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Author: Various
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*** Start of this project gutenberg EBOOK Atlantic monthly, no. 56 ***
Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen and PG
Distributed
Proofreaders. Produced from page scans provided
by Cornell University.
A magazine of literature, art, and politics.
* * * * *
Vol. IX.—June, 1862.—No. LVI.
* * * * *
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care of that.
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going a la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer” a Saunterer,—a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.
It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.
To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order,—not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,—not the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.
We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art; though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence, which are the capital in this profession. It comes only by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers. Ambulator nascitur, non fit. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they were foresters and outlaws.
“When he came to grene wode,
In a mery mornynge,
There he herde the notes small
Of byrdes mery syngynge.
“It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,
That I was last here;
Me lyste a lytell for to shote
At the donne dere.”
I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them,—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.
I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh hour of four o’clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully at this hour in the afternoon over against one’s self whom you have known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an airing,—and so the evil cure itself.
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not stand it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the slumberers.
No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow in-door occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.
But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours,—as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in search of the springs of life. Think of a man’s swinging dumb-bells for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures unsought by him!
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.”
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character,—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough,—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. “They planted groves and walks of Platanes,” where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head, and I am not where my body is,—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good works,—for this may sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours’ walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle of ten miles’ radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of them all,—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road,—follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a beanfield into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs,—a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa, which, together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word vilis and our vile; also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town.
THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.
Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan,—
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone,
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide-boards of stone,
But travellers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you might be.
What king
Did the thing,
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They’re a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveller might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land,
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And road again in the spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk?
I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to settle,—varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for the thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly towards the setting sun, and that there are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,—which, in some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead,—that something like the furor which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails,—affects both nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that disturbance into account.
“Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes.”
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.
“And now the sun had stretched out
all the
hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his
mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures
new.”
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that “the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain this size.” Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes farther,—farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says,—“As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World .... The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant.” When he has exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, “then recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages.” So far Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger Michaux, in his “Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,” says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, “’From what part of the world have you come?’ As if these vast and fertile regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the inhabitants of the globe.”
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, Ex Oriente lux; ex Occidente FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada, tells us that “in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains broader.” This statement will do at least to set against Buffon’s account of this part of the world and its productions.
Linnaeus said long ago, “Nescio quae facies laeta, glabra plantis Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect of American plants”; and I think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, Africanae bestice, African beasts, as the Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the centre of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild beasts.
These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe that climate does thus react on man,—as there is something in the mountain-air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky,—our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,—our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,—and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of laeta and glabra, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?
To Americans I hardly need to say,—
“Westward the star of empire takes its way.”
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.
Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even the slang of to-day.
Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.
Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri, and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona’s Cliff,—still thinking more of the future than of the past or present,—I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of the Northern forests who were.
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course. Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can endure,—as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.
There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to which I would migrate,—wild lands where no settler has squatted; to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.
The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us of those parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper’s coat emits the odor of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the merchant’s or the scholar’s garments. When I go into their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants’ exchanges and libraries rather.
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is a fitter color than white for a man,—a denizen of the woods. “The pale white man!” I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the naturalist says, “A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like a plant bleached by the gardener’s art, compared with a fine, dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields.”
Ben Jonson exclaims,—
“How near to good is what is fair!”
So I would say,—
How near to good is what is wild!
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When, formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,—a natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda (Cassandra calyculata) which cover these tender places on the earth’s surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs which grow there,—the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill, azalea, and rhodora,—all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce and trim box, even gravelled walks,—to have this fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my front-yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then, (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back way.
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it,—“Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal existence.” They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary say,—“On reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So is it with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees, there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men’s thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness,—and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.
The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.
It is said to be the task of the American “to work the virgin soil,” and that “agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere else.” I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over the entrance to the infernal regions,—“Leave all hope, ye that enter,”—that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did survey from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.
The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian’s cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer is armed with plough and spade.
In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for lameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in “Hamlet” and the “Iliad,” in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which ’mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning’s flash, which perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,—and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light of common day.
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets,—Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included,—breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood,—her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.
The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,—transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a library,—ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no culture, in short, can give. Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,—others merely sensible, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence “indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence.” The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those that go with her into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice,—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance,—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights,—any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity on the herd in my eyes,—already dignified. The seeds of instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport, like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas! a sudden loud Whoa! would have damped their ardor at once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, “Whoa!” to mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery, is meeting the horse and ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a side of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a side of beef?
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society. Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization; and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says,—“The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned.” But it is not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be put.
When looking over a list of men’s names in a foreign language, as of military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole,—Iery wiery ichery van, tittle-tol-tan. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in his own dialect. The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless as Bose and Tray, the names of dogs.
Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own. At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called “Buster” by his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from the meadows, and deepens the soil,—not that which trusts to heating manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster, both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very late, he honestly slumbered a fool’s allowance.
There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman, discovered “actinism,” that power in the sun’s rays which produces a chemical effect,—that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues of metal, “are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies of the universe.” But he observed that “those bodies which underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them.” Hence it has been inferred that “the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom.” Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky knowledge,—Gramatica parda, tawny grammar,—a kind of mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers?—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse, and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,——Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.
A man’s ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,—while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,—he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or be who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,—a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot know in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun: [Greek: Os thi noon, on kehinon nohaeseis,]—“You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing,” say the Chaldean Oracles.
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,—and with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the law-maker. “That is active duty,” says the Vishnu Purana, “which is not for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an artist.”
It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories; how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly, though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,—though it be with struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would be well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to have been exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate. Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.
When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars return.
“Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,
And bendest the thistles round Loira of
storms,
Traveller of the windy glens,
Why hast thou left my ear so soon?”
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world [Greek: Kosmos], Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.
For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o’-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their owners’ deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up appear dimly still as through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.
I took a walk on Spaulding’s Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me,—to whom the sun was servant,—who had not gone into society in the village,—who had not been called on. I saw their park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding’s cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not. They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer’s cart-path, which leads directly through their hall, does not in the least put them out,—as the muddy bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor,—notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through the
But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,—sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!
We hug the earth,—how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,— so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me,—it was near the end of June,—on the ends of the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the streets,—for it was court-week,—and to farmers and lumber-dealers and wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has
Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,—the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?
The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,”—and with a sudden gush return to my senses.
We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.
The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and, perchance, as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.
So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.
It would be a task worthy of a volume, and requiring that space in order to be creditably performed, to show how war affects literature, at what points they meet, where they are at variance, if any wars stimulate, and what kinds depress the intellectual life of nations. The subject is very wide. It would embrace a discussion of the effects of war when it occurs during a period of great literary and artistic splendor, as in Athens and in the Italian Republics; whether intellectual decline is postponed or accelerated by the interests and passions of the strife; whether the preliminary concentration of the popular heart may claim the merit of adding either power or beauty to the intellectual forms which bloom together with the war.
These things are not entirely clear, and the experience of different countries is conflicting. The Thirty Years’ War, though it commenced with the inspiration of great political and religious ideas, did not lift the German mind to any new demonstrations of truth or impassioned utterances of the imagination. The nation sank away from it into a barren and trivial life, although the war itself occasioned a multitude of poems, songs, hymns, and political disquisitions. The hymns of this period, which are filled with a sense of dependence, of the greatness and awfulness of an invisible eternity, and breathe a desire for the peaceful traits of a remote religious life, are at once a confession of the weariness of the best minds at the turmoil and uncertainty of the contest and a permanent contribution of the finest kind to that form of sacred literature. But princes and electors were fighting as much for the designation and establishment of their petty nationalities, which first checkered the map of Europe after the imperial Catholic power was rolled southwardly, as they were
[Footnote A: Newspapers proper appeared as early as 1615 in Germany. But these rhymed gazettes were very numerous. They were more or less bulky pamphlets, with pithy sarcastic programmes for titles, and sometimes a wood or copper cut prefixed. A few of them were of Catholic origin, and one, entitled Post-Bole, (The Express,) is quite as good as anything issued by the opposite party.]
On the other hand, Spain, while fighting for religion and a secure nationality, had her Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon, all of whom saw service in the field, and other distinguished names, originators of literary forms and successful cultivators of established ones. They created brilliant epochs for a bigoted and cruel country. All that was noble or graceful in the Spanish spirit survives in works which that country once stimulated through all the various fortunes of popular wars. But they were not wars for the sake of the people; the country has therefore sunk away from the literature which foretold so well how great she might have become, if she had been fortunate enough to represent, or to sympathize with, a period of moral and spiritual ideas. Her literary forms do not describe growth, but arrested development.
A different period culminated in the genius of Milton, whose roots were in that golden age when England was flowering into popular freedom. He finally spoke for the true England, and expressed the vigorous thoughts which a bloody epoch cannot quench. Some of his noblest things were inspired by the exigencies of the Commonwealth, which he saw “as an eagle nursing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam.”
The Dutch people, in their great struggle against Philip II., seemed to find a stimulus in the very exhaustions of war. The protesting ideas for which they fought drew fresh tenacity from the soil, wet with blood and tears, into which generous passion and resolution sank with every death. Here it is plain that a milder conflict, carried on by intrigue and diplomatic forms alone, for peaceable separation from the Catholic interest, would not have so quickened the intelligence which afterwards nourished so many English exiles and helped to freight the Mayflower. And we see the German mind first beginning to blossom with a language and a manifold literature during and after the Seven Years’ War, which developed a powerful Protestant State and a native German feeling. Frederic’s Gallic predilections did not infect the country which his arms had rendered forever anti-Gallic and anti-Austrian. The popular enthusiasm for himself, which his splendid victories mainly created, was the first instinctive form of the coming German sense of independence. The nation’s fairest period coincided with the French Revolution and the aggressions of the Empire. “Hermann and Dorothea” felt the people’s pulse, which soon beat so high at Jena and Leipsic with rage and hope. The hope departed with the Peace of 1815, and pamphleteering, pragmatic writing, theological investigation, historical research, followed the period of creative genius, whose flowers did not wither while the fields ran red.
A war must be the last resort of truly noble and popular ideas, if it would do more than stimulate the intelligence of a few men, who write best with draughts of glory and success. It must be the long-repressed understanding of a nation suffused with strong primitive emotions, that flies to arms to secure the precious privilege of owning and entertaining its knowledge and its national advantages. And in proportion as any war has ever been leavened with the fine excitement of religion or humanity, however imperfectly, and though tyrannized over by political selfishness, we can see that the honest feeling has done something to obliterate the traces of violence, to offer the comfort of worth in the cause to wounded lips.
When the people themselves take to fighting, not for dynastic objects, to secure the succession of an Infant to the throne, to fix a Pope in his chair, or to horse a runaway monarch around their necks, not to extort some commercial advantage, or to resist a tampering with the traditional balance of power, but to drive back the billows of Huns or Turks from fields where cities and a middle class must rise, to oppose citizen-right to feudal-right, and inoculate with the lance-head Society with the popular element, to assert the industrial against the baronial interest, or to expel the invader who forages among their rights to sweep them clean and to plant a system which the ground cannot receive, then we find that the intense conviction, which has
But the original intellectual life begins while the pen is becoming tempered in the fires of a great national controversy, before it is hard enough to draw blood. Magnetic streams attract each slender point to a centre of prophesying thought long before the blood-red aurora stains suddenly the midnight sky and betrays the influence which has been none the less mighty because it has been colorless. Sometimes a people says all that it has in its mind to say, during that comfortless period while the storm is in the air and has not yet precipitated its cutting crystals. The most sensitive minds are goaded to express emphatically their moral feeling and expectation in such a rude climate, which stimulates rather than depresses, but which is apt to fall away into languor and content. This only shows that the people have no commanding place in history, but are only bent upon relieving themselves from sundry annoyances, or are talking about great principles which they are not in a position, from ethnical or political disability, to develop. Such is all the Panslavic literature which is not Russian.[B] But sometimes a people whose intellect passes through a noble pre-revolutionary period, illustrating it by impetuous eloquence, indignant lyrics, and the stern lines which a protesting conscience makes upon the faces of the men who are lifted above the crowd, finds that its ideas reach beyond the crisis in its life into a century of power and beauty, during which its emancipated tendency springs forward, with graceful gestures, to seize every spiritual advantage. Its movements were grand and impressive while it struggled for the opportunity to make known the divine intent that inspired it; but when the fetters burst, and every limb enjoys the victory and the release, the movements become unbounded, yet rhythmical, like Nature’s, and smite, or flow, or penetrate, like hers. To such a people war comes as the disturbance of the earth’s crust which helps it to a habitable surface and lifts fair slopes to ripen wine and grain.
[Footnote B: Some cultivated Bohemians who can recall the glories of Ziska and his chiefs, and who comprehend the value of the tendency which they strove to represent, think that there would have grown a Bohemian people, a great centre of Protestant and Slavonic influence, if it had not been for the Battle of Weissenberg in 1620, when the Catholic Imperialists defeated their King Frederic. A verse of a popular song, The Patriot’s Lament, runs thus, in Wratislaw’s translation:—
“Cursed mountain, mountain white!
Upon thee was crushed our might;
What in thee lies covered o’er
Ages cannot back restore.”
If there had been a Bohemian people, preserving a real vital tendency, the Battle of the White Mountain would have resulted differently, even had it been a defeat.
Other patriots, cultivated enough to be Panslavists, indulge a more cheerful vein. They see a good time coming, and raise the cry of Hej Slovane!
“Hey, Slavonians! our Slavonic language
still is living,
Long as our true loyal heart is for our
nation striving;
Lives, lives the Slavonic spirit, and
’t will live forever:
Hell and thunder! vain against us all
your rage shall shiver.”
This is nothing but a frontier feeling. The true Slavonic centre is at St. Petersburg; thence will roll a people and a language over all kindred ground.]
After all, then, we must carefully discover what a war was about, before we can trace it, either for good or for evil, into the subsequent life of a nation. There can be no such thing as exhaustion or deterioration, if the eternal laws have won the laurel of a fight; for they are fountains of youth, from which new blood comes rushing through the depleted veins. And it soon mantles on the surface, to mend the financial and industrial distress. Its blush of pride and victory announces no heady passion. It is the signal which Truth waves from the hearts of her children.
If we wish directly to consider the effect of war upon our own intellectual development, we must begin by asking what ideas of consequence are suggested by our copious use of the word Country. What a phrase is that—Our Country—which we have been accustomed for eighty years to use upon all festivals that commemorate civic rights, with flattering and pompous hopes! We never understood what it meant, till this moment which threatens to deprive us of the ideas and privileges which it really represents. We never appreciated till now its depth and preciousness. Orators have built up, sentence by sentence, a magnificent estimate of the elements which make our material success, and they thought it was a patriotic chord which they touched with the climax of their fine periods. It was such patriotism as thrives in the midst of content and satisfactory circumstances, which loves to have an inventory made of all the fixtures and conveniences and the crude splendor of a country’s housekeeping,—things which are not indeed to be despised, for they show what a people can do when cast upon their own resources, at a distance from Governmental interference, free to select their own way of living, to be fervent in business, in charities, in the cause of education, in the explorations which lay open new regions to the emigration of a world, in the inventiveness which gives labor new pursuits and increases the chances of poor men, in the enterprise which has made foundries, mines,
Is this really the character of our war, or is it only an ideal picture of what the war might be? That depends solely upon ourselves.
Our soldiers kindle nightly their bivouac fires from East to West, and set their watch. They are the advance posts of the great idea, which is destined to make a country as it advances southwardly, and to settle it with republicans. If we put it in a single sentence, “Freedom of industry for hand and brain to all men,” we must think awhile upon it before we can see what truths and temporal advantages it involves. We see them best, in this night of our distress and trial, by the soldiers’ watch-fires. They encroach upon the gloom, and open it for us with hopes. They shine like the stare of a deeper sky than day affords, and we can see a land stretching to the Gulf, and lying expectant between either sea, whose surface is given to a Republic to people and civilize for the sake of Man. Whoever is born here, or whoever comes here, brought by poverty or violence, an exile from misery or from power, and whatever be his ethnological distinction, is a republican of this country because he is a man. Here he is to find safety, cooperation, and welcome.
This is the first truly religious war ever waged. Can there be such a thing as a religious war? There can be wars in the interest of different theologies, and mixed wars of diplomacy and confessions of belief, wars to transfer the tradition of infallibility from a pope to a book, wars of Puritans against the divine right of kings in the Old World and the natural rights of Indians in the New, in all of which the name of God has been invoked for sanction, and Scripture has been quoted, and Psalms uplifted on the battle-field for encouragement. And it is true that every conflict, in which there are ideas that claim their necessary development against usage and authority, has a religious character so far as the ideas vindicate God by being good for man. But a purely religious war must be one to restore the attributes and prerogatives of manhood, to confirm primitive rights that are given to finite souls as fast as they are created, to proclaim the creed of humanity, which is so far from containing a single article of theology, that it is solely and distinctively religious without it, because it proclaims one Father in heaven and one blood upon the earth. Manhood is always worth fighting for, to resist and put down whatever evil tendency impairs the full ability to be a man, with a healthy soul conscious of rights and duties, owning its gifts, and valuing above everything else the liberty to place its happiness in being noble
Here is a sufficient ground for expecting that intellectual as well as political enlargement will succeed this trial of our country. It is well to think of all the approaching advantages, even those remote ones which will wear the forms of knowledge and art. For it is undeniable, that a war cannot be so just as to bring no evils in its train,—not only the disturbance of all kinds of industry, the suppression of some, the difficulty of diverting, at a moment’s notice, labor towards new objects,—not only financial embarrassment and exhaustion, and the shadow of a coming debt,—not the maiming of strong men and their violent removal from the future labors of peace, nor the emotional suffering of thousands of families whose hearts are in the field with their dear ones, tossed to and fro in every skirmish, where the balls slay more than the bodies which are pierced: not these evils alone,—nor the feverish excitement of eighteen millions of people, whose gifts and intelligence are all distraught, and at the mercy of every bulletin,—nor yet the possible violations of private rights, and the overriding of legal defences, which, when once attempted in a state of war, is not always relinquished on the return of peace. These do not strike us so much as the moral injury which many weak and passionate minds sustain from the necessity of destroying life, of ravaging and burning, of inflicting upon the enemy politic distresses. There will be a taint in the army and the community which will endure in the relations of pacific life. And more than half a million of men, who have tasted the fierce joy of battle, have suffered the moral privations and dangers of
How often we have enumerated and deprecated the evils of war! The Mexican War, in which Slavery herself involved us, (using the power of the Republic against which she conspired to further her conspiracy,) gave us occasion to extol the benefits of peace, and to draw up a formidable indictment against the spirit which lusted for the appeal to arms. We have not lusted for it, and the benefits of peace seem greater than ever; but the benefits of equity and truth seem greater than all. Show me justice, or try to make me unjust,—force upon me at the point of the sword the unspeakable degradation of abetting villany, and I will seize the hilt, if I can, and write my protest clear with the blade, and while I have it in my hand I will reap what advantages are possible in the desolation which it makes.
Among these advantages of a war waged to secure the rights of citizenship to all souls will be the excitement of a national intellectual life, which will take on the various forms of a national literature. This is to be expected for two reasons. First, because our arms will achieve unity. By this is meant not only that there will be a real union of all the States, consequent upon an eventual agreement in great political and moral ideas, but also that this very consent will bring the different characteristic groups of the country so near together, in feeling and mutual appreciation, and with a free interchange of traits, that we shall begin to have a nationality. And there can be no literature until there is a nation; when the varieties of the popular life begin to coalesce, as all sections are drawn together towards the centre of great political ideas which the people themselves establish, there will be such a rich development of intellectual action as the Old World has not seen. Without this unity, literature may be cultivated by cliques of men of talent, who are chiefly stimulated to express themselves by observing the thought and beauty which foreign intellects and past times produced; but their productions will not spring from the country’s manifold life, nor express its mighty individuality. The sections of the country which are nearest to the intelligence of the Old World will furnish the readiest writers and the most polished thinkers, until the New World dwarfs the Old World by its unity, and inspires the best brains with the collected richness of the popular heart. Up to the period of this war the country’s most original men have been those who, by protesting against its evils and displaying a genius emancipated from the prescriptions of Church and State, have prophesied the revolution, and given to America the first rich foretaste of her growing mind. The thunder rolled up the sky in the orator’s great periods, the lightning began to gleam in the preacher’s moral indignation, the glittering steel slumbered uneasily and showed its half-drawn menace from the subtle lines of poets and essayists who have been carrying weapons these twenty years;
No better, and quite as scrofulous, has been the nourishment furnished by the rhetorical time-servers and polished conventionalists, whose gifts have been all directed against the highest good of the country’s mind, to offer sweets to its crying conscience, and draughts of fierce or languid cordials to lull the uneasy moods of this fast-growing child of Liberty. Such men are fabricators of smooth speech; they have brought their gilding to put upon the rising pillars of the country, instead of strength to plant them firmly in their places and to spread the protecting roof. This period of storm will wash off their dainty work. When the clean granite stands where it should to shelter the four-and-thirty States as they walk the vast colonnades together, intent upon the great interchanges of the country’s thought and work, this tinsel will not be missed; as men look upon the grave lines that assure them of security, they will rejoice that the time for the truly beautiful has arrived, and hasten to relieve the solid space with shapes as durable as the imagination which conceives.
There must be a great people before there can be a great character in its books, its instructions, or its works of art. This character is prophesied only in part by what is said and thought while the people is becoming great, and the molten constituents are sparkling as they run into their future form. We have been so dependent upon traditional ideas that we suppose an epic, for instance, to be the essential proof that a people is alive and has something to express. Let us cease to wonder whether there will ever be an American poem, an American symphony, or an American Novum Organon. It is a sign of
There is no part of this country which has not its broad characters and tendencies, different from anything ever seen before, imperfect while they are doomed to isolation, during which they show only a maimed and grotesque vitality. The religious tendency is different, the humor is different, the imagination differs from anything beyond the Atlantic. And the East differs from the West, the North from the South; and the Pacific States will have also to contribute gifts peculiar to themselves, as the silt of the Sacramento glitters unlike that of the Merrimac or the Potomac. We are not yet a People; but we have great, vivid masses of popular life, which a century of literary expression will not exhaust. All these passionate characters are running together in this general danger, having seized a weapon: they have found an idea in common, they are pervaded by their first really solemn feeling, they issue the same word for the night from East to West. The nationality thus commenced will introduce the tendency to blend in place of the tendency to keep apart, and each other’s gifts will pass sympathetically from hand to hand.
The heightened life of this epoch is another cause which shall prepare a great development of intellectual forms. Excitement and enthusiasm pervade all classes of the people. All the primitive emotions of the human heart—friendship, scorn, sympathy, human and religious love—break into the liveliest expression, penetrate every quarter of society; a great river is let loose from the rugged mountain-recesses of the people; its waters, saturated with Nature’s simple fertility, cover the whole country, and will not retire without depositing their renewing elements. A sincere and humble people Is feeling the exigency. A million families have fitted out their volunteers with the most sumptuous of all equipments, which no Government could furnish, love, tears of anxiety and pride, last kisses and farewells, and prayers more heaven-cleaving than a time of peace can breathe. What an invisible cloud of domestic pathos overhung for a year the course of the Potomac, and settled upon those huts and tents where the best part of home resided!
* * * * *
O good painter, tell me true,
Has your hand the cunning
to draw
Shapes of things that you
never saw?
Ay? Well, here is an order for you.
Woods and cornfields, a little brown,—
The picture must not be over-bright,—
Yet all in the golden and
gracious light
Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down.
Alway and alway, night and
morn,
Woods upon woods, with fields
of corn
Lying between
them, not quite sere,
And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom,
When the wind can hardly find breathing-room
Under their tassels,—cattle
near,
Biting shorter the short green grass,
And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,
With bluebirds twittering all around,—
Listen closer. When you
have done
With woods
and cornfields and grazing herds,
A lady, the loveliest ever
the sun
Looked down upon, you must paint for me:
Oh, if I only could make you see
The clear blue eyes, the tender
smile,
The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,
The woman’s soul, and the angel’s
face
That are beaming on me all
the while!
I need not speak these
foolish words:
Yet one word tells you all
I would say,—
She is my mother: you will agree
That all the rest may be thrown
away.
Two little urchins at her knee
You must paint, Sir: one like me,—
The other with
a clearer brow,
And the light of his adventurous
eyes
Flashing with boldest enterprise:
At ten years old he went to sea,—
God knoweth
if he be living now,—
He sailed in the good
ship “Commodore,”—
Nobody ever crossed her track
To bring us news, and she never came back.
Ah, ’tis twenty long
years and more
Since that old ship went out of the bay
With my great-hearted brother
on her deck:
I watched him till he shrank to
a speck,
And his face was toward me all the way.
Bright his hair was, a golden brown,
The time we stood at
our mother’s knee:
That beauteous head, if it did go down,
Carried sunshine into the
sea!
Out in the fields one summer night
We were together, half afraid
Of the corn-leaves’
rustling, and of the shade
Of the high
hills, stretching so still and far,—
Loitering till after the low little light
Of the candle shone through
the open door,
And over the hay-stack’s pointed
top,
All of a tremble, and ready to drop,
The first
half-hour, the great yellow star,
That we, with staring, ignorant
eyes,
Had often and often watched to see
Propped and held in its place
in the skies
By the fork of a tall red mulberry-tree,
Which close in the edge of
our flax-field grew,—
Dead at the top,—just one branch
full
Of leaves, notched round, and lined with
wool,
From which it tenderly shook
the dew
Over our heads, when we came to play
In its handbreadth of shadow, day after
day.
Afraid to go home, Sir; for
one of us bore
A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled
eggs,—
The other, a bird, held fast by the legs,
Not so big as a straw of wheat:
The berries we gave her she wouldn’t
eat,
But cried and cried, till we held her
bill,
So slim and shining, to keep her still.
At last we stood at our mother’s
knee.
Do you think, Sir, if you
try,
You can paint the look of
a lie?
If you can, pray have the
grace
To put it solely in the face
Of the urchin that is likest me:
I think’t
was solely mine, indeed:
But that’s no matter,—paint
it so;
The eyes of our mother—(take
good heed)—
Looking not on the nest-full of eggs,
Nor the fluttering bird, held so fast
by the legs,
But straight through our faces down to
our lies,
And, oh, with such injured, reproachful
surprise!
I felt my heart bleed where
that glance went, as though
A sharp blade struck through
it.
You,
Sir, know,
That you on the canvas are to repeat
Things that are fairest, things most sweet,—
Woods and cornfields and mulberry-tree,—
The mother,—the lads, with
their bird, at her knee:
But, oh, that look of reproachful
woe!
High as the heavens your name I’ll
shout,
If you paint me the picture, and leave
that out.
THE SOUTH BREAKER.
Blue-fish were about done with, when one day Dan brought in some mackerel from Boon Island: they hadn’t been in the harbor for some time, though now there was a probability of their return. So they were going out when the tide served—the two boys—at midnight for mackerel, and Dan had heard me wish for the experience so often, a long while ago, that he said, Why shouldn’t they take the girls? and Faith snatched at the idea, and with that Mr. Gabriel agreed to fetch me at the hour, and so we parted. I was kind of sorry, but there was no help for it.
When we started, it was in that clear crystal dark that looks as if you could see through it forever till you reached infinite things, and we seemed to be in a great hollow sphere, and the stars were like living beings who had the night to themselves. Always, when I’m up late, I feel as if it were something unlawful, as if affairs were in progress which I had no right to witness, a kind of grand freemasonry. I’ve felt it nights when I’ve been watching with mother, and there has come up across the heavens the great caravan of constellations, and a star that I’d pulled away the curtain on the east side to see came by-and-by and looked in at the south window; but I never felt it as I did this night. The tide was near the full, and so we went slipping down the dark water by the starlight; and as we saw them shining above us, and then looked down and saw them sparkling up from below,—the stars,—it really seemed as if Dan’s oars must be two long wings, as if we swam on them through a motionless air. By-and-by we were in the island creek, and far ahead, in a streak of wind that didn’t reach us, we could see a pointed sail skimming along between
“She has come to look at Faith,” said Mr. Gabriel; for Faith, who once would have been nodding here and there all about the boat, was sitting up pale and sad, like another spirit, to confront it. But Dan and I both felt a difference.
Mr. Gabriel, he stepped across and went and sat down behind Faith, and laid his hand lightly on her arm. Perhaps he didn’t mind that he touched her,—he had a kind of absent air; but if any one had looked at the nervous pressure of the slender fingers, they would have seen as much meaning in that touch as in many an embrace; and Faith lifted her face to his, and they forgot that I was looking at them, and into the eyes of both there stole a strange deep smile,—and my soul groaned within me. It made no odds to me then that the air blew warm off the land from scented hay-ricks, that the moon hung like some exhumed jewel in the sky, that all the perfect night was widening into dawn. I saw and felt nothing but the wretchedness that must break one day on Dan’s head. Should I warn him? I couldn’t do that. And what then?
The sail was up, we had left the headland and the hills, and when they furled it and cast anchor we were swinging far out on the back of the great monster that was frolicking to itself and thinking no more of us than we do of a mote in the air. Elder Snow, he says that it’s singular we regard day as illumination and night as darkness,—day that really hems us in with narrow light and shuts us upon ourselves, night that sets us free and reveals to us all the secrets of the sky. I thought of that when one by one the stars melted and the moon became a breath, and up over the wide grayness crept color and radiance and the sun himself, —the sky soaring higher and higher, like a great thin bubble of flaky hues,—and, all about, nothing but the everlasting wash of waters broke the sacred hush. And it seemed as if God had been with us, and withdrawing we saw the trail of His splendid garments,—and I remembered the words mother had spoken to Dan once before, and why couldn’t I leave him in heavenly hands? And then it came into my heart to pray.
Well, this wasn’t what we’d come for,—turning all out-doors into a church,—though what’s a church but a place of God’s presence? and for my part, I never see high blue sky and sunshine without feeling that. And all of a sudden there came a school of mackerel splashing and darkening and curling round the boat, after the bait we’d thrown out on anchoring. ’Twould have done you good to see Dan just at that moment; you’d have realized what it was to have a calling. He started up, forgetting everything else, his face all flushed, his eyes like coals, his mouth tight and his tongue silent; and how many hooks he had out I’m sure I don’t know, but he kept jerking them in by twos and threes, and finally they bit at the bare barb and were taken without any bait at all, just as if they’d come and asked to be caught. Mr. Gabriel, he didn’t pay any attention at first, but Dan called to him to stir himself, and so gradually he worked back into his old mood; but he was more still and something sad all the rest of the morning. Well, when we’d gotten about enough, and they were dying in the boat there, as they cast their scales, like the iris, we put in-shore; and building a fire, we cooked our own dinner and boiled our own coffee. Many’s the icy winter-night I’ve wrapped up Dan’s bottle of hot coffee in rolls on rolls of flannel, that he might drink it hot and strong far out at sea in a wherry at daybreak!
But as I was saying,—all this time, Mr. Gabriel, he scarcely looked at Faith. At first she didn’t comprehend, and then something swam all over her face as if the very blood in her veins had grown darker, and there was such danger in her eye that before we stepped into the boat again I wished to goodness I had a life-preserver. But in the beginning the religious impression lasted and gave him great resolutions; and then strolling off and along the beach, he fell in with some men there and did as he always did, scraped acquaintance. I verily believe that these men were total strangers, that he’d never laid eyes on them before, and after a few words he wheeled about. As he did so, his glance fell on Faith standing there alone against the pale sky, for the weather ’d thickened, and watching the surf break at her feet. He was motionless, gazing at her long, and then, when he had turned once or twice irresolutely, he ground his heel into the sand and went back. The men rose and wandered on with him, and they talked together for a while, and I saw money pass; and pretty soon Mr. Gabriel returned, his face vividly pallid, but smiling, and he had in his hand some little bright shells that you don’t often find on these Northern beaches, and he said he had bought them of those men. And all this time he’d not spoken with Faith, and there was the danger yet in her eye. But nothing came of it, and I had accused myself of nearly every crime in the Decalogue, and on the way back we had put up the lines, and Mr. Gabriel had hauled in the lobster-net for the last time. He liked that branch of the business; he said it had all the excitement of gambling,—the slow settling downwards, the fading of the last ripple, the impenetrable depth and shade and the mystery of the work below, five minutes of expectation, and it might bring up a scale of the sea-serpent, or the king of the crabs might have crept in for a nap in the folds, or it might come up as if you’d dredged for pearls, or it might hold the great backward-crawling lobsters, or a tangle of seaweed, or the long yellow locks of some drowned girl,—or nothing at all. So he always drew in that net, and it needed muscle, and his was like steel,—not good for much in the long pull, but just for a breathing could handle the biggest boatman in the harbor. Well,—and we’d hoisted the sail and were in the creek once more, for the creek was only to be used at high-water, and I’d told Dan I couldn’t be away from mother over another tide and so we mustn’t get aground, and he’d told me not to fret, there was nothing too shallow for us on the coast—“This boat,” said Dan, “she’ll float in a heavy dew.” And he began singing a song he liked:—
“I cast my line in Largo Bay,
And fishes I caught nine:
There’s three to boil, and three
to fry,
And three to bait the line.”
And Mr. Gabriel ’d never heard it before, and he made him sing it again and again.
“The boatie rows, the boatie rows,
The boatie rows indeed,”
repeated Mr. Gabriel, and he said it was the only song he knew that held the click of the oar in the rowlock.
The little birds went skimming by us, as we sailed, their breasts upon the water, and we could see the gunners creeping through the marshes beside them.
“The wind changes,” said Mr. Gabriel. “The equinox treads close behind us. Sst! Is it that you do not feel its breath? And you hear nothing?”
“It’s the Soul of the Bar,” said Dan; and he fell to telling us one of the wild stories that fishermen can tell each other by the lantern rocking outside at night in the dory.
The wind was dead east, and now we flew before it, and now we tacked in it, up and up the winding stream, and always a little pointed sail came skimming on in suit.
“What sail is that, Dan?” asked I. “It looks like the one that flitted ahead this morning.”
“It is the one,” said Dan,—for he’d brought up a whole horde of superstitious memories, and a gloom that had been hovering off and on his face settled there for good. “As much of a one as that was. It’s no sail at all. It’s a death-sign. And I’ve never been down here and seen it but trouble was on its heels. Georgie! there’s two of them!”
We all looked, but it was hidden in a curve, and when it stole in sight again there were two of them, filmy and faint as spirits’ wings,—and while we gazed they vanished, whether supernaturally or in the mist that was rising mast-high I never thought, for my blood was frozen as it ran.
“You have fear?” asked Mr. Gabriel,—his face perfectly pale, and his eye almost lost in darkness. “If it is a phantom, it can do you no harm.”
Faith’s teeth chattered,—I saw them. He turned to her, and as their look met, a spot of carnation burned into his cheek almost as a brand would have burned. He seemed to be balancing some point, to be searching her and sifting her; and Faith half rose, proudly, and pale, as if his look pierced her with pain. The look was long,—but before it fell, a glow and sparkle filled the eyes, and over his face there curled the deep, strange smile of the morning, till the long lids and heavy lashes dropped and made it sad. And Faith,—she started in a new surprise, the darkness gathered and crept off her face as cream wrinkles from milk, and spleen or venom or what-not became absorbed again and lost, and there was nothing in her glance but passionate forgetfulness. Some souls are like the white river-lilies,—fixed, yet floating; but Mr. Gabriel had no firm root anywhere, and was blown about with every breeze, like a leaf on the flood. His purposes melted and made with his moods.
The wind got round more to the north, the mist fell upon the waters or blew away over the meadows, and it was cold. Mr. Gabriel wrapped the cloak about Faith and fastened it, and tied her bonnet. Just now Dan was so busy handling the boat—and it’s rather risky, you have to wriggle up the creek so—that he took little notice of us. Then Mr. Gabriel stood up, as if to change his position; and taking off his hat, he held it aloft, while he passed the other hand across his forehead. And leaning against the mast, he stood so, many minutes.
“Dan,” I said, “did your spiritual craft ever hang out a purple pennant?”
“No,” said Dan.
“Well,” says I. And we all saw a little purple ribbon running up the rope and streaming on the air behind us.
“And why do we not hoist our own?” said Mr. Gabriel, putting on his hat. And suiting the action to the word, a little green signal curled up and flaunted above us like a bunch of the weed floating there in the water beneath and dyeing all the shallows so that they looked like caves of cool emerald, and wide off and over them the west burned smoulderingly red like a furnace. Many a time since, I’ve felt the magical color between those banks and along those meadows, but then I felt none of it; every wit I had was too awake and alert and fast-fixed in watching.
“Is it that the phantoms can be flesh and blood?” said Mr. Gabriel laughingly; and lifting his arm again, he hailed the foremost.
“Boat ahoy! What names?” said he.
The answer came back on the wind full and round.
“‘Speed,’ and ‘Follow.’”
“Where from?” asked Dan, with just a glint in his eye,—for usually he knew every boat on the river, but he didn’t know these.
“From the schooner Flyaway, taking in sand over at Black Rocks.”
Then Mr. Gabriel spoke again, as they drew near,—but whether he spoke so fast that I couldn’t understand, or whether he spoke French, I never knew; and Dan, with some kind of feeling that it was Mr. Gabriel’s acquaintance, suffered the one we spoke to pass us.
Once or twice Mr. Gabriel had begun some question to Dan about the approaching weather, but had turned it off again before anybody could answer. You see he had some little nobility left, and didn’t want the very man he was going to injure to show him how to do it. Now, however, he asked him that was steering the Speed by, if it was going to storm.
The man thought it was.
“How is it, then, that your schooner prepares to sail?”
“Oh, wind’s backed in; we’ll be on blue water before the gale breaks, I reckon, and then beat off where there’s plenty of sea-room.”
“But she shall make shipwreck!”
“‘Not if the court know herself, and he think she do,’” was the reply from another, as they passed.
Somehow I began to hate myself, I was so full of poisonous suspicions. How did Mr. Gabriel know the schooner prepared to sail? And this man, could he tell boom from bowsprit? I didn’t believe it; he had the hang of the up-river folks. But there stood Mr. Gabriel, so quiet and easy, his eyelids down, and he humming an underbreath of song; and there sat Faith, so pale and so pretty, a trifle sad, a trifle that her conscience would brew for her, whether or no. Yet, after all, there was an odd expression in Mr. Gabriel’s face, an eager, restless expectation; and if his lids were lowered, it was only to hide the spark that flushed and quenched in his eye like a beating pulse.
We had reached the draw, it was lifted for the Speed, she had passed, and the wind was in her sail once more. Yet, somehow, she hung back. And then I saw that the men in her were of those with whom Mr. Gabriel had spoken at noon. Dan’s sail fell slack, and we drifted slowly through, while he poled us along with an oar.
“Look out, Georgie!” said Dan, for he thought I was going to graze my shoulder upon the side there. I looked; and when I turned again, Mr. Gabriel was rising up from some earnest and hurried sentence to Faith. And Faith, too, was standing, standing and swaying with indecision, and gazing away out before her,—so flushed and so beautiful,—so loath and so willing. Poor thing! poor thing! as if her rising in itself were not the whole!
