is a continual mystery of variety, so that
at every glance you are aware of a change, and a disclosure of
something new, yet working an harmonious development of what you
have heretofore seen. The west front is unspeakably grand, and may
be read over and over again forever, and still show undetected
meanings, like a great, broad page of marvellous writing in
black-letter,—so many sculptured ornaments there are,
blossoming out before your eyes, and gray statues that have grown
there since you looked last, and empty niches, and a hundred airy
canopies beneath which carved images used to be, and where they
will show themselves again, if you gaze long enough.—But I
will not say another word about the Cathedral.

We spent the rest of the day within the sombre precincts of the
Saracen’s Head, reading yesterday’s
“Times,” “The Guide-Book of Lincoln,” and
“The Directory of the Eastern Counties.” Dismal as the
weather was, the street beneath our window was enlivened with a
great bustle and turmoil of people all the evening, because it was
Saturday night, and they had accomplished their week’s toil,
received their wages, and were making their small purchases against
Sunday, and enjoying themselves as well as they knew how. A band of
music passed to and fro several times, with the rain-drops falling
into the mouth of the brazen trumpet and pattering on the
bass-drum; a spirit-shop, opposite the hotel, had a vast run of
custom; and a coffee-dealer, in the open air, found occasional vent
for his commodity, in spite of the cold water that dripped into the
cups. The whole breadth of the street, between the Stone Bow and
the bridge across the Witham, was thronged to overflowing, and
humming with human life.

Observing in the Guide-Book that a steamer runs on the River
Witham between Lincoln and Boston, I inquired of the waiter, and
learned that she was to start on Monday, at ten o’clock.
Thinking it might be an interesting trip, and a pleasant variation
of our customary mode of travel, we determined to make the voyage.
The Witham flows through Lincoln, crossing the main street under an
arched bridge of Gothic construction, a little below the
Saracen’s Head. It has more the appearance of a canal than of
a river, in its passage through the town,—being bordered with
hewn stone mason-work on each side, and provided with one or two
locks. The steamer proved to be small, dirty, and altogether
inconvenient. The early morning had been bright; but the sky now
lowered upon us with a sulky English temper, and we had not long
put off before we felt an ugly wind from the German Ocean blowing
right in our teeth. There were a number of passengers on board,
country-people, such as travel by third-class on the railway; for,
I suppose, nobody but ourselves ever dreamt of voyaging, by the
steamer for the sake of what he might happen upon in the way of
river-scenery.

We bothered a good while about getting through a preliminary
lock; nor, when fairly under way, did we ever accomplish, I think,
six miles an hour. Constant delays were caused, moreover, by
stopping to take up passengers and freight,—not at regular
landing-places, but anywhere along the green banks. The scenery was
identical with that of the railway, because the latter runs along
by the river-side through the whole distance, or nowhere departs
from it except to make a short cut across some sinuosity; so that
our only advantage lay in the drawling, snail-like slothfulness of
our progress, which allowed us time enough and to spare for the
objects along the shore. Unfortunately, there was nothing, or next
to nothing, to be seen,—the country being one unvaried level
over the whole thirty miles of our voyage,—not a hill in
sight, either near or far, except that solitary one on the summit
of which we had left Lincoln Cathedral. And the Cathedral was our
landmark for four hours or more, and at last rather faded out than
was hidden by any intervening object.

It would have been a pleasantly lazy day enough, if the rough
and bitter wind had not blown directly in our faces, and chilled us
through, in spite of the sunshine that soon succeeded a sprinkle or
two of rain. These English east-winds, which prevail from February
till June, are greater nuisances than the east-wind of our own
Atlantic coast, although they do not bring mist and storm, as with
us, but some of the sunniest weather that England sees. Under their
influence, the sky smiles and is villanous.

The landscape was tame to the last degree, but had an English
character that was abundantly worth our looking at. A green
luxuriance of early grass; old, high-roofed farm-houses, surrounded
by their stone barns and ricks of bay and grain; ancient villages,
with the square, gray tower of a church seen afar over the level
country, amid the cluster of red roofs; here and there a shadowy
grove of venerable trees, surrounding what was perhaps an
Elizabethan ball, though it looked more like the abode of some rich
yeoman. Once, too, we saw the tower of a mediaeval castle, that of
Tattershall, built by a Cromwell, but whether of the
Protector’s family I cannot tell. But the gentry do not
appear to have settled multitudinously in this tract of country;
nor is it to be wondered at, since a lover of the picturesque would
as soon think of settling in Holland. The river retains its
canal-like aspect all along; and only in the latter part of its
course does it become more than wide enough for the little steamer
to turn itself round,—at broadest, not more than twice that
width.

The only memorable incident of our voyage happened when a
mother-duck was leading her little fleet of five ducklings across
the river, just as our steamer went swaggering by, stirring the
quiet stream into great waves that lashed the banks on either side.
I saw the imminence of the catastrophe, and hurried to the stern of
the boat to witness, since I could not possibly avert it. The poor
ducklings had uttered their baby-quacks, and striven with all their
tiny might to escape: four of them, I believe, were washed aside
and thrown off unhurt from the steamer’s prow; but the fifth
must have gone under the whole length of the keel, and never could
have come up alive.

At last, in, mid-afternoon, we beheld the tall tower of Saint
Botolph’s Church (three hundred feet high, the same elevation
as the tallest tower of Lincoln Cathedral) looming in the distance.
At about half-past four we reached Boston, (which name has been
shortened, in the course of ages, by the quick and slovenly English
pronunciation, from Botolph’s town,) and were taken by a cab
to the Peacock, in the market-place. It was the best hotel in town,
though a poor one enough; and we were shown into a small, stilled
parlor, dingy, musty, and scented with stale
tobacco-smoke,—tobacco-smoke two days old, for the waiter
assured us that the room had not more recently been fumigated. An
exceedingly grim waiter he was, apparently a genuine descendant of
the old Puritans of this English Boston, and quite as sour as those
who peopled the daughter-city in New England. Our parlor had the
one recommendation of looking into the market-place, and affording
a sidelong glimpse of the tail spire and noble old church.

In my first ramble about the town, chance led me to the
river-side, at that quarter where the port is situated. Here were
long buildings of an old-fashioned aspect, seemingly warehouses,
with windows in the high, steep roofs. The Custom-House found ample
accommodation within an ordinary dwelling-house. Two or three large
schooners were moored along the river’s brink, which had here
a stone margin; another large and handsome schooner was evidently
just finished, rigged and equipped for her first voyage; the
rudiments of another were on the stocks, in a ship-yard bordering
on the river. Still another, while I was looking on, came up the
stream, and lowered her main-sail, from a foreign voyage. An old
man on the bank hailed her and inquired about her cargo; but the
Lincolnshire people have such a queer way of talking English that I
could not understand the reply. Farther down the river, I saw a
brig, approaching rapidly under sail. The whole scene made an odd
impression of bustle, and sluggishness, and decay, and a remnant of
wholesome life; and I could not but contrast it with the mighty and
populous activity of our own Boston, which was once the feeble
infant of this old English town;—the latter, perhaps, almost
stationary ever since that day, as if the birth of such an
offspring had taken away its own principle of growth. I thought of
Long Wharf, and Faneuil Hall, and Washington Street, and the Great
Elm, and the State-House, and exulted lustily,—but yet began
to feel at home in this good old town, for its very name’s
sake, as I never had before felt, in England.

