Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860. No. XXXVI. - Various
These are legitimate criticisms to make on Theodore Parker, for he was
large enough to merit them. It is only the loftiest trees of which it
occurs to us to remark that they do not touch the sky, and a man must
comprise a great deal before we complain of him for not comprising
everything. But though the closest scrutiny may sometimes find cases
where he failed to see the most subtile and precious truth, it will
never discover one where, seeing, he failed to proclaim it, or,
proclaiming, failed to give it force and power. He lived his life much
as he walked the streets of Boston,--not quite gracefully, nor yet
statelily, but with quick, strong, solid step, with sagacious eyes
wide open, and thrusting his broad shoulders a little forward, as if
butting away the throng of evil deeds around him, and scattering whole
atmospheres of unwholesome cloud. Wherever he went, there went a
glance of sleepless vigilance, an unforgetting memory, a tongue that
never faltered, and an arm that never quailed. Not primarily an
administrative nor yet a military mind, he yet exerted a positive
control over the whole community around him, by sheer mental and moral
strength. He mowed down harvests of evil as in his youth he mowed the
grass, and all his hours of study were but whetting the scythe.
And for this great work it was not essential that the blade should
have a razor's edge. Grant that Parker was not also Emerson; no
matter, he was Parker. If ever a man seemed sent into the world to
find a certain position, and found it, he was that man. Occupying a
unique sphere of activity, he filled it with such a wealth of success,
that there is now no one in the nation whom it would not seem an
absurdity to nominate for his place. It takes many instruments to
complete the orchestra, but the tones of this organ the Music Hall
shall never hear again.
One feels, since he is gone, that he made his great qualities seem so
natural and inevitable, we forgot that all did not share them. We
forgot the scholar's proverbial reproach of timidity and selfishness,
in watching him. While he lived, it seemed a matter of course that the
greatest acquirements and the heartiest self-devotion should go
together. Can we keep our strength, without the tonic of his example?
How petty it now seems to ask for any fine-drawn subtilties of poet or
seer in him who gave his life to the cause of the humblest! Life
speaks the loudest. We do not ask what Luther said or wrote, but only
what he did; and the name of Theodore Parker will not only long
outlive his books, but will last far beyond the special occasions out
of which he moulded his grand career.
* * * * *
ICARUS.
I.
_Io triumphe!_ Lo, thy certain art,
My crafty sire, releases us at length!
False Minos now may knit his baffled brows,
And in the labyrinth by thee devised
His brutish horns in angry search may toss
The Minotaur,--but thou and I are free!
See where it lies, one dark spot on the breast
Of plains far-shining in the long-lost day,
Thy glory and our prison! Either hand
Crete, with her hoary mountains, olive-clad
In twinkling silver, 'twixt the vineyard rows,
Divides the glimmering seas. On Ida's top
The sun, discovering first an earthly throne,
Sits down in splendor: lucent vapors rise
From folded glens among the awaking hills,
Expand their hovering films, and touch, and spread
In airy planes beneath us, hearths of air
Whereon the morning burns her hundred fires.
II.
Take thou thy way between the cloud and wave,
O Daedalus, my father, steering forth
To friendly Samos, or the Carian shore!
But me the spaces of the upper heaven
Attract, the height, the freedom, and the joy.
For now, from that dark treachery escaped,
And tasting power which was the lust of youth,
Whene'er the white blades of the sea-gull's wings
Flashed round the headland, or the barbed files
Of cranes returning clanged across the sky,
No half-way flight, no errand incomplete
I purpose. Not, as once in dreams, with pain
I mount, with fear and huge exertion hold
Myself a moment, ere the sickening fall
Breaks in the shock of waking. Launched, at last,
Uplift on powerful wings, I veer and float
Past sunlit isles of cloud, that dot with light
The boundless archipelago of sky.
I fan the airy silence till it starts
In rustling whispers, swallowed up as soon;
I warm the chilly ether with my breath;
I with the beating of my heart make glad
The desert blue. Have I not raised myself
Unto this height, and shall I cease to soar?
The curious eagles wheel about my path:
With sharp and questioning eyes they stare at me,
With harsh, impatient screams they menace me,
Who, with these vans of cunning workmanship
Broad-spread, adventure on their high domain,--
Now mine, as well. Henceforth, ye clamorous birds,
I claim the azure empire of the air!