Mr. Gabriel stepped across the boat, stooped a minute, and then also took an oar. How perfect he was, as he stood there that moment!—perfect like a statue, I mean,—so slender, so clean-limbed, his dark face pale to transparency in the green light that filtered through the draw! and then a ray from the sunset came creeping over the edge of the high fields and smote his eyes sidelong so that they glowed like jewels, and he with his oar planted firmly hung there bending far back with it, completely full of strength and grace.
“It is not the bateaux in the rapids,” said he.
“What are you about?” asked Dan, with sudden hoarseness. “You are pulling the wrong way!”
Mr. Gabriel laughed, and threw down his oar, and stepped back again; gave his hand to Faith, and half led, half lifted her, over the side, and into the Speed, followed, and never looked behind him. They let go something they had held, the Speed put her nose in the water and sprinkled us with spray, plunged, and dashed off like an arrow.
It was like him,—daring and insolent coolness! Just like him! Always the soul of defiance! None but one so reckless and impetuous as he would have dreamed of flying into the teeth of the tempest in that shell of a schooner. But he was mad with love, and they—there wasn’t a man among them but was the worse for liquor.
For a moment Dan took it, as Mr. Gabriel had expected him to do, as a joke, and went to trim the boat for racing, not meaning they should reach town first. But I—I saw It all.
“Dan!” I sung out, “save her! She’s not coming back! They’ll make for the schooner at Black Rocks! Oh, Dan, he’s taken her off!”
Now one whose intelligence has never been trained, who shells his five wits and gets rid of the pods as best he can, mayn’t be so quick as another, but, like an animal, he feels long before he sees; and a vague sense of this had been upon Dan all day. Yet now he stood thunderstruck, and the thing went on before his very eyes. It was more than he could believe at once,—and perhaps his first feeling was, Why should he hinder? And then the flood fell. No thought of his loss,—though loss it wa’n’t,—only of his friend,—of such stunning treachery, that, if the sun fell hissing into the sea at noon, it would have mattered less,—only of that loss that tore his heart out with it.
“Gabriel!” he shouted,—“Gabriel!” And his voice was heart-rending. I know that Mr. Gabriel felt it, for he never turned nor stirred.
Then I don’t know what came over Dan: a blind rage swelling in his heart seemed to make him larger in every limb; he towered like a flame. He sprang to the tiller, but, as he did so, saw with one flash of his eye that Mr. Gabriel had unshipped the rudder and thrown it away. He seized an oar to steer with in its place; he saw that they, in their ignorance fast edging on the flats, would shortly be aground; more fisherman than sailor, he knew a thousand tricks of boat-craft that they had never heard of. We flew, we flew through cloven ridges, we became a wind ourselves, and while I tell it he was beside them, had gathered himself as if to leap the chasm between time and eternity, and had landed among them in the Speed. The wherry careened with the shock and the water poured into her, and she flung headlong and away as his foot spurned her. Heaven knows why she didn’t upset, for I thought of nothing but the scene before me as I drifted off from it. I shut the eyes in my soul now, that I mayn’t see that horrid scuffle twice. Mr. Gabriel, he rose, he turned. If Dan was the giant beside him, he himself was so well-knit, so supple, so adroit, that his power was like the blade in the hand. Dan’s strength was lying round loose, but Mr. Gabriel’s was trained, it hid like springs of steel between brain and wrist, and from him the clap fell with the bolt. And then, besides, Dan did not love Faith, and he did love Gabriel. Any one could see how it would go. I screamed. I cried, “Faith! Faith!” And some natural instinct stirred in Faith’s heart, for she clung to Mr. Gabriel’s arm to pull him off from Dan. But he shook her away like rain. Then such a mortal weakness took possession of me that I saw everything black, and, when it was clean gone, I looked, and they were locked in each other’s arms, fierce, fierce and fell, a death-grip. They were staggering to the boat’s edge: only this I saw, that Mr. Gabriel was inside: suddenly the helmsman interposed with an oar, and broke their grasps. Mr. Gabriel reeled away, free, for a second; then, the passion, the fury, the hate in his heart feeding his strength as youth fed the locks of Samson, he darted, and lifted Dan in his two arms and threw him like a stone into the water. Stiffened to ice, I waited for Dan to rise; the other craft, the Follow, skimmed between us, and one man managing her that she shouldn’t heel, the rest drew Dan in,—it’s not the depth of two foot there,—tacked about, and after a minute came along-side, seized our painter, and dropped him gently into his own boat. Then—for the Speed had got afloat again—the thing stretched her two sails wing and wing, and went ploughing up a great furrow of foam before her.
I sprang to Dan. He was not senseless, but in a kind of stupor: his head had struck the fluke of a half-sunk anchor and it had stunned him, but as the wound bled he recovered slowly and opened his eyes. Ah, what misery was in them! I turned to the fugitives. They were yet in sight, Mr. Gabriel sitting and seeming to adjure Faith, whose skirts he held; but she stood, and her arms were outstretched, and, pale as a foam-wreath her face, and piercing as a night-wind her voice, I heard her cry, “Oh, Georgie! Georgie!” It was too late for her to cry or to wring her hands now. She should have thought of that before. But Mr. Gabriel rose and drew her down, and hid her face in his arms and bent over it; and so they fled up the basin and round the long line of sand, and out into the gloom and the curdling mists.
I bound up Dan’s head. I couldn’t steer with an oar,—that was out of the question,—but, as luck would have it, could row tolerably; so I got down the little mast, and at length reached the wharves. The town-lights flickered up in the darkness and flickered back from the black rushing river, and then out blazed the great mills; and as I felt along, I remembered times when we’d put in by the tender sunset, as the rose faded out of the water and the orange ebbed down the west, and one by one the sweet evening-bells chimed forth, so clear and high, and each with a different tone, that it seemed as if the stars must flock, tinkling, into the sky. And here were the bells ringing out again, ringing out of the gray and the gloom, dull and brazen, as if they rang from some cavern of shadows, or from the mouth of hell,—but no, that was down-river! Well, I made my way, and the men on the landing took up Dan, and helped him in and got him on my little bed, and no sooner there than the heavy sleep with which he had struggled fell on him like lead.
The story flew from mouth to mouth, the region rang with it; nobody had any need to add to it, or to make it out a griffin or a dragon that had gripped Faith and carried her off in his talons. But everybody declared that those boats could be no ship’s yawls at all, but must belong to parties from up-river camping out on the beach, and that a parcel of such must have gone sailing with some of the hands of a sand-droger: there was one in the stream now, that had got off with the tide, said the Jerdan boys, who’d been down there that afternoon, though there was no such name as “Flyaway” on her stern, and they were waiting for the master of her, who’d gone off on a spree,—a dare-devil fellow, that used to run a smuggler between Bordeaux and Bristol, as they’d heard say: and all agreed that Mr. Gabriel could never have had to do with them before that day, or he’d have known what a place a sand-droger would be for a woman; and everybody made excuses for Gabriel, and everybody was down on Faith. So there things lay. It was raw and chill when the last neighbor left us, the sky was black as a cloak, not a star to be seen, the wind had edged back to the east again and came in wet and wild from the sea and fringed with its thunder. Oh, poor little Faith, what a night! what a night for her!
I went back and sat down by Dan, and tried to keep his head cool. Father was up walking the kitchen-floor till late, but at length he lay down across the foot of mother’s bed, as if expecting to be called. The lights were put out, there was no noise in the town, every one slept,—every one, except they watched like me, on that terrible night. No noise in the town, did I say? Ah, but there was! It came creeping round the corners, it poured rushing up the street, it rose from everywhere,—a voice, a voice of woe, the heavy booming rote of the sea. I looked out, but it was pitch-dark, light had forsaken the world, we were beleaguered by blackness. It grew colder, as if one felt a fog fall, and the wind, mounting slowly, now blew a gale. It eddied in clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn branches flying aloft; it took the house by the four corners and shook it to loosening the rafters, and I felt the chair rock under me; it rumbled down the chimney as if it would tear the life out of us. And with every fresh gust of the gale the rain slapped against the wall, the rain that fell in rivers, and went before the wind in sheets,—and sheltered as I was, the torrents seemed to pour over me like cataracts, and every drop pierced me like a needle, and I put my fingers in my ears to shut out the howl of the wind and the waves. I couldn’t keep my thoughts away from Faith. Oh, poor girl, this wasn’t what she’d expected! As plainly as if I were aboard-ship I felt the scene, the hurrying feet, the slippery deck, the hoarse cries, the creaking cordage, the heaving and plunging and straining, and the wide wild night. And I was beating off those dreadful lines with them, two dreadful lines of white froth through the blackness, two lines where the horns of breakers guard the harbor,—all night long beating off the lee with them, my life in my teeth, and chill, blank, shivering horror before me. My whole soul, my whole being, was fixed in that one spot, that little vessel driving on the rocks: it seemed as if a madness took possession of me, I reeled as I walked, I forefelt the shivering shock, I waited till she should strike. And then I thought I heard cries, and I ran out in the storm, and down upon the causeway, but nothing met me but the hollow night and the roaring sea and the wind. I came back, and hurried up and down and wrung my hands in an agony. Pictures of summer nights flashed upon me and faded,—where out of deep-blue vaults the stars hung like lamps, great and golden,—or where soft films just hazing heaven caught the rays, till all above gleamed like gauze faintly powdered and spangled with silver,—or heavy with heat, slipping over silent waters, through scented airs, under purple skies. And then storms rolled in and rose before my eyes, distinct for a moment, and breaking,—such as I’d seen them from the Shoals in broad daylight, when tempestuous columns scooped themselves up from the green gulfs and shattered in loam on the shuddering rock,—ah!
How long did I stay so? An hour, or maybe two. Dan was still dead with sleep, but mother had no more closed an eye than I. There was no rain now, the wind had fallen, the dark had lifted; I looked out once more, and could just see dimly the great waters swinging in the river from bank to bank. I drew the bucket fresh, and bound the cloths cold on Dan’s head again. I hadn’t a thought in my head, and I fell to counting the meshes in the net that hung from the wall, but in my ears there was the everlasting rustle of the sea and shore. It grew clearer,—it got to being a universal gray; there’d been no sunrise, but it was day. Dan stirred,—he turned over heavily; then he opened his eyes wide and looked about him.
“I’ve had such a fright!” he said. “Georgie! is that you?”
With that it swept over him afresh, and he fell back. In a moment or two he tried to rise, but he was weak as a child. He contrived to keep on his elbow a moment, though, and to give a look out of the window.
“It came on to blow, didn’t it?” he asked; but there he sank down again.
“I can’t stay so!” he murmured soon. “I can’t stay so! Here,—I must tell you. Georgie, get out the spy-glass, and go up on the roof and look over. I’ve had a dream, I tell you! I’ve had a dream. Not that either,—but it’s just stamped on me! It was like a storm,—and I dreamed that that schooner—the Flyaway—had parted. And the half of her’s crashed down just as she broke, and Faith and that man are high up on the bows in the middle of the South Breaker! Make haste, Georgie! Christ! make haste!”
I flew to the drawers and opened them, and began to put the spy-glass together. Suddenly he cried out again,—
“Oh, here’s where the fault was! What right had I ever to marry the child, not loving her? I bound her! I crushed her! I stifled her! If she lives, it is my sin; if she dies, I murder her!”
He hid his face, as he spoke, so that his voice came thick, and great choking groans rent their way up from his heart.
All at once, as I looked up, there stood mother, in her long white gown, beside the bed, and bending over and taking Dan’s hot head in her two hands.
“Behold, He cometh with clouds!” she whispered.
It always did seem to me as if mother had the imposition of hands,—perhaps every one feels just so about their mother,—but only her touch always lightens an ache for me, whether it’s in the heart or the head.
“Oh, Aunt Rhody,” said Dan, looking up in her face with his distracted eyes, “can’t you help me?”
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,” said mother.
“There’s no help, there!” called Dan. “There’s no God there! He wouldn’t have let a little child run into her damnation!”
“Hush, hush, Dan!” murmured mother. “Faith never can have been at sea in such a night as this, and not have felt God’s hand snatching her out of sin. If she lives, she’s a changed woman; and if she dies, her soul is whitened and fit to walk with saints. Through much tribulation.”
“Yes, yes,” muttered father, in the room beyond, spitting on his hands, as if he were going to take hold of the truth by the handle,—“it’s best to clean up a thing with the first spot, and not wait for it to get all rusty with crime.”
“And he!” said Dan,—“and he,—that man,—Gabriel!”
“Between the saddle
and the ground
If mercy’s asked, mercy’s
found,”
said I.
“Are you there yet, Georgie?” he cried, turning to me. “Here! I’ll go myself!” But he only stumbled and fell on the bed again.
“In all the terror and the tempest of these long hours,—for there’s been a fearful storm, though you haven’t felt it,” said mother,—“in all that, Mr. Gabriel can’t have slept. But at first it must have been that great dread appalled him, and he may have been beset with sorrow. He’d brought her to this. But at last, for he’s no coward, he has looked death in the face and not flinched; and the danger, and the grandeur there is in despair, have lifted his spirit to great heights,—heights found now in an hour, but which in a whole life long he never would have gained,—heights from which he has seen the light of God’s face and been transfigured in it,—heights where the soul dilates to a stature it can never lose. Oh, Dan, there’s a moment, a moment when the dross strikes off, and the impurities, and the grain sets, and there comes out the great white diamond. For by grace are ye saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,—of Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning. Oh, I will believe that Mr. Gabriel hadn’t any need to grope as we do, but that suddenly he saw the Heavenly Arm and clung to it, and the grasp closed round him, and death and hell can have no power over him now. Dan, poor boy, is it better to lie in the earth with the ore than to be forged in the furnace and beaten to a blade fit for the hands of archangels?”
And mother stopped, trembling like a leaf.
I’d been wiping and screwing the glass, and I’d waited a breath, for mother always talked so like a preacher; but when she’d finished, after a second or two Dan looked up, and said, as if he’d just come in—
“Aunt Rhody! how come you out of bed?”
And then mother, she got upon the bed, and she took Dan’s head on her breast and fell to stroking his brows, laying her cool palms on his temples and on his eyelids, as once I’d have given my ears to do,—and I slipped out of the room.
Oh, I hated to go up those stairs, to mount that ladder, to open the scuttle! And once there, I waited and waited before I dared to look. The night had unnerved me. At length I fixed the glass. I swept the broad swollen stream, to the yellowing woods, and over the meadows, where a pale transient beam crept under and pried up the hay-cocks,—the smoke that began to curl from the chimneys and fall as soon,—the mists blowing off from Indian Hill, but brooding blue and dense down the turnpike, and burying the red spark of the moon, that smothered like a half-dead coal in her ashes,—anywhere, anywhere but that spot! I don’t know why it was, but I couldn’t level the glass there,—my arm would fall, my eye haze. Finally I brought it round nearer and tried again. Everywhere, as far as your eye could reach, the sea was yeasty and white with froth, and great streaks of it were setting up the inky river, and against it there were the twin light-houses quivering their little yellow rays as if to mock the dawn, and far out on the edge of day the great light at the Isles of Shoals blinked and blinked, crimson and gold, fainter and fainter, and lost at last. It was no use, I didn’t dare point it, my hand trembled so I could see nothing plain, when suddenly an engine went thundering over the bridge and startled me into stillness. The tube slung in my hold and steadied against the chimney, and there——What was it in the field? what ghastly picture?
The glass crashed from my hand, and I staggered shrieking down the ladder.
The sound wasn’t well through my lips, when the door slammed, and Dan had darted out of the house and to the shore. I after him. There was a knot sitting and standing round there in the gray, shivering, with their hands in their pockets and their pipes set in their teeth; but the gloom was on them as well, and the pipes went out between the puffs.
“Where’s Dennis’s boat?” Dan demanded, as he strode.
“The six-oar’s all the one not”——
“The six-oar I want. Who goes with me?”
There wasn’t a soul in the ward but would have followed Dan’s lead to the end of the world and jumped off; and before I could tell their names there were three men on the thwarts, six oars in the air, Dan stood in the bows, a word from him, and they shot away.
I watched while I could see, and then in and up to the attic, forgetting to put mother in her bed, forgetting all things but the one. And there lay the glass broken. I sat awhile with the pieces in my hand, as if I’d lost a kingdom; then down, and mechanically put things to rights, and made mother comfortable,—and she’s never stood on her feet from that day to this. At last I seated myself before the fire, and stared into it to blinding.
“Won’t some one lend you a glass, Georgie?” said mother.
“Of course they will!” I cried,—for, you see, I hadn’t a wit of my own,—and I ran out.
There’s a glass behind every door in the street, you should know, and there’s no day in the year that you’ll go by and not see one stretching from some roof where the heart of the house is out on the sea. Oh, sometimes I think all the romance of the town is clustered down here on the Flats and written in pale cheeks and starting eyes. But what’s the use? After one winter, one, I gave mine away, and never got another. It’s just an emblem of despair. Look, and look again, and look till your soul sinks, and the thing you want never crosses it; but you’re down in the kitchen stirring a porridge, or you’re off at a neighbor’s asking the news, and somebody shouts at you round the corner, and there, black and dirty and dearer than gold, she lies between the piers.
All the world was up on their house-tops spying, that morning, but there was nobody would keep their glass while I had none; so I went back armed, and part of it all I saw, and part of it father told me.
I waited till I thought they were ’most across, and then I rubbed the lens. At first I saw nothing, and I began to quake with a greater fear than any that had yet taken root in me. But with the next moment there they were, pulling close up. I shut my eyes for a flash with some kind of a prayer that was most like an imprecation, and when I looked again they had dashed over and dashed over, taking the rise of the long roll, and were in the midst of the South Breaker. O God! that terrible South Breaker! The oars bent lithe as willow-switches, a moment they skimmed on the caps, a moment were hid in the snow of the spray. Dan, red-shirted, still stood there, his whole soul on the aim before him, like that of some leaper flying through the air; he swayed to the stroke, he bowed, he rose, perfectly balanced, and flexile as the wave. The boat behaved beneath their hands like a live creature: she bounded so that you almost saw the light under her; her whole steal lifted itself slowly out of the water, caught the back of a roller and rode over upon the next; the very things that came rushing in with their white rage to devour her bent their necks and bore her up like a bubble. Constantly she drew nearer that dark and shattered heap up to which the fierce surf raced, and over which it leaped. And there all the time, all the time, they had been clinging, far out on the bowsprit, those two figures, her arms close-knit about him, he clasping her with one, the other twisted in the hawser, whose harsh thrilling must have filled their ears like an organ-note as it swung them to and fro,—clinging to life,—clinging to each other more than to life. The wreck scarcely heaved with the stoutest blow of the tremendous surge; here and there, only, a plank shivered off and was bowled on and thrown high upon the beach beside fragments
When father came home, the rack had driven down the harbor and left clear sky; it was near nightfall; they’d been searching the shore all day,—to no purpose. But that rainbow,—I always took it for a sign. Father was worn out, yet he sat in the chimney-side, cutting off great quids and chewing and thinking and sighing. At last he went and wound up the clock,—it was the stroke of twelve,—and then he turned to me and said,—
“Dan sent you this, Georgie. He hailed a pilot-boat, and’s gone to the Cape to join the fall fleet to the fish’ries; and he sent you this.”
It was just a great hand-grip to make your nails purple, but there was heart’s-blood in it. See, there’s the mark to-day.
So there was Dan off in the Bay of Chaleur. It was the best place for him. And I went about my work once more. There was a great gap in my life, but I tried not to look at it. I durstn’t think of Dan, and I wouldn’t think of them,—the two. Always in such times it’s as if a breath had come and blown across the pool and you could see down its dark depths and into the very bottom, but time scums it all over again. And I tell you it’s best to look trouble in the face: if you don’t, you’ll have more of it. So I got a lot of shoes to bind, and what part of my spare time I wa’n’t at my books the needle flew. But I turned no more to the past than I could help, and the future trembled too much to be seen.
Well, the two months dragged away, it got to be Thanksgiving-week, and at length the fleet was due. I mind me I made a great baking that week; and I put brandy into the mince for once, instead of vinegar and dried-apple juice,—and there were the fowls stuffed and trussed on the shelf,—and the pumpkin-pies like slices of split gold,—and the cranberry-tarts, plats of crimson and puffs of snow,—and I was brewing in my mind a right-royal red Indian-pudding to come out of the oven smoking hot and be soused with thick clots of yellow cream,—when one of the boys ran in and told us the fleet’d got back, but no Dan with it, —he’d changed over to a fore-and-after, and wouldn’t be home at all, but was to stay down in the Georges all winter, and he’d sent us word. Well, the baking went to the dogs, or the Thanksgiving beggars, which is the same thing.
Then days went by, as days will, and it was well into the New Year. I used to sit there at the window, reading,—but the lines would run together, and I’d forget what ’twas all about, and gather no sense, and the image of the little fore-and-after, the “Feather,” raked in between the leaves, and at last I had to put all that aside; and then I sat stitching, stitching, but got into a sad habit of looking up and looking out each time I drew the thread. I felt it was a shame of me to be so glum, and mother missed my voice; but I could no more talk than I could have given conundrums to King Solomon, and as for singing—Oh, I used to long so for just a word from Dan!
We’d had dry fine weeks all along, and father said he’d known we should have just such a season, because the goose’s breast-bone was so white; but St. Valentine’s day the weather broke, broke in a chain of storms that the September gale was a whisper to. Ah, it was a dreadful winter, that! You’ve surely heard of it. It made forty widows in our town. Of the dead that were found on Prince Edward’s Island’s shores there were four corpses in the next house yonder, and two in the one behind. And what waiting and watching and cruel pangs of suspense for them that couldn’t have even the peace of certainty! And I was one of those.
The days crept on, I say, and got bright again; no June days ever stretched themselves to half such length; there was perfect stillness in the house,—it seemed to me that I counted every tick of the clock. In the evenings the neighbors used to drop in and sit mumbling over their fearful memories till the flesh crawled on my bones. Father, then, he wanted cheer, and he’d get me to singing “Caller Herrin’.” Once, I’d sung the first part, but as I reached the lines,—
“When ye were sleepin’ on
your pillows,
Dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows
Darklin’ as they face the billows,
A’ to fill our woven willows,”—
as I reached those lines, my voice trembled so’s to shake the tears out of my eyes, and Jim Jerdan took it up himself and sung it through for me to words of his own invention. He was always a kindly fellow, and he knew a little how the land lay between me and Dan.
“When I was down in the Georges,” said Jim Jerdan——
“You? When was you down there?” asked father.
“Well,—once I was. There’s worse places.”
“Can’t tell me nothing about the Georges,” said father. “’Ta’n’t the rivers of Damascus exactly, but ’ta’n’t the Marlstrom neither.”
“Ever ben there, Cap’n?”
“A few. Spent more nights under cover roundabouts than Georgie’ll have white hairs in her head,—for all she’s washing the color out of her eyes now.”
You see, father knew I set by my hair,—for in those days I rolled it thick as a cable, almost as long, black as that cat’s back,—and he thought he’d touch me up a little.
“Wash the red from her cheek and the light from her look, and she’ll still have the queen’s own tread,” said Jim.
“If Loisy Currier’d heern that, you’d wish your cake was dough,” says father.
“I’ll resk it,” says Jim. “Loisy knows who’s second choice, as well as if you told her.”
“But what about the Georges, Jim?” I asked; for though I hated to hear, I could listen to nothing else.
“Georges? Oh, not much. Just like any other place.”
“But what do you do down there?”
“Do? Why, we fish,—in the pleasant weather.”
“And when it’s not pleasant?”
“Oh, then we make things taut, hoist fores’l, clap the hellum into the lee becket, and go below and amuse ourselves.”
“How?” I asked, as if I hadn’t heard it all a hundred times.
“One way ‘n’ another. Pipes, and mugs, and poker, if it a’n’t too rough; and if it is, we just bunk and snooze till it gets smooth.”
“Why, Jim,—how do you know when that is?”
“Well, you can jedge,—’f the pipe falls out of your pocket and don’t light on the ceiling.”
“And who’s on deck?”
“There’s no one on deck. There’s no danger, no trouble, no nothing. Can’t drive ashore, if you was to try: hundred miles off, in the first place. Hatches are closed, she’s light as a cork, rolls over and over just like any other log in the water, and there can’t a drop get into her, if she turns bottom-side up.”
“But she never can right herself!”
“Can’t she? You just try her. Why, I’ve known ’em to keel over and rake bottom and bring up the weed on the topmast. I tell you now! there was one time we knowed she’d turned a somerset, pretty well. Why? Because, when it cleared and we come up, there was her two masts broke short off!”
And Jim went home thinking he’d given me a night’s sleep. But it was cold comfort; the Georges seemed to me a worse place than the Hellgate. And mother she kept murmuring,—“He layeth the beams of His chambers in the waters, His pavilion round about Him is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.” And I knew by that she thought it pretty bad.
So the days went in cloud and wind. The owners of the Feather ’d been looking for her a month and more, and there were strange kind of rumors afloat; and nobody mentioned Dan’s name, unless they tripped. I went glowering like a wild thing. I knew I’d never see Dan now nor hear his voice again, but I hated the Lord that had done it, and I made my heart like the nether millstone. I used to try and get out of folks’s sight; and roaming about the back-streets one day, as the snow went off, I stumbled on Miss Catharine. “Old Miss Catharine” everybody called her, though she was but a pauper, and had black blood in her veins. Eighty years had withered her,—a little woman at best, and now bent so that her head and shoulders hung forward and she couldn’t lift them, and she never saw the sky. Her face to the ground as no beast’s face is turned even, she walked with a cane, and fixing it every few steps she would
“What’s the matter of ye, honey?” said she. “D’ye read your Bible?”
Read my Bible!
“Is that what makes you happy, Miss Catharine?” I asked.
“Well, I can’t read much myself, I don’t know the letters,” says she; “but I’ve got the blessed promises in my heart.”
“Do you want me to read to you?”
“No, not to-day. Next time you come, maybe.”
So I sat awhile and listened to her little humming voice, and we fell to talking about mother’s ailments, and she said how fine it would be, if we could only afford to take mother to Bethesda.
“There’s no angel there now,” said I.
“I know it, dear,—but then there might be, you know. At any rate, there’s always the living waters running to make us whole: I often think of that.”
“And what else do you think of, Miss Catharine?”
“Me?” said she. “Oh, I ha’n’t got no husband nor no child to think about and hope for, and so I think of myself, and what I should like, honey. And sometimes I remember them varses,—here! you read ’em now,—Luke xiii. 11.”
So I read:—
“And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, ’Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.’ And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.”
“Ay, honey, I see that all as if it was me. And I think, as I’m setting here, What if the latch should lift, and the gracious stranger should come in, His gown a-sweepin’ behind Him and a-sweet’nin’ the air, and He should look down on me with His heavenly eyes, and He should smile, and lay His hands on my head, warm?—and I say to myself, ’Lord, I am not worthy,’—and He says, ’Miss Catharine, thou art loosed from thine infirmity!’ And the latch lifts, as I think, and I wait,—but it’s not Him.”
Well, when I went out of that place I wasn’t the same girl that had gone in. My will gave way; I came home and took up my burden and was in peace. Still I couldn’t help my thoughts,—and they ran perpetually to the sea. I hadn’t need to go up on the house-tops, for I didn’t shut my eyes but there it stretched before me. I stirred about the rooms and tried to make them glad once more; but I was thin and blanched as if I’d been rising from a fever. Father said it was the salt air I wanted; and one day he was going out for frost-fish, and he took me with him, and left me and my basket on the sands while he was away. It was this side of the South Breaker that he put me out, but I walked there; and where the surf was breaking in the light, I went and sat down and looked over it. I could do that now.
There was the Cape sparkling miles and miles across the way, unconcerned that he whose firm foot had rung last on its flints should ring there no more; there was the beautiful town lying large and warm along the river; here gay craft went darting about like gulls, and there up the channel sped a larger one, with all her canvas flashing in the sun, and shivering a little spritsail in the shadow, as she went; and fawning in upon my feet came the foam from the South Breaker, that still perhaps cradled Faith and Gabriel. But as I looked, my eye fell, and there came the sea-scenes again,—other scenes than this, coves and corners of other coasts, sky-girt regions of other waters. The air was soft, that April day, and I thought of the summer calms; and with that rose long sheets of stillness, far out from any strand, purple beneath the noon; fields slipping close in-shore, emerald-backed and scaled with sunshine; long sleepy swells that hid the light in their hollows, and came creaming along the cliffs. And if upon these broke suddenly a wild glimpse of some storm careering over a merciless mid-ocean, of a dear dead face tossing up on the surge and snatched back again into the depths, of mad wastes rushing to tear themselves to fleece above clear shallows and turbid sand-bars,—they melted and were lost in peaceful glimmers of the moon on distant flying foam-wreaths, in solemn midnight tides chanting in under hushed heavens, in twilight stretches kissing twilight slopes, in rosy morning waves flocking up the singing shores. And sitting so, with my lids still fallen, I heard a quick step on the beach, and a voice that said, “Georgie!” And I looked, and a figure, red-shirted, towered beside me, and a face, brown and bearded and tender, bent above me.
Oh! it was Dan!
[Footnote A: This monograph, has been prepared almost entirely from original authorities. Citations will be found in it from letters written by General Gage, Governor Bernard, John Pownall, Lord Barrington, and Lord Hillsborough, which have not been heretofore printed or used. They are from the rich historical collections of JARED SPARKS,—who has liberally permitted the writer to use original papers as freely as though they were his own. Among other sources from which the narrative has been drawn is an unfinished Life of Samuel Adams, in manuscript, by Samuel Adams Wells, for the liberal use of which, and for other papers, the writer is indebted to GEORGE BANCROFT. The materials have been mostly taken, however, from a compilation which the writer has had for several years in manuscript, entitled, “The Life and Times of Joseph Warren.”]
As John Adams, in the evening of his life, and in the retirement of Quincy, looked back on the scenes through which he had passed, he dwelt on the removal of the British troops from Boston in the month of March, 1770, as an event that profoundly stirred the public mind, and thus contributed to promote that radical change in affections and principles on the paramount subject of sovereignty, which he regarded as constituting the real American Revolution.
The more this chapter of history is examined, the more there will be found in it to justify the judgment of the venerable patriot. It is fragrant with the political aroma of the time; and the event seems worthy to stand out in the American Revolution, like the Arrest of the Five Members in the English Revolution. It is identified with a great principle. It formed the crisis of an issue of the deepest moment. It culminated in the triumph of the people when roused by passion and high resolve to heroic manhood. The trial-scene was on so important a stage, was so richly dramatic, had actors of such dignity of character, and was so instinct with the national life, as “to deserve to be painted as much as the Surrender of Burgoyne.” It was the moment when Samuel Adams, in the name of a resolute people, made the demand, as an ultimatum, for an immediate removal of the troops. The close connection of this patriot with the whole transaction led Lord North, ever after, to call these troops by the title of “Sam Adams’s Two Regiments.”
The story of the introduction of these troops into Boston, also, is rich in matter illustrative of the springs of political action. The narrative soon shows that it relates to far more than an ordinary transfer of a military force from one station to another. Such transfers are not preceded by long hesitation in cabinets, or by long torture of peaceful communities in expectation of their arrival. Yet such was the preface to the landing of this force in Boston. It was sent on an uncommon service,—a service insulting to a loyal people; and though this people had hailed the flag that waved over it with enthusiasm from the fields of Louisburg and Quebec, they now looked upon it with sorrowing eyes as the symbol of arbitrary power.
These troops were ordered to Boston at an interesting period of the American struggle. The movement against the Stamp Act, noble as it was in the main, had phases that were deeply deplored by reflecting patriots. Such were the riots, attended by destruction of property and personal outrage, which, though common in England, were violative of that reverence for law that was thoroughly ingrained in the American character; and they were, besides, rather in the spirit of hasty and irregular insurrection than of the slow and majestic development of revolution. “We are not able in this way,” wrote Jonathan Mayhew, “to contend against Great Britain.”
On the repeal of the Stamp Act, there was an expression of general joy, and controversy subsided. When fresh aggressions, in, the passage of the Revenue Acts of 1767, required a new movement, the popular leaders, profiting by past sad experience, strove to prevent excesses, and patiently labored to build up their cause in the growth of an intelligent public opinion. Even in reference to obnoxious local officials, the word ran through the ranks,—“Let there be no mobs, no riots. Let not the hair of their scalps be touched.” Hard as it is to restrain the rash, when the popular passion is excited, not a life was sacrificed, not a limb even was dislocated, by the patriots of Boston in political action, until the ripe hour of the Lexington rising.
In this way Massachusetts, when called upon to stand by old customs and rights, acted not only in a spirit of fidelity to liberty, but also in a spirit of loyalty to law and order. Her conduct in the Stamp Act crisis turned towards her the eyes and drew towards her the hearts of the other Colonies, and elevated her into what was then a perilous, but is now a proud, pre-eminence; and the call was made on her (1767) in the journals of other Colonies, and copied into the Boston papers, as “the liberties of a common country were again in danger,” “to kindle the sacred flame that should warm and illuminate the continent.” So instinctively did the common peril suggest the thought and expression of a common country.
The Loyalists, for years, put Boston as in a pillory for punishment. It was (they said) the head-quarters of sedition. It was the fountain of opposition to the Government. It was under the rule of a trained mob. It was swayed to and fro by a few popular leaders. It was the nest of a faction. James Otis and Samuel Adams were the two consuls. Joseph Warren was one of the chiefs. John Hancock was possessed of great wealth and of large social and commercial influence. Such leaders, bankrupts on the exchange or in character, controlled everything. They controlled the clubs,—and there was not a social company or political club that did not claim to have to do with the Government: they controlled the town-meetings,—and these were the instrumentalities of rebellion: and the town-meetings controlled the legislature, and this controlled the Province. Then the local press was filled with incendiary matter from the cabinet of the faction. Thus the spirits who led in the clubs, the town-meetings, and the legislature supplied the seditious writing that was scattered broadcast over the Colonies, and poisoned as it spread.
There was some truth in this Loyalist strain. Patriotic rays gathered and drew to a focus in Boston, and there became intensified with a steady power. The town had jealousies to encounter and prejudices to overcome; but, as if to the manner born, it acted in a spirit of such comprehensive patriotism that it came to be regarded as an exponent of the feelings of the whole country. Its key-note was Union. In fitting words Philadelphia (1768) grandly said to Boston,—“Let us never forget that our strength depends on our union, and our liberty on our strength; united we conquer, divided we die.” Boston returned the pledge, “warmly to recommend and industriously to promote that union among the several Colonies which is so indispensably necessary for the security of the whole.”
Boston at this period is usually described as a noted and opulent trading town,—the Great Town,—the Metropolis of New England,—the best situated for commerce in North America,—the largest city in the American British Empire. It had the air of an English city. Its commodious residences had spacious lawns and gardens and fields; while the contents of its stores, as seen in advertisements that sometimes cover a broadside of the journals, and the number of ship-yards that are shown by the maps to have girdled the town, betoken its business activity. Its population of sixteen thousand, with its three thousand voters, and no pauper class, had carefully nurtured the common school, and was characterized not only by love of order, but by enterprise, intelligence, and public spirit. It early welcomed the doctrine of a right in the people to interpret the religious law and to fashion, the political law, and thus practically welcomed freedom of thought and of utterance, and acknowledged allegiance only to truth. It had tested for more than a century the working of this principle, as it was carried out in the congregation and in the municipality, in the Church and in the State. By it each citizen was made deeply interested in the support of liberty; and thus the town had not only a public, but a public life, quietly nurtured as worthy citizens were successively called to manage the local affairs. It furnished the instance of a community composed of men of small estates who very rarely had to use a mark for their name, and imbued by the spirit of individual independence toned into a respect for law, which, on the decline of feudalism, began to play a part on the national stage. Thus the political character of Boston was sharply defined and firmly fixed. It started in the republican way, went on for over a century in republican habits, and had the priceless heirloom of principles and traditions that were certainly life-giving, and may not inaptly be termed national. The prediction was publicly uttered here, two centuries ago, and printed, that a day would come when “those that were branded before for Huguenots and Lollards and Hereticks, they should be thought the only men to be fit to have crowns upon their heads, and independent government committed to them”; and the crown that shone with superior lustre was progress in things that elevate and adorn humanity.
Such a government, so far as it regarded local affairs, the people substantially enjoyed under the protecting wing of a proud nationality. They loved the old flag. They claimed its history as their history, and its glory as their glory. It gave security to their rights as men, as Christians, and as Englishmen. It thus sheltered the precious body of civil and religious liberties which they were in the habit of speaking of as the rights of mankind. For this they were attached to the English Constitution. For this they said, “Dear England!” Their strong expressions in favor of the union with Great Britain
This idea of creating a new nationality was forced on the Colonies by wanton aggressions on the local self-government. There was far from unanimity of opinion as to the acts, much less as to the ascribed purposes of the Ministry. Setting aside a class of no-party men in peace and of non-combatants in war, the people of Boston, as of other places, were divided into the friends and the opponents of the Administration, Loyalists and Whigs. The Whigs held that the new policy was flat aggression on the old republican way, hostile to their normal political life,—in a word, unconstitutional: the Loyalists maintained that the new policy was required to preserve the dependence on Great Britain, and therefore a necessity. The Whigs, zealous as they were for the local government, claimed to be loyal to the King: the Loyalists, however zealous for the independence of Parliament, claimed, in supporting the supremacy of law, to be friends of freedom. As it was not the original purpose of the Loyalists to invoke for their country the curse of arbitrary power, so it was not the original purpose of the Whigs to sever relations with the British crown. Men, however, are but instruments in the hands of Providence. Both parties drifted into measures which neither party originally proposed or even desired; and thus the Loyalist, to maintain the sovereignty of Parliament, grew into the defender of arbitrary power, and the Whig, to preserve the local government, grew into the asserter of national independence.
Nor was there unanimity among the Patriots themselves as to the way in which the Revenue Acts ought to be opposed; indeed, some were averse to making any opposition to them; but at length the policy of uniting the Colonies in the non-importation agreement, after being talked over at one of the political clubs in Boston, was agreed upon at a public meeting, and sent out to the country. Hence this was the period fixed upon by the Ministry as the time when the popular leaders made themselves liable to the penalties of violated law. When, in England, the idea was entertained and acted upon, that nothing would restore the authority of the Government but the arrest and transportation
This language was addressed to Francis Bernard, who was at this time the highest representative of British power in Boston. He was a native of England, an Oxford graduate, and, from the training of Solicitor of Doctors Commons, was sent over, by the favor of aristocratic relationship, to be the Governor of New Jersey, and now for eight years had been Governor of Massachusetts. He was a scholar, and kept his memory of Alma Mater fresh. He loved literature and science, could write elegies in Latin and Greek, used to say that he could repeat the whole of Shakspeare, and had such gifts of conversation as to charm the social circle. His politics were of the Oxford school, and old at that. He looked upon the people with distrust, and upon the king with veneration: the people had good claim to be well governed, and British Imperialism had the divine right to govern them well. He was a good hater of republican institutions; habitually spoke of the local self-government as a trained mob; and to it (he was not far from right here) he ascribed the temper of the community which he was set to care for and to rule. It was vexatious to his Tory spirit to see the democratic element, which had excluded primogeniture and the hereditary principle and large landed estates, so firmly bedded here, as if for a mighty superstructure; and his reform plans tended to a change to centralization. It was a marvel to him, that this work, which he deemed essential to the maintenance of British power here, had not been begun long before,—that Charles II. had not made a clean sweep of the little New England republics. He urged that this ought to be done now,—that more general governments ought to take their place, with executives having vice-regal powers; and of course, being English, he urged that they should be moulded by England into a shape as nearly as possible like England and for the benefit of England, and thus be made homogeneous. He sighed to impose the dazzle of a miniature St. James on reality-loving New England: as though the soil which had been furrowed for a race of sovereigns could grow a crop of lords; as though the Norman role of privilege could be engrafted on a society imbued with the Saxon spirit of equality: and he clinched the absurdity of his thought by uttering the prediction, that, though the people might bluster a little when such reform was proposed, yet they never would resist by force; and if they did, a demonstration of British power, such as the presence of the King’s troops in a few coast-towns and the occupation of a few harbors by the royal navy, would soon settle the contest.