The next morning we came out in the early sunshine, (the sun
must have been shining nearly four hours, however, for it was after
eight o’clock,) and strolled about the streets, like people
who had a right to be there. The market-place of Boston is an
irregular square, into one end of which the chancel of the church
slightly projects. The gates of the church-yard were open and free
to all passengers, and the common footway of the towns-people seems
to lie to and fro across it. It is paved, according to English
custom, with flat tombstones; and there are also raised, or
altar-tombs, some of which have armorial bearings on them. One
clergyman has caused himself and his wife to be buried right in the
middle of the stone-bordered path that traverses the church-yard;
so that not an individual of the thousands who pass along this
public way can help trampling over him or her. The scene,
nevertheless, was very cheerful in the morning sun: people going
about their business in the day’s primal freshness, which was
just as fresh here as in younger villages; children, with
milk-pails, loitering over the burial-stones; school-boys playing
leap-frog with the altar-tombs; the simple old town preparing
itself for the day, which would be like myriads of other days that
had passed over it, but yet would be worth living through. And down
on the church-yard, where were buried many generations whom it
remembered in their time, looked the stately tower of Saint
Botolph; and it was good to see and think of such an age-long
giant, intermarrying the present epoch with a distant past, and
getting quite imbued with human nature by being so immemorially
connected with men’s familiar knowledge and homely interests.
It is a noble tower; and the jackdaws evidently have pleasant homes
in their hereditary nests among its topmost windows, and live
delightful lives, flitting and cawing about its pinnacles and
flying-buttresses. I should almost like to be a jackdaw myself, for
the sake of living up there.

In front of the church, not more than twenty yards off, and with
a low brick wall between, flows the River Witham. On the hither
bank a fisherman was washing his boat; and another skiff, with her
sail lazily half-twisted, lay on the opposite strand. The stream,
at this point, is about of such width, that, if the tall tower were
to tumble over flat on its face, its top-stone might perhaps reach
to the middle of the channel. On the farther shore there is a line
of antique-looking houses, with roofs of red tile, and windows
opening out of them,—some of these dwellings being so
ancient, that the Reverend Mr. Cotton, subsequently our first
Boston minister, must have seen them with his own bodily eyes, when
he used to issue from the front-portal after service. Indeed, there
must be very many houses here, and even some streets, that bear
much the aspect that they did when the Puritan divine paced
solemnly among them.

In our rambles about town, we went into a bookseller’s
shop to inquire if he had any description of Boston for sale. He
offered me (or, rather, produced for inspection, not supposing that
I would buy it) a quarto history of the town, published by
subscription, nearly forty years ago. The bookseller showed himself
a well-informed and affable man, and a local antiquary, to whom a
party of inquisitive strangers were a godsend. He had met with
several Americans, who, at various times, had come on pilgrimages
to this place, and had been in correspondence with others.
Happening to have heard the name of one member of our party, he
showed us great courtesy and kindness, and invited us into his
inner domicile, where, as he modestly intimated, he kept a few
articles which it might interest us to see. So we went with him
through the shop, up-stairs, into the private part of his
establishment; and, really, it was one of the rarest adventures I
ever met with, to stumble upon this treasure of a man, with his
treasury of antiquities and curiosities, veiled behind the
unostentatious front of a bookseller’s shop, in a very
moderate line of village-business. The two up-stair rooms into
which he introduced us were so crowded with inestimable articles,
that we were almost afraid to stir, for fear of breaking some
fragile thing that had been accumulating value for unknown
centuries.

The apartment was hung round with pictures and old engravings,
many of which were extremely rare. Premising that he was going to
show us something very curious, Mr. Porter went into the next room
and returned with a counterpane of fine linen, elaborately
embroidered with silk, which so profusely covered the linen that
the general effect was as if the main texture were silken. It was
stained, and seemed very old, and had an ancient fragrance. It was
wrought all over with birds and flowers in a most delicate style of
needle-work, and among other devices, more than once repeated, was
the cipher, M.S.,—being the initials of one of the most
unhappy names that ever a woman bore. This quilt was embroidered by
the hands of Mary-Queen of Scots, during her imprisonment at
Fotheringay Castle; and having evidently been a work of years, she
had doubtless shed many tears over it, and wrought many doleful
thoughts and abortive schemes into its texture, along with the
birds and flowers. As a counterpart to this most precious relic,
our friend produced some of the handiwork of a former Queen of
Otaheite, presented by her to Captain Cook: it was a bag, cunningly
made of some delicate vegetable stuff, and ornamented with
feathers. Next, he brought out a green silk waistcoat of very
antique fashion, trimmed about the edges and pocket-holes with a
rich and delicate embroidery of gold and silver. This (as the
possessor of the treasure proved, by tracing its pedigree till it
came into his hands) was once the vestment of Queen
Elizabeth’s Lord Burleigh: but that great statesman must have
been a person of very moderate girth in the chest and waist; for
the garment was hardly more than a comfortable fit for a boy of
eleven, the smallest American of our party, who tried on the
gorgeous waistcoat. Then, Mr. Porter produced some curiously
engraved drinking-glasses, with a view of Saint Botolph’s
steeple on one of them, and other Boston edifices, public or
domestic, on the remaining two, very admirably done. These crystal
goblets had been a present, long ago, to an old master of the Free
School from his pupils; and it is very rarely, I imagine, that a
retired schoolmaster can exhibit such trophies of gratitude and
affection, won from the victims of his birch rod.

Our kind friend kept bringing out one unexpected and wholly
unexpectable thing after another, as if he were a magician, and had
only to fling a private signal into the air, and some attendant imp
would hand forth any strange relic we might choose to ask for. He
was especially rich in drawings by the Old Masters, producing two
or three, of exquisite delicacy, by Raphael, one by Salvator, a
head by Rembrandt, and others, in chalk or pen-and-ink, by
Giordano, Benvenuto Cellini, and hands almost as famous; and
besides what were shown us, there seemed to be an endless supply of
these art-treasures in reserve. On the wall hung a crayon-portrait
of Sterne, never engraved, representing him as a rather young man,
blooming, and not uncomely: it was the worldly face of a man fond
of pleasure, but without that ugly, keen, sarcastic, odd expression
that we see in his only engraved portrait. The picture is an
original, and must needs be very valuable; and we wish it might be
prefixed to some new and worthier biography of a writer whose
character the world has always treated with singular harshness,
considering how much it owes him. There was likewise a
crayon-portrait of Sterne’s wife, looking so haughty and
unamiable, that the wonder is, how he ever contrived to live a week
with such an awful woman.

After looking at these, and a great many more things than I can
remember, above stairs, we went down to a parlor, where this
wonderful bookseller opened an old cabinet, containing numberless
drawers, and looking just fit to be the repository of such
knick-knacks as were stored up in it. He appeared to possess more
treasures than he himself knew of, or knew where to find; but,
rummaging here and there, he brought forth things new and old:
rose-nobles, Victoria crowns, gold angels, double-sovereigns of
George IV., two-guinea pieces of George II.; a marriage-medal of
the first Napoleon, only forty-five of which were ever struck off,
and of which even the British Museum does not contain a specimen
like this, in gold; a brass medal, three or four inches in
diameter, of a Roman Emperor; together with buckles, bracelets,
amulets, and I know not what besides. There was a green silk tassel
from the fringe of Queen Mary’s bed at Holyrood Palace. There
were illuminated missals, antique Latin Bibles, and (what may seem
of especial interest to the historian) a Secret-Book of Queen
Elizabeth, written, for aught I know, by her own hand. On
examination, however, it proved to contain, not secrets of State,
but recipes for dishes, drinks, medicines, washes, and all such
matters of housewifery, the toilet, and domestic quackery, among
which we were horrified by the title of one of the nostrums,
“How to kill a Fellow quickly”! We never doubted that
bloody Queen Bess might often have had occasion for such a recipe,
but wondered at her frankness, and at her attending to these
anomalous necessities in such a methodical way. The truth is, we
had read amiss, and the Queen had spelt amiss: the word was
“Fellon,”—a sort of whitlow,—not
“Fellow.”

