Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 - Various
The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been
with him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in
imagination with tender interest wherever he goes.--In that little
court, where he lived in gay loneliness so long,--
--in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering
down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the
small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets
proud and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair
Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant's
memory in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower
shores,--up in that caravansary on the banks of the stream where
Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to
lead the Commencement processions,--where blue Ascutney looked down
from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah, as the Professor
always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft climbing
masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim's Heavenward Path that he used to
look through his old "Dollond" to see if the Shining Ones were not
within range of sight,--sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks
that carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village
lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to
the terminus of their harmless stroll,--the patulous fage, in the
Professor's classic dialect,--the spreading beech, in more familiar
phrase,--[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done
yet, and we have another long journey before us,]--
--and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic,--dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs
that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demi-blondes,--in the home overlooking the winding stream and the
smooth, flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks
of bears and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter
snow; facing the twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest
waves of the great land-storm in all this billowy region,--suggestive
to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out
by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of
the forest,--in that home where seven blessed summers were passed,
which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the
beatific vision of the holy dreamer,--
--in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet
not unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,--full of great and
little boys' playthings from top to bottom,--in all these summer or
winter nests he was always at home and always welcome.
This long articulated sigh of reminiscences,--this calenture which
shows me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the
mountain-circled green of Grafton beneath the salt waves that come
feeling their way along the wall at my feet, restless and
soft-touching as blind men's busy fingers,--is for that friend of mine
who looks into the waters of the Patapsco and sees beneath them the
same visions that paint themselves for me in the green depths of the
Charles.
----Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress?--Why, no,--of course
not. I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten
minutes. You don't think I should expect any woman to listen to such a
sentence as that long one, without giving her a chance to put in a
word?
----What did I say to the schoolmistress?--Permit me one moment. I don't
doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as
I was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting
young woman, you must allow me to remark, in the classic version of a
familiar phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is _nullum
tui negotii_.
When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask
roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I
felt sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every
morning, and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.
EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.
(_To be burned unread._)
I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to
this young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which
invites confidence and expansive utterance. I have been low-spirited
and listless, lately,--it is coffee, I think,--(I observe that which
is bought _ready-ground_ never affects the head,)--and I notice
that I tell my secrets too easily when I am downhearted.
There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton
Rock, are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.
There is a woman's footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest
ocean-buried inscription!
----Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no!--Yet what is this which has
been shaping itself in my soul?--Is it a thought?--is it a dream?--is
it a _passion_?--Then I know what comes next.
----The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed
corridors are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather. But there are iron
bars to all the windows. When it is fair, some of us can stroll
outside that very high fence. But I never see much life in those
groups I sometimes meet;--and then the careful man watches them so
closely! How I remember that sad company I used to pass on fine
mornings, when I was a schoolboy!--B., with his arms full of yellow
weeds,--ore from the gold mines which he discovered long before we
heard of California,--Y., born to millions, crazed by too much
plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,--made a Polyphemus of
my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a stick,--(the
multi-millionnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy another eye
with; but boys are jealous of rich folks,--and I don't doubt the good
people made him easy for life,)--how I remember them all!
I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in "Vathek,"
and how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its
heart,--a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder
summit. Go there on the next visiting-day, and ask that figure
crouched in the corner, huddled up like those Indian mummies and
skeletons found buried in the sitting posture, to lift its hand,--look
upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes.--No, I must not think
of such an ending! Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of
meeting the difficulty. Make a will and leave her a house or two and
some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to take away her
necessity for keeping school.--I wonder what nice young man's feet
would be in my French slippers before six months were over! Well,
what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn't marry
her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best
person she could by any possibility marry.
----It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing.--It
is the merest fancy that ever was in the world. I shall never be
married. She will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so far, I
will give her a silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her and her
husband, sometimes. No coffee, I hope, though,--it depresses me
sadly. I feel very miserably;--they must have been grinding it at
home.--Another morning walk will be good for me, and I don't doubt the
schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh air before school.
* * * * *
----The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been
coming over me from time to time of late. Did you ever see that
electrical experiment which consists in passing a flash through
letters of gold-leaf in a darkened room, whereupon some name or legend
springs out of the darkness in characters of fire?