As such an arrogant official, from yet unsealed Oxford heights, thus paternally looked down over Boston and New England, he could see in the little self-directing communities that clustered about the village church and the public school but a race of nobodies. He may be pardoned for not finding greatness in art, literature, or science in the circle that has been called the Athens of America; he could not be expected to measure the rich and enduring fame of a Jonathan Edwards; and it was an article in the then Oxford creed, that there could not be, unmoulded by the influences of an hereditary nobility, such a general product as a people lifted up by education and religion into a self-directing race of high-minded men, as the basis of a State. But a small class of British observers, who had other principles and other eyes, saw now in Boston the most orderly town and the most intelligent and moral people on the face of the earth; and said—the words were printed (1768) in London, and reproduced in the local press here—that no people since the ruin of the Roman Commonwealth seemed to entertain more just ideas of liberty or breathed forth a truer spirit of independence than these American colonists. Now Governor Bernard and his political friends regarded the chafings of such a people at what they held to be palpable aggressions on their established system of local government as the acts of a trained mob, and proofs of a long-matured design to cast off allegiance to the British crown and of an immediate purpose of insurrection; and for years they systematically urged, and attempted to fortify their policy by the most unscrupulous misrepresentations, that nothing could check this anarchical element and traitorous design but the abrogation of fundamental parts of the local constitution and the implanting of a feudal exotic by military power. The people claimed to be as free as the English were, and the calumnies were heaped on them of being anarchists and rebels.
This theory of insurrection was acted upon by the Governor as long as he remained in the Province. Every hasty word of the violent, and every public deliberation of the wise as well, were made to nurture this theory. By acting on such premises, besides doing gross injustice to the people, he made himself ridiculous. Still he clung tenaciously to his error and his plans as long as he remained in office; and even after he returned to England, the course of the Patriots continued to strengthen his convictions, and he wrote back that it was “plainly the design of the chiefs of the Boston faction to measure swords with Great Britain.”
Though Governor Bernard had long thought a military force necessary to sustain the new measures, yet he refused to make a requisition for it. He expected the Government, of its own motion, would order troops to Boston in the time of the Stamp Act, and looked for trouble on their arrival. “The crisis,” he wrote, (September 1, 1766,) “which I apprehend most danger from, is the introduction of King’s troops into this town, which, having become necessary to the support of the Government, will be placed to the account of the Governor.” But no troops were ordered then. He never was able to get his Council, even when he supposed a majority agreed with him in politics, to recommend their introduction; for no policy or measure which even such a Council indorsed required troops to enforce it. The Governor, however, was a zealous advocate of the new policy of the Ministry, which he judged could not be carried out without military force; but his point was, that, along with the stiff instructions to carry that policy out, the Ministry ought to supply force enough to do it.
The new Revenue Acts provided for a Board called the Commissioners of Customs, who were empowered to collect duties along a truly imperial line of coast, extending from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico. They were appointed to reside in Boston. They were five in number,—Charles Paxton, Henry Hulton, William Burch, John Robinson, and John Temple. Not much is said of Hulton and Burch, who appear to have been simply zealous partisans; Robinson’s violent temper is seen in his savage assault on Otis; Temple was not in favor of the creation of the Board, and won its enmity by taking exceptions to its doings; Paxton was charged with being the father of the Board and its chief. He was a zealous official, with a clean Tory record, of bland, courtlike ways, and certificated to England as Bernard’s confidential friend. There he is said to have “whined, cried, professed, swore, and made his will in favor of that great man,” Charles Townshend, whom, when in Boston, he had supplied with funds, and thus gained his objects. This Board soon became a severe and chronic local irritant. The foreign ways of its members, for most of them were strangers, supplied the wits of the town with material for satire, while its main acts were as iron to the soul of a high-spirited community. As it was created to collect taxes held to be unconstitutional, it could not have been popular; but it discharged an ungracious task in an ungracious way; and so singularly ill-judged was its action, that, while it excited odium here, it elicited censure in England.
The Commissioners were full believers in the theory that the popular leaders designed insurrection. The Governor, in a letter to Lord Barrington, (March 8, 1768,) relates that they would ask him what support he could give them, “if there should be insurrection.” “I answer,” Bernard says, “‘None at all.’ They then desire me to apply to the General for troops. I tell them I cannot do it; for I am directed to consult the Council about requiring troops, and they will never advise it, let the case be ever so desperate. Indeed, I no more dare apply for troops than the Council dare advise me to it. Ever since I have perceived that the wickedness of some and the folly of others will in the end bring troops here, I have conducted myself so as to be able to say, and swear to it, if the Sons of Liberty shall require it, that I have never applied for troops; and therefore, my Lord, I beg that nothing I now write may be considered such an application.” This is a fair show for this royal official. He begins his letter by telling how, within ten days just passed, nights have been twice fixed upon for a mob; at the close, he returns to the matter of a mob, and tells how he has promised the Commissioners an asylum at the Castle in case of a mob; and he warns his superior that a mob, unchecked, “might put the Commissioners and all their officers on board ship, and send them back to England.” This was the Governor’s method of not asking for troops. The Commissioners, at least, asked for troops in a manly way. “About a fortnight ago,” Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson writes, (March 23, 1768,) “I was in consultation with the Commissioners. They were very desirous the Governor should——for a R——. If he had done it, by some means or other it would have transpired, and there is no saying to what lengths the people would have gone in their resentment.” The letter just cited explains why the Governor did not send for a regiment.
A few days after this consultation the Patriots celebrated the anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act by a day of general rejoicing. There were things that could be perverted, and were perverted, into signs of mob-rule and disloyalty. Daylight revealed hanging on the Liberty Tree effigies of Commissioner Paxton and Inspector Williams, the latter of whom, being a cabinet-maker, had a glue-pot by his side, but by order of the popular leaders they were soon removed; there were salutes, liberty toasts, and other joyful demonstrations, and in the evening a procession, which was quite harmless, though, as it went along the street by the Province House, somewhat noisy, so that the Governor said that he and his family were disturbed. But there was an allegation that ran deeper than processions, and which went to the meaning of these rejoicings. The Loyalists said that the Patriots congratulated one another on their glorious victory over England in the repeal of the Stamp Act; and if the Tory relations may be believed, there were men in Boston who were so foolish as to say,—We have shown our spirit; we have convinced them of our resentment; they repealed their foolish act; they durst not do otherwise; if they had, we should have ruined them. And the Loyalists said, that, when the mother-country had a right to look for gratitude, she actually met with insult.
With such views of the day, it is easy to see how its proceedings might be perverted. They were represented to the Ministry by Governor Bernard as signs of a rebellious spirit; and were made the ground by the Commissioners of a direct application to Commodore Hood, at Halifax, for the protection of a naval force,—he being advised that the conduct and temper of the people, the adverse aspect of things in general, the security of the revenue, the safety of its officers, and the honor of Government required immediate aid; and the hope being expressed that he would find it consistent with the King’s other service to afford such assistance. The Commodore ordered the Romney to be fitted out with all possible despatch, and, accompanied by two armed schooners, she sailed for Boston. As they came into the harbor, being short of men, a press-gang landed from them, who impressed on board Massachusetts citizens. Ever since the revival of the aggressions on Colonial rights, “Hyperion” (Josiah Quincy, Jr.) says, the Loyalists publicly threatened the defenders of the rights of America with halters, fire, and fagots; but there was nothing more serious than threats, or more authentic than rumors, until this appearance of the Romney and her two tenders.
This show of naval force, though no troops came, was irritating, and multiplied the sayings of the violent, which appear to have been reported to the Governor, who advised the Ministry that he was “well assured that it was the intention of the faction in Boston to cause an insurrection against the crown officers.” At this time he favored Lord Hillsborough with a lucid explanation of a paradox,—how a few leaders of bankrupt reputation ruled with a rod of iron the most virtuous town in the world. “It has been a subject of wonder,” are the Governor’s words, (May 19,1768,) “how the faction which harasses this town, and through it the whole continent, which is known to consist of very few of the lowest kind of gentry, and is directed by three or four persons, bankrupts in reputation as well as in property, should be able to keep in subjection the inhabitants of such a town as this, who possess a hundred times the credit and property (I might say much more) of those who rule them with a rod of iron. This paradox is at once solved by showing that this town is governed by the lowest of the people, and from the time of the Stamp Act to this hour has been and is in the hands of the mob.” He represented the friends of the Government as very desponding, on seeing, unchecked, the imperial power treated with a contempt not only indecent, but almost treasonable. Of such cast were letters read to George III. in his closet, and made the basis of royal instructions which it was claimed had the force of law.
This was an anxious hour in Boston. The journals carried into every circle the reports, private and public, that the Ministry were resolved upon new and decisive measures; and thus this show of force had a painful significance. It was the common talk, that the people were doomed to be taxed to maintain a parcel of sycophants, court favorites, and hungry dependants; that needy lawyers from abroad or tools of power at home would be their judges; and that their governors, if natives, would be partisans rewarded for mercenary service, or if foreigners, would be nobles of wasted fortunes and greedy for salaries to replenish them. Kindling-matter from abroad was thrown on this inflammable public mind at home; for after each arrival the journals would be filled with the enthusiasm of the Wilkes controversy, which then was at its height in England; and if “London resounded the word Liberty from every corner and every voice,” there was an echo in every street and every home in Boston. The people knew they were misrepresented and ill-used, and were sullen. They knew they were in the right, and they were resolute.
In about a month after Governor Bernard had solved the problem how such bankrupts in reputation as Joseph Warren, James Otis, John Hancock, and Samuel Adams ruled the town as with a rod of iron, there was (June 10, 1768) a real mob. The Board of Customs directed the revenue officers, for alleged violations of the revenue laws, to seize the sloop Liberty, owned by Hancock, which they did on a Friday, near the hour of sunset, as the men were going home from their day’s work. And as though the people contemplated forcible resistance to the law, and would refuse to respect the arrest, the sloop, after the broad arrow was put upon her, contrary to the advice of the Collector, was moved, with vulgar and rough words by the officers, from the wharf where she lay, and moored under the guns of the Romney. This was the beginning of a war of epithets, in the usual way of brawls, between the crowd, which kept increasing, and the custom-house officers,—and, by a sort of natural law of mobs, grew into a riot, in which the offending officials were severely pelted with dirt and stones. It is related, that, while Warren, Hancock, and Samuel Adams were in consultation, the mob broke the windows of the residences of the Comptroller and Inspector, and dragged the pleasure-boat of the Collector to the Common, where they burned it. But here Hancock and other popular leaders went among them, and succeeded in restoring quiet. These were outrages, and could not be justified, though the parents of them were the brutal words of the captain of the Romney and the mob procedure of the officers in taking the vessel, which was detained three days without any legal process being filed against her. After all, this was a very slight affair when compared with the contemporary terrific mobs of London and elsewhere, which did not spare the highest officials, and, instead of stopping at breaking glass, pushed into the most costly houses, made complete havoc of furniture, destroyed life, and were checked only by military force and bloodshed. In view of these, Colonel Barre might truly say in the House of Commons, that, in this riot, “Boston was only mimicking the mother-country.”
But the officials, and especially the Commissioners, all but Temple, chose to consider the mob as quite original and American, and as proof that the people of Boston were ripe for open revolt. They regarded the excitement that arose as confirming this view. The Commissioners, who had not been harmed and were not threatened, were the most violent and unreasonable; and though the Governor all Saturday and Sunday endeavored to persuade them “to come into some pacific measures,” yet it was all to no purpose. On Monday morning, they, with the exception of Temple, notified the Governor by a card that they were going on board the Romney, and desired the necessary orders for them to use the Castle; and they took their families with them. They immediately sent Hallowell off to England, and advised the Lords of the Treasury,—“Nothing but the immediate exertion of military power will prevent an open revolt of this town, which may probably spread throughout the Colonies.” Temple, and a number of the subordinates of the Board, remained in town, were not molested, and gathered in the revenue which importers continued to pay.
The town regarded the manner of the seizure of the Liberty as a gross affront, and coupled with it the recent cases impressment; and on Monday things looked threatening. But the popular leaders came out, put themselves at the head of the movement, and guided the indignation along the safe channels of law, in such a manner that it resulted in nothing more violent than petition and remonstrance, calmly, but strongly, expressed through the town-meeting. It is not necessary to detail what took place at the Liberty Tree, in Faneuil Hall, and in the Old South, where the Patriots held the greatest meetings, so it is written, that were ever seen on the American continent At their commencement, on Tuesday morning, at the Liberty Tree, the Governor, whose town-residence was the Province House, was at his country-seat at Jamaica Plain, in Roxbury. He received such startling advices from his friends, as to the doings of the Sons of Liberty, that he sent one of his own sons into town with a message desiring the immediate presence of Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, as he was “in expectation of very important news from town,” and such as would make it necessary for him to withdraw. While with perturbed nerves he awaited Hutchinson’s arrival, he must have been surprised to see moving towards his house, not a Parisian populace, pell-mell, flourishing liberty-caps and pikes, or even a growling London mob, but a peaceful train of eleven cozy chaises, conveying a very respectable committee from a public meeting, at the head of which were Warren, Otis, and Samuel Adams. They bore a petition to the Governor from the town, which protested against the right of Parliament to tax the Colonies, and denied the legality of press-gangs in Massachusetts. “I received them,” are the Governor’s words, “with all possible civility, and having heard their petition,
The Governor’s reply to the town, on the next day, was conciliatory. The petition which the committee presented to him was regarded by Hutchinson as going beyond anything that had yet been advanced in the way of a practical denial of Parliamentary authority; but the Governor wisely declined to argue the vexed question of that day, and as wisely promised redress for the press-gang outrage, all of which was highly satisfactory to the meeting. The chairman, James Otis, made the reply more satisfactory by acknowledging the Governor’s hospitality. Still the men who filled the Old South to overflowing did not omit the duty of stern-worded protest against the aggressions of Parliament; and in an elaborate and admirable paper, marked with Joseph Warren’s energy of soul, they alleged the unconstitutional imposition of taxes as the groundwork of the recent troubles. It was oppression, and it “came down upon the people like an armed man, though they were the subjects of an empire which was the toast of the nations for freedom and liberty.”
It was now the current rumor that this and other aggressions were to be enforced by arms. The idea was abhorrent to the people. A committee, to whom was referred the subject of the rumored introduction of troops, reported to the meeting a resolve to the effect that whoever had urged this measure was “a tyrant in his heart, a traitor and an open enemy to his country”; but though this resolve was advocated by William Cooper, the faithful and intrepid town-clerk, and by others, the resolution finally adopted declared only that any person who should solicit or promote the importation of any troops at this time was an enemy to the town and the Province, and a disturber of the peace and good order of both.
The Governor was now on good terms with the people. He was in the habit of saying that nothing which he had done would bring troops into the town,—that he was desirous of promoting harmony between the Province and the mother-country,—and the memorial to the Ministry in their behalf contained the assurance that they bore “the same sentiments of loyalty and duty towards their gracious King, and the same reverence for the great council of the nation, the British Parliament, as ever.” This was the truth, touchingly expressed. The Bostonians never considered the Parliament to be such an embodiment of Imperialism that it could rightfully mould their local institutions, or control their congregations
But he quietly lighted his fusee, when the horizon became all aglow with what to the Loyalists was the lurid flame of destruction, but to the Patriots was as light from heaven. The occasion is too well known to need more than a glance. The House of Representatives, on the eleventh of February, had sent its famous Circular Letter to the other Colonies, proposing, that, in the present crisis, there should be unity of action among them. The Loyalists charged that this was an attempt to organize a Confederacy, and therefore was revolutionary; the Patriots averred that its sole object was to unite in petition and remonstrance for redress of grievances, and therefore that it was constitutional; the Ministry regarded the act as in the last degree dangerous to the prerogative, and ordered Governor Bernard to demand of the House to recall or rescind this Circular Letter. The communication of this order was what the Governor called lighting his fusee. His daily letters show precisely his state of mind as he touched it off. He saw a determination to resist Great Britain; he was told that the people were making preparations to do it; and he wrote to his relative, Viscount Barrington, who had the entree of the royal closet,—sending the letter by Hallowell,—with rather more than the usual emphasis of error,—“I am sure that things are coming apace to a crisis, and I fear the Bostonians will get the start of you.” In this mood the Governor sent in the arrogant British demand. The House, (June 26, 1768,) by the memorable vote of ninety-two to seventeen, flatly refused to comply with the royal order; whereupon the Governor, as the punishment, dissolved the General Court; and for many months Massachusetts was without a legislature.
These were of the order of events that take fast hold of the public mind. Far and wide and profound was the sensation; and the unity of the response from abroad, made known to the people through the press, was truly inspiring. “We all rejoice,” says a letter, “in what your Assembly has done, and join in acclamations to the glorious Ninety-Two. ’Twas certainly the most important case an American assembly ever acted upon.” This brief narrative is uncommonly suggestive. The letter of Bernard is a testimony to the kindly disposition of the people, who were ready to return much gratitude for little service, and who only asked to be left to the measure of freedom that was enjoyed by their brethren in England; the magnificent No which the House gave to the royal command shows how they could maintain their self-respect, and stand by their local government; and the general indorsement of the action of the House in other Colonies indicates a community of interest in each other’s destiny.
The replies of local legislatures, as they were printed from time to time in the journals, filled the hearts of the Boston patriots with joy. Hutchinson, who kept constant watch of these things, and who rightly estimated the importance of the formation of public opinion, wrote,—“The action of the other Colonies keeps up the spirit of our demagogues. I am told Adams and Cooper say it is the most glorious day they ever saw.” They saw a general manifestation of a spirit of unity in the support of common rights. Without union they knew they were nothing; with union they felt equal to all things. Thus here were working two of the elements of our political system, local self-government and American nationality.
The June mob, the public meetings, the vote of the House of Representatives, and the union feeling supplied zealous Loyalists with rich material to pervert into fresh argument for the necessity of troops to keep the people in order. It was promptly seized upon. The Commissioners set out the Boston tumults as the heralds of a rebellion that had begun its course over the continent. They not only sent a batch of falsehoods to England by Hallowell, but they also sent letters to General Gage, the Commander-in-Chief, whose head-quarters were in New York, with a request for troops, and to Commodore Hood at Halifax asking for more ships. General Gage was surprised at not receiving letters from the Governor, but with a soldier’s promptness he at once (June 24) tendered to Governor Bernard all the force he might need to preserve the public peace; yet regarding it as improper to order the King’s forces into a Province to quell a riot without a requisition from the Executive, he frankly advised the Governor to this effect. But the Governor did not want troops to quell a riot, and said so; and in answer to the tender, returned a long and heavy disquisition, showing why, though he considered troops essential to the promotion of the good of his country, he did not and would not
The ships promptly arrived, and were moored about Castle William; but no troops appeared, though early in July the Governor felt sure they were ordered here from Halifax, from the fact that General Gage sent a batch of despatches, under cover to him, addressed to Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple, the senior British officer in command at that station. On forwarding these despatches, Bernard wrote to Dalrymple,—“You know that my situation requires that I should appear to know as little in the proceedings of this kind as can well be. I should, therefore, be obliged to you, if in conducting a business of this kind you would let me appear a stranger to it until it becomes necessary to communicate it to me officially. In the mean time any private hints, conveyed to me by a safe hand, will be acceptable.”
A straightforward British officer must have conceived contempt for such an official, even before subsequent action on the part of this official elicited an expression of it.
The Governor was doomed to disappointment. The orders which he transmitted merely placed troops in readiness to proceed to Boston on his requisition, which requisition he steadily refused to make, and he wrote,—“The crisis awaits the arrival of the troops, and I now learn they are not coming.” He next officially laid the tender of the Commanding General before the Council, when he found that its members were unanimously of the opinion that troops were not required. Now this body contained decided Loyalists; and this unanimity of opinion appears to have amazed the Governor. He advised Lord Barrington, that the fact convinced him that he could “no longer depend upon the Council for the support of the small remains of royal and parliamentary power now left, the whole of which had been gradually impeached, arraigned, and condemned under his eye”; which was arrant party-misrepresentation. He further expressed the opinion that the sending of troops to Boston ought to be a business of quartering and cantonment. “It is no secret,” he said, “that this ought to have been done two years and a half ago. If it had, there would have been no opposition to Parliament now, and above all, no such combinations as threaten (but I hope vainly) the overthrow of the British Empire. If provision was to have been made against faction and sedition, the head-quarters should have been secured.” Instead of this, “Boston has been left under a trained mob from August 14, 1765, to this present July 23, 1768.”
While these things had been going on here, the die as to Massachusetts and Boston had been cast in the British cabinet, by the conclusion to place a military force at the command of the Governor. This decision was reached before the June meeting or the June riot; and it is quite in vain to seek the real reason for it in what appears on paper about the processions on the eighteenth of March or the equally insignificant prior manifestations. Hutchinson and Gage and other Loyalists admitted that all these were trifles. The Ministers were no strangers to mobs; even if there had been as violent ones in Boston as there were in London, they could not have acted upon them as proofs of disloyalty. Besides the calumnies that made out the popular leaders to be anarchists, that perverted love of the local government into a desire for independence, there was one that touched the pride of the mother-country; for the Loyalists said of the Bostonians,—(there is nothing like the language of the time to embody the spirit of the time,)—that “every dirty fellow, just risen from his kennel, congratulated his neighbor on their glorious victory over England; and they were so intoxicated with their own vast importance, that the lowest wretch among them conceived himself superior to the first English merchant.” This was falsehood; for it is certain that the joy for the repeal of the Stamp Act was joy for harmony restored between the Colonies and Great Britain.
Thus, owing to such representations, while the people of Boston were deliberating in the great town-meetings of June, orders were on their way to General Gage, whose head-quarters were in New York, to place troops in Castle William, to station a detachment in Boston, and to keep a naval force in the harbor. The despatch of Lord Hillsborough, addressed to Governor Bernard, communicating this conclusion, was elaborate and able, and laid down in full the policy of the Government. The instructions were based on the pretence that Boston was “in possession of a licentious and unrestrained mob”; that it was animated by a disposition “to resist the laws and to deny the authority of Parliament”; and that the alleged “illegal and unwarrantable measures which had been pursued in opposing the officers of the revenue in the execution of their duty, and for intimidating the civil magistrates, showed the necessity of strengthening the hands of the Government.” This despatch refers to five of Bernard’s letters as containing such representations. It is worthy of remark, that Lord Hillsborough sharply rebuked the Governor for having all along asked the advice of the Council as to the introduction of the troops; for to admit such a function in the Council, he said, was to concede a power inconsistent with the Constitution. “It is you,” are the official words, “to whom the Crown has delegated its authority, and you alone are responsible for the best use of it.”
This action was unknown to the popular leaders, and the month of August passed in doubt as to whether the Ministers would be persuaded to quarter troops in Boston. The town was remarkably quiet, when the Governor issued (August 3, 1768) a proclamation against riots, and calling all magistrates to suppress tumults and unlawful assemblies, and to restore vigor and firmness to the Government. “It cannot be wondered at,” said “Determinatus,” (August 8,) in the “Gazette,” “if the mother-country should think that we are in a state of confusion equal to what we hear from the orderly and very polite cities of London and Westminster. There, we are told, is the weavers’ mob, the seamen’s mob, the tailors’ mob, the coal-miners’ mob, and some say the clergy’s mob; and, in short, it is to be feared the whole kingdom, always excepting the * * * * and P——t, will unite in one general scene of tumult. I sincerely pray for the peace and prosperity of the nation and her colonies, whose interest, if she would open her eyes, she would clearly discern to be undivided.” The journals during this month have full details of these mobs. The coal-heavers of Wapping destroyed property and committed murders, and two thousand keel-men and sailors of Sunderland fairly beat off the King’s troops that were sent against them from Newcastle. Happily such want of reverence for law was unknown in Boston or the Province. Still the Governor kept on representing that he was under the control of a mob; and another day of rejoicing gave him another opportunity of misrepresenting the people. This was the fourteenth of August, being the third celebration of the uprising against the Stamp Act. In the procession on this occasion there was one man who had had a hand in the attack on the Lieutenant-Governor’s house on the twenty-sixth of August, and had in consequence incurred the penalty of death, and who was now celebrating his mob-exploits; and at the head of the procession were two Boston merchants, who thus were charged with countenancing mobs. The Governor well knew that the Patriots abhorred the outrages of the twenty-sixth of August as much as they gloried in the uprising against the stamp-duty on the fourteenth of August. Hutchinson, moreover, was a good deal disturbed by the public affronts put upon the Commissioners, who were still at the Castle, though their subordinates were in town collecting the revenue. The Cadets, on motion of Hancock, voted to exclude them from the usual public dinner; and the town voted to refuse the use of Faneuil Hall for the dinner, unless with the stipulation that the Commissioners were not to be invited. Such proceedings, with petitions and resolutions, made nearly the whole outrage of the Boston “trained mob” that the Governor talked about. Yet he affected to be in fear of an insurrection, and on the last day of the month whiningly wrote,—“The town is at present just as defensible as it was two years ago,—not a sergeant’s guard of real soldiers within two hundred miles of it.”
In a few days after, on a Saturday night, William Sheriff, aide-de-camp to General Gage, arrived in town from New York, which he left on Wednesday morning, bearing the following letter to Governor Bernard, the original of which is indorsed, “Received Sept. 3.”
* * * * *
“New York, Aug. 31,1768.
“Sir,—It is not necessary to trouble you with any answers to your letters, and I only acknowledge the receipt of them.
“I am now to acquaint you that I have received orders to send forces to Boston, and would regulate the number to be sent agreeable to your opinion of the number that will be necessary. Captain Sheriff, my aide-de-camp, goes to Boston under pretence of private business, and will deliver you this letter. He is directed to settle this matter with you; and you may rely on his discretion, prudence, and secrecy. I have intrusted him with a letter of orders to the commander of his Majesty’s forces at Halifax to embark with the 14th Regiment, and left a blank in the letter for Captain Sheriff to fill up with the like order for the 29th Regiment, in case you shall judge it proper to have the whole or any part of the 29th Regiment, as well as the 14th, and not think one regiment a sufficient force. When you shall have fixed the matter with Captain Sheriff, you will be so good as to send me immediate notice, that I may without delay write you a public letter to demand quarters for the numbers that will be ordered into your Province. The contents of this, as well as your answer, and everything I now transact with you, will be kept a profound secret, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
“It is submitted in my letters, whether it would not be advisable, as troops will probably continue at Boston, to take possession of Castle William, which, being a place of some strength, may in case of emergency be of great service, and it is said to belong to the Crown.
“You will be so good as to fix with Captain Sheriff, whether you would have the whole, or any part of the troops ordered to Boston, quartered in Castle William. If you should be of opinion that troops stationed there will not answer the intention of sending them to Boston, for the purposes of enforcing a due obedience to the laws, and protecting and supporting the civil magistrates and the officers of the Crown in the execution of their duty, part may be stationed there, and part in the town. Should you require both the regiments from Halifax, one of them, or three or four companies of one of them, might be quartered in the Castle, and you would then have an entire regiment and five companies of another in the city. I mention this, but leave it to your determination; and you will regulate this matter with Captain Sheriff according to the number of troops you think necessary to be sent to Boston. You will be pleased to give me notice of your resolves on this head.
“I don’t know if you can supply bedding for such of the troops as you would choose to be lodged in the Castle; if not, Captain Sheriff will write to Lieutenant-Colonel Dalrymple to bring bedding with him from Halifax, sufficient for the number of men you shall fix upon for the garrison of Castle William.
“I have the honor to be with great regard,
“Sir,
“Your most
obedient,
“Humble
servant,
“TH’S.
GAGE.”
Such was the mode in which the Sam Adams Regiments were ushered into Boston According to this letter, the Governor himself, substantially, gave the order that brought all but the Fourteenth Regiment,—an order which was to “be kept a profound secret, at least on this side of the Atlantic.”
At this time the mass of the citizens Boston were very bitter and suspicious towards all who were in any way supposed to be concerned in urging the introduction of troops among them; because troops had come to be looked upon as means of subjugating them to laws to which they never would give their consent through their representatives. The fiery Josiah Quincy, Jr., would say,—“Before the freeborn sons of the North will yield a general and united submission to any tyrannic power on earth, fire and sword, desolation and ruin, will ravage the land.” The intrepid Samuel Adams would say,—“Before the King and Parliament shall dragoon us, and we become slaves, we will take up arms and our last drop of blood.” The calm Andrew Eliot would say,—“You cannot conceive of our distress: to have a standing army! What can be worse to a people who have tasted the sweets of liberty?” Hutchinson wrote,—“Many of the common people were in a frenzy, and talked of dying in defence of their liberties,” while “too many above the vulgar countenanced and encouraged them.” Such was the intensity of the public feeling; such the earnestness with which liberty was ranked above material prosperity. It was now to be seen whether the American cause was to suffer shipwreck on the rock of premature insurrection, or whether it was to be led on by such cautious and wise steps as develop into the majesty of revolution.
The present public alarm was occasioned by vague statements from abroad or rumors started at home as to the coming of a military force. Troops were ordered in from the outposts of Canada to Halifax; an unusual naval force was gathering at that station; it was said that the destination of both was Boston: but the Governor persisted in denying that he had done anything that would bring troops here, and kept on playing the know-nothing. This created a painful suspense, and, to cool observers, the policy of the Government appeared inexplicable. But however deep may have been the indignation of the people at the prospect of military rule, it was no part of the plan of the popular leaders, if troops came here, to resist the landing, or to allow the rash spirits, who are ever ready for any imprudence, to do so; but their object was to fix in the public mind a just sense of the rights thus violated, to guide the general indignation into a safe channel of action, and thus turn the insult to the benefit of the general cause.
Two days after the Governor received the letter of General Gage, a communication appeared in the “Boston Gazette,” under the head of “READER! ATTEND!” which arraigned, with uncommon spirit and boldness, the course of the officials who were urging the policy of arbitrary power, as having a direct tendency “to dissolve the union between Great Britain and her colonies.” It proposed to remonstrate against this policy to the King, and at the same time to declare that “there was nothing this side eternity they dreaded more than being broken off from his government.” In urging resistance to this course the author said,—“We will put our lives in our hands, and cry to the Judge of all the Earth, who will do right.”
This paper, like many similar appeals in that well-stored Liberty arsenal, the “Boston Gazette,” had the genuine Liberty ring, yet there was in it nothing very unusual; but the royal circle at the Province House lived in an unusual atmosphere, and this article came sounding in among them like a great moral Dahlgren. “In the Boston Gazette of the fifth instant,” the Governor, with his usual acuteness, wrote to the Secretary of State, “appeared a paper containing a system of politics exceeding all former exceedings. Some took it for the casual ravings of an occasional enthusiast. But I persuaded myself that it came out of the cabinet of the faction, and was preparatory to some actual operations against the Government. In this persuasion, I considered, that, if the troops from Halifax were to come here on a sudden, there would be no avoiding an insurrection, which would at least fall upon the crown officers, if it did not amount to an opposition to the troops. I therefore thought it would be best that the expectation of the troops should be gradually communicated, that the heads of the faction might have time to consider well what they were about, and prudent men opportunity to interpose their advice.” Accordingly (September 8) he “took an occasion to mention to one of the Council, in the way of discourse, that he had private advice that troops were ordered to Boston, but had no public orders about it”; and before night, the Governor adds, the intelligence was all over the town.
Before night, too, a petition, addressed to the Selectmen, was circulating all over the town, and large numbers were affixing their names to it. It prayed that the town might be legally convened to require of the Governor the reasons for his declaration that three regiments might be daily expected, and “to consider of the most wise, consistent, and salutary measure suitable to meet the occasion.” The Selectmen acted promptly, (John Hancock was on the Board,) and summoned the citizens to meet on the Monday following. In this way, openly before men, not covertly like a body of conspirators, did the solid men and prudent men of Boston prepare for council.
Though the Governor averred that his object, in his verbal communication, was to give a chance for an interposition of such sound advice, yet to Lord Hillsborough he actually represented the call and the movement of these men as proofs that the long-contemplated insurrection was now at hand. He informed the Secretary, that on the next evening (Friday) there was a large private meeting, where “it was the general opinion that they should raise the country and oppose the troops”; and that on the succeeding evening (Saturday) there was a very small private meeting at the house of one of the chiefs, where it was resolved “to surprise and take the Castle the Monday night following.” The Governor evidently had misgivings about its being the fact that such an object was planned. “I don’t,” he said, “relate these as facts, but only as reported and believed.” I have found no account of the Friday-evening meeting, which undoubtedly was a meeting of one of the political clubs of the time; but on Saturday evening James Otis and Samuel Adams met at Warren’s residence in Hanover Street (on the site of the American House) for conference as to Monday’s meeting,—for instance, to draw up the resolves and decide upon the action that might be expedient: whatever may have been the warmth of expression of popular leaders, or the wishes of extremists among the people, the whole object of this conference was to concentrate and use only the moral force of public opinion; and there is not a trace of a design of insurrection in all the known private correspondence of these patriots.
However, the belief in insurrection, at this time, appears to have been as strongly rooted in the minds of prominent Loyalists as it was in the mind of the again perturbed Governor. Signs of what is thought to be near at hand are apt to be seen or fancied; and it was so in this case. Somebody had put a turpentine barrel in the skillet that hung at the top of the beacon-pole on Beacon Hill. Now it had been designed, for a long time, by such a mode of bonfire, to alarm the country, in case of invasion. This fact was put with another fact, namely, that the beacon had been newly repaired; and from the two facts was drawn the startling inference, that matters were ready for a rising in the town, and for giving the concerted signal to summon in the country to aid this rising,—and this, too, when the Governor had not a sergeant’s guard of real soldiers nearer than two hundred miles. And now members of the Council flocked to the Governor and demanded a meeting of this imposing body; and a meeting was promptly held at a gentleman’s residence half-way between Boston and Jamaica Plain, where, after grave debate about taking down the barrel, it was finally voted to make a formal demand on the Board of Selectmen to order it to be done. On the next day, (Sunday,) the Fathers of the Town held a special meeting to consider the vote of the Council, which resulted in declining to act on this matter of taking down the barrel as too trivial. About the hour of dining, on this day, however, Sheriff Greenleaf gave some peace to the frightened officials by repairing to Beacon Hill with half a dozen others and removing the obnoxious barrel, which proved to be empty. The public did not hear the last of this affair for months, as may be seen in the affidavits about it, afterwards, in the journals.
There was really no ground for all this alarm. The popular leaders, from the excited state of the public mind, might have been apprehensive of an explosion from the rash, which they meant, if possible, to prevent, and if it came, to repress; but the Loyalist leaders would have it that there was a deep-laid plot even for a revolution. “It is now known,” is Governor Bernard’s malicious misrepresentation, as he reviewed these scenes and justified the introduction of the troops, “that the plan was to seize the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor and take possession of the treasury, and then set up their standard.” He said that five hundred men had been enrolled to take the Castle, and it was likely that the names, at least of the chief of them, would be discovered. There is no such list in thirteen folio volumes of his correspondence. Hutchinson’s misrepresentation was as mischievous, but more cautious; for he assured his British correspondents that at the time when the troops landed in Boston the Province was on the brink of ruin, and that their arrival prevented the most extravagant measures,—though, he said, he did not certainly know what the dark designs of the heads of the opposition were.
On the morning of the town-meeting, (September 12,) Governor Bernard believed that the popular leaders were resolved not merely to capture the crown officials, but to resume the first charter, which, he said, had not a single ingredient of royalty in it. But while he was looking for insurrection, a committee of the highest respectability waited on him, and asked him to be pleased to communicate to the town the grounds and assurances on which he had intimated his apprehensions that one or more regiments might he daily expected. On the next day the Governor replied in writing,—“My apprehensions that some of his Majesty’s troops are to be expected in Boston arise from information of a private nature; I have received no public letters notifying to me the coming of such troops.” The information came by letter from the only official in the country who could order troops into Boston, and yet he said it was private; according to this letter, he must have decided on the number of troops that were to come, and yet he prattled about apprehensions. Such was the way in which a royal Governor of the Stuart school dealt with a people filled with patriotic concern for their country. It is the dealing of a small man. If he can escape the charge of deliberate falsehood, it is only, on demurrer, by the plea of a contemptible quibble.
It is not necessary here to follow the noble popular demonstrations that rounded off by a delegate convention, which, at the simple request of Boston, assembled in Faneuil Hall. The officials, who had long played falsely with a liberty-loving, yet loyal people, now fairly quailed before the whirlwind of their righteous indignation. Two days after Bernard had “intimated his apprehensions,” as though steps had been
The circular letter which Boston addressed (September 14) to the towns, calling a Convention, accurately states the object of the military force that was now expected:—“The design of these troops is, in every one’s apprehension, nothing short of enforcing by military power the execution of Acts of Parliament, in the forming of which the Colonies have not, and cannot have, any constitutional influence. This is one of the greatest distresses to which a free people can be reduced.” The object of the Convention is as accurately stated to be, “to prevent any sudden and unconnected measures,” and to act in every constitutional way for the preservation of invaluable rights. The Governor, as usual, acting on his theory of insurrection, held that the Convention was designed to mature plans for it; and he wrote (September l6) to Lord Hillsborough as to his own plans,—“For my own part, if I had any place of protection to resort to, I would publish a proclamation against the assembling of the Convention, but I dare not take so spirited a step without first securing my retreat”; and, with unusual good sense, he expressed “much doubt whether the force already ordered by General Gage, namely, two regiments, would be sufficient” to fight off the original charter, and to keep the crown officers in their places. There was a small party who were in favor of resuming the old charter; but the union of the towns of Massachusetts, and then the union of all the Colonies, for the sake of continued union with Great Britain, was the key of the action of the leaders who were the exponents of the Patriots. They did not contemplate going into acts of government; and neither now nor in the future did they ever contemplate “sudden and unconnected measures.”
Three days later (September 19) Governor Bernard threw off all disguise. He formally announced to the Council that troops were coming, and asked this body to provide them quarters. And now began a long, irritating, and arrogant endeavor on the part of the Executive to browbeat the local authorities in the matter of providing quarters for the troops. The official record is voluminous. The Patriots kept strictly to the law, and won a moral victory: the royal officials persisted in virtually urging burly British will as law, and suffered the shame of an ignominious defeat. The Governor thought the Government had received a blow that made it reel; and, in a garrulous, complaining letter, supplies not only a vivid idea of the whole of this struggle, but an idea of his well-deserved individual mortification.