Our hospitable friend now made us drink a glass of wine, as old
and genuine as the curiosities of his cabinet; and while sipping
it, we ungratefully tried to excite his envy, by telling of various
things, interesting to an antiquary and virtuoso, which we had seen
in the course of our travels about England. We spoke, for instance,
of a missal bound in solid gold and set round with jewels, but of
such intrinsic value as no setting could enhance, for it was
exquisitely illuminated, throughout, by the hand of Raphael
himself. We mentioned a little silver case which once contained a
portion of the heart of Louis XIV, nicely done up in spices, but,
to the owner’s horror and astonishment, Dean Buckland popped
the kingly morsel into his mouth, and swallowed it. We told about
the black-letter prayer-book of King Charles the Martyr, used by
him upon the scaffold, taking which into our hands, it opened of
itself at the Communion Service; and there, on the left-hand page,
appeared a spot about as large as a sixpence, of a yellowish or
brownish hue: a drop of the King’s blood had fallen
there.

Mr. Porter now accompanied us to the church, but first leading
us to a vacant spot of ground where old John Cotton’s
vicarage had stood till a very short time since. According to our
friend’s description, it was a humble habitation, of the
cottage order, built of brick, with a thatched roof. The site is
now rudely fenced in, and cultivated as a vegetable garden. In the
right-hand aisle of the church there is an ancient chapel, which,
at the time of our visit, was in process of restoration, and was to
be dedicated to Cotton, whom these English people consider as the
founder of our American Boston. It would contain a painted
memorial-window, in honor of the old Puritan minister. A festival
in commemoration of the event was to take place in the ensuing
July, to which I had myself received an invitation, but I knew too
well the pains and penalties incurred by an invited guest at public
festivals in England to accept it. It ought to be recorded, (and it
seems to have made a very kindly impression on our kinsfolk here,)
that five hundred pounds had been contributed by persons in the
United States, principally in Boston, towards the cost of the
memorial-window, and the repair and restoration of the chapel.

After we emerged from the chapel, Mr. Porter approached us with
the vicar, to whom he kindly introduced us, and then took his
leave. May a stranger’s benediction rest upon him! He is a
most pleasant man; rather, I imagine, a virtuoso than an antiquary;
for he seemed to value the Queen of Otaheite’s bag as highly
as Queen Mary’s embroidered quilt, and to have an omnivorous
appetite for everything strange and rare. Would that we could fill
up his shelves and drawers (if there are any vacant spaces left)
with the choicest trifles that have dropped out of Time’s
carpet-bag, or give him the carpet-bag itself, to take out what he
will!

The vicar looked about thirty years old, a gentleman, evidently
assured of his position, (as clergymen of the Established Church
invariably are,) comfortable and well-to-do, a scholar and a
Christian, and fit to be a bishop, knowing how to make the most of
life without prejudice to the life to come. I was glad to see such
a model English priest so suitably accommodated with an old English
church. He kindly and courteously did the honors, showing us quite
round the interior, giving us all the information that we required,
and then leaving us to the quiet enjoyment of what we came to
see.

The interior of Saint Botolph’s is very fine and
satisfactory, as stately, almost, as a cathedral, and has been
repaired—so far as repairs were necessary—in a chaste
and noble style. The great eastern window is of modern painted
glass, but is the richest, mellowest, and tenderest modern window
that I have ever seen: the art of painting these glowing
transparencies in pristine perfection being one that the world has
lost. The vast, clear space, of the interior church delighted me.
There was no screen,—nothing between the vestibule and the
altar to break the long vista; even the organ stood
aside,—though it by-and-by made us aware of its presence by a
melodious roar. Around the walls there were old engraved brasses,
and a stone coffin, and an alabaster knight of Saint John, and an
alabaster lady, each recumbent at full length, as large as life,
and in perfect preservation, except for a slight modern touch at
the tips of their noses. In the chancel we saw a great deal of
oaken work, quaintly and admirably carved, especially about the
seats formerly appropriated to the monks, which were so contrived
as to tumble down with a tremendous crash, if the occupant happened
to fall asleep.

We now essayed to climb into the upper regions. Up we went,
winding and still winding round the circular stairs, till we came
to the gallery beneath the stone roof of the tower, whence we could
look down and see the raised Fort, and my Talma lying on one of the
steps, and looking about as big as a pocket-handkerchief. Then up
again, up, up, up, through a yet smaller staircase, till we emerged
into another stone gallery, above the jackdaws, and far above the
roof beneath which we had before made a halt. Then up another
flight, which led us into a pinnacle of the temple, but not the
highest; so, retracing our steps, we took the right turret this
time, and emerged into the loftiest lantern, where we saw level
Lincolnshire, far and near, though with a haze on the distant
horizon. There were dusty roads, a river, and canals, converging
towards Boston, which—a congregation of red-tiled
roofs—lay beneath our feet, with pigmy people creeping about
its narrow streets. We were three hundred feet aloft, and the
pinnacle on which we stood is a landmark forty miles at sea.

Content, and weary of our elevation, we descended the corkscrew
stairs and left the church; the last object that we noticed in the
interior being a bird, which appeared to be at home there, and
responded with its cheerful notes to the swell of the organ.
Pausing on the church-steps, we observed that there were formerly
two statues, one on each side of the door-way; the canopies still
remaining, and the pedestals being about a yard from the ground.
Some of Mr. Cotton’s Puritan parishioners are probably
responsible for the disappearance of these stone saints. This
door-way at the base of the tower is now much dilapidated, but must
once have been very rich and of a peculiar fashion. It opens its
arch through a great square tablet of stone, reared against the
front of the tower. On most of the projections, whether on the
tower or about the body of the church, there are gargoyles of
genuine Gothic grotesqueness,—fiends, beasts, angels, and
combinations of all three; and where portions of the edifice are
restored, the modern sculptors have tried to imitate these wild
fantasies, but with very poor success. Extravagance and absurdity
have still their law, and should pay as rigid obedience to it as
the primmest things on earth.

In our further rambles about Boston, we crossed the river by a
bridge, and observed that the larger part of the town seems to lie
on that side of its navigable stream. The crooked streets and
narrow lanes reminded me much of Hanover Street, Ann Street, and
other portions of the North End of our American Boston, as I
remember that picturesque region in my boyish days. It is not
unreasonable to suppose that the local habits and recollections of
the first settlers may have had some influence on the physical
character of the streets and houses in the New-England metropolis;
at any rate, here is a similar intricacy of bewildering lanes, and
numbers of old peaked and projecting-storied dwellings, such as I
used to see there. It is singular what a home-feeling and sense of
kindred I derived from this hereditary connection and fancied
physiognomical resemblance between the old town and its well-grown
daughter, and how reluctant I was, after chill years of banishment,
to leave this hospitable place, on that account. Moreover, it
recalled some of the features of another American town, my own dear
native place, when I saw the seafaring people leaning against
posts, and sitting on planks, under the lee of warehouses,—or
lolling on long-boats, drawn up high and dry, as sailors and old
wharf-rats are accustomed to do, in seaports of little business. In
other respects, the English town is more village-like than either
of the American ones. The women and budding girls chat together at
their doors, and exchange merry greetings with young men; children
chase one another in the summer twilight; school-boys sail little
boats on the river, or play at marbles across the flat tombstones
in the churchyard; and ancient men, in breeches and long
waistcoats, wander slowly about the streets, with a certain
familiarity of deportment, as if each one were everybody’s
grandfather. I have frequently observed, in old English towns, that
Old Age comes forth more cheerfully, and genially into the sunshine
than among ourselves, where the rush, stir, bustle, and irreverent
energy of youth are so preponderant, that the poor, forlorn
grandsires begin to doubt whether they have a right to breathe in
such a world any longer, and so hide their silvery heads in
solitude. Speaking of old men, I am reminded of the scholars of the
Boston Charity-School, who walk about in antique, long-skirted blue
coats, and knee-breeches, and with bands at their
necks,—perfect and grotesque pictures of the costume of three
centuries ago.