Henceforth I breast the current of the morn,
Between her crimson shores: a star, henceforth,
Upon the crawling dwellers of the earth
My forehead shines. The steam of sacred blood,
The smoke of burning flesh on altars laid,
Fumes of the temple-wine, and sprinkled myrrh,
Shall reach my palate ere they reach the Gods.
III.
Nay, am not I a God? What other wing,
If not a God's, could in the rounded sky
Hang thus in solitary poise? What need,
Ye proud Immortals, that my balanced plumes
Should grow, like yonder eagle's, from the nest?
It may be, ere my crafty father's line
Sprang from Erectheus, some artificer,
Who found you roaming wingless on the hills,
Naked, asserting godship in the dearth
Of loftier claimants, fashioned you the same.
Thence did you seize Olympus; thence your pride
Compelled the race of men, your slaves, to tear
The temple from the mountain's marble womb,
To carve you shapes more beautiful than they,
To sate your idle nostrils with the reek
Of gums and spices, heaped on jewelled gold.
IV.
Lo, where Hyperion, through the glowing air
Approaching, drives! Fresh from his banquet-meats,
Flushed with Olympian nectar, angrily
He guides his fourfold span of furious steeds,
Convoyed by that bold Hour whose ardent torch
Burns up the dew, toward the narrow beach,
This long, projecting spit of cloudy gold
Whereon I wait to greet him when he comes.
Think not I fear thine anger: this day, thou,
Lord of the silver bow, shalt bring a guest
To sit in presence of the equal Gods
In your high hall: wheel but thy chariot near,
That I may mount beside thee!
----What is this?
I hear the crackling hiss of singed plumes!
The stench of burning feathers stifles me!
My loins are stung with drops of molten wax!--
Ai! ai! my ruined vans!--I fall! I die!
* * * * *
Ere the blue noon o'erspanned the bluer strait
Which parts Icaria from Samos, fell,
Amid the silent wonder of the air,
Fell with a shock that startled the still wave,
A shrivelled wreck of crisp, entangled plumes,
A head whence eagles' beaks had plucked the eyes,
And clots of wax, black limbs by eagles torn
In falling: and a circling eagle screamed
Around that floating horror of the sea
Derision, and above Hyperion shone.
* * * * *
WALKER.
I confess to knowledge of a large book bearing the above title,--a
title which is no less appropriate for this brief, disrupted
biographical memorandum. That I have a right to act as I have done, in
adopting it, will presently appear,--as well as that the honored name
thus appropriated by me refers neither io the dictionary nor the
_filibustero_, both of which articles appear to have been superseded
by newer and better things.
At the first flush, Fur would seem to be rather a sultry subject to
open either a store or a story with, in these glowing days of a justly
incensed thermometer.
And yet there is a fine bracing mountain-air to be drawn from the
material, as with a spigot, if you will only favor your mind with a
digression from the tangible article to the wild-rose associations in
which it is enveloped.
Think of the high, wind-swept ridges, among the clefts of which are
the only homesteads of the hardy pioneers by whose agency alone one
kind of luxury is kept up to the standard demand for it in the great
cities. It might not be so likely a place to get fancy drinks in as
Broome Street, certainly, we must admit, as we picture to ourselves
some brushy ravine in which the trapper has his irons cunningly set
out for the betrayal of the stone-marten and the glossy-backed
"fisher-cat,"--but the breeze in it is quite as wholesome as a
brandy-smash. The whirr of the sage-hen's wing, as she rises from the
fragrant thicket, brings a flavor with it fresher far than that of the
mint-julep. It is cheaper than the latter compound, too, and much more
conducive to health. Continuing to indulge our fancy in cool images
connected with fur and its finders, we shall see what contrasts will
arise. The blue shadow of a cottonwood-tree stretching over a
mountain-spring. By the edge of the sparkling water sits, embroidering
buckskin, a red-legged squaw, keeper of the wigwam to the ragged
mountain-man who set the traps that caught the martens which furnished
the tails that mark so gracefully the number of skins of which the
rich banker's wife's _fichu-russe_ is composed. Here is a striking
contrast, in which extremes meet,--not the martens' tails, but the two
men's wives, the banker's and the trapper's, brought into antithetical
relation by the simple circumstance of a _fichu-russe_, the material
of which was worn in some ravine of the wilderness, mayhap not a
twelvemonth since, by a creature faster even than a banker's wife.
Great is the hereafter of the marten-cat, whose skin may be looked
upon as the soul by which the animal is destined to attain a sort of
modified immortality in the Elysian abodes of Wealth and Fashion,--the
place where good martens go!