The new scene of an American States-General in Faneuil Hall,—so the royal Governor and Parliamentary orators termed the Convention,—a manifestation of the rising power of the people, was followed by the spectacle of an imposing naval force in the harbor. The Sam Adams Regiments, sent on the mission of warring against the republican idea, were proudly borne to Boston by fifteen British men-of-war, which were moored (September 29) in well-chosen fighting positions around the north end of the quiet, but glorious town. In the evening the curious Bostonians put out in their boats from the wharves to get a near view of the ships. There were great rejoicings on board. The sky was brilliant with the rockets that were shot off from the decks, and the air resounded with the music of the bands. It was noticed that the favorite piece seemed to be “the Yankee tune”: it was played by the regimental bands when Earl Percy led a British force out of Boston on Lexington morning, but no mention is made of its being performed when this force returned in the evening of that famous day, or when the Sam Adams Regiments left the town.
The King’s troops landed on the first day of October. Though it had been printed in England that ten thousand men were enrolled to oppose them,—though the local officials had predicted that the event would occasion a crisis in affairs,—though John Bull had been so abominably imposed upon that he as much expected to see a mob resist the landing as he lately expected the mob would resist the delivery of the Confederate Commissioners,—and though not merely ministerial circles, but all England, were looking forward with serious apprehensions to the result,—yet the day was so tame that little history was made worth relating. As the spectators on board the ships, about noon, were looking for a battle-scene, they saw only a naval and military show. The ships of war were prepared for action by loading the guns and putting springs on the cables. The troops, after sixteen rounds of powder and ball had been served out to them, entered the boats. Rude artists were looking on, and sketching the peaceful display, setting down each boat and ship and island, with view undisturbed by the smoke of battle or even of salute. They did not notice, however, that
An hour after the Commander made his reconnoissance, about noon, the boats moved in fine order towards the Long Wharf, so termed as being a noble commercial pier running far out into the Bay. Here the Fourteenth Regiment, under Colonel Dalrymple, landed, and, having formed, marched, in the words of the time, with drums beating, fifes playing, and colors flying, up King Street (now State Street) to the Town-House, where it halted. It is not said that the troops were complimented by the presence of the people, who, on holidays then as on holidays now, usually appeared, having an air of self-respect, well-dressed, well-behaved, with nothing moving among them more threatening than the baton of the police as the sign of law and authority, but respecting that as the symbol of their own law. What Tory writers and officials say warrants the inference that the Patriots kept away. Dalrymple said that the Convention was planet-stricken; “Sagittarius,” a Tory scribbler, says the Convention ran, and tells how they ran:—“The courage of the faithful only consisted in blustering, for the morning that the troops landed they broke up, and rushed out of town like a herd of scalded hogs.” If the Patriots generally were absent, it was from design. The Fourteenth Regiment remained near the Town-House until the Twenty-Ninth joined it, when the column marched to the Common. About four o’clock these troops were joined by the Fifty-Ninth Regiment, and a train of artillery with two field-pieces. This made a force of a thousand fine-appearing and well-disciplined regulars.
Colonel Dalrymple ordered the Twenty-Ninth Regiment to encamp immediately, which, as it had field-equipage, it was enabled to do, and pitched its tents on the Common; but he had no cover for the Fourteenth Regiment, and he now endeavored to obtain quarters for it. He was directed to the Manufactory House, a large building owned by the Province, in what is now Hamilton Place, near the Common, which was hired by a zealous
Such was the day, so long looked forward to, of the landing of the King’s troops. The people were indignant, but were silent and preserved their self-respect; but the object of the popular leaders had been accomplished, so far as the reception of the military force was concerned. A candid British observer, who was in Boston, saw the truth and printed it in England:—“The Patriot leaders of the Opposition were much more concerned at any mobs that happened than the Government people. These last seem pleased with them, as countenancing their representations,—the necessity of sending soldiers to keep them in order.” On this occasion, in the words of the “Gazette,” “Not the least attempt was made or contemplated to oppose the landing of the King’s troops or their encampment on the Common.” There is no mention made of even hisses or groans, as the colors that symbolized arbitrary power were proudly borne up King Street. The peace and good order that marked the day much chagrined the Loyalists, and fairly astonished “the gentlemen of the military.”
These gentlemen might have read in the next issues of the journals the temper of the public mind, in the comments freely made on their mission and on the events that were said to have occasioned their presence. The pretext, the obnoxious proceedings of the eighteenth of March, was characterized as the trifling hallooing of a harmless procession; the mob of the tenth of June was more serious, but was soon over; but on the all-important and vital point of allegiance, they might have seen expressed, in the weighty words of the Council, infinite regret at the reflection which that show of force implied on the loyalty of the people to their sovereign, who had not in his wide-extended dominions any more faithful subjects than in the town of Boston. And what really was the offence of the Patriots? They had resolved, they had petitioned, they had agreed not to import or to buy British goods. But they were not law-breakers, for they could triumphantly challenge their opponents to produce a single instance since the tenth of June of an interruption of the public peace or of resistance to law; and they were not political heretics, for the principles of colonial administration which they stood on were such as their
Thus wove the solid men of Boston their mantle of enduring glory.
Wearily, wearily, wearily:
Sobbing through space like a south-wind,
Floating in limitless ether,
Ether unbounded, unfathomed,
Where is no upward nor downward,
Island, nor shallow, nor shore:
Wearily floating and sobbing,
Out of the body to God!
Lost in the spaces of blankness,
Lost in the deepening abysses,
Haunted and tracked by the past:
No more sweet human caresses,
No more the springing of morning,
Never again from the present
Into a future beguiled:
Lonely, defiled, and despairing,
Out of the body to God!
Reeling, and tearless, and desperate,
On through the quiet of ether,
Helpless, alone, and forsaken,
Faithless in ignorant anguish,
Faithless of gasping repentance,
Measuring Him by thy measure,—
Measure of need and desert,—
Out of the body to God!
Soft through the starless abysses,
Soft as the breath of the summer
Loosens the chains of the river,
Sweeping it free to the sea,
Murmurs a murmur of peace:—
“Soul! in the deepness of heaven
Findest thou shallow or shore?
Hast thou beat madly on limit?
Hast thou been stayed in thy fleeing
Out of the body to God?
“Thou that hast known Me in spaces
Boundless, untraversed, unfathomed,
Hast thou not known Me in love?
Am I, Creator and Guider,
Less than My kingdom and work?
Come, O thou weary and desolate!
Come to the heart of thy Father
Home from thy wanderings weary,
Home from the lost to the Loving,
Out of the body to God!”
THE HEALTH OF OUR GIRLS.
Among the lower animals, so far as the facts have been noticed, there seems no great inequality, as to strength or endurance, between the sexes. In migratory tribes, as of birds or buffaloes, the males are not observed to slacken or shorten their journeys from any gallant deference to female weakness, nor are the females found to perish disproportionately through exhaustion. It is the English experience that among coursing-dogs and race-horses there is no serious sexual inequality. Aelian says that Semiramis did not exult when in the chase she captured a lion, but was proud when she took a lioness, the dangers of the feat being far greater. Hunters as willingly encounter the male as the female of most savage beasts; and if an adventurous fowler, plundering an eagle’s nest, has his eyes assaulted by the parent-bird, it is no matter whether the discourtesy proceeds from the gentleman or the lady of the household.
Passing to the ranks of humanity, it is the general rule, that, wherever the physical nature has a fair chance, the woman shows no extreme deficiency of endurance or strength. Even the sentimental physiology of Michelet is compelled to own that his elaborate theories of lovely invalidism have no application to the peasant-women of France, that is, to nineteen-twentieths of the population. Among human beings, the disparities of race and training far outweigh those of sex. The sedentary philosopher, turning from his demonstration of the hopeless inferiority of woman, finds with dismay that his Irish or negro handmaiden can lift a heavy coal-hod more easily than he. And while the dream is vanishing of the superiority of savage races on every other point, it still remains unquestionable that in every distinctive attribute of physical womanhood the barbarian has the advantage.
The truth is, that in all countries female health and strength go with peasant habits. In Italy, for instance, About says, that, of all useful animals, the woman is the one that the Roman peasant employs with the most profit. “She makes the bread and the cake of Turkish corn; she spins, she weaves, she sews; she goes every day three miles for wood and a mile for water; she carries on her head the load of a mule; she toils from sunrise to sunset without resisting or even complaining. The children, which she brings forth in great numbers, and which she nurses herself, are a great resource; from the age of four years they can be employed in guarding other animals.”
Beside this may be placed the experience of Moffat, the African missionary, who, seeing a party of native women engaged in their usual labor of house-building, and just ready to put the roof on, suggested that some of the men who stood by should lend a hand. It was received with general laughter; but Mahuto, the queen, declared that the plan, though hopeless of execution, was in itself a good one, and that men, though excused from lighter labors, ought to take an equal share in the severer,—adding, that she wished the missionaries would give their husbands medicine and make them work.
The health of educated womanhood in the different European nations seems to depend mainly upon the degree of conformity to these rustic habits of air and exercise. In Italy, Spain, Portugal, the women of the upper classes lead secluded and unhealthy lives, and hence their physical condition is not superior to our own. In the Northern nations, women of refinement do more to emulate the active habits of the peasantry,—only substituting out-door relaxations for out-door toil,—and so they share their health. This is especially the case in England, which accordingly seems to furnish the representative types of vigorous womanhood.
“The nervous system of the female sex in England seems to be of a much stronger mould than that of other nations,” says Dr. Merei, a medical practitioner of English and Continental experience. “They bear a degree of irritation in their systems, without the issue of fits, which in other races is not so easily tolerated.” So Professor Tyndall, watching female pedestrianism among the Alps, exults in his countrywomen:—“The contrast in regard to energy between the maidens of the British Isles and those of the Continent and of America is astonishing.” When Catlin’s Indians first walked the streets of London, they reported with wonder that they had seen many handsome squaws holding to the arms of men, “and they did not look sick either";—a remark which no complimentary savage was ever heard to make in any Cisatlantic metropolis.
There is undoubtedly an impression in this country that the English vigor is bought at some sacrifice,—that it implies a nervous organization less fine and artistic, features and limbs more rudely moulded, and something more coarse and peasant-like in the whole average texture. Making all due allowance for national vanity, it is yet easy to see that superiority may be had more cheaply by lowering the plane of attainment. The physique of a healthy day-laborer is a thing of inferior mould to the physique of a healthy artist. Muscular power needs also nervous power to bring out its finest quality. Lightness and grace are not incompatible with vigor, but are its crowning illustration. Apollo is above Hercules; Hebe and Diana are winged, not weighty. The physiologist must never forget that Nature is aiming at a keener and subtiler temperament in framing the American,—as beneath our drier atmosphere the whole scale of sounds and hues and odors is tuned to a higher key,—and that for us an equal state of health may yet produce a higher type of humanity. To make up the arrears of past neglect, therefore, is a matter of absolute necessity, if we wish this experiment of national temperament to have any chance; since rude health, however obtuse, will in the end overmatch disease, however finely strung.
But the fact must always be kept in mind that the whole problem of female health is most closely intertwined with that of social conditions. The Anglo-Saxon organization is being modified not only in America, but also in England, with the changing habits of the people. In the days of Henry VIII. it was “a wyve’s occupation to winnow all manner of cornes, to make malte, to wash and ironyng, to make hay, shere corne, and in time of nede to help her husband fill the muchpayne, drive the plough, load hay, corne, and such other, and go or ride to the market to sell butter, cheese, egges, chekyns, capons, hens, pigs, geese, and all manner of cornes.” But now there is everywhere complaint of the growing delicacy and fragility of the English female population, even in rural regions; and the king of sanitary reformers, Edwin Chadwick, has lately made this complaint the subject of a special report before the National Association. He assumes, as a matter settled by medical authority, that the proportion of mothers who can suckle their children is decidedly diminishing among the upper and middle classes, that deaths from childbirth are eight times as great among these classes as among the peasantry, and that spinal distortion, hysteria, and painful disorders are on the increase. Nine-tenths of the evil he attributes to the long hours of school study, and to the neglect of physical exercises for girls.
This shows that the symptoms of ill-health among women are not a matter of climate only, but indicate a change in social conditions, producing a change of personal habits. It is something which reaches all; for the standard of health in the farm-houses is with us no higher than in the cities. It is something which, unless removed, stands as a bar to any substantial progress in civilization. It is a mere mockery for the millionnaire to create galleries of Art, bringing from Italy a Venus on canvas or a stone Diana, if meanwhile a lovelier bloom than ever artist painted is fading from his own child’s cheek, and a firmer vigor than that of marble is vanishing from her enfeebled arms. What use to found colleges for girls whom even the high-school breaks down, or to induct them into new industrial pursuits when they have not strength to stand behind a counter? How appeal to any woman to enlarge her thoughts beyond the mere drudgery of the household, when she “dies daily” beneath the exhaustion of even that?
And the perplexity lies beyond the disease, in the perils involved even in the remedy. No person can be long conversant with physical training, without learning to shrink from the responsibility of the health of girls. The panacea for boyish health is commonly simple, even for delicate cases. Removal from books, if necessary, and the substitution of farm-life,—with good food, pure air, dogs, horses, oxen, hens, rabbits,—and fresh or salt water within walking distance. Secure these conditions, and then let him alone; he will
Everything that follows in these pages must therefore be construed in the light of this admitted difficulty. The health of boys is a matter not hard to treat, on purely physiological grounds; but in dealing with that of girls caution is necessary. Yet, after all, the perplexities can only obscure the details of the prescription, while the main substance is unquestionable. Nowhere in the universe, save in improved habits, can we ever find health for our girls. Special delicacy in the conditions of the problem only implies more sedulous care in the solution. The great laws of exercise, of respiration, of digestion are essentially the same for all human beings; and greater sensitiveness in the patient should not relax, but only stimulate, our efforts after cure. And the unquestionable fact that there are among us, after the worst is said, large numbers of robust and healthy women, should keep up our courage until we can apply their standard to the whole sex.
In presence of an evil so great, it is inevitable that there should be some fantastic theories of cure. But extremes are quite pardonable, where it is so important to explore all the sources of danger. Special ills should have special assailants, at whatever risk of exaggeration. As water-cures and vegetarian boarding-houses are the necessary defence of humanity against dirt and over-eating, so is the most ungainly Bloomer that ever drifted on bare poles across the continent a providential protest against the fashion-plates. It is probable, that, on the whole, there is a gradual amelioration in female costume. These hooded water-proof cloaks, equalizing all womankind,—these thick soles and heavy heels, proclaiming themselves with such masculine emphasis on the pavement,—these priceless india-rubber boots, emancipating all juvenile femineity from the terrors of mud and snow,—all these indicate an approaching era of good sense; for they are the requisite machinery of air, exercise, and health, so far as they go.
The weight of skirts and the constraints of corsets are still properly made the theme of indignant declamation. Yet let us be just. It is impossible to make costume the prime culprit, when we recall what robust generations have been reared beneath the same formidable panoply. For instance, it seems as if no woman could habitually walk uninjured with a weight of twelve pounds of skirts suspended at her hips,—Dr. Coale is responsible for the statistics,—and as if salvation must therefore lie in shoulder-straps. Yet the practice cannot be sheer suicide, when the Dutch peasant-girl plods bloomingly through her daily duties beneath a dozen successive involucres of flannel. So in regard to tight lacing, no one can doubt its ill effects, since even a man’s loose garments are known to diminish by one-fourth his capacity for respiration. Yet inspect in the shop-windows (where the facts of female costume are obtruded too pertinaciously for the public to remain in ignorance) the light and flexible corsets of these days, and then contemplate at Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth the stout buckram stays that once incased the stouter heart of Alice Bradford. Those, again, were to those of a still earlier epoch as leather to chain-armor. The Countess of Buchan was confined in an iron cage for life for assisting to crown Robert the Bruce, but her only loss by the incarceration was that her iron cage ceased to be portable.
Passing from costume, it must be noticed that there are many physical evils which the American woman shares with the other sex, but which bear with far greater severity on her finer organization. There is improper food, for instance. The fried or salted meat, the heavy bread, the perennial pork, the disastrous mince-pies of our farmers’ houses are sometimes pardoned by Nature to the men of the family, in consideration of twelve or more hours of out-door labor. For the more sedentary and delicate daughter there is no such atonement, and she vibrates between dyspepsia and starvation. The only locality in America where I have ever found the farming population living habitually on wholesome diet is the Quaker region in Eastern Pennsylvania, and I have never seen anywhere else such a healthy race of women. Yet here, again, it is not safe to be hasty, or to lay the whole responsibility upon the kitchen, when we recall the astounding diet on which healthy Englishwomen subsisted two centuries ago. Consider, for instance, the housekeeping of the Duke of Northumberland. “My lord and lady have for breakfast, at seven o’clock, a quart of beer, as much wine, two pieces of salt fish, six red herring, four white ones, and a dish of sprats.” Digestive resources which could, entertain this bill of fare might safely be trusted to travel in America.
The educational excesses of our schools, also, though shared by both sexes, tell much more formidably upon girls, in proportion as they are keener students, more submissive pupils, and are given to studying their lessons at recess-time, instead of shouting and racing in the open air. They are also easily coerced into devoting Wednesday and Saturday afternoons to the added atrocity of music-lessons, and in general, but for the recent blessed innovation of skating, would undoubtedly submit to having every atom of air and exercise eliminated from their lives. It is rare to find an American mother who habitually ranks physical vigor first, in rearing her daughters, and intellectual culture only second; indeed, they are commonly satisfied with a merely negative condition of health. The girl is considered to be well, if she is not too ill to go to school; and she therefore lives from hand to mouth, as respects her constitution, and lays up nothing for emergencies. From this negative condition proceeds her inability to endure accidents which to an active boy would be trivial. Who ever hears of a boy’s incurring a lame knee for a year by slipping on the ice, or spinal disease for a lifetime by a fall from a sled? And if a girl has not enough of surplus vitality to overcome such trifles as these, how is she fitted to meet the coming fatigues of wife and mother?
These are important, if superficial, suggestions; but there are other considerations which go deeper. I take the special provocatives of disease among American women to be in great part social. The one marked step achieved thus far by our civilization appears to be the abolition of the peasant class, among the native-born, and the elevation of the mass of women to the social zone of music-lessons and silk gowns. This implies the disappearance of field-labor for women, and, unfortunately, of that rustic health also which in other countries is a standing exemplar for all classes. Wherever the majority of women work in the fields, the privileged minority are constantly reminded that they also hold their health by the tenure of some substituted activity. With us, all women have been relieved from out-door labor,—and are being sacrificed in the process, until they learn to supply its place. Except the graceful and vanishing pursuit of hop-picking, there is in New England no agricultural labor in which women can be said to be habitually engaged. Most persons never saw an American woman making hay, unless in the highly imaginative cantata of “The Hay-Makers”; and Dolly the Dairy-Maid is becoming to our children as purely ideal a being as Cinderella. We thus lose not only the immediate effect, but the indirect example, of these out-door toils.
This influence of the social transition bears upon all women: there is another which especially touches wives and mothers. In European countries, the aim at anything like gentility implies keeping one or more domestics to perform house-hold labors; but in our Free States every family aims at gentility, while not one in five keeps a domestic. The aim is not a foolish one, though follies may accompany it,—for the average ambition of our people includes a certain amount of refined cultivation;—it is only that the process is exhausting. Every woman must have a best-parlor with hair-cloth furniture and a photograph—book; she must have a piano, or some cheaper substitute; her little girls must have embroidered skirts and much mathematical knowledge; her husband must have two or even three hot meals every day of his life; and yet her house must be in perfect order early in the afternoon, and she prepared to go out and pay calls, with a black silk dress and a card-case. In the evening she will go to a concert or a lecture, and then, at the end of all, she will very possibly sit up after midnight with her sewing-machine, doing extra shop-work to pay for little Ella’s music-lessons. All this every “capable” New-England woman will do, or die. She does it, and dies; and then we are astonished that her vital energy gives out sooner than that of an Irishwoman in a shanty, with no ambition on earth but to supply her young Patricks with adequate potatoes.
Now it is useless to attempt to set back the great social flood. The New-England housekeeper will never be killed by idleness, at any rate; and if she is exposed to the opposite danger, we must fit her for it, that is all. There is reason to be hopeful; the human race as a whole is tending upward, even physically, and if we cannot make our girls healthy quite yet, we shall learn to do it by-and-by. Meanwhile we must hold hard to the conviction, that not merely decent health, but even a high physical training, is a thing thoroughly practicable for both sexes. If a young girl can tire out her partner in the dance, if a delicate wife can carry her baby twice as long as her athletic husband, (for certainly there is nothing in the gymnasium more amazing than the mother’s left arm,) then it is evident that the female frame contains muscular power, or its equivalent, though it may take music or maternity to bring it out. But other inducements have proved sufficient, and the results do not admit of question. The Oriental bayaderes, for instance, are trained from childhood as gymnasts: they carry heavy jars on their heads, to improve strength, gait, and figure; they fly kites, to acquire “statuesque attitudes and graceful surprises”; they must learn to lay the back of the hand flat against the wrist, to partially bend the arm in both directions at the elbow, and, inclining the whole person backward from the waist, to sweep the floor with the hair. So, among ourselves, the great athletic resources of the female frame are vindicated by every equestrian goddess of the circus, every pet of the ballet. Those airy nymphs have been educated for their vocation by an amount of physical fatigue which their dandy admirers may well prefer to contemplate through the safe remoteness of an opera-glass.
Dr. Gardner, of New York, has lately contributed very important professional observations upon this class of his patients; he describes their physique as infinitely superior to that of ordinary women, wonderfully adapting them not only to the extraordinary, but to the common perils of their sex, “with that happy union of power and pliability most to be desired.” “Their occupation demands in its daily study and subsequent practice an amount of long-continued muscular energy of the severest character, little recognized or understood by the community”; and his description of their habitual immunity in the ordeals of womanhood reminds one of the descriptions of savage tribes. But it is really a singular retribution for our prolonged offences against the body, when our saints are thus compelled to take their models from the reputed sinners,—prize-fighters being propounded as missionaries for the men, and opera-dancers for the women.
Are we literally to infer, then, that dancing must be the primary prescription? It would not be a bad one. It was an invaluable hint of Hippocrates, that the second-best remedy is better than the best, if the patient likes it best. Beyond all other merits of the remedy in question is this crowning advantage, that the patient likes it. Has any form of exercise ever yet been invented which a young girl would not leave for dancing?
“Women, it is well known,” says Jean Paul, “cannot run, but only dance, and every one could more easily reach a given point by dancing than by walking.” It is practised in this country under immense disadvantages: first, because of late hours and heated rooms; and secondly, because some of the current dances seem equally questionable to the mamma and the physiologist. But it is doubtful whether any possible gymnastic arrangement for a high-school would be on the whole so provocative of the wholesome exercise as a special hall for dancing, thoroughly ventilated, and provided with piano and spring-floor. The spontaneous festivals of every recess-time would then rival those German public-rooms, where it is said you may see a whole company waltzing like teetotums, with the windows wide open, at four o’clock in the afternoon.
Skating is dancing in another form; both aim at flying, and skating comes nearest to success. The triumph of this art has been so astonishing, in the universality of its introduction among our girls within the short space of four winters, that it is hardly necessary to speak of it, except to deduce the hope that other out-door enjoyments, equally within the reach of the girls, may be as easily popularized.
For any form of locomotion less winged than skating and dancing the feet of American girls have hitherto seemed somehow unfitted by Nature. There is every abstract reason why they should love walking, on this side of the Atlantic: there is plenty of room for it, the continent is large; the exercise, moreover, brightens the eye and purifies the complexion, —so the physiologists declare: so that an English chemist classifies red cheeks as being merely oxygen in another form, and advises young ladies who wish for a pair to seek them where the roses get them, out-of-doors,—upon which an impertinent damsel writes to ask “Punch” if they might not as well carry the imitation of the roses a little farther, and remain in their beds all the time? But it is a lamentable fact, that walking, for the mere love of it, is a rare habit among our young women, and rarer probably in the country than in the city; it is uncommon to hear of one who walks habitually as much as two miles a day. There are, of course, many exceptional instances: I know maidens who love steep paths and mountain rains, like Wordsworth’s Louisa, and I have even heard of eight young ladies who walked from Andover to Boston, twenty-three miles, in six hours, and of two who did forty-five miles in two days. Moreover, with our impulsive temperaments, a special object will always operate as a strong allurement. A confectioner’s shop, for instance. A camp somewhere in the suburbs, with dress-parades, and available lieutenants. A new article of dress: a real ermine cape may be counted as good for three miles a day, for the season. A dearest friend within pedestrian distance: so that it would seem well to plant a circle of delightful families just in the outskirts of every town, merely to serve as magnets. Indeed, so desperate has the emergency become, that one might take even ladies’ hoops to be a secret device of Nature to secure more exercise for the occupants by compelling them thus to make the circuit of each other, as the two fat noblemen at the French court vindicated themselves from the charge of indolence by declaring that each promenaded twice round his friend every morning.
In view of this distaste for pedestrian exercise, it seems strange that the present revival of athletic exercises has not yet reached to horsemanship, the traditional type of all noble training, chevalerie, chivalry. Certainly it is not for the want of horse-flesh, for never perhaps was so much of that costly commodity owned in this community; yet in New England you shall find private individuals who keep a half-dozen horses each, and livery-stables possessing fifty, and never a proper saddle-horse among them. In some countries, riding does half the work of physical training, for both sexes; Sir Walter Scott, when at Abbotsford, never omitted his daily ride, and took his little daughter with him, from the time she could sit on horseback; but what New-England man, in purchasing a steed, selects with a view to a side-saddle?
An exercise to which girls take almost as naturally as to dancing is that of rowing, an accomplishment thoroughly feminine, learned with great facility, and on the whole safer than most other sports. Yet until within a few years no one thought of it in connection with women, unless with semi-mythical beings, like Ellen Douglas or Grace Darling. Even now it is chiefly a city accomplishment, and you rarely find at rural or sea-side places a village damsel who has ever handled an oar. But once having acquired the art, girls will readily fatigue themselves with its practice, unsolicited, careless of tan and freckles. At Dove Harbor it is far easier at any time to induce the young ladies to row for two hours than to walk in the beautiful wood-paths for fifteen minutes;—the walking tires them. No matter; for a special exercise the rowing is the most valuable of the two, and furnishes just what the dancing-school omits. Unfortunately, the element of water is not quite a universal possession, and no one can train Naiads on dry land.
One of the merits of boating is that it suggests indirectly the attendant accomplishment of swimming, and this is some thing of such priceless importance that no trouble can be too great for its acquisition. Parents are uneasy until their children are vaccinated, and yet leave them to incur a risk as great and almost as easily averted. The barbarian mother, who, lowering her baby into the water by her girdle, teaches it to swim ere it can walk, is before us in this duty. Swimming, moreover, is not one of those arts in which a little learning is a dangerous thing; on the contrary, a little may be as useful in an emergency as a great deal, if it gives those few moments of self-possession amid danger which will commonly keep a person from drowning until assistance comes. Women are naturally as well fitted for swimming as men, since specific buoyancy is here more than a match for strength; but effort is often needed to secure for them those opportunities of instruction and practice which the unrestrained wanderings of boys secure for them so easily. For this purpose, swimming-schools for ladies are now established in many places, at home and abroad; and the newspapers have lately chronicled a swimming-match at a girls’ school in Berlin, where thirty-three competitors were entered for the prize,—and another among titled ladies in Paris, where each fashionable swimmer was allowed the use of the left hand only,
Other out-door habits depend upon the personal tastes of the individual, in certain directions, and are best cultivated by educating these. If a young girl is born and bred with a love of any branch of natural history or of horticulture, happy is she; for the mere unconscious interest of the pursuit is an added lease of life to her. It is the same with all branches of Art whose pursuit leads into the open air. Rosa Bonheur, with her wanderings among mountains and pastures, alternating with the vigorous work of the studio, needed no other appliances for health. The same advantages come to many, in spite of delinquent mothers, in the bracing habits of household labor, at least where mechanical improvements have not rendered it too easy. Improved cooking-stoves and Mrs. Cornelius have made the culinary art such a path of roses that it is hardly now included in early training, but deferred till after matrimony. Yet bread-making in well-ventilated kitchens and sweeping in open-windowed rooms are calisthenics so bracing that one grudges them to the Irish maidens, whose round and comely arms betray so much less need of their tonic influence than the shrunken muscles exhibited so freely by our short-sleeved belles.
Perhaps even well-developed arms are not so essential to female beauty as erectness of figure, a trait on which our low school-desks have made sad havoc. The only sure panacea for round shoulders in boys appears to be the military drill, and Miss Mitford records that in her youth it was the custom in girls’ schools to apply the same remedy. Dr. Lewis relies greatly on the carrying of moderate weights upon a padded wooden cap which he has devised for this purpose; and certainly the straightest female figure with which I am acquainted—aged seventy-four—is said to have been formed by the youthful habit of pacing the floor for half an hour dally, with a book upon the head, under rigid maternal discipline. Another traditional method is to insist that the damsel shall sit erect, without leaning against the chair, for a certain number of hours daily; and Sir Walter Scott says that his mother, in her eightieth year, took as much care to avoid giving any support to her back as if she had been still under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie, her early teacher. Such simple methods may not be enough to check diseased curvatures or inequalities when already formed: these are best met by Ling’s system of medical gymnastics, or “movement-cure,” as applied by Dr. Lewis, Dr. Taylor, and others.
The ordinary gymnastic apparatus has also been employed extensively by women, and that very successfully, wherever the exercises have been systematically organized, with agreeable classes and competent teachers. If the gymnasium often fails to interest girls as much as boys, it is probably from deficiency in these respects,—and also because the female pupils, beginning on a lower plane of strength, do not command so great a variety of exercises, and so tire of the affair more readily. But hundreds, if not thousands, of American women have practised in these institutions during the last ten years,—single establishments in large cities having sometimes several hundred pupils,—and many have attained a high degree of skill in climbing, vaulting, swinging, and the like; nor can I find that any undue proportion of accidents has occurred. Wherever Dr. Lewis’s methods have been introduced, important advantages have followed. He has invented an astonishing variety of games and well-studied movements,—with the lightest and cheapest apparatus, balls, bags, rings, wands, wooden dumb-bells, small clubs, and other instrumentalities,—which are all gracefully and effectually used by his classes, to the sound of music, and in a way to spare the weakest when lightly administered, or to fatigue the strongest when applied in force. Being adapted for united use by both sexes, they make more thorough appeal to the social element than the ordinary gymnastics; and evening classes, to meet several evenings in a week, have proved exceedingly popular in some of our towns. These exercises do not require fixed apparatus or a special hall. For this and other reasons they are peculiarly adapted for use in schools, and it would be well if they could be regularly taught in our normal institutions. Dr. Lewis himself is now training regular teachers to carry on the same good work, and his movement is undoubtedly the most important single step yet taken for the physical education of American women.
There is withal a variety of agreeable minor exercises, dating back farther than gymnastic professors, which must not be omitted. Archery, still in fashion in England, has never fairly taken root among us, and seems almost hopeless: the clubs formed for its promotion die out almost as speedily as cricket-clubs, and leave no trace behind; though this may not always be. Bowling and billiards are, however, practised by lady amateurs, just so far as they find opportunity, which is not very far; desirable public or private facilities being obtainable by few only, except at the summer watering-places. Battledoor-and-shuttlecock seems likely to come again into favor, and that under eminent auspices: Dr. Windship holding it in high esteem, as occupying the mind while employing every part of the body, harmonizing the muscular system, giving quickness to eye and hand, and improving the balancing power. The English, who systematize all amusements so much more than we, have developed
It may seem trivial to urge upon rational beings the use of a shuttlecock as a duty; but this is surely better than that one’s health should become a thing as perishable, and fly away as easily. There is no danger that our educational systems will soon grow too careless of intellect and too careful of health. Reforms, whether in physiology or in smaller things, move slowly, when prejudice or habit bars the way. Paris is the head-quarters of medical science; yet in Paris, to this day, the poor babies in the great hospital of La Maternite are so tortured in tight swathings that not a limb can move. Progress is not in proportion to the amount of scientific knowledge on deposit in any country, but to the extent of its diffusion. No nation in the world grapples with its own evils so promptly as ours. It is but a few years since there was a general croaking about the physical deterioration of young men in our cities,—and now already the cities and the colleges are beginning to lead the rural districts in this respect. The guaranty of reform in American female health is to be found in the growing popular conviction that reform is needed. The community is tired of the reproaches of foreigners, and of the more serious evils of homes desolated by disease, and lives turned to tragedies. Morbid anatomy has long enough served as a type of feminine loveliness; our polite society has long enough been a series of soirees of incurables. Health is coming into fashion. A mercantile parent lately told me that already in his town, if a girl could vault a five-barred gate, her prospects for a husband were considered to be improved ten per cent.; and every one knows that there is no metre of public sentiment so infallible as the stock-market. Now that the country is becoming safe, we must again turn our attention to the health of our girls. Unless they are healthy, the country is not safe. No where can their physical condition be so important as in a republic. The utmost attention was paid to the bodily training of Victoria, because she was to be a queen and the mother of kings. By the theory of our government, however imperfectly applied as yet, this is the precise position of every American girl. Voltaire said that the fate of nations had often depended on the gout of a prime-minister; and the fate of our institutions may hang on the precise temperament which our next President shall have inherited from his mother.
* * * * *
The starry flower, the flower-like stars
that fade
And brighten with the daylight and the
dark,
The bluet in the green I faintly mark,
And glimmering crags with laurel overlaid,
Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of
shade,
Shine one to me,—the least
still glorious made
As crowned moon or heaven’s great
hierarch.
And, so, dim grassy flower and night-lit
spark
Still move me on and upward for the True;
Seeking, through change, growth, death,
in new and old,
The full in few, the statelier in the
less,
With patient pain; always remembering
this,—
His hand, who touched the sod with showers
of gold,
Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.
THE HORRORS OF SAN DOMINGO.
INTRODUCTION.
Among the stock fallacies which belong to public writers and thinkers, and which exercise a kind of conventional influence as often as they are paraded, there is none greater than this,—that History always repeats herself, because Human Nature never changes. The Tories of all ages and countries content themselves and alarm their neighbors by an adroit interpolation of this formula in their speech. They create the alarm because they are contented and intend to remain so. Successive audiences yield, as to the circus-jokes of the clown, who hits his traditional laugh in the same place so often that it is a wonder the place is not worn through. But people of a finer wit are not so easily surprised. If they bore a fair numerical proportion to the listeners of doctrinaires and alarmists, the repetition would be eventually resisted, with an indignation equal to the amount of literary and political damage which it had effected.
If people mean, when they say that Human Nature is always the same, that a few primitive impulses appear through the disguise of all ages and races, which can be modified, but never extinguished, which work and are worked upon, are capable of doing good or harm according to circumstances, but are at all events the conditions of life and motion, it is fortunately true. That is to say, it is very fortunate that men and women inhabit the earth. Their great, simple features uplift and keep all landscapes in their places, and prevent life from falling through into the molten and chaotic forces underneath. These rugged water-sheds inclose, configure, temper, fertilize, and also perturb, the great scenes and stretches of history. They hold the moisture, the metal, the gem, the seeds of alternating forests and the patient routine of countless harvests. Superficially it is a great way round from the lichen to the vine, but not so far by way of the centre. The many-colored and astonishing life conceals a few simple motives. Certainly it is a grand and lucky thing that there are so many people grouped along the lines of divine consistency.
Men will not starve, if they can help it, nor thirst, if water can be gathered in the palm or reached by digging. If they succeed in making a cup, they betray a tendency to ornament its rim or stem, or to emboss a story on its side. They are not disposed to become food for animals, or to remain unprotected from the climate. They like to have the opportunity of supplying their own wants and luxuries, and will resist any tyrannical interference with the methods they prefer. They propagate their race, and collect in communities for defence and social advantage. When thus collected, they will learn to talk, to write, to symbolize, to construct something, be it a medicine-lodge or a Parthenon. Their primitive sense of an invisible and spiritual agency assumes the forms of their ignorance and of their disposition: dread and cruelty, awe and size, fancy and proportion, gentleness and simplicity, will be found together in the rites and constructions of religion. They like to make the whole tribe or generation conform; and it is dangerous to oppose this tendency to preserve the shape of society from within and to protect it against assaults from without. These are motives originally independent of circumstances, and which made the first circumstances by coming in contact with the elements of the physical world.
But these circumstances are not always and everywhere as invariable as the primitive wants which first set them in motion. Enlargement of knowledge, of political and human relations, of the tenure of the earth, increases the number and variety of circumstances, and combines them so unexpectedly that it is a science to discover their laws, and the conditions of action and reaction between men and things that happen. We can depend upon Human Nature, but the problem always remains, What shall be expected of Human Nature under this or that modification of its external environment? Great laws from without act as well as great laws from within. If we knew all the laws, we should know what average consequences to expect. But in the mean time we shall commit the error of supposing that History does nothing but repeat itself, fretfully crooning into the “dull ear” of age a twice-told tale, if we do not allow for the modifications amid which the primitive impulses find themselves at work.
And besides, there is a difference in individuals; one set of people alone is too poor to furnish us with an idea of human nature. It is natural for Themistocles, Pausanias, or Benedict Arnold, under suspicion or ill-treatment, to desert to the enemy, and propose crushing his country for a balm to apply to wounded feelings. But General Fremont, in similar circumstances, will derive comfort from his loyal heart, and wait in hopes that at least a musket may be put into his hands with which to trust him against the foe. These are very simple variations; they turn upon the proportion of selfish feeling which the men possess. A self-seeking man will turn
Nations differ also, in spite of the similar things that they do in analogous circumstances. Both Rome and England will not have too ambitious neighbors. They hate a preponderating power, and find out some way to get rid of the threat to their national egotism. The Romans exterminate the Veians and Carthaginians; they want no colonizing or commercial rivals. If England rules the sea, and uses its advantage to create markets where it can buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest rates, we can understand its inexpensive sympathy for the people who can manufacture little and therefore have to import a great deal, who are thus the natural, disinterested lovers of free trade. It is very easy to see why England turns red in the Crimea with the effort to lift up that bag of rags called Turkey, to set it on the overland route to India; one decayed nation makes a very good buffer to break the shock of natural competition in the using up of another. It was the constant policy of Rome to tolerate and patronize the various people in its provinces, to respect, if not to understand, their religions, and to protect them from the peculator. She was not so drunk with dominion as not to see that her own comfort and safety were involved in this bearing to inferior and half-effete races. On the other hand, England, with far stronger motives of interest to imitate that policy, disregarding the prophecies of her best minds, takes no pains to understand, and of course misgoverns and outrages her poor nebulous Bengalese, and forces the opium which they cultivate upon the Chinese whom it demoralizes. Is this difference merely the difference between a pocket in a toga and one in the trousers? But a nerve from the moral sense does, nevertheless, spread into papilloe over the surface of the tighter pocket, not entirely blunted by yellow potations; so that the human as well as financial advantage of Jamaica emancipation is perceived. Should we expect this from the nation which undertook the destruction of the Danish fleet before Copenhagen in 1801, without even the formality of a declaration of war, on the suspicion that the Dane preferred to sympathize with France? What moral clamor could have made the selfish exigency of that act appear more damaging than a coalition of all the fleets of Europe? Yet plantation fanaticism did not prevent the great act from which we augured English hatred of a slaveholders’ rebellion. Probably the lining membrane of a pocket may have intermitted accesses of induration: we must consult circumstances, if we would know what to expect. An extraordinary vintage or a great fruit year will follow a long series of scant or average crops; but we can count upon the average.