On the morning of our departure, I looked from the parlor-window
of the Peacock into the market-place, and beheld its irregular
square already well-covered with booths, and more in process of
being put up, by stretching tattered sail-cloth on poles. It was
market-day. The dealers were arranging their commodities,
consisting chiefly of vegetables, the great bulk of which seemed to
be cabbages. Later in the forenoon there was a much greater variety
of merchandise: basket-work, both for fancy and use; twig-brooms,
beehives, oranges, rustic attire; all sorts of things, in short,
that are commonly sold at a rural fair. I heard the lowing of
cattle, too, and the bleating of sheep, and found that there was a
market for cows, oxen, and pigs, in another part of the town. A
crowd of towns-people and Lincolnshire yeomen elbowed one another
in the square; Mr. Punch was squeaking in one corner, and a
vagabond juggler tried to find space for his exhibition in another:
so that my final glimpse of Boston was calculated to leave a
livelier impression than my former ones. Meanwhile the tower of
Saint Botolph’s looked benignantly down; and I fancied that
it was bidding me farewell, as it did Mr. Cotton, two or three
hundred years ago, and telling me to describe its venerable height,
and the town beneath it, to the people of the American city, who
are partly akin, if not to the living inhabitants of Old Boston,
yet to some of the dust that lies in its churchyard.

One thing more. They have a Bunker Hill in the vicinity of their
town; and (what could hardly be expected of an English community)
seem proud to think that their neighborhood has given name to our
first and most widely celebrated and best-remembered
battle-field.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF A
STRENGTH-SEEKER.

“There goes the smallest fellow in our class.”

I was crossing one of the paths that intersect the college green
of old Harvard when this remark fell upon my ears. Looking up, I
saw two stalwart Freshmen on their way to recitation, one of whom
had called the other’s attention to my humble self by this
observation, reminding me of a distinction which I did not
covet.

It was not quite true. There was one, and only one, member of
the class of ‘54 who was as small as I. Some consolation,
though not much, in that! But the air of amused compassion with
which the lusty Down-Easter, who had made me feel what the
digito monstrari was, now looked down on me, raised a
feeling of resentment and self-depreciation which left me in no
mood to make a brilliant show of scholarship in construing my
“Isocrates” that morning.

“True, I am small, nay, diminutive,” I soliloquized,
as I wended my way homeward under the classic umbrage of venerable
elms. “But surely this is no fault of mine.—Hold there!
Are you quite sure it’s no fault of yours? Are we not
responsible to a much greater extent than we imagine for our
physical condition? After making all abatement for insurmountable
hereditary influences upon organization,—after granting to
that remorseless law of genealogical transmission its proper
weight,—after admitting the seemingly capricious facts of
what the modern French physiologists call atavism, under
which we are made drunkards or consumptives, lunatics or wise men,
short or tall, because of certain dominant traits in some remote
ancestor,—after conceding all this, does not Nature leave it
largely in our own power to counteract both physical and moral
tendencies, and to mould the body as well as the mind, if we will
only put forth in action the requisite energy of will?”

This disposition to cavil at received axioms has beset me
through life. No sooner does a truth present itself than I want to
see it on its other side. If I hear the Devil spoken ill of, I
puzzle myself to find what can be said in his favor. The man who
thus halts between conflicting opinions, solicitous to give both
their due, and to see the truth, pure and simple and entire, may
miss laying hold of great convictions till it is too late for him
to act on them; but what he accepts he generally holds.

My meditations on the subject of my inferior stature led me to a
determination to try what gymnastic practice could do to remedy the
defect. For some thirty years, gymnastics, first introduced into
this country, I believe, at the Round-Hill School at Northampton,
then under the charge of Messrs. Cogswell and Bancroft, had
languished and revived fitfully at Cambridge. It was during one of
the languishing periods that I began my practice. For some five or
six weeks I kept it up with enthusiasm. Then I began to grow less
methodical and regular in my habits of exercise; and then to find
excuses for my delinquencies.

After all, what matter, if, like Paul’s, my “bodily
presence is weak”? Were not Alexander the Great and Napoleon
small men? Were not Pope, and Dr. Watts, and Moore, and Campbell,
and a long list of authors, artists, and philosophers, considerably
under medium height? Were not Garrick and Kean and the elder Booth
all under five feet four or five? Is there not a volume somewhere
in our college library, written by a learned Frenchman, devoted
exclusively to the biography of men who have been great in mind,
though diminutive in stature? Is not Lord John Russell as small
almost as I? Have I many inches to grow before I shall be as tall
as Dr. Holmes?

These consolatory considerations softened my chagrin at the
contemplation of my height. “Care I for the limb, the thews,
the stature, bulk, and big assemblance of a man? Give me the
spirit, Master Shallow,—the spirit!”

And so my gymnastic ardor, after a brief blaze, flickered, fell,
was ashes. But it was destined to be soon revived by an incident,
trifling in itself, though of a character to assume exaggerated
proportions in the mind of a sensitive boy. A youth, who had
considerably the advantage of me both in inches and in years, and
whose overflow of animal spirits required some object to vent
itself upon, selected me as the victim of his ebullient vivacity.
He began by tossing my book down stairs. This seemed to me rather
rough play, especially from one with whom I was not, at the time,
on terms of intimacy; but, making allowance for the hilarity of
classmates just let loose from recitation, I picked up, without a
thought of resentment, the abused volume, and took no further
notice of the matter. I subsequently found that it was merely the
commencement of a series of similar annoyances. This lively
classmate would even play tricks on me at the dinner table.

What was to be done? I mentioned the grievance to a friend, and
he remonstrated with my lively classmate, threatening him with my
serious displeasure. “Pooh! how can he help himself?”
was the reply which came duly to my ears.

Sure enough! How could I help myself? The aggressor was my
superior in weight and size. It was a plain case that I should get
badly and ridiculously whipped, if I attempted to cope with him in
any pugilistic encounter. But how would it do to demand of him the
satisfaction of a gentleman? True, I knew nothing of
pistol-shooting, and had never handled a small-sword. No matter for
that!

But another consideration speedily drove this scheme of
vengeance à l’outrance out of my head. Not
many years before, a peppery little Freshman had been insulted, as
he thought, by a Sophomore. The Soph, I believe, had knocked the
young one’s hat over his eyes, as they were kicking foot-ball
in the Delta. Freshman sent a challenge, the effect of which was to
excite inextinguishable laughter among the Sophs convened over
their cigars in the aggressor’s room. Amid roars, one of the
conspirators penned an acceptance, fixing as the weapon, hair
triggers,—time, five o’clock in the
morning,—place, the Delta,—second, the bearer, Mr.
M——, the writer of this reply.

It was a cruel business. A sham second was imposed on poor
little Fresh. Brave as Julius Caesar, he sat up all night writing
letters and preparing his will. Prompt to the moment, he was on the
chosen ground. An unusually large delegation for such a delicate
affair seemed to be present. One rascal who wore enormous green
goggles was pointed out to the innocent as Dr. Von Guldenstubbe, a
celebrated German surgeon, just from Leipsic. Little Fresh shook
hands with him gravely, amid the smothered laughter of the
conspirators. The distance was to be five paces; for it was
whispered so as to reach the ear of Fresh, that Soph was thirsting
for his heart’s blood. They take their places,—the
signal is given,—they fire,—and with a hideous groan
and a wild pirouette, the Soph falls to the ground.