The men through whose intervention eventual felicity is thus secured
to the fur-creature are as much a race in themselves as the Gypsies.
No genuine type of them ever approaches nearer to the confines of
civilization than a frontier settlement beckons him. Old Adams, the
bear-tutor, might have been of this type once, but he is adulterated
with sawdust and gas-light now, with city cookery and spurious
groceries. Many men of French Canadian origin are to be found trading
and trapping in the Far West; although, taken in the aggregate, there
are no people less given to stirring enterprise than these colonial
descendants of the Gaul. The only direction, almost, in which they
exhibit any expansive tendency is in the border trade and general
adventure business, in which figure the names of many of them
conspicuously and with honor. The Chouteaus are of that stock; and of
that stock came the late Major Aubry, renowned among the guides and
trappers of the southwestern wilderness; and if J.C. Fremont is not a
French Canadian by birth, the strong efforts made about the time of
the last Presidential election to establish him as one had at least
the effect of determining his Canadian descent.
Pierre La Marche was a Franco-Canadian of the spread-eagle kind
referred to. Departing widely from the conservative prejudices of his
race, his wandering propensities took him away, at an early age, from
the primitive colonial village in which he first saw the light of day.
He was but fourteen years old when he left his peaceful and thoroughly
whitewashed home on the banks of the St. Francois, in company with a
knot of Canadian _voyageurs_, whose principles tended towards the Red
River of the North. Leaving this convoy at Fond-du-Lac, he pushed his
way on to the Mississippi, alone and friendless, and, falling in with
a party of trappers at St. Louis, accompanied them when they returned
to the mountain "gulches" in which their business lay.
After six years of trapper and trader life, but little trace of the
simple young Canadian _habitant_ was left in Pierre La Marche. He
spoke mountain English and French _patois_ with equal fluency. There
was a decision of character about him that commanded the respect of
his comrades. When the other trappers went to St. Louis, they used to
drink and gamble away their hard-won dollars, few of these men caring
for anything beyond the indulgence of immediate fancies. But Pierre
was ambitious, and thought that money might be made subservient to his
aspirations in a better way than speculating with it upon "bluff" or
squandering it upon deteriorating drinks.
About this time of his life, Pierre began to think that the fact of
his being "only a French Canadian" was likely to be a bar to his
advancement. He despised himself greatly for one thing, indeed,--that
his name was La Marche, and not Walker,--which patronymic he made out
to be the nearest Anglo-Saxon equivalent for his French one. He
adopted it,--calling himself Peter Walker,--and had an adventure out
of it, to begin with.
While trading furs at St. Louis, on one occasion, he offered a remnant
of his stock to a dealer with whom he was not acquainted. They had an
argument as to prices. The dealer, a man of hasty temper, asked him
his name.
"Walker," was the reply.
When La Marche arose from the distant corner into which he was
projected in company with the bundle of furs levelled at his head,
revenge was his natural sentiment. Drawing his heavy knife from its
sheath, he flung it away: the temptation to use it might have been too
much for him. Small in stature, but remarkable for muscular strength,
and for inventive resource in the "rough-and-tumble" fight, La Marche
clenched with the burly store-keeper, who was getting the worst of it,
when some of his _employes_ interfered. This led to a general
engagement. Several of La Marche's companions now rushed in, and in
five minutes their opponents gave out, succumbent to superior wind and
sinew.
Next morning, when the trappers took their way out of St. Louis, La
Marche was a leader among them for life. But the reason of the
store-keeper's rage was for many years a mystery to him. He knew not
the enormity of "Walker," as an exponent of disparagement; he simply
thought it a nicer name than La Marche, while it fully embodied the
sentiment of that name. He adopted it, then, as I said before, and
went on towards posterity as Peter Walker.