But unless circumstances are constant, it matters little how constant tempers and tendencies may be; and the expectations which we found upon the general action of avarice, credulity, bigotry, self-seeking, or any of the debased forms of legitimate human impulses, will often be disappointed by results. Prepare the favorite climate, moisture, exposure of a foreign plant, imitate its latitude and air and soil: it will not necessarily grow at all, or, growing, it will only surprise you by some alteration of its native features. Results are better chemists than we, and their delicate root-fibres test the ground more accurately; we shall find them languishing for some favorite elements, or colored and persuaded by novel ones. History must remember the constants of Man and of Nature, but be always expecting their variables, lest her prophetic gift fall into ill-repute.
Thus, give unlimited power to the Catholic, and he cannot anywhere set up his old-fashioned absolutism, unless you can manage at the same time to furnish him with Roman and Spanish people, and the fifteenth century. Yet we, too, have trembled at the imaginary horrors of Popery. All the power you can thrust and pile upon the Catholic in America will become an instrument to further the country’s tendency towards light, as it drags the human impulses away from the despotic past. All the Jesuits, and prize bulls by every steamer, relays of papal agents, and Corpus-Christi processions in the streets of Boston, will hardly lift the shoulders of the great protesting country, as it turns to stare from its tilling, steaming, pioneering, emancipating task.
It is not difficult to see why the revolts of peasants in the Middle Ages were marked by horrible excesses,—why diplomatic Catholicism prepared a St. Bartholomew’s Eve for Paris,—why Dutch and Scotch Protestants defaced and trampled under foot ecclesiastical Art,—why German princes proclaimed a crusade against budding Protestantism and Pan-slavism under Ziska and Procopius in Bohemia,—why the fagots were fired at Constance, Prague, and Smithfield, and Pequod wigwams in New England. All dreadful scenes, by simply taking place, show that they have reason for it. But will they take place again? A Black Douglas did undoubtedly live, and he was the nursery-threat for fractious Scotch children during several generations; the Douglas never caught one of them, but the threat did. So we are plied with stock-phrases, such as “the Reign of Terror” and “the Horrors of San Domingo,” and History is abjectly conjured not to repeat herself, as she certainly will do, if she goes on in the old way. Of course she will. But does she propose to furnish a fac-simile of any critical epoch which haunts the imaginations of mankind? That depends upon circumstances. The same barrel will play a fresh tune by a hair’s-breadth shifting of a spring. Two epochs may seem to be exactly alike, and the men who only remember may seek to terrify the men who hope by exposing the resemblance. But unless they can show that all the circumstances are identical, they have no right to infect the morning with their twilight fears. History insensibly modifies her plan to secure the maximum of progress with the minimum of catastrophes, and she repels the flippant insinuation that her children win all their fresh advantages at the expense of the old crimes.
The story of Hayti is worth telling, apart from its bearing upon questions connected with the emancipation of slaves. It is a striking record of the degradation of fine races and the elevation of inferior ones, and shows with what ease Nature can transfer her good points from her gifted children and unexpectedly endow with them her neglected ones,—thus affording us a hint of something that is more permanent and irreversible than ethnological distinctions, by repeating within our own time her humane way with her old barbarians whose hair was long. From them sprang the races which never could have dominated by cunning and force alone, and which have to lay down their dominion when they have exhausted everything but force and cunning. It is a story of the desolation in which the avarice and wrath of man must always travel: colonial prosperity was nothing but a howling war-path blazed directly across stately and beautiful human nature. It shows the blood which the fine hands of luxury never could wash off; the terrible secret at last betrayed itself. In telling this story, the horrors of San Domingo are accounted for, and whatever was exceptional in the circumstances is at the same time marked, to prevent them from being applied without discrimination to the present condition of America. But the story must be told from the beginning, for its own sake; otherwise it will be a bad story, without a moral. If the main features of it are carefully preserved, it will make its own application.
That, however, is fatal to any attempt to infect minds with the Haytian bug-bear, now that political discussion threatens to ravage the country which our arms are saving. It has been used before, when it was necessary to save the Union and to render anti-slavery sentiment odious. The weak and designing, and all who wait for the war to achieve a constitutional recurrence of our national malady, will use it again to defeat the great act of justice and the people’s great necessity.
Slavery is a continual conspiracy. Its life depends upon intrigue, aggression, adroit combinations with other forms of human selfishness. The people at the North who at this moment hate to hear the word Emancipation mentioned, and who insist that the war shall merely restore things to their original position, are the people who always hated the phrase “Anti-Slavery,” who will be ready to form a fresh coalition with Slavery for the sake of recovering or creating political advantages, and whom the South will know how to use again, by reviving ancient prejudices, and making its very wounds a cause for sympathy. Slavery will be the nucleus of political combinations so long as it can preserve its constitutional and commercial advantages,—while it can sell its cotton and recover its fugitives. Is the precious blood already spilled in this war to become, as it congeals, nothing but cement to fugitive-slave bills, and the basis of three-fifths, and the internal
Blow, North-wind, blow! Keep that bearded field of bayonets levelled southward! Rustle, robes of Liberty, who art walking terribly over the land, with sombre countenance, and garments rolled in blood! See, she advances with one hand armed with Justice, while the other points to that exquisite symmetry half revealed, as if beckoning thitherward her children back again to the pure founts of life! “Be not afraid,” she cries, “of the noise of my garments and their blood-stains; for this is the blood of a new covenant of Freedom, shed to redeem and perpetuate a chosen land.”
THE PLACE—THE CLIMATE—NATIVES—SETTLERS.
This old haunted house of Hayti had many occupants, who left as heirlooms generation upon generation of hateful memories. Their dreams, their deeds, their terrific tempers, lurked for the newcomers, and harried them forth or made them kin. It is a cumulative story of dire and fateful proceedings, like the story of the family of Pelops. It must be told with deliberation. So the place, the climate, the aborigines, the early atrocities, the importation of new races and characteristics, command consideration as inevitable elements of the narrative.
This spot of the New World was the first to ache beneath the white man’s greedy and superstitious tread. A tenacious Gothic race, after its long blockade by Moors in the northern mountains of the Iberian Peninsula, had lately succeeded in recovering the last stronghold of Arab power and learning. Fresh from the atrocities of that contest, its natural bigotry deepened by its own struggle for national existence, sombre, fanatical, cruel, and avaricious, but enterprising and indomitable, it is wafted across the ocean by Columbus, to expend its propensities unchecked against a weaker and less characteristic barbarism. What might be expected, when a few noble men succeed in transporting the worst features of their own country, in such numbers of intractable people, the raking of seaports, with little on board in the way of religion, save the traditions of the Church and the materials for exhibiting the drama of the Mass! This is the contingent which civilization detaches for the settlement of another world. It effaces a smiling barbarism by a saturnine and gloomy one, as when a great forest slides from some height over a wild gay meadow. These capable, cruel men went sailing among the Bahamas, soothed by the novelty and delight of finding land, and tried to behave at first as men do among artless children who measure every thing by their own scantiness; for they compelled themselves to be very mild and condescending, till, after various mischances and rebuffs by sea and land, the temper breaks forth in rage at disappointments, and Hayti is the first place which is blasted by that frightful Spanish scowl. The change was as sudden as that from calm weather to one of her tempests. The whole subsequent history seems as if it were the revenge of Columbus’s own imagination, when the sober truth was discovered instead of Cipango and the King of India. Thus was the New World unsettled, and the horrors of San Domingo committed to the soil.
Nearly the whole of Hayti lies between the eighteenth and twentieth degrees of latitude, and the sixty-ninth, and seventy-fifth of longitude. Its greatest length is three hundred and forty miles, its greatest breadth, one hundred and thirty-two. It has a surface of somewhat more than twenty-seven thousand square miles, or about eighteen million square acres. The greater part of this is mountain-land. There are three extensive plains,—La Vega in the east, Santiago in the north, and Les Plaines in the southeast. These are distinct from the Savannas.[A] The island is about the size of the State of Maine. Its shape is peculiar, as it widens gradually from its southeastern end to nearly the centre of its greatest length, whence the southern coast trends rapidly to the north and west and stretches into a peninsula, like a long mandible, corresponding to which on the northern coast is another half as long, like a broken one, and between these lies a great bay with the uncultivated island of Gonaive. The eastern part of the island has also the small peninsula of Saniana, lying along the bay of that name. The surface is covered by mountains which appear at first to be tossed together wildly, without system or mutual relation, but they can be described, upon closer inspection, as four ranges, with a general parallelism, extending nearly east and west, but broken in the centre by the Cibao ridge, which radiates in every direction from two or three peaks, the highest in the island. Their height is reputed to be nine thousand feet, but they have not yet been accurately measured. The mountains of La Hotte, which form the long southern tongue of land, rise to the height of seven thousand feet. They are all of calcareous formation, and abound in the caverns which are found in limestone regions. Some of these have their openings on the coast, and are supposed to extend very far inland; they receive the tide, and reject it with a bellowing noise, as the pent air struggles with it under their arched roofs. These were called by the Spaniards baxos roncadores, droning or snoring basses. The French had a name, le gouffre, the gulf, to describe these noises; but they also applied it to the subterranean rumbling, accompanied with explosions and violent vibrations of the ground, which is caused by the heavy rains soaking through the porous stone, after the dry season has heated the whole surface of the island. The steaming water makes the earth groan and shake as it forces its way through the crevices, feeling for an outlet, or thrown back upon its own increasing current. These mysterious noises filled with awe the native priests who managed the superstition of the island before the Spaniards introduced another kind: no doubt they served for omens, to incite or to deter, voices of Chthonian deities, which needed interpreting in the interest of some great cacique who would not budge upon his business without the sanction of religion. Many a buccaneer, in after-times, who quailed before no mortal thunders made by French or Spanish navies, was soundly frightened by the gigantic snoring beneath his feet into reviewing his career, and calculating the thickness of the crust between himself and his impatient retribution.
[Footnote A: Savanna was a Haytian word spelt and pronounced by Spaniards. It is a plain of grass, affording pasturage in the rainy season; but a few shrubs also grow upon it. Pampas are vast plains without vegetation except during three months of the rainy season, when they yield fine grass. The word is Peruvian; was originally applied to the plains at the mouth of the La Plata. But the plains of Guiana and tropical America, which the Spaniards called Llanos, are also pampas. The Hungarian pasture-lands, called Puszta, are savannas. A Steppe is properly a vast extent of country, slightly rolling, without woods, but not without large plants and herbs. In Russia there are sometimes thickets eight or ten feet high. The salt deserts in Russia are not called steppes, but Solniye. Pampas and deserts are found alternating with steppes. A Desert may have a sparing vegetation, and so differ from pampas: if it has any plants, they are scrubby and fibrous, with few leaves, and of a grayish color, and so it differs from steppes and savannas. But there are rocky and gravelly, sandy and salt deserts: gravelly, for instance, in Asia Minor, principally in the district known to the ancients as the [Greek: katakekaumegae]. A Heath is a level covered with the plants to which that name has been applied. Finally, a Prairie differs from a savanna only in being under a zone where the seasons are not marked as wet and dry, but where the herbage corresponds to a variable moisture.]
The words crete, pic, and montagne are sometimes applied to the peaks and ridges of the island, but the word morne, which is a Creole corruption of montagne, is in common use to designate all the elevated land, the extended ridges which serve as water-sheds for the torrents of the rainy season, as well as the isolated hillocks, clothed in wood, which look like huge hay-cocks,—those, for instance, which rise in the rear of Cap Haytien. The aspect of the higher hills in the interior might mislead an etymologist to derive the word morne from the French adjective which means gloomy, they are so marked by the ravages of the hurricane and earthquake, so ploughed up into decrepit features by the rains, the pitiless vertical heat, the fires, and the landslides. The soft rock cannot preserve its outlines beneath all these influences; its thin covering of soil is carried off to make the river-silt, and then it crumbles away beneath the weather. Great ruts are scored through the forests where the rock has let whole acres of trees and rubbish slip; they sometimes cover the negro-cabins and the coffee-walks below. These mountains are capricious and disordered masses of grayish stone; there are no sustained lines which sweep upward from the green plantations and cut sharply across the sky, no unchangeable walls of cool shadow, no delicate curves, as in other hills, where the symmetry itself seems to protect the material from the wear and tear of the atmosphere. The mornes are decaying hills; they look as if they emerged first from the ocean and were the oldest parts of the earth, not merely weather-beaten, but profligately used up with a too tropical career, which deprives their age of all grandeur: they bewilder and depress.
There are delightful valleys below these sullen hills. In the dry season their torrents are stony bridle-paths, with only two or three inches of water, along which the traveller can pass from the flourishing plantations, where all the forms of a torrid vegetation are displayed, into this upper region of decay. The transition is sudden and unpleasant. Everything below is stately, exuberant: the sugar-cane, the cotton-tree, the coffee-shrub are suggestive of luxury; the orange and lemon shine through the glossy leaves; the palm-tree, the elegant papayo, the dark green candle-wood, the feathery bamboo, the fig, the banana, the mahogany, the enormous Bombax ceiba, the sablier,[B] display their various shapes; shrubs and bushes, such as the green and red pimento, the vanilla, the pomegranate, the citron, the sweet-smelling acacia, and the red jasmine, contest the claim to delight one’s senses; and various flowers cover the meadows and cluster along the shallow water-courses. No venomous reptiles lurk in these fragrant places: the seed-tick, mosquito, and a spiteful little fly are the greatest annoyances. The horned lizard, which the Indians esteemed so delicate, and the ferocious crocodile, or caiman, haunt the secluded sands and large streams, and the lagoons which form in marshy places.
[Footnote B: Hura crepitans, one of the handsomest trees in the West Indies, called sablier because its fruit makes a very convenient sandbox, when not fully ripe, by removing the seeds. It is of a horn-color, about three and a half inches wide and two high, and looks like a little striped melon. The ripe fruit, on taking out one of the twelve woody cells which compose it, will explode with a noise like a pistol, each cell giving a double report. This sometimes takes place while the fruit is hanging on the tree, and sometimes when it stands upon the table filled with sand. To prevent this, it is prettily hooped with gold, silver, or ivory.]
The trees and thickets do not glitter with fruits alone: gay birds fill them with shifting colors, and a confusion of odd, plaintive, or excited notes. Several kinds of pigeons, paroquets, thrushes, bright violet and scarlet tanagras go foraging among the bananas, the rice, and the millet. The ponds of the savannas are frequented by six or eight varieties of wild ducks, and the wild goose; woodcock and plover abound in the marshy neighborhoods; and the white crane, the swan, different kinds of herons, and an ibis are found near the sea. On the shores stand pelicans and cormorants absorbed in fishing enterprises, and the flamingo,[C] whose note of alarm sounds like a trumpet.
[Footnote C: When the English were meditating a descent upon the coast of Gonaive, a negro happened to see a prodigious number of these red-coated birds ranked on the savanna near the sea, as their habit is, in companies. He rushed into the town, shouting, "Z’Anglais, yo apres veni, yo en pile dans savanne l’Hopital!" “The English, they are after coming, they are drawn up on l’Hopital savanna!” The generale was beaten, the posts doubled, and a strong party was sent out to reconnoitre.
The pelican is a source of great amusement to the negroes. They call this bird blague a diable, because of the incredible number of fish it can stow away in its pouch. They call the cormorant grand gosier, big gullet; and they make use of the membranous pocket which is found under the lower mandible of its beak to carry their smoking tobacco, fancying that it enhances the quality and keeps it fresh. Among the queer birds is the cra-cra, or crocodile’s valet, a bold and restless bird with a harsh cry, represented in its name, which it uses to advertise the dozing crocodile of any hostile approach. It is a great annoyance to the sportsman by mixing with the wild ducks and alarming them with the same nervous cry.]
Charming valleys open to sight from the coast, where the limestone bluffs let in the bays. The eye follows the rivulets as they wind through green, sequestered places, till the hills bar the view, but do not prevent the fancy from exploring farther, and losing itself in a surmise of glens filled with rare vegetation and kept quiet by the inclosing shadows. From the sea this picture is especially refreshing, with the heat left out which is reflected with great power from the sandy rocks and every denuded surface. Below all appears beautiful, luxurious, and new; but above the signs of decrepitude appear, and the broad wastes stretch where little grows except the bayaonde, (Mimosa urens,) with its long murderous spines and ugly pods. Sudden contrasts and absence of delicate gradations mark the whole face of the island. All is extreme; and the mind grows disquieted amid these isolated effects.
The climate also corresponds to this region of luxury and desolation. From November to April everything is parched with heat; some of the trees lose their leaves, the rest become brown, and all growth ceases. From April to November everything is wet; vegetation revives without a spring, and the slender streams suddenly become furious rivers, which often sweep away the improvements of man, and change the face of the country in a single night. During the dry season the inhabitants depend upon the sea-breeze which blows in over the heated land to replace the rarefied air. It blows from six in the morning to three in the afternoon, in the eastern part of the island; in other parts, from nine to three. But frequently a furious northeast wind interrupts this refreshing arrangement: the air becomes hard and cold; thick, wintry-looking clouds sweep over the hills; the inhabitants shut themselves up in their houses to escape the rheumatism, which is a prevalent infliction; a March weather which was apparently destined for New England seems to have got entangled and lost among these fervid hills. The languid Creole life is overtaken by universal discomfort.
Great fires break out over the elevated plateaus and hill-sides, during the dry season. They sweep with incredible rapidity across great tracts, levelling everything in the way. The mountains seem tipped with volcanic flames. The angry glow spreads over the night, and its smoke mixes with the parched air by day. These fires commence by some carelessness, though they are sometimes attributed to the action of the son’s rays, concentrated by the gray cliffs upon great masses of vegetation dried to tinder.
In the rainy season the earthquakes occur; and not a year passes without the experience of several shocks in different parts of the island. The northern part is exempt from them.[D] Those which take place in the west, around the shores of the great bay upon which Port-au-Prince is situated, are severe, and sometimes very disastrous. At mid-day the wind falls instantly, there is a dead calm on land and sea, the heat is consequently more intense, and the atmosphere suffocating; then the vibrations occur, after which the wind begins to blow again. Sometimes, at an interval of ten or twelve hours, there is a supplementary shock, less violent than the first one. It is said that the coast-caves bellow just before an earthquake. Their noise probably seems more emphatic In the sudden calm which is the real announcement of the earth’s shudder.
[Footnote D: Not entirely. The great earthquake of the 7th of May, 1842, was very destructive at Cap Haytien. On this occasion Port-au-Prince escaped with little injury.]
Port-au-Prince was entirely destroyed by an earthquake in June, 1770. The Inhabitants built the new town upon the edge of the gulf which had just swallowed up their old one, convinced that the same disaster would not recur in the same spot. But that region is peculiarly sensitive: the subterranean connections with the Mexican and South-American volcanic districts chronicle disturbances whose centre is remote.
The rains are short and frequent showers, very heavy, and almost always accompanied by violent electric phenomena. By June they are at their height. Then the land-slides take place, which often affect seriously the cultivation, not only by their direct ravages, but by the changes which they make in the water-courses: large tracts of good soil are turned into swamp-land, the rivers are forced to bend out of their direction and to desert places which depended upon them for irrigation. These damages were seldom repaired, for the indolent planter would not undertake the work of draining and of permanently securing the tillable surface of his land. It is good luck, if a land-slide, instead of creating a new morass, fills up an old one.
As if completely to unsettle any claim that this Creole climate might make to character, the hurricane leaves its awful trace upon the island. This rotating storm of wind has its origin to the east of the Caribbee Islands; its long parabolic curve sweeps over them, and bends to the northeast below Florida. In its centre, as it moves, it carries a lull whose breadth varies from five to thirty miles. This dreadful calm comes suddenly in the height of the storm, and is as suddenly interrupted, after lasting sometimes for half an hour, by the revolving edge of the wind. Torrents of rain go with it, and heavy thunder, and it brings from the sea an enormous wave, which sweeps harbors clean of their ships, and runs up, like an earthquake-wave, upon the shore. This vortex, moving often a hundred miles an hour, takes hold of the Bombax ceiba like an enormous proboscis, pulls it from the thin soil of the tropics despite the great lateral clutch of its knotty roots, and swallows it up. Houses, cultivated fields, men and animals, are obliterated by its heavy foot.
In some years no less than three hurricanes have occurred in the West Indies. Father Du Tertre, a French missionary in St. Christophe, describes one which he witnessed in 1642,—a year memorable for three. During the second of these, more than twenty vessels, laden with colonial produce and just ready to sail for Europe, were wrecked in the harbor, including the ship of De Ruyter, the Dutch Admiral. The island was swept of houses, trees, cattle, and birds; the manioc and tobacco plants were destroyed, and only one cotton shrub survived. The shores were covered with dead fishes blown out of the water, and the bodies of ship-wrecked men. The salt-works were flooded and spoiled, and all the provisions on the island were so damaged that the inhabitants were put on rations of biscuit till the arrival of vessels from France.
Another storm like this desolated Martinique in 1657; and the annals of most of the islands abound in similar narratives. They are less severe in Hayti, and seldom sweep violently over Cuba. The word hurricane is a European adaptation of a Carib word, borrowed by the Haytian Indians from the natives of the Antilles.
The inhabitants of Hayti do not agree in the statements which they make concerning their climate. The commencement of the two seasons, the range of the thermometer, the duration of the different winds, the liability to earthquakes, are subjects upon which the North is at variance with the East, and the West with both. The most trustworthy notices of these phenomena are held to represent that portion of the island which was formerly occupied by the French. Still the variations cannot be important over so small an area: the petty and fitful changes of every day are more noticeable, but the climate has its average within which these local caprices occur.
In another climate the mountains would present a gradation of vegetable growth, from the tropical through the temperate to the northern zone. And this can be traced in some quarters, where the palm and mahogany are succeeded by resinous trees, of which there are several varieties, till the bare summits show only lichens and stunted shrubs. But the seasons do not harmonize with this graduated rise of the mountain-chains, and the temperate forms are interrupted, or confined to a few localities. Yet the people who live upon the mornes, those for instance which are drained by Trois-Rivieres in the northwestern part of the island, are healthier and plumper, and the Creoles have a fresher look, than the inhabitants of the plains. In the still more elevated regions the cold is frequently so great that people do not like to live there. Newly imported negroes frequently perished, if they were carried up into the southern range of mountains; and the dependent Creole was forced to abandon places where the slave could not go.
It would be singular, if a place of such marked natural features, and with such phenomena of climate, should have no perceptible effects upon the Eastern races of all kinds which have been transported there. We shall expect that the Creole will betray a certain harmony with his petulant and capricious skies, and imitate the grace and exuberance of the tropical forms amid which he lives, the languor of the air that broods over them, its flattering calms and fierce transitions; he will mature early and wilt at maturity with passions that despise moderation and impulses that are incapable of continuity. In Hayti the day itself rushes precipitately into the sky, and is gone as suddenly: there is no calm broadening of dawn, and no lingering hours of twilight. The light itself is a passion which fiercely revels among the fruits and flowers that exhale for it ardently; it gluts, and then suddenly spurns them for new conquests. Nothing can live and flourish here which has not the innate temperament of the place.
One would not expect to find great wealth in these gray-looking mountains of simple and uniform structure; yet they abound in stones and metals. Besides the different kinds of marble, which it is not strange to find, diamonds also, jasper, agates, onyx, topaz, and other stones, a kind of jade and of malachite, are found in a great many places. Copper exists in considerable quantities in the neighborhood of Dondon and Jacmel, and in the Cibao; silver is found near San Domingo, and in various places in the Cibao, together with cinnabar, cobalt, bismuth, zinc, antimony, and lead in the Cibao, near Dondon and Azua, blue cobalt that serves for painting on porcelain, the gray, black specular nickel, etc.; native iron near the Bay of Samana, in the Mornes-du-Cap, and at Haut-and Bas-Moustique; other forms of that metal abound in numerous places, crystallized, spathic, micaceous, etc. Nitre can be procured in the Cibao, that great storehouse which has specimens of almost every metal, salt, and mineral; borax at Jacmel and Dondon, native alum at Dondon, and aluminous earth near Port-au-Prince; vitriol, of various forms, in a dozen places; naphtha, petroleum, and asphaltum at Banique, and sulphur in different shapes at Marmalade, La Soufriere, etc. The catalogue of this wealth would be tedious to draw up.
The reports concerning gold do not agree. It is maintained that there are mines and washings which have been neglected, or improperly worked, and that a vigorous exploration would reopen this source of wealth; but it is also said as confidently that the Spaniards took off all the gold, and were reduced to working mines of copper, before the middle of the sixteenth century. It is certain, however, that great quantities of gold were taken from the island by the Spaniards, while they had the natives to perform the labor. The principal sources from which gold can be procured are in the part of the island formerly
Bobadilla’s lump was found by a slave of Francisco de Garay, afterwards Governor of Jamaica. He and the famous Diaz worked a mine together in San Domingo. His slave was poking about with a pike in the shallows of the River Hayna, when the head struck the metal. Garay was so rejoiced that he sacrificed a pig, which was served upon this extemporaneous platter, and he boasted that there was no such dish in Europe. Twenty other ships with gold on board went down in the storm which swallowed up Garay’s waif.[E]
[Footnote E: Great quantities of gold were embezzled by the Spanish officials. Las Casas in his lively arguments with the Council of State in behalf of the Indians, always insisted that his plan for controlling them would be more profitable as well as humane. He promised large increase of treasure, and showed how the royal officers appropriated the gold which they extorted from the natives. Piedro Arias, for instance, spent six years at Castilla-du-Oro, at a cost to the Government of fifty-four thousand ducats, during which time he divided a million’s worth of gold with his officers, at the expense of thousands of natives, whose lives were the flux of the metallic ore, while he paid only three thousand pesos for the king’s fifth.—Llorente: Oeuvres de Las Casas, Tom. II—p.472.]
Many French writers have maintained that the Indians procured their golden ornaments from Yucatan and other points of the main-land, by way of traffic. But they had nothing to barter, and their ornaments were numerous. Besides, the Spaniards found in various places near the rivers the holes and slight diggings whence the gold had been procured. It is said that the Haytian natives only washed for gold, but the Caribs had frequented the island long previously, and they without doubt earned gold away from it. The Spaniards were deceived by the Haytians, who did not wish to dig gold under the lash to glitter on the velvet of hidalgos.
It is difficult, as Humboldt says, to distinguish, in the calculations by the Spanish writers of the amount of gold sent to Spain, “between that obtained by washings and that which had been accumulated for ages in the hands of the natives, who were pillaged at will.” He inclines, however, to the opinion, that a scientific system of mining would renew the supply of gold, which may not be represented by the scanty washings that have been occasionally tried in Hayti and Cuba. In Hayti, “as well as at Brazil, it would be more profitable to attempt subterraneous workings, on veins, in primitive and intermediary soils, than to renew the gold-washings which were abandoned in the ages of barbarism, rapine, and carnage."[F]
[Footnote F: Personal Narrative, Vol. III. p. 163, note. Bohn’s Series.]
But the chief interest which Spain took in Hayti was derived from the collars and bracelets which shone dully against the skins of the caciques and native women in the streets of Seville. It did not require an exhausted treasury, and the clamor of a Neapolitan war for sinews, to stimulate the appetite of a nation whose sensibility for gold was as great as its superstition. Columbus triumphed over the imaginations of men through their avarice; the procession of his dusky captives to the feet of Isabella was as if the Earth-Spirit, holding a masque to tempt Catholic majesties to the ruin of the mine, sent his familiars, “with the earth-tint yet so freshly embrowned,” to flatter with heron-crests, the plumes of parrots, and the yellow ore. Behind that naked pomp the well-doubleted nobles of Castile and Aragon trooped gayly with priests and crosses, the pyx and the pax, and all the symbols of a holy Passion, to crime and death.
Columbus discovered Guanahani, which he named San Salvador, on the morning of the 12th of October, 1492. After cruising among these Lucayan Islands, or Bahamas, for some time, he reached Cuba on the 28th of the same month. His Lucayan interpreters were understood by the natives of Cuba, notwithstanding they spoke a different dialect. They were also understood at Hayti, which was reached on the 6th of December; but here the Cuban interpreter was found to be more useful. Each island appeared to have a dialect of a language whose origin has been variously attributed to Florida, to Central America, and to the Caribbee Islands. But the Indians of Central America could not understand the Cubans and Haytians, and they in turn spoke a different language from the Caribs, some of whose words they had borrowed. A favorite theory is, that the Ygneris were ancient inhabitants of the West Indian Islands, distinct from the Caribs, who made their way from Florida by the Lucayan Islands, leaving Hayti to the right, and reaching South America by that fringe of islands that stretches from Porto Rico to Trinidad, through which the great current is strained into the Caribbean Sea. Humboldt says,[G]
[Footnote G: Personal Narrative, Vol. III. p. 78, where see the subject discussed at length.]
[Footnote H: Histoire Generale des Antilles, par Du Tertre, Paris, 1667, Tom. II. p. 360.]
The Caribs are supposed to have derived the compliment of their name, which means “valiant men,” from the Appalachians, who had great trouble in dislodging them. They were very different from the Haytians: they cut their hair very short in front, leaving a tuft upon the crown, bandaged the legs of their children to make a calf that Mr. Thackeray’s Jeames would have envied, pulled out their beard hair by hair, and then polished the chin, with rough leaves. A grand toilet included a coat of scarlet paint, which protected them from the burning effect of the sun and from the bites of insects. It also saved their skins from the scurf and chapping which the sea-water occasioned. A Carib chief, in a full suit of scarlet, excited once the anger of Madame Aubert, wife of a French governor of Dominica, because he sat upon her couch, which had a snowy dimity cover, and left there the larger portion of his pantaloons. But afterwards, upon being invited to dine at the Government-House, he determined to respect the furniture, and, seeing nothing so appropriate as his plate, he removed it to his chair before he took his seat. The Caribs, however, had such an inveterate preference for dining au naturel, that they frequently served up natives themselves, whenever that expensive luxury could be obtained. The Spaniards brought home the word Cannibal, which was a Haytian pronunciation of Cariba (Galiba); and it gradually came into use to express the well-known idea of a man-eater. The South-American Caribs preserve this vicious taste.
The Caribs had not overrun the island of Hayti, but it was never free from their incursions. That hardy and warlike race was feared by the milder Haytians, who had been compelled, especially in the southern provinces of the island, to study the arts of defence, which do not appear to have been much esteemed by them. Their arms were of the simplest description: wood pointed and hardened in the fire, arrows tipped with fish-bone or turtle-shell, and clubs of the toughest kinds of wood. The Caribs used arrows poisoned with the juice of the manchineel, or pointed with formidable shark’s-teeth, their clubs of Brazil-wood were three feet long, and their lances of hardened wood were thrown with great adroitness and to a great distance. The southern Haytians learned, warlike habits from these encroaching Caribs, and were less gentle than the natives whom Columbus first met along the northern coast.
But they were all gentler, fairer, more graceful and simple than the Caribs, or the natives of the main. Their ambition found its limit when the necessaries of daily life were procured. The greatest achievement of their manual dexterity was the hollowing of a great trunk by fire to fashion a canoe.[I] Their huts were neatly made of stakes and reeds, and covered with a plaited roof, beneath which the hamaca, (hammock,) coarsely knitted of cotton, swung. Every collection of huts had also one of larger dimensions, like a lodge, open at the sides, where the natives used to gather for their public business or amusement. This was called bohio, a word improperly applied to the huts, and used by the Spaniards to designate their villages. In the southern districts, the bohios, and the dwellings of the caciques, were furnished with stools wrought with considerable skill from hard wood, and sometimes ornamented. But they could not have been made by the natives, who had neither iron nor copper in use. Their golden ornaments were nothing more than pieces of the metal, rudely turned, by pounding and rubbing, into rings for the nose and ears, and necklace-plates. Whatever they had, for use or ornament, which was more elaborate, came by way of trade from Yucatan and the contiguous coasts. It is difficult to conjecture what their medium of barter was, for they prepared nothing but cassava-cakes for food and the fermented juice for drink, and raised only the pimento, (red pepper,) the agi, (sweet pepper,) the yuca, whence the cassava or manioc meal was obtained, and sweet potatoes; and all these productions were common to the tribes along the coast. Tobacco may have been cultivated by them and neglected by other tribes. The Haytian word tabaco, which designated the pipe from which they sucked the smoke into their nostrils, and also the roll of leaves,—for they employed both methods,—has passed over to the weed. The pipe was a hollow tube in the shape of a Y, the mystic letter of Pythagoras: the two branches were applied to the nose, and the stem was held over the burning leaves. The weed itself was called cohiba.
[Footnote I: Canoa is Haytian, and is like enough to Kayak, Esquimaux, to Caique, Turkish and to Kahn, German, to unsettle an etymologist with a theory of origin.]
At the time of the discovery, five principal caciques ruled the island, which was divided into as many provinces, with inferior caciques, who appear to have been the chiefs of settlements. We find, for instance, that Guatiguana was cacique of a large town in the province of which Guarionex was the chief cacique. The power of each cacique was supreme, but nothing like a league existed between the different provinces. When the Haytians in desperation tried the fortune of war against the Spaniards, Caonabo, the cacique of the central province in the South, like another Pontiac, rallied the natives from all quarters, and held them together long enough to fight a great battle on the Vega. But he was a Carib. His brother who succeeded him was also a Carib, and he maintained a union of several caciques till his defeat by Ojeda. Then the less warlike chiefs of the North readily submitted to the Spaniards, and the bolder caciques of the South were compelled to ask for peace.[J]
[Footnote J: In Mr. Irving’s Life of Columbus, the characters of the different Indian chieftains are finely drawn, and the history of their intercourse and warfare with the Spaniards admirably told.]
Thus were the natives bound together by the polity of instinct and consanguinity alone. They had no laws, but only natural customs. The cacique was an arbitrator: if his decision did not appease a litigant, the parties had an appeal to arms in his presence. Their cacique received unbounded reverence, and for him they would freely die. Polygamy was permitted only to him, but not always practised by him. The Spaniards were so surprised at the readiness with which the natives gave them everything, both food and ornaments, that they declared them to be defective in the sense of property, and to have everything in common. This was a mistake: each man had his little possessions; stealing was punished with death, as the crime that did the greatest violence to the natural order; and crimes against domestic purity were severely punished, till the people became demoralized by their conquerors, who mistook the childish freedom of the women, for lustful invitation, and imputed to the native disposition something which belonged to their own.[K]
[Footnote K: They even accused the natives of communicating that loathsome disease which results from promiscuous intercourse, when in fact the virus was shipped at Palos, with the other elements of civilization, to give a new world to Castile and Leon! Nations appear to be particularly sensitive upon this point, and accuse each other. But the first time a disorder is observed is not the date of its origin. See the European opinion in the fifteenth century, in Roscoe’s Lorenzo de’ Medici, p. 350, and note, Bohn’s edition. It has probably existed from the earliest times, wherever population was dense and habits depraved. The Romans suffered from it, but, like the Europeans of the Middle Ages, did not always attribute it to its proper source. What did Persius mean in one or two places in his Third Satire, e.g., 113-115? And see also Celaus, Medicina, Lib. V. Sec.3.
When the fighting-man of Europe became a mercenary, (soldier, soldner, paid-man,) he carried this tinder from country to country, and kindled the fire afresh. The Spaniards bore it to Hayti, and it stung like a snake beneath that fervid sky.]
They were timid, credulous, extravagantly friendly, affected easily to tears, not cunning enough for their own good, and little capable of concealing or of planning anything. Yet when their eyes were opened, and they understood at last that the strangers had not descended from the skies, their indignation and loathing were well sustained, with a frankness, indeed, which only embittered their condition. They suffered, but could not dissimulate.
But they were at once volatile and of a languid frame, which could not long repel the enticements of wine and passionate excess, liable to petty rages, incapable of concentration, with no power of remembering anything but a benefit, lavish fawners, but not hearty haters, easily persuaded, and easily repenting of everything but hospitality. No abuse of that put the drop of savage blood in motion, till the Spaniards began to regard their women with indiscriminate desire. That was the first outrage for which a Spanish life had to atone. But neither treachery nor cruelty lurked beneath their flowery ways; it was sullen despair which broke their gayety, brief spasms of wrath followed by melancholy. But they could not keep their ideas well enough in hand to lay a plot.
These graceful children, with their curious prognostics of a Creole temper, were not devoid of religion. The Creator has set none of His children in the sun, to work or play, without keeping this hold upon them. They defer to this restraint, with motions more or less instinctive, but can never, in their wildest gambols, break entirely loose. It is not easy to separate the real beliefs of the Haytians from the conjectures of Catholic and Jewish observers. The former were interested to discover analogies which would make it appear that they had been foreordained to conversion; the latter were infested with the notion that they were descendants of one of the Lost Tribes. What, for instance, can be made of the assertion that the Haytian Supreme had a mother? The natives were gentle enough to love such a conception, and to be pleased with the Catholic presentation of it, but this is the only proof we have that they originated it. It would be pleasant to believe that they referred, in some dim way, their sense of the womanly quality back to the great Source of Life.
But the Hebrew coincidences were as eagerly sought.[L] If a cacique remarked to Columbus that he thought good men would be transported to a place of delights, and bad men to a foul and dismal place where darkness reigned, it was deemed to be a reminiscence of Sheol and a later Jewish idea of Paradise. If Anacaona, the charming wife of Caonabo, came forth to meet the Adelantado, at the head of thirty maidens of her household, dancing and singing their native songs, and waving branches of the palm-tree, a variety of Old and New Testament pictures occurred to the mind. Their hospitality and pertinacious sheltering of fugitives was another Oriental trait. But, above all, the horrible oppression to which the Spaniards subjected them, the indignities and sufferings heaped upon them, were considered to fulfil the divine curse which rested upon Jews! What a choice morsel of theology is this!
[Footnote L: Consult a curious book, The Ten Tribes of Israel historically identified with the Aborigines of the Western Hemisphere. By Mrs. Simon. 1836.]
Cabrera found at Cuba, says Humboldt, a variation of the story respecting the first inebriation of Noah. A wild grape grew in all the West India Islands. The natives of Cuba preserved also the tradition of a great terrestrial disturbance, in which water played the chief part. This was probably held by the Haytians also, for we find it again among the Caribs beyond, especially in South America. But Cabrera, mounting with the waters of the Deluge, was not content till he had found in Cuba the ark, the raven and dove, the uncovering of Noah, and his curse; in fact, the Indians were descended from this unfortunate son whom Noah’s malediction reduced to nudity, but the Spaniards, descending from another son, inherited his clothes. “Why do you call me a dog?” said an old Indian of seventy years to Cabrera, who had been insulting him. “Did we not both come out of the same large ship that saved us from the waters?"[M]
[Footnote M: Notes on Cuba, containing an Account of its Discovery and Early History. By Dr. Wurdemann. 1844.]