The Freshman is led up near enough to see the fellow’s
face covered with blood, and to hear his cries to his friends to
put him out of his misery. Intensely agitated, poor little Fresh is
hurried by pretended friends into a carriage, and driven off; and
it is not till a week afterwards that he learns he has been the
victim of a hoax.

No! it would never answer for me to run the risk of being
sold in any such way as this. I must select a surer and
more practical vengeance. I thought the matter over intently, and
finally resolved that I would put myself on a physical equality
with my persecutor, and then meet him in a fair fight with such
weapons as Nature had given us both. I accordingly said to the
friend and classmate who had played the part of intercessor,
“Wait two years, and I promise you I will either make my
tormentor apologize or give him such a thrashing as he will
remember for the rest of his life.”

Thus was my resolve renewed to accomplish myself as a gymnast,
and, above all, to develop my physical strength. My previous
attempts in the gymnasium had been spasmodic and irregular. Having
now a definite object in view, I set about my work in earnest, and
went through a daily systematic practice of a little more than an
hour’s duration.

The gymnasium was kept by a Mr. Law, and, though ordinary in its
accommodations, had a good arrangement of apparatus, of which I
faithfully availed myself. The spring-board, horse,
vaulting-apparatus, parallel bars, suspended rings, horizontal and
inclined ladders, pulley-weights, pegs, climbing-rope, trapezoid,
etc., were all put in frequent requisition. My time for exercise
was generally in the evening, when I would find myself almost
alone,—while the clicking of balls from the billiard-rooms
and bowling-alleys down-stairs announced that a busy crowd—if
amusement may be called a business—were there assembled.

Naturally indolent, it was not without a severe struggle that I
overcame a besetting propensity to confine myself to sedentary
pursuits. The desire of retaliation soon became extinct. My pledge
to my friend and sympathizer, that in two years I would cry
quittance to my foe, would occasionally act as a spur in
the side of my intent; but my two best aids in supplying me with
the motive power to keep up my gymnastic practice were
habit and progress. What will not habit make easy
to us, whether it be for good or for evil? And what an incentive we
have to renewed effort in finding that we are making actual
progress,—that we can do with comparative facility to-day
what we could do only with difficulty yesterday!

Two years, while we are yet on the sunny side of twenty, are no
trifle; but for two years I persistently and methodically went
through the exercises of the gymnasium. At the end of that time I
had quite lost sight of my original object in cultivating my
athletic powers; for all annoyances towards me had long since been
dropped by my old enemy. But punctually on the day of expiration,
the friend who had listened to my pledge came to me and claimed its
fulfilment. From some evidences which he had recently had of my
strength he felt a soothing assurance that I should have no
difficulty in making good my promise.

I accordingly called on the lively young gentleman who two years
before had indulged in those little frolics at my expense. With
diplomatic ceremony and circumlocution I introduced the object of
my visit, and wound up with an ultimatum to this effect:
There must either be a frank apology for past indignities, or he
must accompany me, each with a friend, to some suitable spot, and
there decide which was “the better man.”

If he had been called on to expiate an offence committed before
he was breeched, the young gentleman could not have been more
astounded. Two years had made some change in our relative
positions. I was now about his equal in size, and felt a
comfortable sense of my superiority, so far as strength was
concerned. My shoulders had broadened, and my muscles been
developed, so as to present to the critical and interested observer
a somewhat threatening appearance. Mr. —— (who, by the
way, was a good fellow in the main) protested that he had never
intended to give me any offence,—that he, in fact, did not
remember the circumstances to which I referred,—and finished
by peremptorily declining my proposal. When I reflected on the
disparity between us in strength, which my two years’
practice had established, I felt that it would be cowardly for me
to urge the matter further, especially as it was so long a time
since he had given me cause of complaint. I have only to add, that
we parted without a collision, and that, in my heart, I could not
help thanking him for the service he had rendered in inciting me to
the regimen which had resulted so beneficially to my health.

The impetus given to my gymnastic education by the little
incident I have just related was continued without abatement
through my whole college life. Gradually I acquired the reputation
of being the strongest man in my class. I discovered that with
every day’s development of my strength there was an increase
of my ability to resist and overcome all fleshly ailments, pains,
and infirmities,—a discovery which subsequent experience has
so amply confirmed, that, if I were called on to condense the
proposition which sums it up into a formula, it would be in these
words: Strength is Health.

Until I had renovated my bodily system by a faithful gymnastic
training, I had been subject to nervousness, headache, indigestion,
rush of blood to the head, and a weak circulation. It was torture
to me to have to listen to the grating of a slate-pencil, the
filing of a saw, or the scratching of glass. As I grew in strength,
my nerves ceased to be impressible to such annoyances. Another good
effect was to take away all appetite for any stimulating food or
drink. Although I had never applied “rebellious
liquors” to my blood, I had been in the habit of taking a
bowl of strong coffee morning and night. Now a craving for milk
took the place of this want, and my coffee was gradually diminished
to less than a fourth of what had been a customary indulgence.

At last arrived the eagerly looked-for day of release from
collegiate restrictions and labors. I graduated, and the question,
so momentous in the history of all adolescents, “What shall I
be?” addressed itself seriously to my mind. My father was
desirous that I should choose medicine for a profession, and become
the fourth physician, in lineal sequence, of my family on the
paternal side.

Medicine. I cavilled at it awhile, that I might bring out to
view its grimmest and most discouraging aspect The cares, trials,
humiliations of a young physician, his months and years of
uncompensated drudgery, passed in awful review before me. I thought
of his toils among the poor and lowly, the vicious and
depraved,—of his broken sleep,—the interruptions of his
social ease,—and then of the many scenes so repugnant to
delicate nerves which he has to pass through,—scenes of pain
and insanity, of maimed and severed limbs, and all the
eccentricities and fearful forms of disease. These considerations
pressed with such weight on my mind that for a time my ancestral
craft was in danger of being ignominiously rejected by me. Indeed,
I began to think seriously of adopting a very different vocation.
And here I will make a confession, if the gentle reader will take
it confidentially.

It is a familiar fact, that every college-boy has to pass
through an attack of the rhyming frenzy as regularly as the child
has to submit to measles and the whooping-cough. A less frequent,
but not less trying complaint, is that which manifests itself in a
passion for the stage and in an espousal of the delusion that one
was born for a great actor. At any rate, this last was the type
which my juvenile malaise-du-coeur finally assumed.

I have heard of a young gentleman who, whenever he was hard up
for money, went to his nearest relatives and threatened them with
the publication of a volume of his original poems. This threat
never failed to open the paternal purse. I do not know what effect
the intimation of my histrionic aspirations would have had; but one
fine day I found myself on my way to Rochester, in the State of New
York.

My rôle of dramatic characters was a very modest
one for a beginner. It embraced only Richelieu, Bertram, Brutus,
Lear, Richard, Shylock, Sir Giles Overreach, Hamlet, Othello, and
Macbeth. My principal literary recreation for several years had
been in studying these parts; and as I knew them by heart, I did
not doubt that a few rehearsals would put me in possession of the
requisite stage-business. And yet my familiarity with the theatre
was very limited. I had never been behind the scenes. Once, with a
classmate, I had penetrated in the daytime to the stage of the old
Federal-Street Theatre, and looked with awe on the boards formerly
trodden by the elder Kean; but a growl from that august
functionary, the prompter, sent us back in quick retreat, and I had
never ventured again into those sacred precincts.