I heard many strange anecdotes of Peter Walker at the residence of a
retired _voyageur_, who used to sing him Homerically to his chosen
friends. These _voyageurs_ are professional canoe-men; adventurers
extending, sparsely, from the waters of French Canada to those of
Oregon,--and sometimes back. Honest old Quatreaux! I mentioned his
"residence" just now, and the term is truly grandiloquent in its
application. The residence of old Quatreaux was a log _cabane_, about
twenty feet square. Planks, laid loosely upon the cross-ties of the
rafters, formed the up-stairs of the building: up-ladder would be a
term more in accordance with facts; for it was by an appliance of that
kind that the younger and more active of the sixteen members composing
the old _voyageur's_ family removed themselves from view when they
retired for the night. A partition, extending half-way across the
ground-floor, screened off the state or principal bed from outside
gaze; at least, it was exposed to view only from points rendered
rather inaccessible by tubs, with which these Canadian families are
generally provided to excess. This apartment was strictly assigned to
me, as a visitor; and although I firmly declined the honor,--chiefly
with reference to certain large and very hard fleas I knew of in its
dormitory arrangements,--it was kept religiously vacant, in case my
heart should relent towards it, and the family in general slept
huddled together on the outer floor, without manifest classification:
the two old people; son and wife; daughter and husband; children; the
extraordinary little hunch-backed and one-eyed girl, whom nobody would
marry, but everybody liked; dogs. I used to stretch myself on a
buffalo-robe before the wood-fire, in company with a faithful spaniel,
who was as wakeful on these occasions as if he suspected that the
low-bred curs of the establishment might pick his pockets.
Quatreaux's _cabane_ was situated on the edge of an extensive tract of
marsh,--lagoon would be a more descriptive word for it, perhaps,--a
splashy, ditch-divided district, extending along the borders of a lake
for miles. Snipe-shooting was my motive there; and dull work it was in
those dark, Novembry, October days, with "the low rain falling" half
the time, and the yellow leaves all the time, and no snipe. But
whether we poled our log canoe up to some stunted old willow-tree that
sat low in the horizontal marsh, and took shelter under it to smoke
our pipes, or whether we mollified the privation of snipe in the
_cabane_ at night with mellow rum and tobacco brought by me, still was
Walker the old _voyageur's_ favorite theme.
Old Quatreaux spoke English perfectly well, although his conservatism
as a Canadian induced him to prefer his mother tongue as a vehicle for
general conversation. But I remarked that his anecdotes of Walker were
always related in English, and on these occasions, therefore, for my
benefit alone: for but little of the Anglo-Saxon tongue appeared to be
known to, or at least used by, any member of his numerous family.
Indeed, I can recall but two words of that language which I could
positively aver to have heard in colloquial use among them,--_poodare_
and _schotte_. And why should the old _voyageur_ have thus reserved
his experiences from those who were near and dear to him? Simply
because most of his adventures with Walker were not of the strictly
mild character becoming a family-man. But it was all the same to these
good people; and when I laughed, they all took up the idea and laughed
their best,--the little hunch-backed girl generally going off into a
kind of epilepsy by herself, over in the darkest corner of the room,
among the tubs.
When divested of the strange Western expletives and imprecations with
which the old man used to spice his reminiscences, some of them are
enough. I remember one, telling how Peter Walker "raised the wind" on
a particular occasion, when he got short of money on his way to some
distant trading-post, in a district strange to him. It is before me,
in short-hand, on the pages of an old, old pocket-book, and I will
tell it with some slight improvements on the narrator's style, such as
suppressing his unnecessary combinations of the curse.
Mounted on a two-hundred-dollar buffalo-horse, for which he would not
have taken double that amount, Peter Walker found himself, one
afternoon, near the end of a long day's ride. He had but little
baggage with him, that little consisting entirely of a bowie-knife and
holster-pistols,--for the revolver was a scarce piece of furniture
then and there. Of money he was entirely destitute, having expended
his last dollar upon the purchase of his noble steed, and of the
festive suit of clothes with which he calculated upon astonishing
people who resided outside the limits of civilization. The pantaloon
division of that suit was particularly superb, consisting principally
of a stripe by which the outer seam of each leg was made conducive to
harmony of outline. He was about three days' journey from the
trading-post to which he was bound. The country was a frontier one,
sparsely provided with inns.
The sun was framed in a low notch of the horizon, as he approached a
border-hostelry, on the gable of which "Cat's Bluff Hotel" was painted
in letters quite disproportioned in size to the city of Cat's Bluff,
which consisted of the house in question, neither more nor less. In
that house Peter Walker decided upon sojourning luxuriously for that
night, at least, if he had to draw a check upon his holsters for it.
Having stabled his horse, then, and seen him supplied with such
provender as the place afforded, he looked about the hotel, which he
found to be an institution of very considerable pretensions. It seemed
to have a good deal of its own way, in fact, being the only house of
entertainment for many miles upon a great south-western thoroughfare,
from which branched off the trail to be taken by him tomorrow,--a
trail which led only to the trading-post or fort already mentioned.