It is certain that the Haytians believed in continued existence after death, and pointed, as all men do, to the sky, when talking of that subject. They held, indefinitely, that there was some overruling Spirit; but they believed also in malignant influences which it was advisable to propitiate. Their worship was connected with the caverns of the island, those mysterious formations beneath which the strange sounds were heard. The walls of these caverns were covered with pictured distortions, half man, half animal, which yielded to the priests, or butios, interpretations according to the light and shadow. Some of these vaults are lighted through a natural fissure in the roof, and the worship or augury commenced at the moment the sun struck through it. There were movable idols, called Zemes, which represented inferior deities. The Catholic writers call them messengers and mediators, having their own saints in mind. But their forms were sometimes merely animal, a toad, a tortoise with a sun upon its back, and upon each side a star with the moon in her first change; another was a monstrous figure in basalt, representing a head surmounting a female bosom, diminishing to a ball; another was a human figure made from a gypseous stalactite.[N]
[Footnote N: The savages of Martinique kept in their caverns idols made of cotton, in the form of a man, with shining black seeds of the soap-berry (Sapindus) for eyes, and a cotton helmet. These were the original deities of the island. It cannot now be decided whether the cotton thus worshipped was long-staple or upland; but the tendency of the savage mind to make a fetich of its chief thing appears to be universal.]
The cacique took precedence of the butios, in theory, at least, and designated the days for public worship. He led the procession of men and women festively adorned, beating on a drum, to the cavern where the priests awaited them. Presents were offered, and old dances and songs repeated in honor of the Zemes, and of departed caciques. Then the priests broke cakes and distributed the pieces to the heads of families, who carefully kept them till the next festival as amulets and preservatives against disease.
They had an original way of expressing their vague instinct that the Supreme Being loves truth and cleanliness in the inward parts. Each person presented himself, with singing, before the chief idol, and there thrust a stick into his throat till the gorge rose, in order, as they said, to appear before the Divinity with a heart clean and upon the lips.[O]
[Footnote O: Histoire d’Hayti, par M. Placide Justin, p. 8.]
The priests were diviners and doctors. If their predictions failed, they did not want the usual cunning of mediums and spiritual quacks of all ages, who are never known to be caught. But it became a more serious affair for them in the case of a death. Friends consulted the soul at the moment of its leaving the body, and if it could give no sign, or if no omen of fair play appeared from any quarter, the butio was held to be the author of the death, and, if he was not a very popular individual, he incurred the vengeance of the family. If at such a time an animal was seen creeping near, the worst suspicions were confirmed.[P]
[Footnote P: Voyages d’un Naturaliste, etc., par M.E. Descourtilz, Tom. II. p. 19, et seq. 1809.]
The natives had a legend that the sun and moon issued from one of these caverns, which Mr. Irving says is the Voute-a-Minguet, about eight leagues from Cap Haytien.
They were very nervous, and did not like to go about after dark. Many people of all races have this vague disquiet as soon as the sun goes down. It is the absence of light which accounts for all the tremors and tales of superstition. How these sunflowers of Hayti must have shuddered and shrunk together at the touch of darkness! But they had a graceful custom of carrying the cocujos[Q] in a perforated calabash, and keeping them, in their huts, when the sudden twilight fell.
[Footnote Q: A Haytian word appropriated by the Spaniards, (cocuyos); Elater noctilucus. Their light is brilliant enough to read by.]
Their festivals and public gatherings were more refined than those of the Caribs, who held but one meeting, called a Vin, for consultation upon war-matters and a debauch upon cassava-beer.[R] The Haytians loved music, and possessed one or two simple instruments; their maguey was like a timbrel, made of the shells of certain fishes. Their speech, with its Italian terminations, flowed easily into singing, and they extemporized, as the negroes do, the slightest incidents in rhythmical language. They possessed national ballads, called areytos, and held in high repute the happy composers of fresh ones. Altogether their life was full of innocence and grace.
[Footnote R: Father Du Tertre enjoys relating, that a Carib orator, wishing to make his speech more impressive, invested his scarlet splendor in a jupe which he had lately taken from an Englishwoman, tying it where persons of the same liturgical tendency tie their cambric. But though his garrulity was thereby increased, the charms of the liquor drew his audience away.]
Such were the aborigines of Hayti, the “Mountain-land.” But as our narrative does not propose a minute and consecutive survey, it will detain us too long from certain essential points which deserve to be made clear, if we follow step by step the dealings of the Spaniards with these natives. All this can be found delightfully told by Mr. Irving in his “Life of Columbus,” in such a way as to render an attempt at repeating it hazardous and useless. Our task is different,—to make prominent first, the character of the natives, which we have just striven to do, and next, the style of treatment in converting and in enslaving them, which gave its first chapter of horrors to San Domingo, and laid violent hands on the whole sequence of her history.
What influence could the noble elements of the Spanish character have, when theology, avarice, and lust controlled the conquest? Pure minds and magnanimous intentions went in the same ships with adventurers, diseased soldiers, cold and superstitious men of business, and shaven monks with their villanous low brows and thin inquisitorial smile. The average character speedily obtained ascendency, because the best men were to some extent partakers of it. Columbus was eager to make his great discovery pay well, to preserve the means of continued exploration. In one hand he lifted high the banner of possession with its promise of a cross, which direful irony fulfilled; with the other he kept feeding the ravenous nation with gold, to preserve its sympathy and admiration, that the supply of men and vessels should not fail. Las Casas himself, a just and noble man, the first advocate of the natural rights of men in the New World, soon found that the situation was too strong and cruel; his wishes and struggles went under before the flood of evil passions which swept the island. He maintained his fight against Indian slavery by not discountenancing negro slavery. And his fight was unavailing, because mercy had no legitimate place upon the new soil. The logic of events was with the evil majority, which was obliged at last to maintain its atrocious consistency in self-defence. He might as well have preached the benefits of Lenten diet to shipwrecked men upon a raft, insane with thirst and the taste of comrade’s flesh. It was a Devil’s problem, which is the kind that cannot hold back from its devilish conclusion.
But bad passions were not alone to blame. The Spanish notion of conversion desolated like avarice. The religious bodies which from time to time controlled the affairs of the island differed in their humanity and general policy: the Dominicans were friends of the Indian and haters of the turbulent oppressor; the Franciscans were the instruments of the bad men whose only ambition was to wring pleasure and fortune out of the Indian’s heart; the monks of St. Jerome undertook in vain a neutral and reconciling policy. But they all agreed that the Indians must be baptized, catechized, and more or less chastised
The cacique Hatuey understood the Spaniards. He was the first man in the New World who saw by instinct what an after-age perceived by philosophical reflection. He should have been the historian of the Conquest. The Spaniards had destroyed his people, and forced him to fly to Cuba for safety. There he also undertook a conversion of the natives. “Do you expect to defend yourselves against this people,” he said, “while you do not worship the same God? This God I know; he is more powerful than ours, and I reveal him to you.” With this he shows them a little piece of gold. “Here he is; let us celebrate a festival to honor him, that his favor may be extended to us.” The natives hold a solemn smoking around the Spanish God, which is followed by singing and dancing, as to one of their own Zemes. Having adroitly concentrated their attention in this way upon the article of gold, Hatuey the next morning reassembles the people and finishes his missionary labors. “My mind is not at ease. There can be no safety for us while the God of the Spaniard is in our midst. They seek him everywhere. Their devotion is so great that they settle in a place only for the convenience of worship. It is useless to attempt to hide him from their eyes. If you should swallow him, they would disembowel you in the name of religion. Even the bottom of the sea may not be too far, but there it is that we must throw him. When he can no longer be found with us, they will leave us in peace.”
Admirable counsel, if the gold in veins, or their own blood, were not also the object of search. The natives collected all their gold and threw it into the sea. A party of Spaniards landing upon the island not long after, Hatuey was taken prisoner, and condemned to be burnt alive because he refused to be converted!
“Was conduct ever more affronting?
With all the ceremony settled!
With the towel ready”—
and all the other apparatus for a first-class baptism, and the annexation to Rome and heaven of a tribe! When he was tied to the stake, and a priest conjured him to profess Christianity and make a sure thing of paradise, he cut him short with,—
“Are there Spaniards in this place of delights of which you speak?”
“There are indeed, but only good ones.”
“The best of them is good for nothing,” said the cacique. “I would rather not go where I might have to meet them.”
Dying, he had his preference.
It seems to be one that is innate in the savage mind. An Ojibbeway was apparently pleased with the new religion that was proffered to him, and thought of being baptized, but, dreaming that he went up to a fair prairie covered with numerous trails of white men, without the print of a single moccasin, was cured of his desire. The Frisian Radbod also expressed his disgust at the converting methods of Charles the Hammer. “He had already immersed one of his royal legs in the baptismal font, when a thought struck him. ‘Where are my dead forefathers at present?’ he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran. ’In hell, with all other unbelievers,’ was the imprudent answer. ‘Mighty well!’ replied Radbod, removing his leg; ’then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden than dwell with your little starveling band of Christians in heaven.’"[S] And if he, too, died a heathen, it is certain that one continued to live in Bishop Wolfran. For it is men of his narrow and brutal theology who are not yet converted to Christianity, but who get a dispensation to disgust men with that glorious name.
[Footnote S: Motley’s Dutch Republic, Vol. I. p. 20.]
So it went on at Hayti. Catholic fetiches vied with the native ones for ascendency. Ecclesiastics were charged with the management of secular as well as spiritual matters, for it was the genius of Spain to govern by the priest. A very few of them understood men, and had a head for affairs; of these, some were pure, the rest were base, and readily fraternized with the soldiers and politicians in their selfish policy. A bad and cruel theology, a narrow priestly mind, became the instruments of lust and murder.
Guarionex was the chief cacique of a province which comprised the middle part of the Vega Real. His conversion was undertaken by Friar Roman, a St. Jeromite, and Joan Borognon, a Franciscan. The cacique listened attentively to their instructions, but the natives, already alienated by the excesses of the Spaniards, would neither attend mass nor be catechized, except upon compulsion. It was the policy of Guarionex to offer no resistance to the addresses of the priests. But an outrage committed upon his wife hindered the progress of religion in his province. He dashed the cross to the ground in fury, and scattered the utensils. The affrighted priests fled, leaving behind a chapel with some pictures which they had instructed the converts to regard in offering up their prayers. Guarionex buried all the pictures, and said over them, instead of a Pater, “Now you will begin to bear fruit!” Friar Roman says that a catechumen, digging his agis (sweet pepper) in that field, found two or three of them grown together in the shape of a cross. The miracle and the outrage were reported at once, and the six natives who had buried the pictures at the command of Guarionex were burnt alive! This was the first auto-da-fe on Haytian soil.
The preaching and the lust went on. But the preaching sometimes addressed the sinner also. Montesino, a Dominican preacher, attacked the cruelty of the colonists from the pulpit of San Domingo. He was accused of treason; that is to say, the king was held to represent the policy which enslaved and destroyed the Indian. The authorities threatened to expel the Dominicans from the island, if the preacher did not apologize and withdraw his charges. Montesino promised soon to preach in another style. Having filled the church with his malignant audience, he bravely maintained his position with fresh facts and arguments; he showed that the system of repartimientos, or partition of the Indians among the colonists, was more disastrous than the first system, which imposed upon each cacique a tax and left him to extort it from his subjects. He urged the policy of interest; for the Indians, unused to labor, died in droves: they dropped in the fields beneath the whip; they escaped by whole families to the mountains, and there perished with hunger; they threw themselves into the water, and killed each other in the forests; families committed suicide in concert;—there would soon be no laborers, and the Spaniard could rob and murder, but would not toil. Brave preacher, worthy mouth-piece of the humane Las Casas, what could he effect against the terrible exigency of the situation? For here was a colony, into which all the prisons of Spain had just been emptied to repair a failing emigration,—men bred in crime coalescing with men whose awakened passions made them candidates for prison,—the whole community, with the exception of the preacher and his scattered sympathizers, animated by one desire, to get the gold, to exhaust the soil, to glut voluptuous immunity, to fill the veins with a fiery climate, and to hurry back with wealth enough to feed it more safely in the privacies of Madrid and Seville. What were preaching and benevolent intention, where shaven superstition was inculcating the cross by its weight alone, and bearded ferocity desolated with the sword what the cross could spare? The discussion which Montesino raised went home to Spain; but when a board of commissioners, charged to investigate the subject, advised that all Indians granted to Spanish courtiers, and to all other persons who did not reside upon the island, should be set at liberty, the colonists saw the entering wedge of emancipation. The discontent was so great, and the alternative of slavery or ruin was so passionately offered to the Government at home, that the system of repartimientos remained untouched; for the Government felt that it must choose between the abandonment of the island and the destruction of those who alone, if judiciously protected, could make it profitable to retain it.
Protection and amelioration, then, became the cry. In consequence of the great increase of cattle in the island, it was considered no more than just that the Indians should no longer be used as beasts of burden. They were also to have one day in the seven, besides the Church festivals, for their own use; and intendants were appointed who were to have a general supervision of their affairs, and to protect them from barbarous punishments. These regulations were a weir of reeds thrown across a turbid and tumultuous Amazon.
Las Casas was an eye-witness of the cruelties which he exposed in his memoirs to the Government, those uncompromising indictments of his own nation and of the spirit of the age. He had seen the natives slaughtered like sheep in a pen, and the butchers laid bets with each other upon their dexterity in cleaving them asunder at a stroke. Children, torn from the bosoms of their mothers, were brained against the stones, or thrown into the water with mocking cries,—“That will refresh you!” A favorite mode of immolation, which had the merit of exciting theological associations, was to bind thirteen of the natives to as many stakes, one for each apostle and one for the Saviour, and then to make a burnt-offering of them. Others were smeared with pitch and lighted. Sometimes a fugitive who had been recaptured was sent into the forest with his severed hand,—“Go, carry this letter to the others who have escaped, with our compliments.”
“I have seen,” says Las Casas, “five chiefs and several other Indians roasting together upon hurdles, and the Spanish captain was enraged because their cries disturbed his siesta. He ordered them to be strangled, that he might hear no more of it. But the superintendent, whom I know, as well as his family, which is from Seville, more cruel than the officer, refused to end their torture.” He would not be cheated of his after-dinner luxury, so he gagged them with sticks, and replenished the fires.[T]
[Footnote T: Llorente’s Oeuvres de Las Casas; Premiere Memoire, contenant la Relation des Cruautes, etc.]
Columbus first made use of dogs against the Indians, but merely to intimidate. They were swift dogs of chase, impetuous and dangerous, but did not yet deserve to be called blood-hounds. The Spaniards, however, by frequently using them in the pursuit of escaping natives, without thinking it worth while to restrain their motions, gradually educated them to a taste for human blood. From the breed, thus modified, the West-Indian blood-hound descended, possibly not without admixture with other savage dogs of French and English breeds which were brought to the island by their scarcely less savage owners. Many of the dogs which the Spaniards carried to South America roamed at large and degenerated into beasts of prey. Soldiers at one time were detailed to hunt them, and were then nicknamed Mataperros, or dog-slayers.
But if the dogs fed upon the Indian’s body, the monk was ever vigilant to save his soul. A woman was holding her child of twelve months, says Las Casas, when she perceived the approach of the hounds in full cry after a party of natives. Feeling that she could not escape, she instantly tied her babe to her leg and then suspended herself from a beam. The dogs came up at the moment that a monk was baptizing the child, thus luckily cutting off its purgatory just behind the jaws that devoured it.
Spaniards were known to feed their dogs, when short of meat, by chopping off a native’s arm and throwing it to them; and a few fed their dogs exclusively upon native-meat. We have the authority of Las Casas for the fact, which he took care to have well attested from various sources, that a Spaniard would borrow a quarter of native from a friend for his hounds, promising to return it at a favorable opportunity. Somebody asked one of these generous livers how his housekeeping flourished. “Well enough,” was the reply; “I have killed twenty of these rascally Indians, and now, thank God, my dogs have something to eat.”
The Spaniards paid their gambling debts in natives. If a governor lost heavily at cards, he would give the winner an order upon some cacique for a corresponding amount of gold, or natives in default of the metal, knowing that the gold could no longer be procured. Sometimes the lucky gambler made the levy without applying to the cacique. The stakes were not unfrequently for three and four hundred Indians in the early days of the colonies, when natives were so plenty that one could be bought for a cheese, or an arroba of vinegar, wine, or lard. Eighty natives were swapped for a mare, and a hundred for a lame horse. When it began to be difficult to lay hands upon them, it was only necessary to send for a missionary, who would gradually collect them for purposes of instruction and worship. When the habit of attending a chapel was pretty well confirmed, the building was surrounded, the young and stout ones were seized and branded, and carried away, with the most attractive females, for further indoctrination in the Christian arts.
A device of the caciques which was practised in Nicaragua might easily have been pursued in Hayti. But the account of Las Casas refers to the former province. When a demand was made upon one cacique to supply laborers, he would repair to another, and say, “The devil who has me in his power wants so many men and women. I have no doubt that your devil will say the same thing to you. Let us arrange the matter. Give me the facility of procuring my quota in your tribe, and you shall take yours from my tribe.” “It is agreed; for my devil has just made a similar demand of me.” Each cacique would then swear to the Commanders, who were very nice upon the technicality so long as slaves were plenty, that the men furnished came from his own district, thus saving his life and his credit with his people. This was a great convenience; for in all savage exigencies and dire perils men must study how they can best arrange with the inevitable.
But it will be too painful to recount the various inventions for punishing these unhappy children of Nature. The dogs, perhaps, were merciful, for they killed and ate a native on the spot. Cutting off the ear and nose was an ordinary barbarity,—in its origin it was a way to save time in collecting ornaments; shutting fifty or more into a house and setting it in flames was a favorite method of extemporizing a bonfire; pricking a crowd of insurgent natives over a precipice into the sea was an exceptional act of mercy,—they would place one hand over their eyes and take the plunge. It was a common sport to match stout Indians with the hounds, and bet upon their wrestling. In the pearl-fisheries, in rowing galleys, in agriculture, in the mines, in carrying ship-timber, anchors, and pieces of ordnance, in transporting produce, the Spaniards wasted the natives as if they were wind-and water-power which Nature would supply without limit. How can this ferocity be accounted for? It consulted neither interest nor personal safety. They raged like men stung to madness by poisonous clouds of insects; the future received no consideration; plans for improving the methods of cultivating different crops, or for introducing new staples, could not be carried out. Once having tasted native blood, like their own dogs, the hunting mania possessed them, till two millions of Haytians alone had perished. The population had become so reduced as early as 1508 that they were obliged to organize great Indian chases on the main-land, and a Coolie trade sprang up in the Lucayan Islands, to keep the Haytian mines and plantations supplied with hands. Forty thousand of these Lucayans were transported, on the assurance of the Spaniards that they would be restored to the souls of their ancestry, who had gone to reside in that Mountain-land of the West. Was there a touch of grim Spanish humor in this inducement to emigrate? For certainly the Lucayans did very soon rejoin those departed souls.
Wine and the climate maddened these unbridled Europeans. Avarice is a calculating passion; but here were aimless and exhausting horrors, like those which swarm in the drunkard’s corrupted brain. What were vices at home became transformed into manias here. The representatives of other nations were not slow to imitate the example of the possessors of Hayti. Venezuela was ceded to a company of Germans in 1526, whose object was simply to strip the country of its treasures. Las Casas tries to believe that the Spaniards seemed like just men by the side of these new speculators; but it was not possible to destroy natives faster than was done in the countries under Spanish rule. The Germans, after all, were forced to employ Spaniards to pursue the Indians when they attempted to escape from this new system of farming into the mountains, and they profited so well by the lessons of their Catholic hunters, that, upon their departure, they hit upon new expedients for making
How did the Spaniards conform to it? Rude soldiers became the managers of the different working gangs into which the Indians had been divided, and it devolved upon them to superintend their spiritual welfare. Enough has been said about their brutality; but their ignorance was no less remarkable. Las Casas complains that they could not repeat the Credo, nor the Ten Commandments. Their ignorance of the former would have been bliss, if they had been practically instructed in the latter. John Colmenero was one of these common soldiers who became installed in a Commandery (Encomienda). When the missionaries visited his plantation, they found that the laborers had not the slightest notions of Christianity. They examined John upon the subject, and discovered to their horror that he did not know even how to make the sign of the cross. “What have you been teaching these poor Indians?” they asked him. “Why, that they are all going to the Devil! Won’t your signin santin cruces help to teach them that?"[U]
[Footnote U: Llorente, Tom. I. p. 180.]
No doubt it would; for we know how serviceable in that way Ovando found it, when he plotted to seize the beautiful Anacaona, who governed the province of Xaragua in Hayti. This he did, and also gave the signal for a dreadful massacre of her subjects, whom he had beguiled to a military spectacle, by lifting his hand to the cross of Alcantara that was embroidered on his dress.
Colmenero had not a head for business like that other Spaniard who baptized all the inhabitants of a village and took away their idols of gold, for which he substituted copper ones, and then compelled the natives to purchase them of him at so many slaves per idol.
“Come, then, caciques and Indians, come!” This was the ordinary style of proclamation. “Abandon your false gods, adore the God of the Christians, profess their religion, believe in the gospel, receive the sacrament of baptism, recognize the King of Castile for your king and master. If you refuse, we declare war upon you to kill you, to make you slaves, to spoil you of your goods, and to cause you to suffer as long and as often as we shall judge convenient,"[V] and for the good of your souls.
[Footnote V: Llorente, Tom. I. p. 28.]
In 1542, Charles V. procured a bull from Pope Paul III. restoring the Indians to their natural freedom: this he confirmed and despatched to the island. Las Casas, the Protector of the Indians, had carried his point at last, but the Indians were beyond protection. The miserable remnant were no longer of consequence, for the African had begun to till the soil enriched by so much native blood. Thus ends the first chapter of the Horrors of San Domingo.
Schoelcher reminds us that the traveller may read upon the tomb of Columbus at Seville: “Known worlds were not enough for him: he added a new to the old, and gave to heaven innumerable souls.”
[To be continued.]
A few miles from the southern extremity of Florida, separated from it by a channel, narrow at the eastern end, but widening gradually toward the west, and rendered every year more and more shallow by the accumulation of materials constantly collecting within it, there lies a line of islands called the Florida Keys. They are at different distances from the shore, stretching gradually seaward in the form of an open crescent, from Virginia Key and Key Biscayne, almost adjoining the main-land, to Key West, at a distance of twelve miles from the coast, which does not, however, close the series, for sixty miles farther west stands the group of the Tortugas, isolated in the Gulf of Mexico. Though they seem disconnected, these islands are parts of a submerged Coral Reef, concentric with the shore of the peninsula and continuous underneath the water, but visible above the surface at such points of the summit as have fully completed their growth.
This demands some explanation, since I have already said that no Coral growth can continue after it has reached the line of high-water. But we have not finished the history of a Coral wall, when we have followed it to the surface of the ocean. It is true that its normal growth ceases there, but already a process of partial decay as begun that insures its further increase. Here, as elsewhere, destruction and construction go hand in hand, and the materials that are broken or worn away from one part of the Reef help to build it up elsewhere. The Corals which form the Reef are not the only beings that find their home there: many other animals—Shells, Worms, Crabs, Star-Fishes, Sea-Urchins—establish themselves upon it, work their way into its interstices, and seek a shelter in every little hole and cranny made by the irregularities of its surface. In the Zoological Museum at Cambridge there are some large fragments of Coral Reef which give one a good idea of the populous aspect that such a Reef would present, could we see it as it actually exists beneath the water. Some of these fragments consist of a succession of terraces, as it were, in which are many little miniature caves, where may still be seen the Shells or Sea-Urchins which made their snug and sheltered homes in these recesses of the Reef.
We must not consider the Reef as a solid, massive structure throughout. The compact kinds of Corals, giving strength and solidity to the wall, may be compared to the larger trees in a forest, which give it shade and density; but between these grow all kinds of trailing vines, ferns and mosses, wild flowers and low shrubs, that till the spaces between the larger trees with a thick underbrush. The Coral Reef also has its underbrush of the lighter, branching, more brittle kinds, that fill its interstices and fringe the summit and the sides with their delicate, graceful forms. Such an intricate underbrush of Coral growth affords an excellent retreat for many animals that like its protection better than exposure to the open sea, just as many land-animals prefer the close and shaded woods to the open plain: a forest is not more thickly peopled with Birds, Squirrels, Martens, and the like, than is the Coral Reef with a variety of animals that do not contribute in any way to its growth, but find shelter in its crevices or in its near neighborhood.
But these larger animals are not the only ones that haunt the forest. There is a host of parasites besides, principally Insects and their larvae, which bore their way into the very heart of the tree, making their home in the bark and pith, and not the less numerous because hidden from sight. These also have their counterparts in the Reef, where numbers of boring Shells and marine Worms work their way into the solid substance of the wall, piercing it, with holes in every direction, till large portions become insecure, and the next storm suffices to break off the fragments so loosened. Once detached, they are tossed about in the water, crumbled into Coral sand, crushed, often ground to powder by the friction of the rocks and the constant action of the sea.
After a time, an immense quantity of such materials is formed about a Coral Reef; tides and storms constantly throw them up on its surface, and at last a soil collects on the top of the Reef, wherever it has reached the surface of the water, formed chiefly of its own debris, of Coral sand, Coral fragments, even large masses of Coral rock, mingled with the remains of the animals that have had their home about the Reef, with sea-weeds, with mud from the neighboring land, and with the thousand loose substances always floating about in the vicinity of a coast and thrown upon the rocks or shore with every wave that breaks against them. Add to this the presence of a lime-cement in the water, resulting from the decomposition of some of these materials, and we have all that is needed to make a very compact deposit and fertile soil, on which a vegetation may spring up, whenever seeds floating from the shore or dropped by birds in their flight take root on the newly formed island.
There is one plant belonging to tropical or sub-tropical climates that is peculiarly adapted by its mode of growth to the soil of these islands, and contributes greatly to their increase. This is the Mangrove-tree. Its seeds germinate in the calyx of the flower, and, before they drop, grow to be little brown stems, some six or seven inches long and about as thick as a finger, with little rootlets at one end. Such Mangrove-seedlings, looking more like cigars than anything else, float in large numbers about the Reef. I have sometimes seen them in the water about the Florida Reef in such quantities that one would have said some vessel laden with Havana cigars had been wrecked there, and its precious cargo scattered in the ocean.
In consequence of their shape and the development of the root, one end is a little heavier than the other, so that they float unevenly, with the loaded end a little lower than the lighter one. When they are brought by the tide against such a cap of soil as I have described, they become stranded upon it by their heavier end, the rootlets attach themselves slightly to the soil, the advancing and retreating waves move the little plant up and down, till it works a hole in the sand, and having thus established itself more firmly, steadied itself as it were, it now stands upright, and, as it grows, throws out numerous roots, even from a height of several feet above the ground, till it has surrounded the lower part of its stem with a close net-work of roots. Against this natural trellis or screen all sorts of materials collect; sand, mud, and shells are caught in it; and as these Mangrove-trees grow in large numbers and to the height of thirty feet, they contribute greatly to the solidity and compactness of the shores on which they are stranded.
Such caps of soil on the summit of a Coral Reef are of course very insecure till they are consolidated by a long period of accumulation, and they may even be swept completely away by a violent storm. It is not many years since the light-house built on Sand Key for the greater security of navigation along the Reef was swept away with the whole island on which it stood. Thanks to the admirably conducted Investigations of the Coast-Survey, this part of our seaboard, formerly so dangerous on account of the Coral Reefs, is now better understood, and every precaution has been taken to insure the safety of vessels sailing along the coast of Florida.
I cannot deny myself the pleasure of paying a tribute here to the high scientific character of the distinguished superintendent of this survey, who has known so well how to combine the most important scientific aims with the most valuable practical results in his direction of it. If some have hitherto doubted the practical value of such researches,—and unhappily there are always those who estimate intellectual efforts only by their material results,—one would think that these doubts must be satisfied now that
Several of the Florida Keys, such as Key West and Indian Key, are already large, inhabited islands, several miles in extent. The interval between them and the main-land is gradually filling up by a process similar to that by which the islands themselves were formed. The gentle landward slope of the Reef and the channel between it and the shore are covered with a growth of the more branching lighter Corals, such as Sea-Fans, Coral-lines, etc., answering the same purpose as the intricate roots of the Mangrove-tree. All the debris of the Reef, as well as the sand and mud washed from the shore, collect in this net-work of Coral growth within the channel, and soon transform it into a continuous mass, with a certain degree of consistence and solidity. This forms the foundation of the mud-flats which are now rapidly filling the channel and must eventually connect the Keys of Florida with the present shore of the peninsula.
Outside the Keys, but not separated from them by so great a distance as that which intervenes between them and the main-land, there stretches beneath the water another Reef, abrupt, like the first, on its seaward side, but sloping gently toward the inner Reef, and divided from it by a channel. This outer Reef and channel are, however, in a much less advanced state than the preceding ones; only here and there a sand-flat large enough to afford a foundation for a beacon or a lighthouse shows that this Reef also is gradually coming to the surface, and that a series of islands corresponding to the Keys must eventually be formed upon its summit. Some of my readers
What is now the rate of growth of these Coral Reefs? We cannot, perhaps, estimate it with absolute accuracy, since they are now so nearly completed; but Coral growth is constantly springing up wherever it can find a foothold, and it is not difficult to ascertain approximately the rate of growth of the different kinds. Even this, however, would give us far too high a standard; for the rise of the Coral Reef is not in proportion to the height of the living Corals, but to their solid parts which never decompose. Add to this that there are many brittle delicate kinds that have a considerable height when alive, but contribute to the increase of the Reef only so much additional thickness as they would have when broken and crushed down upon its surface. A forest in its decay does not add to the soil of the earth a thickness corresponding to the height of its trees, but only such a thin layer as would be left by the decomposition of its whole vegetation. In the Coral Reef, also, we must allow not only for the deduction of the soft parts, but also for the comminution of all these brittle branches, which would be broken and crushed by the action of the storms and tides, and add, therefore, but little to the Reef in proportion to their size when alive.
The foundations of Fort Jefferson, which is built entirely of Coral rock, were laid on the Tortugas Islands in the year 1846. A very intelligent head-work man watched the growth of certain Corals that established themselves on these foundations, and recorded their rate of increase. He has shown me the rocks on which Corals had been growing for some dozen years, during which they had increased at the rate of about half an inch in ten years. I have collected facts from a variety of sources and localities that confirm this testimony. A brick placed under water in the year 1850 by Captain Woodbury of Tortugas, with the view of determining the rate of growth of Corals, when taken up in 1858 had a crust
Estimating the growth of the Coral Reef according to these and other data of the same character, it should be about half a foot in a century; and a careful comparison which I have made of the condition of the Reef as recorded in an English survey made about a century ago with its present state would justify this conclusion. But allowing a wide margin for inaccuracy of observation or for any circumstances that might accelerate the growth, and leaving out of consideration the decay of the soft parts and the comminution of the brittle ones, which would subtract so largely from the actual rate of growth, let us double this estimate and call the average increase a foot for every century. In so doing, we are no doubt greatly overrating the rapidity of the progress, and our calculation of the period that must have elapsed in the formation of the Reef will be far within the truth.
The outer Reef, still incomplete, as I have stated, and therefore of course somewhat lower than the inner one, measures about seventy feet in height. Allowing a foot of growth for every century, not less than seven thousand years must have elapsed since this Reef began to grow. Some miles nearer the main-land are the Keys, or the inner Reef; and though this must have been longer in the process of formation than the outer one, since its growth is completed, and nearly the whole extent of its surface is transformed into islands, with here and there a narrow break separating them, yet, in order to keep fully within the evidence of the facts, I will allow only seven thousand years for the formation of this Reef also, making fourteen thousand for the two.
This brings us to the shore-bluffs, consisting simply of another Reef exactly like those already described, except that the lapse of time has united it to the main-land by the complete filling up and consolidation of the channel which once divided it from the extremity of the peninsula, as a channel now separates the Keys from the shore-bluffs, and the outer Reef, again, from the Keys. These three concentric Reefs, then, the outer Reef, the Keys, and the shore-bluffs, if we measure the growth of the two latter on the same low estimate by which I have calculated the rate
But this is not the end of the story. Travelling inland from the shore-bluffs, we cross a low, flat expanse of land, the Indian hunting-ground, which brings us to a row of elevations called the Hummocks. This hunting-ground, or Everglade as it is also called, is an old channel, changed first to mud-flats and then to dry land by the same kind of accumulation that is filling up the present channels, and the row of hummocks is but an old Coral Reef with the Keys or islands of past days upon its summit. Seven such Reefs and channels of former times have already been traced between the shore-bluffs and Lake Okee-cho-bee, adding some fifty thousand years to our previous estimate. Indeed, upon the lowest calculation, based upon the facts thus far ascertained as to their growth, we cannot suppose that less than seventy thousand years have elapsed since the Coral Reefs already known to exist in Florida began to grow. When we remember that this is but a small portion of the peninsula, and that, though we have not yet any accurate information as to the nature of its interior, yet the facts already ascertained in the northern part of this State, formed like its Southern extremity of Coral growth, justify the inference that the whole peninsula is formed of successive concentric Reefs, we must believe that hundreds of thousands of years have elapsed since its formation began. Leaving aside, however, all that part of its history which is not susceptible of positive demonstration in the present state of our knowledge, I will limit my results to the evidence of facts already within our possession; and these give us as the lowest possible estimate a period of seventy thousand years for the formation of that part of the peninsula which extends south of Lake Okee-cho-bee to the present outer Reef.
So much for the duration of the Reefs themselves. What, now, do they tell us of the permanence of the Species by which they were formed? In these seventy thousand years has there been any change in the Corals living in the Gulf of Mexico? I answer, most emphatically, No. Astraeans, Porites, Maeandrinas, and Madrepores were represented by exactly the same Species seventy thousand years ago as they are now. Were we to classify the Florida Corals from the Reefs of the interior, the result would correspond exactly to a classification founded upon the living Corals of the outer Reef to-day. There would be among the Astraeans the different species of Astraea proper, forming the close round heads,—the Mussa, growing in smaller stocks, where the mouths coalesce and run into each other as in the Brain-Corals, but in which the depressions formed by the mouths are deeper,—and the Caryophyllians, in which the single individuals stand out more distinctly from the stock; among Porites, the P. Astroides, with pits resembling those of the Astraeans in form, though smaller in size, and growing also in solid heads, though these masses are covered with club-shaped protrusions, instead of presenting a smooth, even surface like the Astraeans,—and the P. Clavaria, in which the stocks are divided in short, stumpy branches, with club-shaped ends, instead of growing in close, compact heads; among the Maeandrinas we should have the round heads we know as Brain-Corals, with their wavy lines over the surface, and the Manacina, differing again from the preceding by certain details of structure; among the Madrepores we should have the Madrepora prolifera, with its small, short branches, broken up by very frequent ramifications, the M. cervicornis, with longer and stouter branches and less frequent ramifications, and the cup-like M. palmata, resembling an open sponge in form. Every Species, in short, that lives upon the present Reef is found in the more ancient ones. They all belong to our own geological period, and we cannot, upon the evidence before us, estimate its duration at less than seventy thousand years, during which time we have no evidence of any change in Species, but on the contrary the strongest proof of the absolute permanence of those Species whose past history we have been able to trace.
Before leaving the subject of the Coral Reefs, I would add a few words on the succession of the different kinds of Polyp Corals on a Reef as compared with their structural rank and also with their succession in time, because we have here another of those correspondences of thought, those intellectual links in Creation, which give such coherence and consistency to the whole, and make it intelligible to man.
The lowest in structure among the Polyps are not Corals, but the single, soft-bodied Actiniae. They have no solid parts, and are independent in their mode of existence, never forming communities, like the higher members of the class. It might at first seem strange that independence, considered a sign of superiority in the higher animals, should here be looked upon as a mark of inferiority. But independence may mean either simple isolation, or independence of action; and the life of a single Polyp is no more independent in the sense of action than that of a community of Polyps. It is simply not connected with or related to the life of any others. The mode of development of these animals tells us something of the relative inferiority and superiority of the single ones and of those that grow in communities. When the little Polyp Coral, the Astraean or Madrepore, for instance, is born from the egg, it is as free as the Actinia, which remains free all its life. It is only at a later period, as its development goes on, that it becomes solidly attached to the ground, and begins its compound life by putting forth new beings like itself as buds from its side. Since we cannot suppose that the normal development of any being can have a retrograde action, we are justified in believing that the loss of freedom is in fact a stage of progress in these lower animals, and their more intimate dependence on each other a sign of maturity.
There are, however, structural features by which the relative superiority of these animals may be determined. In proportion as the number of their parts is limited and permanent, their structure is more complicated; and the indefinite multiplication of identical parts is connected with inferiority of structure. Now in these lowest Polyps, the Actiniae, the tentacles increase with age indefinitely, never ceasing to grow while life lasts, new chambers being constantly added to correspond with them, till it becomes impossible to count their numbers. Next to these come the true Fungidae. They are also single, and though they are stony Corals, they have no share in the formation of Reefs. In these, also, the tentacles multiply throughout life, though they are usually not so numerous as in the Actiniae. But a new feature is added to the complication of their structure, as compared with Actiniae, in the transverse beams which connect their vertical partitions, though they do not stretch across the animal so as to form perfect floors, as in some of the higher Polyps. These transverse beams or floors must not be confounded with the horizontal floors alluded to in a former article as characteristic of the ancient Acalephian Corals, the Rugosa and Tabulata. For in the latter these floors stretch completely across the body, uninterrupted by vertical partitions, which, if they exist at all, pass only from floor to floor, instead of extending unbroken through the whole height of the body, as in all Polyps. Where, on the contrary, transverse floors exist in true Polyps, they never cut the vertical partitions in their length, but simply connect their walls, stretching wholly or partially from wall to wall.
In the Astraeans, the multiplication of tentacles is more definite and limited, rising sometimes to ninety and more, though often limited to forty-eight in number, and the transverse floors between the vertical partitions are more complete than in the Fungidae. The Porites have twelve tentacles only, never more and never less; and in them the whole solid frame presents a complicated system of connected beams. The Madrepores have also twelve tentacles, but they have a more definite character than those of the Porites, on account of their regular alternation in six smaller and six larger ones; in these also the transverse floors are perfect, but exceedingly delicate. Another remarkable feature among the Madrepores consists in the prominence of one of the Polyps on the summit of the branches, showing a kind of subordination of the whole community to these larger individuals, and thus sustaining the view expressed above, that the combination of many individuals into a connected community is among Polyps a character of superiority when contrasted with the isolation of the Actiniae;. In the Sea-Fans, the Halcyonoids, as they are called in our classification, the number of tentacles is always eight, four of which are already present at the time of their birth, arranged in pairs, while the other four are added later. Their tentacles are lobed all around the margin, and are much more complicated in structure than those of the preceding Polyps.
According to the relative complication of their structure, these animals are classified in the following order:—
Halcyonoids: eight tentacles in pairs, lobed around the margin; always combined in large communities, some of which are free and movable like single animals.
Madrepores: twelve tentacles, alternating in six larger and six smaller ones; frequently a larger top animal standing prominent in the whole community, or on the summit of its branches.
Porites: twelve tentacles, not alternating in size; system of connected beams.
Astraeans: tentacles not definitely limited in number, though usually not exceeding one hundred, and generally much below this number; transverse floors. Maeandrines, generally referred to Astraeans, are higher than the true Astraeans, on account of their compound Polyps.
Fungidae: indefinite multiplication of tentacles; imperfect transverse beams.
Actiniae: indefinite multiplication of tentacles; soft bodies and no transverse beams.
If, now, we compare this structural gradation among Polyps with their geological succession, we shall find that they correspond exactly. The following table gives the geological order in which they have been introduced upon the surface of the earth.