Arrived at Rochester,—which place I had selected for my
début because of its remoteness from home,—I
looked in, the evening of my arrival, to see the performances at
the theatre. It was a hall of humble dimensions, seating an
audience of five or six hundred. The piece was a travesty of
“Hamlet,” neither edifying nor amusing. A little of the
couleur-de-rose which had flushed my prospect faded that
night; but the few friends at home to whom I had confided my plans
had so pertinaciously assured me that I—the most diffident
man in the world—could never appear before an audience
without letting them see I was shaky in the knees, that I resolved
to do what I could to show my depreciators they were false
prophets.

And so I called on the manager,—with a beating heart, as
you may suppose. He was a small, quiet, gentlemanly person, whom I
regret I cannot, consistently with historical truth, show up as a
Crummles. But not even Dickens could have found any salient trait
for ridicule in the man. Frankly and kindly he went into the
statistics of the theatrical business, and showed me, that, unless
I was rich, and could afford to play for my own amusement, the
stage held out few inducements; it was barren of promise to a young
man anxious to make himself independent of the world.

I did not reply, “Perish the lucre!” but said that I
would be content, in the early part of my career, to labor for
reputation. He soon satisfied me that he could not give up his
stage to an experimentalist, and I did not urge my suit; but bade
Mr. S. good morning, and, a day or two afterwards, started for
Niagara. Here, wet by the mist and listening to the roar of the
great cataract, I speedily forgot my chagrin, and took a not
unfriendly leave of the illusions which had lured me on to try my
fortune on the stage. Even now they return occasionally with all
their fascination.

While at Rochester, as I was passing through the principal
street, I met a crowd assembled about a lifting-machine. On making
trial of it, I found I could lift four hundred and twenty pounds. I
had then been for four years a gymnast, and I supposed my practice
would have qualified me to make the crowd stare at my achievement.
But the result was far from triumphant. I found what many other
gymnasts will find, that main strength, by which I mean
the strength of the truckman and the porter, cannot be acquired in
the ordinary exercises of the gymnasium.

Returning home, I began the study of anatomy and physiology, and
in the autumn of 1854 entered the Harvard Medical School. The
question of the extent to which human strength can be developed had
long been invested with a scientific interest to my mind. One of
the greatest lifting feats on authentic record is that of Thomas
Topham, an Englishman, who in Bath Street, Cold Bath Fields,
London, on the 28th of May, 1741, lifted three hogsheads of water,
said to weigh, with the connections, eighteen hundred and
thirty-six pounds. In the performance of this feat, Topham
stood on a raised platform, his hands grasping a fixture on either
side, and a broad strap over his shoulders communicating with the
weight. An immense concourse of persons was assembled on the
occasion,—the performance having been announced as “in
honor of Admiral Vernon,” or rather, “in commemoration
of his taking Porto Bello with six ships only.” Being a
descendant myself from the Vernon family of Haddon Hall,
Derbyshire, England, I have reserved it for future genealogical
inquiry to learn whether the Admiral was connected with that branch
of the Vernons. If so, a somewhat remarkable coincidence is
involved.

I now informed my father that I intended to go through a series
of experiments in lifting. He was afraid I should injure myself,
and expressly forbade any such practice on his premises. To gratify
him, I gave up testing the question for a whole year.

But the desire re-awoke, and I had frequent arguments with my
father in the endeavor to overcome his objections.

“Look at that man,” he said to me one
day,—pointing to a large, stout individual in front of
us,—“you might practise lifting all your life, and
never be able to lift as much as that big fellow.”

“Let me construct a lifting-apparatus in the back-yard,
and I will soon prove to you that you are mistaken,” I
replied.

Finding that I was bent on the experiment, he at length gave a
reluctant consent.

It was now the August of 1855, and I was in my twenty-second
year. My first lifting-apparatus was constructed in the following
manner. I first sank into the ground a hogshead, and into the
hogshead a flour-barrel. Then I lowered to the bottom of the barrel
a rope having at the end a round stick transversely balanced, about
four inches in diameter and fifteen inches long. A quantity of
gravel, nearly sufficient to bury the stick, was then thrown into
the barrel; some oblong stones were placed across the stick and
across and between one another, and the interstices filled with
smaller stones and gravel. When I had by this method about
two-thirds filled the barrel, taking care to keep the axis of the
rope in correspondence with the long axis of the barrel, I judged I
had a sufficient weight for a first trial. I now formed a loop in
the end of the rope over the top of the barrel, and put through it
a piece of a hoe-handle, about two feet long; and standing astride
of the hogshead, and holding the handle with one hand before me and
the other behind,—straightening my body, previously a little
flexed,—with mouth closed, head up, chest out, and shoulders
down,—I succeeded in lifting the barrel, containing a weight
of between four and five hundred pounds, some five or six inches
from the bottom of the hogshead.

It was no great feat, after all, considering that I had been for
five years a gymnast. I found that I was inharmoniously developed
in many points of my frame,—was perilously weak in the sides,
between the shoulders, and at the back of the head. However, the
day after this trial, I succeeded in lifting the same weight with
somewhat less difficulty. This induced me to add on a few pounds;
and in three or four weeks I could lift between six and seven
hundred. I now had the satisfaction of seeing the stout gentleman,
whom a few months before my father had pointed out as possessed of
a strength I could never attain to, introduced to an inspection of
my apparatus. Through the blinds of a back-parlor window I watched
his movements, as, encouraged by pater-familias, he drew
off his coat, moistened his hands, and undertook to “snake
up” the big weight. An ignominious failure to start the
barrel was the result. The stout gentleman tugged till he was so
red in the face that apoplexy seemed imminent, and then he
dejectedly gave it up. The reputation he had long enjoyed of being
one of the “strongest men about” must henceforth be a
thing of the past till it fades into a myth.

In the December of 1855 I was admitted to the arcana of the
dissecting-room, and forthwith commenced some experiments with the
view of testing the sustaining power of human bones. Some one had
told me, that, in lifting a heavy weight, there was danger of
fracturing the neck of the thigh-bone; but my experiments satisfied
me, that, if properly positioned, it would safely bear a strain of
two or three thousand pounds. And so I concluded that I might
securely continue my practice of lifting till I reached the
last-named limit.

In order to get all possible hints from the inspiration and
experience of the past, I studied some of the ancient statues. The
specimens of Grecian statuary at the Boston Athenæum were
objects of my frequent contemplation,—especially the
Farnesian Hercules. From this I derived a proper conception of the
bodily outline compatible with the exercise of the greatest amount
of strength. I was particularly struck by the absence of all
exaggeration in the muscular developments as represented. I saw by
this statue that a Hercules must be free from superfluous flesh,
neatly made, and finely organized,—that form and quality were
of more account than quantity in his formation. Some years earlier
I might have been more attracted by the Apollo Belvedere; but it
was a Hercules I dreamed of becoming, and the Apollo was but the
incipient and potential Hercules. Two other statues that shared my
admiration and study were the Quoit-Thrower and the Dying
Gladiator. From the careful inspection of all these relics of
ancient Art I obtained some valuable hints as to my own physical
deficiencies. I learned that the upper region of my chest needed
developing, and that in other points I had not yet reached the
artist’s ideal of a strong man.

Good casts of these and other masterpieces in statuary may be
had at a trifling cost. Why are they not generally introduced into
the gymnasia attached to our colleges and schools? The habitual
contemplation of such works could not fail to have a good effect
upon the physical bearing and development of the young. We are the
creatures of imitation. I remember, at the school I attended in my
seventh year, the strongest boy among my mates was quite
round-shouldered. Fancying that he derived his strength from his
stoop, I began to imitate him; and it was not till I learned that
he was strong in spite of his round shoulders, and not because of
them, that I gave up aping his peculiarity.

On the 29th of January, 1856, I lifted seven hundred pounds in
Bailey’s Gymnasium, Franklin Street, Boston. The exhibition
created great surprise among the lookers-on; and at that time it
was, perhaps, an extraordinary feat; but since the extension and
growth of the lifting mania, it would not be regarded by the
knowing ones as anything to marvel at. The fourth of April
following, my lifting capacity had reached eight hundred and forty
pounds.