The deportment of the landlord was gracious, as he went about
whistling "Wait for the wagon," and jingling with gold chains and
heavy jewelry. Still more exhilarating was the prosperous confidence
of the bar-keeper, who took in, while Walker was determining a drink,
not less than a dozen quarter-dollars, from blue-shirted, bearded,
thirsty men with rifles, who came along in a large covered wagon of
western tendency, in which they immediately departed with haste, late
as it was, as if bound to drive into the sun before he went down
behind the far-off edge. Walker used to say, jocularly, that he
supposed this must have been the wagon for which the landlord
whistled, and which came to his call.
Everything denoted that there was abundance of money in that favored
place. Even small boys who came in and called for cigars and drinks
made a reckless display of coin as they paid for them, and then drove
off in their wagons,--for they all had wagons, and were all intent
upon driving rapidly in then toward the west.
But, as night fell, travel went down with the declining day; and
Walker felt himself alone in the world,--a man without a dollar.
Nevertheless, he called for good cheer, which was placed before him on
a liberal scale: for landlords thereabouts were accustomed to provide
for appetites acquired on the plains, and their supply was obliged to
be both large and ready for the chance comers who were always dropping
in, and upon whom their custom depended. So he ate and drank; and
having appeased hunger and thirst, he went into the bar, and opened
conversation with the landlord by offering him one of his own cigars,
a bunch of which he got from the bar-keeper, whom he particularly
requested not to forget to include them in his bill, when the time for
his departure brought with it the disagreeable necessity of being
served with that document.
Western landlords, in general, are not remarkable for the reserve with
which they treat their guests. This particular landlord was less so
than most others. He was especially inquisitive with regard to
Walker's exquisite pantaloons, the like of which had never been seen
in that part of the country before. His happiness was evidently
incomplete in the privation of a similar pair.
"Them pants all wool, now?" asked he, as he viewed them with various
inclinations of head, like a connoisseur examining a picture.
"All except the stripes," replied Walker;--"stripes is wool and cotton
mixed; gives 'em a finer grain, you see, and catches the eye."
The landlord respected Walker at once. Perhaps he might be an Eastern
dry-goods merchant, come along for the purpose of making arrangements
to inundate the border-territory with stuffs for exquisite pantaloons.
He proceeded with his interrogatories. He laid himself out to extract
from Walker all manner of information as to his origin, occupation,
and prospects, which gave the latter an excellent opportunity of
glorifying himself inferentially, while he affected mystery and
reticence with regard to his mission "out West." At last the landlord
set him down for an agent come on to open the sluices for a great tide
of foreign emigration into the territory,--an event to which he
himself had been looking for a long time, and the prospect of which
had guided him to the spot where he had established his hotel, which
he now looked upon as the centre from which a great city was destined
immediately to radiate. And the landlord retired to his bed to
meditate upon immense speculations in town-lots, and, when sleep came
upon him, to dream that he had successfully arranged them through the
medium of an angel with a speaking-trumpet, whose manifest wardrobe
consisted of a pair of fancy pantaloons with stripes on the seams and
side-pockets, exactly like Walker's.
Walker, too, retired to rest, but not to sleep, for his mind was
occupied in turning over means whereby to obtain some of the real
capital with which people here seemed to be superabundantly provided.
He had speculations to carry out, and money was the indispensable
element. Had he only been able to read the landlord's thoughts, he
might have turned quietly over and slept; for so held was that
person's mind by the idea that his ultimate success was to be achieved
through the medium of his unknown guest, that he would without
hesitation have lent him double the sum necessary for his financial
arrangements.
There was a disturbance some time about the middle of the night.
People came along in wagons, as usual, waking up the bar-keeper, whose
dreams perpetually ran upon that kind of trouble. Walker, who was wide
awake, gathered from the conversation below that the travellers had
only halted for drinks, and would immediately resume their way
westward with all speed. He arose and looked out at the open window,
which was about fifteen feet from the ground. Something white loomed
up through the darkness: it was the awning of one of the wagons, which
stood just under the window, to the sill of which it reached within a
few feet. Walker, brought up in the rough-and-ready school, had lain
down to rest with his trousers on. A sudden inspiration now seized
him: he slipped them rapidly off, and dropped them silently on to the
roof of the wagon, which soon after moved on with the others, and
disappeared into the night. This done, he opened softly the door of
the room, and, leaving it ajar, returned to bed and slept.