GEOLOGICAL SUCCESSION.
Present, Halcyonoids.
Pliocene, \
Miocene, } Madrepores.
Eocene, /
Cretaceous, \ Porites
Jurassic, } and
Triassic, } Astraeans.
Permian, /
Carboniferous, \
Devonian, } Fungidae
Silurian, /
With regard to the geological position of the Actiniae we can say nothing, because, if their soft, gelatinous bodies have left any impressions in the rocks, none such have ever been found; but their absence is no proof that they did not exist, since it is exceedingly improbable that animals destitute of any hard parts could be preserved.
The position of the Corals on a Reef accords with these series of structural gradation and geological succession. It is true that we do not find the Actiniae in the Reef any more than in the crust of the earth, for the absence of hard parts in their bodies makes them quite unfit to serve as Reef-Builders. Neither do we find the Fungidae, for they, like all low forms, are single, and not confined to one level, having a wider range in depth and extent than other stony Polyps. But the true Reef-Building Polyps follow each other on the Reef in the same order as prevails in their structural gradation and their geological succession; and whether we classify them according to their position on the Reef, or their introduction upon the earth in the course of time, or their relative rank, the result is the same.
[Illustration: SUCCESSION ON THE REEF.]
It would require an amount of details that would be tedious to many of my readers, were I to add here the evidence to prove that the embryological development of these animals, so far as it is known, and their geographical distribution over the whole surface of our globe, show the same correspondence with the other three series. But this recurrence of the same thought in the history of animals of the same Type, so that, from whatever side we consider them, their creation and existence seem to be guided by one Mind, is so important in the study of Nature, that I shall constantly refer to it in the course of these papers, even though I may sometimes be accused of unnecessary repetition.
What is the significance of these coincidences? They were not sought for by the different investigators, who have worked quite independently, while ascertaining all these facts, without even knowing that there was any relation between the objects of their studies. The succession of fossil Corals has been found in the rocks by the geologist,—the embryologist has followed the changes in the growth of the living Corals,—the zooelogist has traced the geographical distribution and the structural relations of the full-grown animals; but it is only after the results of their separate investigations are collected and compared that the coincidence is perceived, and alt find that they have been working unconsciously to one end. These thoughts in Nature, which we are too prone to call simply facts, when in reality they are the ideal conception antecedent to the very existence of all created beings, are expressed in the objects of our study. It is not the zooelogist who invents the structural relations establishing a gradation between all Polyps,—it is not the geologist who
When we observe the practical results of this sequence in the position of Corals on the Reef, we cannot fail to see that it is not a mere accidental difference of structure and relation, but that it bears direct reference to the part these little beings were to play in Creation. It places the solid part of the structure at the base of the Reef,—it fills in the interstices with a lighter growth,—it crowns the summit with the more delicate kinds, that yield to the action of the tides and are easily crushed into the fine sand that forms the soil,—it makes a masonry solid, compact, time-defying, such a masonry as was needed by the great Architect, who meant that these smallest creatures of His hand should help to build His islands and His continents.
When Mr. Disraeli congratulated himself that in the “Wondrous Tale of Alroy” he had invented a new style, he scarcely deemed that he had but spun the thread which was to vibrate with melody under the hand of another. For in none of his magical sentences is the spell exactly complete, and nowhere do they drop into the memory with that long slow rhythm and sweet delay which mark every distinct utterance of Elizabeth Sheppard. Yet at his torch she lit her fires, over his stories she dreamed, his “Contarini Fleming” she declared to be the touchstone of all romantic truth, and with the great freights of thought argosied along his pages she enriched herself. “Destiny is our will, and our will is our nature,” he says. Behold the key-note of those strangely beautiful Romances of Temperament of which for ten years we have been cutting the leaves!
In “Venetia,” hint and example were given of working the great ores that lie in the fields about us; and when Elizabeth Sheppard in turn took up the divining-rod, it sought no clods of baser metal, but gold-veined masses of crystal and the clear currents of pure water-streams;—beneath her compelling power, Mendelssohn—Beethoven—Shelley—lived again and forever.
The musician who perhaps inspired a profounder enthusiasm during his lifetime than any other ever did had been missed among men but a few years, when a little book was quietly laid upon his shrine, and he received, as it were, an apotheosis. Half the world broke into acclaim over this outpouring of fervid worship. But it was private acclaim, and not to be found in the newspapers. To those who, like the most of us in America, vainly hunger and thirst after the sweets of sound, the book was an initiation into the very penetralia of music, we mounted and rested in that sphere from the distastes of too practical life, long afterwards we seemed to hear the immortal Song of which it spoke, and our souls were refreshed. There followed this in a year—inscribed to Mrs. Disraeli, as the other had been to that lady’s husband—“Counterparts”: a novel which, it is not too much to say, it is impossible for human hand to excel;—superior to its predecessor, since that was but a memorial, while this was the elaboration of an Idea. Here the real author ceased awhile. Three succeeding books were but fancies wrought out, grafts, happy thoughts, very possibly enforced work; but there were no more spontaneous affairs of her own individuality, until the one entitled “Almost a Heroine.” In this work, which treated of the possible perfection of marriage, the whole womanly nature of the writer asserted itself by virtue of the mere fact of humanity. After this came a number of juvenile stories, some commonplace, others infiltrated with that subtile charm which breathes, with a single exception, through all her larger books like the perfume of an exotic. Thus in the three novels mentioned we have all that can be had of Elizabeth Sheppard herself: in the third, her theory of life; in the second, her aspirations and opinions; in the first, her passion.
The orphaned daughter of an English clergyman, and self-dependent, in 1853 she translated her name into French and published “Charles Auchester,”—a book written at the age of sixteen. That name of hers is not the most attractive in the tongue, but all must love it who love her; for, if any theory of transmission be true, does she not owe something of her own oneness with Nature, of her intimacy with its depths, of her love of fields and flowers and skies, to that ancestry who won the name as, like the princely Hebrew boy, they tended the flocks upon the hills, under sunlight and starlight and ill every wind that blew? Never was there a more characteristic device than this signature of “E. Berger”; and nobody learned anything by it. At first it was presumed that some member of the house of Rothschild had experienced a softening of the brain to the extent implied by such effusion of genuine emotion, and it was rather gladly hailed as evidence of the weakness shared in common with ordinary mortals by that more than imperial family, the uncrowned potentates of the world,—the subject and method of the
Working constantly for so many years, she had yet known nothing of her readers, had felt her literary life to be an utter failure, had thrown a voice into the world and heard no echo; and when for the first time told of the admiration she elicited in this country and of one who rejoiced in her, her face kindled and she desired to come and be among her own people. Those who have failed to appreciate her can hardly be blamed, as it is owing entirely to their deficiency; but the cavillers—those who have ears and hear not—are less excusable. Almost a recluse,—declining even an interview with her publishers,—in ill-health, in poverty, and with waning youth, she poured out her precious ointment from alabaster boxes, and there were not wanting Pharisees. But hampered by precedent and somewhat barren of enthusiasms as are almost all productions now, how could we do aught but welcome this spontaneous and ever-fresh fountain bubbling into the sunlight, albeit without geometrical restrictions, and bringing as it did such treasures from its secret sources? Yet, welcomed or not, there is no record of any female prose-writer’s ever having lived who possessed more than a portion of that genius which permeated Elizabeth Sheppard’s whole being. Genius,—the very word expresses her: in harmony with the great undertone of the universe, the soul suffused with light. Flower-warmth and fragrance are on her page, the soft low summer wind seems to be speaking with you as you read, her characters are like the stars impersonated, and still, however lofty her nature, always and forever genial. You catch her own idiosyncrasy throughout, and believe, that, like Evelyn Hope, she was made of spirit, fire, and dew. When we remember the very slight effect ever visible to her of all her labor, there is something sad in the thought of this young soul, thrilled with its own fervors and buoyant in anticipation, sending forth the first venture. But then we recognize as well, that she was one of those few to whom creation is a necessity, that in truth she scarcely needed human response, and that when men were silent God replied.
Miss Sheppard’s style was something very novel. Based, perhaps, on an admiration of one whose later exploits have dwarfed his earlier in the general estimation, there was yet no more resemblance than between the string-courses of a building and its sculptured friezes. Indeed, writing was not her virtual expression: this may be learned even in her peculiar way of loving Nature, for it was not so much Nature itself as Nature’s effects that she prized; and between the work now performed and that awaiting her in some further life one feels the difference that exists between the soft clay model with its mild majesty, its power clogged and covered, and the same when it issues in the white radiance of marble. She does not seem to have been an extensive reader, and certainly no student, while she totally disregarded all rules and revision. Her sentences
But, after all, this was not her style’s chief excellence; she cared little for such pictorial achievements, and in presenting her fancies she often sacrificed outline to melody; it is necessary for you to feel rather than to see her meaning. What distinguished her yet more was the ability by means of this style to interpret music into words. Although this may not be correct practice, there was never a musical critic who did not now and then attempt it: musicians themselves never do, because music is to them nothing to see or to describe, but the air they breathe, and in fact a state of being. Do you remember that tone-wreath of heather and honeysuckle? “It was a movement of such intense meaning that it was but one sigh of unblended and unfaltering melody isolated as the fragrance of a single flower, and only the
“At first awoke the strange, smooth wind-notes of the opening adagio; the fetterless chains of ice seemed to close around my heart. The movement had no blandness in its solemnity; and so still and shiftless was the grouping of the harmonies, that a frigidity, actual as well as ideal, passed over my pores and hushed my pulses. After a hundred such tense yet clinging chords, the sustaining calm was illustrated, not broken, by a serpentine phrase of one lone oboe, pianissimo over the piano-surface, which it crisped not, but on and above which it breathed like the track of a sunbeam aslant from a parted cloud. The slightest possible retardation at its close brought us to the refrain of the simple adagio, interrupted again by a rush of violoncello-notes, rapid and low, like some sudden under-current striving to burst through the frozen sweetness. Then spread wide the subject, as plains upon plains of water-land; though the time was gradually increased. Amplifications of the same harmonies introduced a fresh accession of violoncelli and oboi contrasted artfully in syncopation, till at length the strides of the accelerando gave a glittering precipitation to the entrance of the second and longest movement.
“Then Anastase turned upon me, and with the first bar we fell into a tumultuous presto. Far beyond all power to analyze as it was just then, the complete idea embraced me as instantaneously as had the picturesque chillness of the first. I have called it tumultuous,—but merely in respect of rhythm:—the harmonies were as clear and evolved as the modulation itself was sharp, keen, and unapproachable. Through every bar reigned that vividly enunciated ideal, whose expression pertains to the one will alone in any age,—the ideal, that, binding together in suggestive imagery every form of beauty, symbolizes and represents something beyond them all.
“Here over the surge-like, but fast-bound motivo—only like those tost ice-waves, dead still in their heaped-up crests—were certain swelling crescendos of a second subject, so unutterably if vaguely sweet, that the souls of all deep blue Alp-flowers, the clarity of all high blue skies, had surely passed into them, and was passing from them again....
“It was not until the very submerging climax that the playing of Anastase was recalled to me. Then, amidst long ringing notes of the wild horns, and intermittent sighs of the milder wood, swept from the violins a torrent of coruscant arpeggi, and above them all I heard his tone, keen but solvent, as his bow seemed to divide the very strings with fire, and I felt as if some spark had fallen upon my fingers to kindle mine. As soon as it was over, I looked up and laughed in his face with sheer pleasure.”
Nothing of the kind was ever half so delightful, if one excepts Mr. Dwight’s translation of a Gondel-lied. As literal description it is wondrous, but as imagination it equals the music itself. Let us pause for an instant here and recall the singular inventive and combining grace with which a Spectacle is always given in these stories. It is well known that Mendelssohn contemplated an opera upon the “Tempest,” although he did not live to execute the idea; but how charmingly is that taken and mingled with what he had already done in the “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” at the festival of the Silver Wedding, when the lonely tones from age to age frozen on the cups of lilies, the orbed harmonies bound burning within the roses, the dreaming song thrilled along the veins of violets, intricate sounds hushed under green gloom of myrtle-leaves, mourning chords with which the cedars stood charged,—were all disenchanted and stole forth on longing wind-instruments and on the splendor of violins, “accumulating in orchestral richness, as if flower after flower of music were unsheathing to the sun”!
Yet the unlovely is not to be found within these covers: there was a quality in the writer’s mind like that fervid, all-vivifying sunshine which so illumines the cities of the desert, so steeps the pavements, so soaks through the pores of solids, so sharpens angles and softens curves, as Fromentin tells us, that even squalor borrows brilliant dyes, and rags and filth lighten into picturesque and burnished glory. And this is well for the reader, as all have not time for philosophy, nor can all transmute pain into treasure. But for her, sweet sounds and sights abound in everything; bird and breeze and bee alike are winged with melody; the music of the sea satisfies her heart, and there “the artist-ear,—which makes a spectrum for all sounds that are not separate, distinguishes the self-same harmonies that govern the gradations of the orchestra, from deep to deep descending, until sounds are lost in sound as lights in light";—the trains have their thunderous music in her hearing; and the bells to which Cecilia listens seem to be ringing in the last day:—“The ravishing and awful sound of them, which is only heard by the few,—the passion in their rise and fall,—their wavering,—their rushing fulness,—drew off all consciousness: most like the latest and last passion,—the passion of death.”
There seems to be no subject which this woman has not pondered deeply. Her theory of Temperament is an attendant fairy that does marvellous things for her, and not only apportions natures, but corresponding bodies, so that we can easily see how the golden age is to return again, when peradventure deceits shall be impossible, and all the virtues thrive by mere necessity under the reign of this perfected Science of the Soul. Yet, roam where she would, there were always two mysteries that allured her back again, as Thone’s curt sentence told,—“Tonkunst und Arzenei”; and to these might be added Race, in defiance of Mr. Buckle. Assuredly the Hebrew owes acknowledgment to her, and not George Borrow, with all his weird learning, enters more deeply into the Burden of Egypt; Browning’s appreciation of the gypsy standing alone beside hers,—Browning, between whose writings and her own a rich sympathy exists, both being so possessed of fulness. Yet verse could not chain her wide eloquence in its fetters; and whenever she attempted it, its music made her thought shapeless. There is one exception to this, however, and we give it below,—for, inartistic as this mould may seem, and amorphous as its ideas may be, it is the only instance of any rhymes fully translating the meaning of music, and it is as full of clinging pathos and melody as the great creation it paraphrases, and to which no words will quite respond.
“In gardens where the languid roses
keep
Perpetual sweetness for the hearts that
smile,
Perpetual sadness for the hearts that
weep,
Lonely, unseen, I wander, to beguile
The day that only shines to show thee
bright,
The night whose stars burn wan beside
thy light,
Adelaida!
“Adelaida! all the birds are singing
Low, as thou passest, where in leaves
they lie;
With timid chirp unto their soft mates
clinging,
They greet that presence without which
they die,—
Die, even with Nature’s universal
heart,
When thou, her queen, dost in thy pride
depart,
Adelaida!
“Depart! and dim her beauty evermore;
Go, from the shivering leaves and lily-flowers,
That, white as saints on the eternal shore,
Stand wavering, beckoning, in the moony
bowers,—
Beckon me on where their moist feet are
laid
In the dark mould, fast by the alder-shade,
Adelaida!
“Adelaida! ’tis the Grave
or Love
Must fight for this great first, last
mastery.
I feed in faith on spicy gales above,
Where all along that blue unchanging sky
Thy name is traced;—its sweetness
never fails
To sound in streams of peace in spicy
gales,
Adelaida!
“Adelaida! woe is me, woe, woe!
Not only in the sky, in starry gold,
I see thy name,—where peaceful
rivers flow,
Not only hear its sweetness manifold;
On every white and purple flower ’tis
written,
Its echo every aspen-quake hath smitten,
Adelaida!
“Go farther! let me leave thee!
I depart!—
Who whispered I would linger by thy side?
Who said it beat so warm, my feeble heart?
Who told, I dared to claim thee as my
bride?
Who cried, I roamed without thee all the
day
And clasped thee in my dreams? Away,
away,
Adelaida!
“I die, but thou shall live; in
the loud noon
Thy feet shall crush the long grass o’er
my head,
Not rudely, rudely,—gently,
gently, soon
Shall tread me heavier down in that dark
bed;
And thou shalt know not on whose head
they pass,
Whose silent hands, whose frozen heart!—Alas,
Adelaida!”
There are those who in “Charles Auchester,” charmed by the simplicity and truth of that first part called “Choral Life,” objected to the rest on the score of extravagance. But this book records the adoration of music, and in an age replete with the dilettanti of indifference may we not thank God for one enthusiast? Yet, indeed, everything about Mendelssohn was itself extravagant,—his childhood, his youth, his life, his beauty, his power: should the instrument, then, be tuned lower than such key-note? And again, to us who live a somewhat commonplace routine, the life of musical artists, especially abroad, must necessarily seem redundant; yet it is only that life, natural and actual, into which we are here inducted. The same is possible to no other class of artists: even the scholar, buried in his profound studies, must descend from his abstraction; the poet, the painter, cannot share it: for the latter, however much he clubs and cliques, is seldom sufficiently dispossessed of himself; and the other, though he strike out of his heat poems as immortal as stars, may yet live among clods and feel no thrill returning on himself. But the musician cannot dwell alone: his art requires that he should cluster, and the orchestra enforces it; therefore he acts and reacts like the vibrations ridged within a Stradivarius, he is kept in his art’s atmosphere till it becomes his life, its aura bathes every trivial thing, and existence which might otherwise be meagre is raised and glorified. Thus yet more, when we recall that even were the musician’s life not so, still it ought to be, and it is the right of the author to idealize, one can believe “Charles Auchester” to be but a faithful transcript. “In proportion to our appreciation of music is also our appreciation of what is not music,” Sarona says; and so faithfully does this writer prove it, by her attention to minute and usual circumstances, that one might certainly allow her some exaltation when touching on one theme,—yet how this exaltation can be called in question by any who espouse Bettine von Arnim’s sublime ravings the morning after entering Vienna is mysterious. Were the real condition of these natures—which certainly exist—bared to view, many from their phlegmatic experience might deem all the nerves to be in a state
There is a wonderful strength exhibited in the sketch of Seraphael from first to last: not to mention the happiness of the name, of which this is by no means a single instance, and the fact of his having no pramomen, both of which so insignificant atoms in themselves lift him at once a line above the level in the reader’s sympathy,—it was a most difficult thing to present such delicacy and lightness, and yet to preserve “the awful greatness of his lonely genius,” as somewhere else she calls it; but all must confess that it is done, and perfectly. It is not alone in Seraphael that this strength is shown; a new mould of character in fiction is given us,—masculine characters which, though light and airy, are yet brilliant and strong, most sweet, and surcharged with loveliness. It is this perfect sweetness that constitutes half the charm of her books,—for in the only one where it is deficient, “Beatrice Reynolds,” the whole fails. One feels sure that it was never deficient in herself, that her own heart must have been overflowing with warm and cordial tenderness,—and if any testimony were wanting, we should have it in
Miss Sheppard’s plots are not conspicuous, for her characters make circumstance and are their own fate; still her capacity in that line is finely exhibited by the plot of the opera of “Alarcos.” In mere filling up, having excepted the incident,—always original and delightful,—the lofty imagination, and the descriptions of wind and weather,—one of her best points will be found to be costume, a minor thing, but then there are few who excel in modern millinery. “Salome was beautiful. Her splendid delicate dress, all rosy folds, skirt over skirt of drapery falling softly into each other, made her clear skin dazzle in the midst of them; and the masses of vivid geraniums here and there without their leaves were not too gorgeous for her bearing,—nor for her hair, in whose rich darkness geraniums also glowed, long wreaths curling down into her neck.” Rose in white, with wreaths of rubies weighing down her slender arms;—Adelaida, with her lace robe like woven light on satin like woven moon-beams, and large water-lilies in her golden hair;—my Lady Barres, whose dress “consisted almost always of levantine, with demi-train and under-petticoat of white brocaded silk peeping through its open front; the hair showing the shape of the head, and confined by a narrow band of black velvet across the brow, fastened in the morning with onyx or agate, in the evening with a brilliant only; she always wore upon her wrists delicate bands of cambric embroidered with seed-pearl so minutely that it seemed a pattern wrought out of the threads of the stuff, and little pearl tassels drooped there scarcely eclipsing her hands in fairness.”
But a far stronger point is the power of portraiture. Seraphael having been identified, people turned their attention to the other cipher. Disregarding the orchestral similitude of sound in his name, which, by the way, nobody pronounces as Aronach instructed, they chose to infer that Charles Auchester himself was the Herr Joachim, that Starwood Burney stood for Sterndale Bennett, that Diamid Albany meant Disraeli, that Zelter figured as Aronach, and that Jenny Lind, of whom Mendelssohn himself said there would not in a whole century be born another being so gifted, and whom the Italians, those lovers of fair pseudonymes, called “La Benedetta,” is no other than Clara Benette. But these are trivial, compared with Rodomant and Porphyro. It was daring enough, when Beckendorf mimicked Prince Metternich; but to undertake and to contrast Louis Napoleon and Beethoven, without belittling either, pales every other performance. They tower before us grand and immutable as if cast in bronze, and so veritable that they throw shadows; the prison-gloom is sealed on Porphyro’s face,—power and purpose indomitable; just as the “gruesome Emperor” is to-day, we find him in that book,—dark in the midst of his glory, as enduring as a Ninevite sculpture, strong and inscrutable as the Sphinx. But his heights topple over with this world’s decline, while the other builds for the eternal aeons. Rodomant,—did one fail to find his identity, they would yet recognize him in those old prints, the listening head bent forwards, the features like discords melting info chords; it is hard to tell how such strength was given in such slight sentences,—but from the time when he contemptuously tossed out his tune-fooleries, through the hour when with moonlight fancies “a serene ecstatic serenade was rippling silently beneath his pen,” to that when the organ burst upon his ear in thunders quenchless and everlasting as the sea’s, he is still Beethoven, gigantic in pride, purity, and passion. “I dream now,” said Rodomant; “like the Spirit of God moving upon the face of the waters, so stir my shadows, dim shapes of sound, across the chaos of my fathomless intention.” This “Rumour” has never been reprinted in America; it will, then, be excusable to give here a scene which Is indeed its climax.
“A spiritual nature has for its highest and hardest temptation a disposition to outrage, precedent,—sometimes propriety. It is sure of itself—very likely—but it may endanger the machinery, moral or tangible, which it employs for agent. Again, who has not dreamed of a dream? who has not remembered dimly what yet experience contradicts? who does not confound fact and imagination, to the damage of his reputation for truth?
“Rodomant was in a lawless frame, a frame he had fixed on himself by his outrage on precedent; his subsequent excitement had enchanted him more wildly, and any number of imps and elves were ready to rush at his silent word from the caverns of his haunted brain. Again, he felt he must spend his energy, his long idleness reacted on a sudden in prodigious strength of intellect, it stirred like a giant refreshed. Long time ago he had dreamed—he had entirely forgotten it was a fact that he had been told—that, if the whole force of that organ were put out, the result would be tremendous. He had also dreamed—that is, been assured—that there was a law made to the purpose that the whole force of the organ was never to be employed. The law had never been broken, except once;—but there his memories waxed dim and indistinct; he was at the mercy of his own volition, which resolved on recalling nothing that could dissuade him from his rash and forbidden longing. Unknown to himself, perhaps the failure of his design to escape, of which the princess had assured him, drove him to the crisis of a more desperate endeavor. But, whether it was so or not, he was unconscious of it,—so far innocent. He sat down, believing himself alone.... ’Softly, softly,’ mocked his whisper—to himself,—and he touched alone the whispering reeds, Adelaida held her breath, and chid the beating of her heart, which seemed louder than the mellow pulse that throbbed in tune above. The symphony that followed fell like a mighty universal hush, through which the clarionet-stop chanted, unuttered but articulate,—’Give to us peace.’ Then the hush dissolved into a sea of sighs: ‘Peace, peace!’ they yearned, and the mild deep diapason muttered, ‘Peace.’ She, the one listener, felt, as it were, her brain fill soft with tears, her eyes rained them, and her heart, whose pulses had dropped as calm as dew, echoed the peaceful longing of the whole heart of humanity. A longing as peaceful in its expression as the peace it longed for; the creation’s travail seemed spent to the edge of joy.
“Suddenly, as light swept chaos, this peaceful fancy was disrupted,—her heart ravished from its rest, its calm torn from it. Down went the pedal which forced the whole first organ out at once, and as if shouted by hosts of men and by myriad angels echoed, pealed the great Hosanna. The mighty rapture of the princess won her instantly from regret; no peace could be so glorious as that praise; and vast as was the volume of sound, the hands that invoked it had it so completely under control—voluntary control as yet—that it did not swamp her sense; her spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves towards the measureless immensity of music at its source. To reach that centre without a circle,—that perfection which imperfection shadows not,—that unborn, undying principle, which art tries humbly, falteringly, to illustrate,—was never given to man on earth; and tries he to attain it, some fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at once the symbol and the warning, fastens to his soul for life.
“The princess had bowed her head, and the soft and plenteous waters of her eyes had dried like dew under the midsummer sun; yet still she closed her eyes, for her brain felt fixed and alight with a nameless awe, such as passion lends presentiment.
“Suddenly, in the words of Albericus, there burst overhead a noise like the roaring of ’enormous artificial golden lions,’—that was the drum: less, in this instance, like smitten parchment than the crackling roll of clouds that embrace in thunder. The noise amazed himself,—yet Rodomant exulted in it, his audacity expanded with it, broke down the last barrier of reason. He added stop after stop,—at the last and sixtieth stop, he unfettered the whole volume of the wind. That instant was a blast, not to speak irreverently, which sounded like the crack of doom. To her standing stricken underneath, it seemed to explode somewhere in the roof with a shock beyond all artillery,—to tear up the ground under her feet, like the spasm of an earthquake,—to rend the walls, like lightning’s electric finger; and to shriek in her ringing brain the advent of some implacable and dreadful judgment, but not the doom of all men,—only one, which doom, alas! she felt might be also hers in his.
“All men and women within a mile had heard the shock, or rather felt it, and interpreted it in various ways. Only the prince himself—who was standing on the terrace, and had distinctly perceived the rich vibration of the strong, but calm, Hosanna—interpreted it rightly and directly; more than that, his animal sagacity told him it was Rodomant, who, having amused himself, was now indulging the same individual....
“To Adelaida there was something more terrible in the succeeding silence than in the shock of sound; it had ceased directly, died first into a discordant groan, which, rising to a scream, was still. She listened intensely: there was no fall of rattling fragments, the vibration had been insufficient, or not prolonged enough, to injure the window,—that had been her first, chief fear. This removed, however, she felt doubly, desperately anxious. Why did he not come down, or speak, or stir? The men employed to feed the monstrous machine with wind had all rushed away together by the back-ladder through which they entered: hence the cause of the shrieking groan and silence. He was there alone,—for he knew not that she was there. Oh that he would give some sign!
“In a few minutes a sign was given, but not from him. The princess heard the grinding of the immense door near the altar; it was opened; steps entered hurriedly. She heard, next instant, her father’s voice,—impregnated with icy ire, low with smothered hatred, distinct with the only purpose he ever entertained,—punishment. She flew, with feet that gave no echo, up the stair on her side of the lobby. Rodomant was sitting dead-still, with his face in his hands; they looked rigid; the veins in his forehead, as it showed above
“’God has taken my punishment into Hiss own hands: yet I defied not Him, only something made by man, and man himself.’ He spoke loudly, yet in halting words, with gaps of silence between each phrase; then stared wildly round him, and clapped both his hands upon his ears,—withdrew them,—closed his ears with his fingers, then dropped his hands, and cast on her a glance that implored—that demanded—the whole pity of her heart. ‘Have mercy!’ were his words; ’I have lost my hearing, and it is forever!’”
The discrimination of character exercised by Miss Sheppard is very wonderful. Many as are the figures on her stage, they are never repeated, and they are all as separate, as finely edged and bevelled, as gems. The people grow under her pen,—whether you take Auchester, developing so when first thrown on himself in Germany, and becoming at length the rare type of manhood which he presents,—or the one change wrought by years in Miss Benette, just the addition of something that would have been impossible in any child, a deepened sweetness, that completest touch of the perfect woman, “like perfume from unseen flowers, diffusing itself when the wind awakens, while we know neither whence the windy fragrance comes nor whither it flows.” Perhaps this characterization is most noticeable in “Counterparts,” which she called her small party of opposing temperaments: Salome, so gracious; Rose, like the spirit of a sunbeam; Sarona, so keen and incisive, his passion confronting Bernard’s sweetness; and Cecilia, who, it is easy to conjecture, wrote the book. I have always fancied that some mystic trine was chorded by three beings who, with all their separate gifts, possessed an equal power and sweetness,—Raphael, Shelley, and Mendelssohn. And perhaps the same occurred more emphatically to Miss Sheppard, for after Seraphael she drew Bernard,—Bernard, who is exceeded by none in the whole range of romance. “Counterparts” is a novel of ideal life; it is the land of one’s dreams and one’s delights; its dwellers are more real to us than the men and women into whose eyes we look upon the street, they haunt us and enrapture
Between the publication of Miss Sheppard’s second book and “Rumour” two others were issued,—“Beatrice Reynolds” and “The Double Coronet,”—for which one wishes there were some younger sister, some Acton or Ellis, to whom to impute them,—evidently the result of illness, weariness, and physical weakness, perhaps wrung from her by inexorable necessity, but which should never have been written. In the last, in spite of its very Radcliffean air, there are truly terrible things, as Gutilyn and his green-eyed child bear witness; but the other reminds one, as nearly as a modern book may do so, of no less a model than the redoubtable “Thaddeus of Warsaw!” But Miss Sheppard had already written all that at present there was to say; rest was imperative till the intermittent springs again overflowed. “Rumour,” which approached the old excellence, was no result of a soul’s ardor,—merely very choice work. Notwithstanding, everything is precious that filters through such a medium, and in these three publications she found opportunity for expressing many a conviction and for weaving many a fancy; moreover, she was afraid of no one, and never minced matters, therefore they are interspersed with criticisms: she praised Charlotte Bronte, condemned George Sand, ridiculed Chopin, reproved Elizabeth Browning, and satirized “Punch.” In her last book there was a great, but scarcely a good change of style, she having been obliged by its thinness to pepper the page with Italics; still these are only marks of a period of transition, and in spite of them the book is priceless. Judging from internal evidence, she here appears to have frequented more society, and the contact of this carelessly marrying world with her own pure perception of right struck the spark which kindled into “Almost a Heroine.” Here awakens again that graceful humor which is the infallible sign of health, and which was so lightly inwrought through the earlier volumes. Reading it over, one is struck with its earnestness, its truth and noble courage,—one feels that lofty social novels, which might have infused life and principle and beauty into the mass of custom, were promised in this, and are now no longer a possibility. And herein are the readers of this magazine especially affected; since there is no reason to suppose that the work promised and begun by her for these pages would not have been the peer of her best production,
But in the midst of regret,—since all lovely examples lend their strength, since they give such grace even to the stern facts of suffering and death, and since there are too few such records on Heaven’s scroll,—be glad to know that for every throb of anguish, for every swooning lapse of pain, there was one beside her with tenderest hands, most careful eyes, most yearning and revering heart,—one into whose sacred grief our intrusion is denied, but the remembrance of whose long and deep devotion shall endure while there are any to tell how Severn watched the Roman death-bed of Keats!
It is impossible to estimate our loss, because it draws upon infinitude; there was so much growth yet possible to this soul; to all that she was not she might yet have enlarged; and while at first her audience had limits, she would in a calm and prosperous future have become that which she herself described in saying that a really vast genius who is as vast an artist will affect all classes, “touch even the uninitiated with trembling and delight, and penetrate even the ignorant with strong, if transient spell, as the galvanic energy binds each and all who embrace in the chain-circle of grasping hands, in the shock of perfect sympathy.” Nevertheless, she has served Art incalculably,—Art, which is the interpretation of God in Nature. And if, as she believed, in spiritual things Beauty is the gage of immortality, the pledge may yet be redeemed on earth, ever forbidding her memory to die.
ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 1862.
When first I saw our banner wave
Above the nation’s council-hall,
I heard beneath its marble
wall
The clanking fetters of the slave!
In the foul market-place I stood,
And saw the Christian mother
sold,
And childhood with its locks
of gold,
Blue-eyed and fair with Saxon blood.
I shut my eyes, I held my breath,
And, smothering down the wrath
and shame
That set my Northern blood
aflame,
Stood silent—where to speak
was death.
Beside me gloomed the prison-cell
Where wasted one in slow decline
For uttering simple words
of mine,
And loving freedom all too well.
The flag that floated from the dome
Flapped menace in the morning
air;
I stood, a perilled stranger,
where
The human broker made his home.
For crime was virtue: Gown and Sword
And Law their threefold sanction
gave,
And to the quarry of the slave
Went hawking with our symbol-bird.
On the oppressor’s side was power;
And yet I knew that every
wrong,
However old, however strong,
But waited God’s avenging hour.
I knew that truth would crush the lie,—
Somehow, sometime, the end
would be;
Yet scarcely dared I hope
to see
The triumph with my mortal eye.
But now I see it! In the sun
A free flag floats from yonder
dome,
And at the nation’s
hearth and home
The justice long delayed is done.
Not as we hoped, in calm of prayer,
The message of deliverance
comes,
But heralded by roll of drums
On waves of battle-troubled air!—
’Midst sounds that madden and appall,
The song that Bethlehem’s
shepherds knew!—
The harp of David melting
through
The demon-agonies of Saul!
Not as we hoped;—but what are
we?
Above our broken dreams and
plans
God lays, with wiser hand
than man’s,
The corner-stones of liberty.
I cavil not with Him: the voice
That freedom’s blessed
gospel tells
Is sweet to me as silver bells,
Rejoicing!—yea, I will rejoice!
Dear friends still toiling in the sun,—
Ye dearer ones who, gone before,
Are watching from the eternal
shore
The slow work by your hands begun,—
Rejoice with me! The chastening rod
Blossoms with love; the furnace
heat
Grows cool beneath His blessed
feet
Whose form is as the Son of God!
Rejoice! Our Marah’s bitter
springs
Are sweetened; on our ground
of grief
Rise day by day in strong
relief
The prophecies of better things.
Rejoice in hope! The day and night
Are one with God, and one
with them
Who see by faith the cloudy
hem
Of Judgment fringed with Mercy’s
light!
A LEGEND OF NEW ORLEANS.
MISS BADEAU.
It is useless to disguise the fact: Miss Badeau is a Rebel.
Mr. Beauregard’s cannon had not done battering the walls of Sumter, when Miss Badeau was packed up, labelled, and sent North, where she has remained ever since in a sort of aromatic, rose-colored state of rebellion.
She is not one of your blood-thirsty Rebels, you know; she has the good sense to shrink with horror from the bare mention of those heathen who, at Manassas and elsewhere, wreaked their unmanly spite on the bodies of dead heroes: still she is a bitter little Rebel, with blonde hair, superb eyelashes, and two brothers in the Confederate service,—if I may be allowed to club the statements. When I look across the narrow strait of our boarding-house table, and observe what a handsome wretch she is, I begin to think that if Mr. Seward doesn’t presently take her in charge, I shall.
The preceding paragraphs have little or nothing to do with what I am going to relate: they merely illustrate how wildly a fellow will write, when the eyelashes of a pretty woman get tangled with his pen. So I let them stand,—as a warning.
My exordium should have taken this shape:—
“I hope and trust,” remarked Miss Badeau, in that remarkably scathing tone which she assumes in alluding to the U.S.V., “I hope and trust, that, when your five hundred thousand, more or less, men capture my New Orleans, they will have the good taste not to injure Pere Antoine’s Date-Palm.”
“Not a hair of its head shall be touched,” I replied, without having the faintest idea of what I was talking about.
“Ah! I hope not,” she said.
There was a certain tenderness in her voice which struck me.
“Who is Pere Antoine?” I ventured to ask. “And what is this tree that seems to interest you so?”
“I will tell you.”
Then Miss Badeau told me the following legend, which I think worth writing down. If it should appear tame to the reader, it will be because I haven’t a black ribbed-silk dress, and a strip of point-lace around my throat, like Miss Badeau; it will be because I haven’t her eyes and lips and music to tell it with, confound me!
THE LEGEND.
Near the levee (quay) and not far from the old French Cathedral, in New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, some thirty feet high, growing out in the open air as sturdily as if its roots were sucking sap from their native earth. Sir Charles Lyell, in his “Second Visit to the United States,” mentions this exotic:—“The tree is seventy or eighty years old; for Pere Antoine, a Roman Catholic priest, who died about twenty years ago, told Mr. Bringier that he planted it himself, when he was young. In his will he provided that they who succeeded to this lot of ground should forfeit it, if they cut down the palm.”
Wishing to learn something of Pere Antoine’s history, Sir Charles Lyell made inquiries among the ancient Creole inhabitants of the faubourg. That the old priest, in his last days, became very much emaciated, that he walked about the streets like a mummy, that he gradually dried up, and finally blew away, was the meagre result of the tourist’s investigations.
This is all that is generally known of Pere Antoine. Miss Badeau’s story clothes these bare facts.
When Pere Antoine was a very young man, he had a friend whom he loved as he loved his eyes. Emile Jardin returned his passion, and the two, on account of their friendship, became the marvel of the city where they dwelt. One was never seen without the other; for they studied, walked, ate, and slept together.
Antoine and Emile were preparing to enter the Church; indeed, they had taken the preliminary steps, when a circumstance occurred which changed the color of their lives.
A foreign lady, from some far-off island in the Pacific, had a few months before moved into their neighborhood. The lady died suddenly, leaving a girl of sixteen or seventeen entirely friendless and unprovided for. The young men had been kind to the woman during her illness, and at her death, melting with pity at the forlorn situation of Anglice, the daughter, swore between themselves to love and watch over her as if she were their sister.
Now Anglice had a wild, strange beauty, that made other women seem tame beside her; and in the course of time the young men found themselves regarding their ward not so much like brothers as at first. They struggled with their destiny manfully, for the holy orders which they were about to assume precluded the idea of love.
But every day taught them to be more fond of her. So they drifted on. The weak like to temporize.
One night Emile Jardin and Anglice were not to be found. They had flown,—but whither nobody knew, and nobody, save Antoine, cared.
It was a heavy blow to Antoine,—for he had half made up his mind to run away with her himself.
A strip of paper slipped from a volume on Antoine’s desk, and fluttered to his feet.
“Do not be angry” said the bit of paper, piteously; “forgive us, for we love.”
Three years went by. Antoine had entered the Church, and was already looked upon as a rising man; but his face was pale and his heart leaden, for there was no sweetness in life for him.
Four years had elapsed, when a letter, covered with outlandish stamps, was brought to the young priest,—a letter from Anglice. She was dying; would he forgive her? Emile, the year previous, had fallen a victim to the fever that raged on the island; and their child, little Anglice, was likely to follow him. In pitiful terms she begged Antoine to take charge of the child until she was old enough to enter a convent. The epistle was finished by another hand, informing Antoine of Madame Jardin’s death; it also told him that Anglice had been placed on a vessel shortly to leave the island for some Western port.