On Fast-Day of that year, two Irishmen knocked at my door and
asked to see the strong man. I presented myself, and they told me
there was great curiosity among the “ould counthrymen”
in the vicinity to ascertain if one Pat Farren, the strongest
Irishman in Roxbury, could lift my weight. “Would it be
convanient for me to let him thry?”
“Certainly,—and I think he’ll lift it,” I
modestly added.

Soon afterwards a delegation of Irishmen, rather startling from
its numbers, entered the yard. Among them was Mr. Farren. They
surrounded my lifting-apparatus, while I, unseen, surveyed them
from a back window. I saw Mr. Farren take the handle, straddle the
hogshead, throw himself into a lifting posture, and, straining
every muscle to its utmost tension, give a tremendous pull. But the
weight made no sign; and his friends, thinking he was merely
feeling it, said, “Wait a bit,—Pat’ll have it up
the next pull.” Mr. Farren rested a moment,—then threw
off his coat, rubbed his hands, and, seizing the handle a second
time, tugged away at it till his muscles swelled and his frame
quivered. But he failed in starting the barrel, and a burst of
laughter from his friends and backers announced his defeat.

It is now but justice to Mr. Farren to say that it could hardly
be expected of him to lift such a weight at either the first trial
or the second. A want of confidence, or the maladjustment of the
rope, might have interfered with the full exercise of his strength.
I need not say that his discomfiture was witnessed by me from my
hiding-place with the liveliest satisfaction; for I had begun to
pride myself on being able to outlift any man in the country.

In May, 1856, I received the appointment of medical assistant to
Dr. Walker, at the Lunatic Hospital, South Boston, and gave up for
a couple of months my practice of lifting. The consequence was a
rapid diminution of strength, which suggested to me a return to the
lifting exercise. Near the hospital was a large unoccupied
building, formerly the House of Industry. In the cellar of this
building I put a barrel, and loaded it with rocks and gravel as I
had done in Roxbury. Immediately overhead, on the first floor, I
cut a hole, about six inches square, and passed up a rope attached
to the barrel. This rope I looped at the end, for the reception of
a handle. On the floor I nailed two cleats between three and four
feet apart, as guards to keep my feet from slipping. Beginning with
about six hundred pounds, I added a few pounds daily, till I was
able, in November, 1856, to lift with my hands alone nine hundred
pounds.

Returning home the ensuing winter, I attended a second course of
medical lectures, and, in the routine of labors incident to a
medical student’s life, omitted to develop further my powers
as a lifter. In the summer of 1857 I became a practitioner of
medicine. In the autumn of that year, a gentleman, who had been
looking at my lifting-apparatus, remarked to me, “If you are
as strong as they tell me, what is to prevent your seizing hold of
me, (I weigh only a hundred and eighty pounds) holding me at
arm’s-length over your head, and pitching me over that
fence?” To this I replied, that, if he would give me six
weeks for practice, I would satisfy him the thing could be done. He
agreed to be on hand at the end of the time named.

In order to be sure of the muscles that would be brought into
play by the feat, I procured an oblong box with a handle on either
side running the whole length. Into the box I threw a number of
brick-bats,—then raised the box at arm’s-length above
my head, and threw it over my vaulting-pole, which was at an
elevation of six and a half feet from the ground. Subsequently I
added more brick-bats, till gradually their weight amounted to
precisely one hundred and eighty pounds. Having practised till I
could easily handle and throw the box thus charged, I informed my
challenger that I was ready for him. He came, when, seizing him by
the middle, I lifted him struggling above my head, and threw him
over the fence before he was hardly aware of my intent. As he was
somewhat corpulent and puffy, and the act involved an abdominal
pressure which was by no means agreeable, he expressed himself
perfectly satisfied with the experiment, but objected very
decidedly to its repetition.

In June, 1858, I commenced practising with two fifty-pound
dumb-bells, and subsequently added one of a hundred pounds, which I
was prompted to get from hearing that one of that weight was used
by Mr. James Montgomery, at that time a celebrated gymnast of New
York City, and afterwards a successful teacher at the Albany
Gymnasium. Not having given much attention to the development of
the extensor muscles of the arms for several months previous, it
was a number of weeks before I could put this dumb-bell up at
arm’s-length above my head with one hand. As soon as I
succeeded in doing this with comparative ease, I procured another
hundred-pound dumb-bell, and in a few months succeeded in
exercising with both of the instruments at the same time, raising
each alternately above my head. I then commenced practice with a
dumb-bell weighing one hundred and forty-one pounds. It consisted
of two shells connected by a handle, which, being removable,
allowed me to introduce shot, from time to time, into the cavities
of the shells. After a few months of practice, I could, with a
jerk, raise the instrument from my shoulder to arm’s-length
above my head. My first public exhibition of this feat took place
in Philadelphia, in April, 1860.

The spring of 1859 was now drawing nigh, and I began to think of
giving a public lecture on Physical Culture, illustrating it with
some exhibitions of the strength to which I had attained. My father
approved the venture, but, bethinking himself of my extreme
diffidence, significantly asked, when I would be ready to
permit a public announcement of my intention. “Oh, in a few
days,” I replied, as if it were as small a matter for me to
lecture in public as to lift a thousand pounds in a gymnasium.
Weeks flew by, and still to the galling inquiry,
“When?” I could only answer, “Soon, but
not just yet.” February and March had come and gone, and
still I was not ready. Finally, to the oft-renewed interrogatory, I
made this reply: “As soon as I can shoulder a barrel of
flour, a feat which I am determined to accomplish before an
audience, you may announce my lecture.”

I had then been practising some two months with a loaded barrel,
so contrived that it should weigh a little more each succeeding
day; and it had now reached a hundred and ninety pounds. About this
time it occurred to me, that, among my many experiments, I had
never fairly tried that of a vegetable diet. I read anew the works
of Graham and Alcott; and conceiving that my strength had reached a
stagnation-point, I gave up meat, and restricted my animal diet to
milk.

A barrel of flour weighs on an average two hundred and sixteen
pounds. I therefore could not succeed in shouldering one until
twenty-six pounds had been added to my loaded barrel. Day after day
I shouldered my one hundred and ninety pounds, but could not get an
ounce beyond that limit. My grand theory of the possible
development of a man’s strength began to look somewhat
insecure.

The shouldering of a barrel of flour is a feat, by the way,
which many an old inhabitant will tell you that he, or some friend
of his, could accomplish in his eighteenth year. Why it should
always be among the res gestæ temporis acti cannot
be readily explained. It is a common belief that any stout truckman
can do the thing; but I have been assured by one of the leading
truckmen of Boston, that there are not, probably, three individuals
in the city who are equal to the accomplishment.

The mode of life that I had hitherto found essential to the
keeping up of my strength was quite simple, and rather negative
than positive. From tobacco and all ardent spirits, including wine,
I had to abstain as a matter of course. Beer and all fermented
liquors had also been ruled out. Impure air must be avoided like
poison. Summer and winter I slept with my windows open. Badly
ventilated apartments were scrupulously shunned. Cold bathing of
the entire person was rarely practised oftener than once a week in
cold weather or twice a week in warm weather. A more frequent
ablution seemed to over-stimulate the excretory functions of the
skin, so that excessive bathing defeated its very object. The
“tranquil mind” must be preserved with little or no
interruption. Great physical strength cannot coexist with an
unhappy, discontented temper. You must be habitually cheerful, if
you would be strong. With regard to diet,—that was the very
experiment I was trying,—the experiment, namely, of going
without solid animal food. With me it did not succeed. So far from
gaining in strength, hardly did I hold my own. Suddenly I resolved
to give up my vegetable diet, and return to beef-steaks,
mutton-chops, and loins of veal. A daily appreciable increase of
strength was soon the consequence. Within ten days I succeeded in
shouldering the loaded barrel weighing two hundred and sixteen
pounds; and a day or two after I shouldered, in the presence of our
grocer himself, a barrel of flour.