The letter was hardly read and wept over, when little Anglice arrived. On beholding her, Antoine uttered a cry of joy and surprise,—she was so like the woman he had worshipped.
As a man’s tears are more pathetic than a woman’s, so is his love more intense,—not more enduring, or half so subtile, but intenser.
The passion that had been crowded down in his heart broke out and lavished its richness on this child, who was to him, not only the Anglice of years ago, but his friend Emile Jardin also.
Anglice possessed the wild, strange beauty of her mother,—the bending, willowy form, the rich tint of skin, the large tropical eyes, that had almost made Antoine’s sacred robes a mockery to him.
For a month or two Anglice was wildly unhappy in her new home. She talked continually of the bright country where she was born, the fruits and flowers and blue skies. Antoine could not pacify her. By-and-by she ceased to weep, and went about the cottage with a dreary, disconsolate air that cut Antoine to the heart. Before the year ended, he noticed that the ruddy tinge had fled from her cheek, that her eyes had grown languid, and her slight figure more willowy than ever.
A physician was called. He could discover nothing wrong with the child, except this fading and drooping. He failed to account for that. It was some vague disease of the mind, he said, beyond his skill.
So Anglice faded day after day. She seldom left the room now. Antoine could not shut out the fact that the child was passing away. He had learned to love her so!
“Dear heart,” he said once, “what is’t ails thee?”
“Nothing, mon pere”—for so she called him.
The winter passed, the balmy spring air had come, and Anglice seemed to revive. In her little bamboo chair, on the porch, she swayed to and fro in the fragrant breeze, with a peculiar undulating motion, like a graceful tree.
At times something seemed to weigh upon her mind. Antoine noticed it, and waited. At length she spoke.
“Near our house,” said little Anglice, “near our house, on the island, the palm-trees are waving under the blue sky. Oh, how beautiful! I seem to lie beneath them all day long. I am very, very happy. I yearned for them until I grew sick,—don’t you think so, mon pere?”
“Mon Dieu, yes!” exclaimed Antoine, suddenly. “Let us hasten to those pleasant islands where the palms are waving.”
Anglice smiled.
“I am going there, mon pere!”
Ay, indeed. A week from that evening the wax candles burned at her feet and forehead, lighting her on the journey.
All was over. Now was Antoine’s heart empty. He had nothing to do but to lay the blighted flower away.
Pere Antoine made a shallow grave in his garden, and heaped the fresh brown mould over his idol.
In the genial spring evenings the priest was seen sitting by the mound, his finger closed in the unread prayer-book.
The summer broke on that sunny land; and in the cool morning twilight, and after nightfall, Antoine lingered by the grave. He could never be with it enough.
One morning he observed a delicate stem, with two curiously shaped emerald leaves, springing up from the centre of the mound. At first he merely noticed it casually; but at length the plant grew so tall, and was so strangely unlike anything he had ever seen before, that he examined it with care.
How straight and graceful and exquisite it was! When it swung to and fro with the summer wind, in the twilight, it seemed to Antoine as if little Anglice were standing there in the garden!
The days stole by, and Antoine tended the fragile shoot, wondering what sort of blossom it would unfold, white, or scarlet, or golden. One Sunday, a stranger, with a bronzed, weather-beaten face like a sailor’s, leaned over the garden-rail, and said to him,—
“What a fine young date-palm you have there, Sir!”
“Mon Dieu!” cried Pere Antoine, “and is it a palm?”
“Yes, indeed,” returned the man. “I had no idea the tree would flourish in this climate.”
“Mon Dieu!” was all the priest could say.
If Pere Antoine loved the tree before, he worshipped it now. He watered it, and nurtured it, and could have clasped it in his arms. Here were Emile and Anglice and the child, all in one!
The years flew by, and the date-palm and the priest grew together,—only one became vigorous and the other feeble. Pere Antoine had long passed the meridian of life. The tree was in its youth. It no longer stood in an isolated garden; for homely brick and wooden houses had clustered about Antoine’s cottage. They looked down scowling on the humble thatched roof. The city was edging up, trying to crowd him off his land. But he clung to it, and wouldn’t sell. Speculators piled gold on his door-step, and he laughed at them. Sometimes he was hungry, but he laughed none the less.
“Get thee behind me, Satan!” said the old priest’s smile.
Pere Antoine was very old now, scarcely able to walk; but he could sit under the pliant, caressing leaves of his tree, and there he sat until the grimmest of speculators came to him. But even in death Pere Antoine was faithful to his trust. The owner of that land loses it, if he harms the date-tree.
And there it stands in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful, dreamy stranger, an exquisite foreign lady whose grace is a joy to the eye, the incense of whose breath makes the air enamored. A precious boon is she to the wretched city; and when loyal men again walk those streets, may the hand wither that touches her ungently!
“Because it grew from the heart of little Anglice,” said Miss Badeau, tenderly.
* * * * *
“SOLID OPERATIONS IN VIRGINIA”:
OR, ’T IS EIGHTY YEARS SINCE.
I have never had many personal interviews with Princes. Setting aside a few with different Excellencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I never had but one such interview, which prolonged itself far enough to deserve a place in these memoirs of our time. This was with a President of the then United States,—with him who was, I fear, the Last of the Virginians. At least, I know no one on the line of promotion just now who seems to me likely to succeed him.
“Have ye travelled in Virginia, Mr. Larkin?” said the President to me.
I said I had not, but that I hoped to see the Valley of Virginia before I went home. That is the name given, in those regions, to the district west of the Blue Ridge. The President listened, but expressed himself dissatisfied with my plan.
“Ah, Sah!” he said, “ye sh’d see Jeems River. Every American sh’d see Jeems River. Ye’ll not see the appearance of a large population, to which ye’re used in Massachusetts,—the—customs,—the —arrangements,—the habits—of—our—laboring people—are such—that—that—their residences—are—are—more distant—from the highway than with you;—but—but—ye’ll be greatly interested in seeing Jeems River. We’ve not the cities to show that ye have in Massachusetts,—but—there are great historical associations with Jeems River.”
I bowed assent,—and when the President spoke again with some depreciation of their productions, I made up my mouth to say, in courtly vein,
“Man is the nobler growth your realms supply,”
when I recollected that that remark was too literally true to be complimentary to a State which made its chief business the growing of men and women for a distant market. So I did what it is always wise to do,—I said nothing. And the President, warming with his theme, said,—
“Yes, Sah, ye sh’d see Jeems River. There, at Jeemst’n, America first gave a home to the European,—and hard by, at Yorkt’n, the tie with Europe was sundered. There ye may see Williamsburg,—and our oldest college. There ye may see the birthplaces of four Presidents,—and there the capital of Virginia!”
With such, and other temptations, did he direct me on my journey.
I have been thinking how little the poor man foresaw that the time would come when in the valley of “Jeems River” the traveller would see the grave of the only President of the United States who ever in his old age turned rebel to the country which had honored him. How little he foresaw that other campaigns were impending, which would give more historical interest to the valley than even Cornwallis’s marchings and countermarchings! how little he dreamed of Monitors and Merrimacks in fierce melee before his own little Hampton! how little, while he sowed the wind that winter, he looked forward to the whirlwind-reaping,—of which, indeed, he lived to hear only the first fierce sigh!
This valley of “Jeems River,” and the three other valleys which radiate like the four fingers of an open hand, and send their waters down into the great conduit of Chesapeake Bay, which is the palm to these four fingers, are in this very month of April, when I write, to become the great battle-field of the continent. How strangely history repeats itself, that, after eighty-one years, we should be looking out on the map the Rapid Ann and the Chickahominy, and Williamsburg and Fredericksburg, just as our fathers did in 1781,—that the grandchildren of the men who marched under Lafayette from Baltimore to Richmond, by the forced march which saved that infant capital from the enemy, should be marching now, with a more Fabian tread, to save the same Richmond from worse enemies! Does the Comte de Paris trace the footprints of the young Marquis-General, who afterwards, among other things, made his grandfather King? How strange it all is! While I wait to know where Fabius is hidden, and where those army-corps of hundreds of thousands are, which seem to have sunk into the ground at Warrenton the other day, you and I, Reader, will familiarize ourselves with the geography a little, by brushing the dust off those old campaigns.
They began by mere predatory excursions, which occupied, for a few weeks at a time, the English forces which could be detached from New York. “We march up and down the country,” said Cornwallis, not overmuch pleased, “stealing tobacco.” As early as 1779, on the 8th of May, the Raisonnable, sixty-four, five smaller ships of the English navy, and a number of privateers acting as convoy to a cloud of transports, entered the Capes of the Chesapeake. The Raisonnable drew too much water to go farther than Hampton Roads: they probably did not know the channel as well as the Merrimack’s pilots do. But the rest of them went up Elizabeth River, as one Pawnee did afterwards,—and there, at Gosport, found the State’s navy-yard, as the Pawnee found a nation’s. There was a vessel of war, unfinished, of twenty-eight guns, and many smaller vessels,—and they burned them all. How exactly it begins as the history of another war begins! Different branches of this expedition destroyed one hundred and thirty-seven vessels, and tobacco beyond account,—and they were all snugly back in New York in twenty-four days after they started.
It is the second campaign which is the most picturesque, varied, and exciting of the campaigns of the American Revolution,—and which was fought on ground which will have been made sacred by another campaign, perhaps even before these words meet the reader’s eye. The men engaged in it were men who have left their mark. Cornwallis and Baron Steuben share with each other the honor of inventing the present light-infantry tactics of the world. Cornwallis. in Carolina, had seen the necessity of divesting his troops of their impediments. Steuben had been doing the same with the American line, ever since
In October, 1780, the English General Leslie entered Chesapeake Bay again, and established himself for a while at Portsmouth, opposite Norfolk. But Colonel Ferguson, with whom Leslie was to cooperate, had been defeated at King’s Mountain, and when Leslie learned of the consequent change in Cornwallis’s plans, he returned to New York on the 24th of November. His departure was regarded as a victory by General Muhlenberg, and the Virginia militia, who were called out to meet him.
They had scarcely been disbanded, however, when a second expedition, which had been intrusted to the traitor Arnold, arrived from New York in James River. Baron Steuben, the Prussian officer, who had “brought the foreign arts from far,” was at this time in command, but with really little or no army. Steuben was, at the best, an irritable person, and his descriptions of the Virginia militia are probably tinged by his indignation at constant failure. General Nelson, who was the Governor of the State, behaved with spirit, but neither he nor Steuben could make the militia stand against Arnold. They could not create a corps of cavalry among the Virginia Cavaliers, and Arnold’s expedition, therefore, marched twenty-five miles and back without so much as a shot being fired at them. He established himself at Portsmouth, where Muhlenberg watched him, and he there waited a reinforcement.
Just at this juncture a little gleam of hope shot across the darkened landscape, in the arrival of three French vessel’s of war at the mouth of James River. The American officers all hated Arnold with such thorough hatred that they tried to persuade the French officers to shut up Elizabeth River by sea, while they attacked him at Portsmouth from the land; but the Frenchmen declined cooperation, and Steuben was always left to boast of what he might have done. As he had but eight rounds of ammunition a man for troops who had but just now failed him so lamentably, we can scarcely suppose that Arnold was in much danger.
Washington, meanwhile, had persuaded the French Admiral, at Newport, to send his whole fleet to act against Portsmouth; and by land he sent Lafayette, with twelve hundred light infantry, to take command in Virginia. Lafayette left Peekskill, feigned an attack upon Staten Island in passing, marched rapidly by Philadelphia to the head of the Chesapeake,—they all call it the “head of Elk,”—crowded his men on such boats as he found there, and, like General Butler after him, went down to Annapolis. At Annapolis, with some of his officers, he took a little vessel, in which he ran down to Williamsburg to confer with Steuben. He then crossed the James River, and reached the camp of Muhlenberg near Suffolk on the 19th of March. The reader has only to imagine General Burnside shutting up Norfolk on the south and west just now, to conceive of Lafayette’s position, as he supposed it to be, when, on the 20th, he was told that the French fleet had arrived within the Capes. But, alas! on the 23d, it proved that this was not the French fleet, but the English, which had so far injured the French fleet in an action that they had returned to Newport; so that it was Arbuthnot, and not Destouches, whose fleet had arrived at Hampton Roads. Under their protection the English General Phillips relieved Arnold with two thousand more men; and it is at this moment that the active campaign of 1781 may be said to begin.
General Phillips immediately took command of the English army, for which he had sufficient force of light transports, and proceeded up James River. He landed first at Burrel’s Ferry, opposite Williamsburg, into which city, till lately the capital of the State, he marched unmolested. His different marauding parties had entire success in their operations; and it is to be observed that his command of the navigation was an essential element of that success. “There is no fighting here,” wrote Lafayette, “unless you have a naval superiority, or an army mounted on race-horses.” Under almost all circumstances a corps embarked on boats could be pushed along these rivers faster than an enemy marching on the land. This remark, constantly verified then, will be much more important in the campaign now pending, in which these streams will, of course, be navigated by steam. It must be remembered, also, that the State of Virginia was at this time the storehouse from which General Greene’s army in Carolina was supplied. To destroy the stores collected here, and thus directly to break down the American army in the South, was Sir Henry Clinton’s object in sending out General Phillips. To protect these stores and the lines of communication with the Southern army was the object of the American generals. Had these designs been left unchanged, however, I should not now be writing this history. Indeed, the whole history of the United States would have had another beginning, and the valley of the James River would have had as little critical interest, in the close of the American Revolution,
He wrote from North Carolina, directing General Phillips to join him in Petersburg, Virginia; and thither Phillips called in his different corps who were “stealing tobacco,” and there he himself arrived, in a dying condition, on the 9th of May. “I procured a post-chaise to convey him,” says Arnold, his second in command. The town is familiar to travellers, as being the end of the first railroad-link south of Richmond. They still show the old house in which poor Phillips lay sick, while Lafayette, from the other side of the river, cannonaded the town with his light field-pieces. One of his balls entered the house, killed an old negro-woman who was reviling the American troops, and passed through the room where Phillips lay. “Will they not let me die in peace?” he asked. Arnold was also in danger, one of the balls passing near him; and, by his orders, Phillips and all the household were removed into the cellar. General Phillips was afterwards taken to another house, where he died on the 13th. It is in his memoranda of this affair at Petersburg that Lafayette records the fact that his father died at Minden from one of the shots of Phillips’s batteries.
We left Lafayette at Williamsburg, which, my readers will remember, is on the neck of land of which Fort Monroe forms the southeast corner: it is about twenty-six miles northwest of that post, and ten miles west of Yorktown. If they do not remember this, they had better learn it now,—for, on this second of April, the appearances are that they will need to know it before long. If any one of them does not care to look at a map, he may take my figure which called Chesapeake Bay the palm of the hand,—to which the James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac Rivers are the four fingers. Lay down on the page your right hand, upon its back, with the fingers slightly apart. The thumb is a meridian which points north. The forefinger is the Potomac as far as Washington. The middle finger is the Rappahannock,—with Fredericksburg about the first joint. The ring-finger is York River, with Williamsburg and Yorktown just above and below the knuckle line. The little finger is the James River, as far as Richmond. Fort Monroe is at the parting of the last two fingers. We left Lafayette at Williamsburg, disappointed at the failure to entrap Arnold. He returned at once to Annapolis by water, and transported his troops back to the head of Chesapeake Bay,—expecting to return to New York, now that his mission had failed. But Washington had learned, meanwhile, that General Phillips had been sent from New York to reinforce Arnold,—and so Lafayette met orders at the head of the Chesapeake to return, take command in Virginia, and foil the English as he might. Wayne, in Pennsylvania, was to join him with eight hundred of the mutinous Pennsylvania line. Were they the grandfathers of the men who deserted before Bull’s Run? They retrieved themselves at James Island afterwards,—as the Bull’s Run Pennsylvanians did at Newbern the other day. “How Lafayette or Wayne can march without money or credit,” wrote Washington to Laurens, “is more than I can tell,” But he did his part, which was to command,—and they did theirs, which was to obey.
Lafayette did his part thus. His troops, twelve hundred light infantry, the best soldiers in the world, he said at the end of the summer, had left Peekskill for a short expedition only. They had no supplies for a summer campaign, and seemed likely to desert him. Lafayette issued a spirited order of the day, in which he took the tone of Henry V. before the Battle of Agincourt, and offered a pass back to the North River to any man who did not dare share with him the perils of the summer against a superior force. He also hanged one deserter whom he caught after this order, and pardoned another who was less to blame. By such varied means he so far “encouraged the rest” that he wholly stopped desertion. He crossed the Susquehanna on the 13th of April, was in Baltimore on the 18th, and it was here that the ladies gave him the ball where he said, “My soldiers have no shirts.” He borrowed two thousand guineas on his own personal security, promising
This was the first march “Forward to Richmond” in history. For the moment, it saved the city and its magazines from General Phillips, who had reached Manchester, on the opposite side of James River. Phillips retired down the river, hoping to decoy Lafayette after him, on that neck of land, now, as then, a point so critical, between the James and York Rivers,—and then to return by his vessels on the first change of wind, get in Lafayette’s rear, and shut him up there. But it was another general who was to be shut up on that neck. Phillips was called south to Petersburg, where, as we have seen, he died. “Will they not let me die in peace?”
Cornwallis arrived at Petersburg with his Southern troops, including Tarleton’s horse, on the 20th of May. He then had nearly six thousand men under his orders. Lafayette had about thirty-two hundred, of whom only a few were cavalry, a volunteer body of Baltimore young gentlemen being the most of them. The Virginia gentry had hesitated about giving up their fine blood-horses to mount cavalry on. But Tarleton had no hesitation in stealing them for his troopers, nor Simcoe, his fellow-partisan, for his,—so that Cornwallis had the invaluable aid of two bodies of cavalry thus admirably mounted, against an enemy almost destitute. Both armies marched without tents, with the very lightest baggage. It purely a light-infantry campaign, excepting the dashing raids of Tarleton and Simcoe.
Lafayette felt his inferiority of force,—and as soon as Cornwallis joined, crossed back over James River at Osborn’s (say the bottom of the little-finger nail on our extempore map). Cornwallis crossed at Westover, also marked now on the maps as Ruffin’s, some twenty miles lower down the river. Lafayette felt the necessity of meeting Wayne, who was supposed to be coming from Pennsylvania; he therefore retraced his march of a few weeks before, followed by Cornwallis with his infantry;—the cavalry had been on more distant service. Cornwallis would have crushed Lafayette, if he had overtaken him; but Lafayette knew this as well as we do,—marched nearly up to Fredericksburg again,—protected it till its stores were removed,—and then, after five days’ march more, westward, met Wayne with his eight hundred Pennsylvanians at Raccoon Ford
While the third breakfast was being cooked, the legislators escaped. Jefferson was among them. Tarleton took seven, however, who told him that the country was tired of the war,—and that, if no treaty for a loan were made with France that summer, Congress would negotiate with England before winter. They were eighty-one years in advance of their time! Tarleton returned down the Rivanna River to its junction with the James, where he assisted Simcoe in driving out Baron Steuben, who with a few militia was trying to protect some arms there. Poor Steuben had but few to protect, nothing to protect them with, and lost them all. At this point the cavalry rejoined the main army under Cornwallis.
In all these movements of both parties, the character of the “laboring people,” of which, as I have said, President Tyler spoke to me, was illustrated. These people swarmed to Cornwallis with information, with horses and supplies. They did not swell the ranks of the Virginia militia. “He took away thirty thousand of our slaves,” says Mr. Jefferson. “Many of your negroes joined the enemy,” says Lafayette to Washington; “the news did not trouble me much, for that sort of interests touch me very little.” This is in the letter where he tells the General how his agent, Lund Washington, had been disgracefully treating with the invaders. This disposition of the “laboring people,”
Lafayette followed him with delight, not to say amazement. “The enemy is so obliging as to withdraw before us,” he writes,—and probably, to the end of his life, he did not fully understand why Lord Cornwallis did so. Their forces were numerically about equal, each commanding now rather more than five thousand men. But of Lafayette’s only fifty were cavalry, a very important arm in that campaign, while Cornwallis had now eight hundred men mounted on the blood horses of Virginia. It was not true, as Lafayette thought possible, that the English exaggerated his force. It appears from Tarleton’s memoirs that they estimated it very precisely. But we now know from Cornwallis’s letters, that he had promised Clinton to be at Williamsburg on the 26th of June, ready for any operations he might then and there propose. He hoped that Clinton would largely reinforce him, so that his favorite scheme of “solid operations in Virginia” might be carried on. At all events, he had promised to have his army at Williamsburg to join any force which Clinton might send to him. To make this imagined junction, which never took place, he began his retreat. Lafayette again offered him battle; but Cornwallis did not accept the opportunity, and on the 25th of June he arrived at Williamsburg. Lafayette was always one day’s march behind him, and encamped at last at Tyre’s Plantation, one day beyond Williamsburg, which may become famous again in a few days. Colonel Butler, of Pennsylvania, with his riflemen, attacked Colonel Simcoe, of the English corps of refugees, at the Fords of the Chickahominy, about six miles west of Williamsburg. We shall be hearing of these fords again.
At Williamsburg poor Cornwallis met his fate. He had, perhaps, been dreading the arrival of his despatches from Clinton, through all the month he had been in Virginia. At last they came. Clinton was sorry he was there, expressed his regret that Cornwallis did not favor his plan for marching on Philadelphia, gave him carte blanche for Baltimore or Delaware,—but, instead of reinforcing him, asked for two thousand men, if he could spare them. The letter is, on the whole, a manly letter, from a superior to an inferior, who had social rank higher than himself, and more of the confidence of their Government. It gives Cornwallis great latitude; but it does not “abandon New York and bring our whole force into Virginia,” which was Cornwallis’s pet plan.
His Lordship behaved ill,—and, in a pet, threw away the British empire in America. He sulked, to speak simply. He took the sullen policy of literal obedience to orders, though he knew he should “break his owners.” He marched at once, crossed James River at Jamestown, where Lafayette attacked his rear,—and, if his Lordship had been in fighting humor, would have got well beaten for his pains,—withdrew to Portsmouth, and put on vessels the two thousand men asked for by Sir Henry. Just then new despatches came from Clinton, who had received later news, and who was always trying to humor this spoiled child. He told him to keep all his men in Virginia, where he would take command himself as soon as the hot season was over. The “solid operations” were to begin. Very unstable they proved, even in the beginning!
Clinton ordered him to take post at Old Point Comfort,—where Fort Monroe is. But the engineer officers reported that they could not protect the fleet there against the French; and, to the delight of Lafayette and of all good angels, Cornwallis selected Yorktown for his summer position. Our neighborhood to it at Fort Monroe has made the position again familiar.
When Lafayette heard that the troops had sailed up the Chesapeake,—instead of to New York, which he had very correctly supposed to be their destination,—he thought Cornwallis was going to strike at Baltimore, and that he must “cut across” to Fredericksburg. That way he marched with his light infantry. His amazement hardly concealed itself when he found the enemy stopped at Yorktown. Back he came to Williamsburg, and wrote to Washington,—“If a fleet should arrive at this moment, our affairs will take a very fortunate turn.” This was on the 6th of August. On the 1st of September he could write,—“From the bottom of my heart, my dear General, I felicitate you on the arrival of the French fleet.... Thanks to you, my dear General, I am in a charming situation, and I find myself at the head of a superb corps.” The Marquis of St. Simon joined him with three thousand French infantry from the fleet,—and at Williamsburg they effectually kept Cornwallis from escape by land, as the French fleet did by sea.
The only proposal which Cornwallis made to save his corps after this was carefully considered, and, it is said, at one time determined on; but it was finally rejected, in expectation of relief from Clinton. Just now that we are beginning “solid operations in Virginia,” and may have occasion to move a hundred thousand men, more or less, up the long neck of land between York and James Rivers, the passage is an interesting one. Washington had not yet arrived. The English plan was to attack and beat Lafayette and St. Simon before Washington joined them. The English columns were to move from Yorktown so as to attack Williamsburg before daybreak. “That time was deemed eligible,” says Tarleton, “because the ground near and in Williamsburg is cut by several ravines, and because the British column, in advancing in the long and straight road through the town, would not be so much exposed to the enemy’s cannon under cover of the night as during the day.” Let the reader remember these defiles, as he traces the march of another column from Fort Monroe through Yorktown to Williamsburg, with some General Magruder falling back before it, watching his chances to strike. Cornwallis gave up the plan, however, and waited for the help from Clinton, which never came. On the 15th of September Washington and Rochambeau joined Lafayette; on the 18th of October Cornwallis capitulated, and for eighty years the Virginian campaigns were over.
There is not one subdivision of them but is touched by the movements of to-day. Everything is changed, indeed, except Virginia. But Raccoon Ford and Bottom’s Bridge are where they were then. The division which marches on Gordonsville may send a party down the “Marquis’s Road,” as the people still call the wood-road which Lafayette opened; and all the battles of the next month,[A] in short, will be fought on the ground familiar to the soldiers of eighty years ago.
[Footnote A: By “the next month” the writer meant May. It will be observed that his article was finally prepared for the press on the second of April. It has not since been changed. The references to Williamsburg, the Chickahominy, and the “neck between the rivers” are not “prophecies after the fact.”]
To the Editors of the ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
Jaalam, 17th May, 1862.
Gentlemen,—At the special request of Mr. Biglow, I intended to inclose, together with his own contribution, (into which, at my suggestion, he has thrown a little more of pastoral sentiment than usual,) some passages from my sermon on the day of the National Fast, from the text, “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them,” Heb. xiii. 3. But I have not leisure sufficient at present for the copying of them, even were I altogether satisfied with the production as it stands. I should prefer, I confess, to contribute the entire discourse to the pages of your respectable miscellany, if it should be found acceptable upon perusal, especially as I find the difficulty of selection of greater magnitude than I had anticipated. What passes without challenge in the fervour of oral delivery cannot always stand the colder criticism of the closet. I am not so great an enemy of Eloquence as my friend Mr. Biglow would appear to be from some passages in his contribution for the current month. I would not, indeed, hastily suspect him of covertly glancing at myself in his somewhat caustick animadversions, albeit some of the phrases he girds at are not entire strangers to my lips. I am a more hearty admirer of the Puritans than seems now to be the fashion, and believe, that, if they Hebraized a little too much in their speech, they showed remarkable practical sagacity as statesmen and founders. But such phenomena as Puritanism are the results rather of great religious than merely social convulsions, and do not long survive them. So soon as an earnest conviction has cooled into a phrase, its work is over, and the best that can be done with it is to bury it. Ite, missa est. I am inclined to agree with Mr. Biglow that we cannot settle the great political questions which are now presenting themselves to the nation by the opinions of Jeremiah or Ezekiel as to the wants and duties of the Jews in their time, nor do I believe that an entire community with their feelings and views would be practicable or even agreeable at the present day. At the same time I could wish that their habit of subordinating the actual to the moral, the flesh to the spirit, and this world to the other were more common. They had found out, at least, the great military secret that soul weighs more than body.—But I am suddenly called to a sick-bed in the household of a valued parishioner.
With esteem and respect. Your ob’t serv’t HOMER WILBUR.
Once git a smell o’ musk into a
draw
An’ it clings hold like precerdents
in law:
Your gran’ma’am put it there,—when,
goodness knows,—
To jes’ this-worldify her Sunday-clo’es;
But the old chist wun’t sarve her
gran’son’s wife,
(For, ’thout new funnitoor, wut
good in life?)
An’ so ole clawfoot, from the precinks
dread
O’ the spare-chamber, slinks into
the shed,
Where, dim with dust, it fust or last
subsides
To holdin’ seeds an’ fifty
things besides;
But better days stick fast in heart an’
husk,
An’ all you keep in’t gits
a scent o’ musk.
Jes’ so with poets: wut they’ve
airly read
Gits kind o’ worked into their heart
an’ head,
So’s ’t they can’t seem
to write but jest on sheers
With furrin countries or played-out ideers,
Nor hev a feelin’, ef it doosn’t
smack
O’ wut some critter chose to feel
’way back:
This makes ’em talk o’ daisies,
larks, an’ things,
Ez though we ‘d nothin’ here
that blows an’ sings,—
(Why, I’d give more for one live
bobolink
Than a square mile o’ larks in printer’s
ink,)—
This makes ’em think our fust o’
May is May,
Which ’t ain’t, for all the
almanicks can say.
O little city-gals, don’t never
go it
Blind on the word o’ noospaper or
poet!
They ‘re apt to puff, an’
May-day seldom looks
Up in the country ez it doos in books;
They ‘re no more like than hornets’-nests
an’ hives,
Or printed sarmons be to holy lives.
I, with my trouses perched on cow-hide
boots,
Tuggin’ my foundered feet out by
the roots,
Hev seen ye come to fling on April’s
hearse
Your muslin nosegays from the milliner’s,
Puzzlin’ to find dry ground your
queen to choose,
An’ dance your throats sore in morocker
shoes:
I’ve seen ye an’ felt proud,
thet, come wut would,
Our Pilgrim stock wuz pithed with hardihood.
Pleasure doos make us Yankees kind o’
winch,
Ez though ‘t wuz sunthin’
paid for by the inch;
But yit we du contrive to worry thru,
Ef Dooty tells us thet the thing’s
to du,
An’ kerry a hollerday, ef we set
out,
Ez stiddily ez though ’t wuz a redoubt.
I, country-born an’ bred, know where
to find
Some blooms thet make the season suit
the mind,
An’ seem to metch the doubtin’
bluebird’s notes,—
Half-vent’rin’ liverworts
in furry coats,
Bloodroots, whose rolled-up leaves ef
you oncurl,
Each on ’em’s cradle to a
baby-pearl,—
But these are jes’ Spring’s
pickets; sure ez sin,
The rebble frosts ’ll try to drive
’em in;
For half our May’s so awfully like
Mayn’t,
’T would rile a Shaker or an evrige
saint;
Though I own up I like our back’ard
springs
Thet kind o’ haggle with their greens
an’ things,
An’ when you ’most give up,
without more words
Toss the fields full o’ blossoms,
leaves, an’ birds:
Thet’s Northun natur’, slow
an’ apt to doubt,
But when it doos git stirred, ther’s
no gin-out!
Fust come the blackbirds clatt’rin’
in tall trees,
An’ settlin’ things in windy
Congresses,—
Queer politicians, though, for I’ll
be skinned,
Ef all on ’em don’t head aginst
the wind.
’Fore long the trees begin to show
belief,—
The maple crimsons to a coral-reef,
Then saffern swarms swing off from all
the willers
So plump they look like yaller caterpillars,
Then gray hossches’nuts leetle hands
unfold
Softer ’n a baby’s be at three
days old:
This is the robin’s almanick; he
knows
Thet arter this ther’ ’s only
blossom-snows;
So, choosin’ out a handy crotch
an’ spouse,
He goes to plast’rin’ his
adobe house.
Then seems to come a hitch,—things
lag behind,
Till some fine mornin’ Spring makes
up her mind,
An’ ez, when snow-swelled rivers
cresh their dams
Heaped-up with ice thet dovetails in an’
jams,
A leak comes spirtin’ thru some
pin-hole cleft,
Grows stronger, fercer, tears out right
an’ left,
Then all the waters bow themselves an’
come,
Suddin, in one gret slope o’ shedderin’
foam,
Jes’ so our Spring gits everythin’
in tune
An’ gives one leap from April into
June:
Then all comes crowdin’ in; afore
you think,
The oak-buds mist the side-hill woods
with pink,
The catbird in the laylock-bush is loud,
The orchards turn to heaps o’ rosy
cloud,
In ellum-shrouds the flashin’ hangbird
clings
An’ for the summer vy’ge his
hammock slings,
All down the loose-walled lanes in archin’
bowers
The barb’ry droops its strings o’
golden flowers,
Whose shrinkin’ hearts the school-gals
love to try
With pins,—they ’ll worry
yourn so, boys, bimeby!
But I don’t love your cat’logue
style,—do you?—
Ez ef to sell all Natur’ by vendoo;
One word with blood in ’t’s
twice ez good ez two:
‘Nuff sed, June’s bridesman,
poet o’ the year,
Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here;
Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings,
Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin’
wings,
Or, givin’ way to ’t in a
mock despair,
Runs down, a brook o’ laughter,
thru the air.
I ollus feel the sap start in my veins
In spring, with curus heats an’
prickly pains,
Thet drive me, when I git a chance, to
walk
Off by myself to hev a privit talk
With a queer critter thet can’t
seem to ’gree
Along o’ me like most folks,—Mister
Me.
Ther’ ’s times when I’m
unsoshle ez a stone,
An’ sort o’ suffocate to be
alone,—
I’m crowded jes’ to think
thet folks are nigh,
An’ can’t bear nothin’
closer than the sky;
Now the wind’s full ez shifty in
the mind
Ez wut it is ou’-doors, ef I ain’t
blind,
An’ sometimes, in the fairest sou’west
weather,
My innard vane pints east for weeks together,
My natur’ gits all goose-flesh,
an’ my sins
Come drizzlin’ on my conscience
sharp ez pins:
Wal, et sech times I jes’ slip out
o’ sight
An’ take it out in a fair stan’-up
fight
With the one cuss I can’t lay on
the shelf,
The crook’dest stick in all the
heap,—Myself.
‘T wuz so las’ Sabbath arter
meetin’-time:
Findin’ my feelins wouldn’t
noways rhyme
With nobody’s, but off the hendle
flew
An’ took things from an east-wind
pint o’ view,
I started off to lose me in the hills
Where the pines be, up back o’ ’Siah’s
Mills:
Pines, ef you’re blue, are the best
friends I know,
They mope an’ sigh an’ sheer
your feelins so,—
They hesh the ground beneath so, tu, I
swan,
You half-forgit you ’we gut a body
on.
Ther’s a small school’us’
there where four roads meet,
The door-steps hollered out by little
feet,
An’ side-posts carved with names
whose owners grew
To gret men, some on ’em, an’
deacons, tu;
’T ain’t used no longer, coz
the town hez gut
A high-school, where they teach the Lord
knows wut:
Three-story larnin’ ’s pop’lar
now; I guess
We thriv’ ez wal on jes’ two
stories less,
For it strikes me ther’ ‘s
sech a thing ez sinnin’
By overloadin’ children’s
underpitmin’:
Wal, here it wuz I larned my A B C,
An’ it’s a kind o’ favorite
spot with me.
We ‘re curus critters: Now
ain’t jes’ the minute
Thet ever fits us easy while we ’re
in it;
Long ez ‘t wuz futur’, ’t
would be perfect bliss,—
Soon ez it’s past, thet time’s
wuth ten o’ this;
An’ yit there ain’t a man
thet need be told
Thet Now’s the only bird lays eggs
o’ gold.
A knee-high lad, I used to plot an’
plan
An’ think ’t wuz life’s
cap-sheaf to be a man;
Now, gittin’ gray, there’s
nothin’ I enjoy
Like dreamin’ back along into a
boy:
So the ole school’us’ is a
place I choose
Afore all others, ef I want to muse;
I set down where I used to set, an’
git
My boyhood back, an’ better things
with it,—
Faith, Hope, an’ sunthin’,
ef it isn’t Cherrity,
It’s want o’ guile, an’
thet’s ez gret a rerrity.
Now, ’fore I knowed, thet Sabbath
arternoon
Thet I sot out to tramp myself in tune,
I found me in the school’us’
on my seat,
Drummin’ the march to No-wheres
with my feet.
Thinkin’ o’ nothin’,
I’ve heerd ole folks say,
Is a hard kind o’ dooty in its way:
It’s thinkin’ everythin’
you ever knew,
Or ever hearn, to make your feelins blue.
I sot there tryin’ thet on for a
spell:
I thought o’ the Rebellion, then
o’ Hell,
Which some folks tell ye now is jest a
metterfor
(A the’ry, p’raps, it wun’t
feel none the better for);
I thought o’ Reconstruction, wut
we ’d win
Patchin’ our patent self-blow-up
agin;
I thought ef tins ‘ere milkin’
o’ the wits,
So much, a month, warn’t givin’
Natur’ fits,—
Ef folks warn’t druv, findin’
their own milk fail,
To work the cow thet hez an iron tail,
An’ ef idees ‘thout ripenin’
in the pan
Would send up cream to humor ary man:
From this to thet I let my worryin’
creep,
Till finally I must ha’ fell asleep.
Our lives in sleep are some like streams
thet glide
‘Twixt flesh an’ sperrit boundin’
on each side,
Where both shores’ shadders kind
o’ mix an’ mingle
In sunthin’ thet ain’t jes’
like either single;
An’ when you cast off’ moorins
from To-day,
An’ down towards To-morrer drift
away,
The imiges thet tengle on the stream
Make a new upside-down’ard world
o’ dream:
Sometimes they seem like sunrise-streaks
an’ warnins
O’ wut ’ll be in Heaven on
Sabbath-mornins,
An’, mixed right in ez ef jest out
o’ spite,
Sunthin’ thet says your supper ain’t
gone right.
I’m gret on dreams, an’ often,
when I wake,
I’ve lived so much it makes my mem’ry
ache,
An’ can’t skurce take a cat-nap
in my cheer
‘Thout hevin’ ’em, some
good, some bad, all queer.
Now I wuz settin’ where I ’d
ben, it seemed,
An’ ain’t sure yit whether
I r’ally dreamed,
Nor, ef I did, how long I might ha’
slep’,
When I hearn some un stompin’ up
the step,
An’ lookin’ round, ef two
an’ two make four,
I see a Pilgrim Father in the door.
He wore a steeple-hat, tall boots, an’
spurs
With rowels to ’em big ez ches’nut-burrs,
An’ his gret sword behind him sloped
away
Long ’z a man’s speech thet
dunno wut to say.—
“Ef your name’s Biglow, an’
your given-name
Hosee,” sez he, “it’s
arter you I came;
I’m your gret-gran’ther multiplied
by three.”—
“My wut?” sez I.—“Your
gret-gret-gret,” sez he:
“You wouldn’t ha’ never
ben here but for me.
Two hunderd an’ three year ago this
May
The ship I come in sailed up Boston Bay;
I ’d ben a cunnle in our Civil War,—
But wut on airth hev you gut up
one for?
I’m told you write in public prints:
ef true,
It’s nateral you should know a thing
or two.”—
“Thet air’s an argymunt I
can’t endorse,—
‘T would prove, coz you wear spurs,
you kep’ a horse:
For brains,” sez I, “wutever
you may think,
Ain’t boun’ to cash the draft
o’ pen-an’-ink,—
Though mos’ folks write ez ef they
hoped jes’ quickenin’
The churn would argoo skim-milk into thickenin’;
But skim-milk ain’t a thing to change
its view
O’ usefleness, no more ’n
a smoky flue.
But du pray tell me, ’fore we furder
go,
How in all Natur’ did you come to
know
’Bout our affairs,” sez I,
“in Kingdom-Come?”—
“Wal, I worked round at sperrit-rappin’
some,
In hopes o’ larnin’ wut wuz
goin’ on,”
Sez he, “but mejums lie so like
all-split
Thet I concluded it wuz best to quit.
But, come now, ef you wun’t confess
to knowin’,
You ’ve some conjecturs how the
thing’s a-goin’.”—
“Gran’ther,” sez I,
“a vane warn’t never known
Nor asked to hev a jedgment of its own;
An’ yit, ef ’t ain’t
gut rusty in the jints,
It ’a safe to trust its say on certin
pints:
It knows the wind’s opinions to