I had now no further excuse for deferring my promised lecture.
The month of May had arrived. My father delicately broached the
subject of the announcement. Being a little fractious, perhaps from
some ebb in my strength, I hastily replied,—

“Announce it for the 30th of May.”

“What hall shall I engage?”

“Any hall in Boston. Why not the Music Hall?” I
added, affecting a valor I was far from feeling; but, like Macbeth,
I now realized that “returning were as tedious as go
o’er.”

Mercantile Hall, in Summer Street, was engaged for me,—it
being central, modest in point of size, commodious, and favorably
known. At this time I was in excellent health and weighed one
hundred and forty-three pounds. But from the moment of the public
announcement of my lecture, my appetite for food, for meat
particularly, began to fail me. “How peevish and irritable he
is growing!” I heard one member of the family remark to
another. Soon the grocer’s scales indicated that my weight
was diminishing. It fell to one hundred and forty-one,—then
to one hundred and forty,—then to one hundred and
thirty-eight,—and finally, when the 30th of May arrived, I
found I weighed only one hundred and thirty-four pounds!

The crisis was now at hand. Do not laugh at me, ye self-assured
ones, with your comfortable sense of your own powers,—ye who
care as little for an audience as for a field of cabbages,—do
not jeer at one who has felt the pangs of shyness and quailed under
the imaginary terrors of a first public appearance. For you it may
be a small matter to face an audience,—that nearest
approximation to the many-headed monster which we can palpably
encounter; but for one whose diffidence had become the standard of
that quality to his acquaintances the venture was perilous and
desperate, as the sequel showed.

Never had time rolled by with such fearful velocity as on that
eventful day. Breakfast was hardly over before preparations were
being made for dinner. Small appetite had I for either. Before I
had finished pacing the parlor there was a summons to tea. It was
like the summons to the criminal: “Rise up, Master
Barnardine, and be hanged.” With a most shallow affectation
of nonchalance I sat down at the table. A child might have
detected my agitation; and yet, with horrible insincerity, I
alluded to the news of the day, and asked the family why they were
all so silent. They saw from my look that they might as well have
joked with a man on his way to execution.

Having dressed and adorned myself for the sacrifice, I returned
to the parlor, when the rumbling of coach-wheels, the sudden
letting down of steps, and then a frightfully discordant ring of
the doorbell, sent the blood from my cheeks and made my heart
palpitate like a trip-hammer. “Is th-th-that the
off-officer,—I mean the coachman?” I stammered. Yes,
there was no doubt about it.

Straightening my person, I affected a dignified calmness, and
assured my dear, anxious mother that I was not in the least
nervous,—oh, not in the least!

It was a gloomy night, and the streets wore a dismal aspect. The
hall was distant about three miles; but in some mysterious manner,
or by some route which I have never been able to discover, the
coachman seemed to abridge the distance to less than half a mile.
We are in Summer Street,—before the door. Some juvenile
amateurs, attracted by stories of the strong man, surround the
carriage to get a sight of him.

“Ha! what are these? Sure, hangmen, That come to bind my
hands, and then to drag me Before the judgment-seat: now they are
new shapes, And do appear like Furies!”

The words of Sir Giles Overreach, one of the parts I had studied
during my histrionic accès, were not at all
inappropriate to the state of mind in which, with knee-joints
slipping from under me, I now made my way up-stairs. Having reached
the upper entry, I paused, and glanced at the audience through the
windows, before entering the little retiring-room behind the stage.
With an inward groan at my presumption, I passed on. To think,
that, but for my own madness, I might have been at that moment
comfortably at home, reading the evening paper! Nay, were it not
better to be tossing on stormy seas, driving on a lee-shore,
toiling as a slave under a tropic sun, than here, with a gaping
audience waiting to devour me with their eyes and ears?

The first thing I did, on reaching the retiring-room, was to
give way to a fearful fascination and take another peep at the
audience from behind a curtain at the side-entrance. I then looked
at my watch. Twenty minutes to eight! People were pouring in,
notwithstanding the inclement weather. The hall was nearly crowded
already. One familiar face after another was recognized. Surely
everybody I know is present.

Another look at my watch. Quarter to eight! Suddenly the frantic
thought occurred to me, What if I have lost my manuscript? Where
did I put it? ‘Tis in none of my pockets! Good gracious! Has
any one seen my manuscript? Come, Jerome, no fooling at a time like
this! Where have you hidden it? What! You know nothing about it?
Hunt for it, then! Wouldn’t it be a charming scrape,
if I couldn’t find my lecture? Isn’t this it, in the
drawer? Oh, yes! I must have put it there unconsciously.

Being in a high state of perspiration, and wiping my forehead
incessantly, I disarrange my hair. Where’s that brush? No one
can tell. Agony! Where’s the brush? Here on the floor. Oh,
yes! There! What a blaze my cheeks are in! The audience will think
they are flushed with Bourbon. No matter. That manuscript has
disappeared again. Confusion! Where is it? Here in your
overcoat-pocket. All right.

Five minutes to eight. Grasping the scroll, I rush to the
side-entrance. The audience begin to manifest their impatience by
applause. Suddenly I hear the bell of the Old South Church strike
eight. The last vibration passes like an ice-bolt through my heart.
Wrought up to desperation, I thrust aside the curtain. This gives a
portion of the audience a sight of me, and I hear some one exclaim,
“There he is!” Horrible exposure! I dodge back out of
view, as if to escape the discharge of a battery. A round of
impatient applause rouses me. I count three, and precipitate myself
forward to the centre of the stage.

The hall is filled,—all the seats and most of the
standing-places occupied. But I can no longer recognize any one.
Friend and foe are confounded in an undistinguishable mass; or,
rather, they are but parts and members of one hideous monster,
moving itself by one volition, winking its thousand eyes all at
once, and ready to swallow me with a single deglutition. However,
the plunge is made. The worst is over. I rallied from the shock,
and in a clear, but unnecessarily loud and ponderous voice, pitched
many degrees too high, I commenced my lecture.

For some ten minutes, if I may believe the tender reports in the
newspapers the next day, I got on very respectably. I had won the
attention of the audience. But, at an unlucky moment, a fresh
arrival of persons at the door made the monster turn his thousand
eyes in that direction. I mistook it for an indication that he was
getting weary of my talk. My attention was distracted. Then came a
suspension of all thought, an appalling paralysis of memory. Having
learnt the first part of my discourse by heart, I had been reciting
it without turning over the leaves of the manuscript; and now I was
unable to recollect at what point I had left off, or whether I had
given five pages or ten.

Frightful dilemma! Stupefied with horror, I gazed intently on
the page before me till the lines became all blurred, and a blue
mist wavered before my eyes. Then came a pause of intensest
silence. The monster lying in wait for me evidently began to
anticipate that his victim’s time was come, and so, like a
crafty monster, he remained still and patient. Who could endure a
nightmare like this? I felt myself reeling to and fro. Then a
pleasant thrill, like that, perhaps, which drowning men feel, ran
through my frame. All became dark,—and the strong man
dropped, like a felled ox, senseless on the stage.

When consciousness returned I was lying flat on my back, and
several persons were bending over me.

“Keep down,—don’t rise,” some one
said.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“Nothing,—only you were a little faint.”

“Faint? A man who can lift a thousand pounds
faint—at the sight of an audience? Absurd! Let me
rise.”