There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the
flash might but pass through them,--but the fire must come down from
heaven. Ah! but what if the stormy _nimbus_ of youthful passion
has blown by, and one asks for lightning from the ragged _cirrus_
of dissolving aspirations, or the silvered _cumulus_ of sluggish
satiety? I will call on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom
living ones no longer worship,--the immortal maid, who, name her what
you will,--Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,--sits by the pillow of
every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead until her
tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams.
MUSA.
O my lost Beauty!--hast thou folded quite
Thy wings of morning light
Beyond those iron gates
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
To chill our fiery dreams,
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?
Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
Whose flowers are silvered hair!--
Have I not loved thee long,
Though my young lips have often done thee wrong
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?
Ah, wilt thou yet return,
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?
Come to me!--I will flood thy silent shrine
With my soul's sacred wine,
And heap thy marble floors
As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
In leafy islands walled with madrepores
And lapped in Orient seas,
When all their feathery palms toss, plume-like, in the breeze.
Come to me!--thou shalt feed on honeyed words,
Sweeter than song of birds;--
No wailing bulbul's throat,
No melting dulcimer's melodious note,
When o'er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
Thy ravished sense might soothe
With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.
Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
Sought in those bowers of green
Where loop the clustered vines
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,--
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,
And Summer's fruited gems,
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn's berried stems.
Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,--
Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
Carved with old names Life's time-worn roll disowns,
Lean, lichen-spotted, o'er the crumbled bones
Still slumbering where they lay
While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away!
Spread o'er my couch thy visionary wing!
Still let me dream and sing,--
Dream of that winding shore
Where scarlet cardinals bloom,--for me no more,--
The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
And clustering nenuphars
Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!
Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!--
Come while the rose is red,--
While blue-eyed Summer smiles
O'er the green ripples round yon sunken piles
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,
And on the sultry air
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!
Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
With thrills of wild sweet pain!--
On life's autumnal blast,
Like shrivelled leaves, youth's passion-flowers are cast,--
Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!--
Behold thy new-decked shrine,
And hear once more the voice that breathed "Forever thine!"
THE TRUSTEE'S LAMENT.
_Per aspera ad astra._
(SCENE.--Outside the gate of the Astronomical Observatory at Albany.)
There was a time when I was blest;
The stars might rise in East or West
With all their sines and wonders;
I cared for neither great nor small,
As pointedly unmoved by all
As, on the top of steeple tall,
A lightning-rod at thunders.
What did I care for Science then?
I was a man with fellow-men,
And called the Bear the Dipper;
Segment meant piece of pie,--no more;
Cosine, the parallelogram that bore
JOHN SMITH & CO. above a door;
Arc, what called Noah skipper.
No axes weighed upon my mind,
(Unless I had a few to grind.)
And as for my astronomy,
Had Hedgecock's quadrant then been known,
I might a lamp-post's height have shown
By gas-tronomic skill,--if none
Find fault with the metonymy.
O hours of innocence! O ways
How far from these unhappy days
When all is vicy-versy!
No flower more peaceful took its due
Than I, who then no difference knew
'Twixt Ursy Major and my true
Old crony, Major Hersey.
Now in long broils and feuds we roast,
Like Strasburg geese that living toast
To make a liver-_pate_,--
And all because we fondly strove
To set the city of our love
In scientific fame above
Her sister Cincinnati!
We built our tower and furnished it
With everything folks said was fit,
From coping-stone to grounsel;
And then, to give a knowing air,
Just nominally assigned its care
To that unmanageable affair,
A Scientific Council.
We built it, not that one or two
Astronomers the stars might view
And count the comets' hair-roots,
But that it might by all be said
How very freely we had bled,--
We were not laying out a bed
To force their early square-roots.
The observations _we_ wished made
Were on the spirit we'd displayed,
Worthy of Athens' high days;
But _they_'ve put in a man who thinks
Only of planets' nodes and winks,
So full of astronomic kinks
He eats star-fish on Fridays.
The instruments we did not mean
For seeing through, but to be seen
At tap of Trustee's knuckle;
But the Director locks the gate,
And makes ourselves and strangers wait
While he is ciphering on a slate
The rust of Saturn's buckle.
So on the wall's outside we stand,
Admire the keyhole's contour grand
And gateposts' sturdy granite;--
But, ah, is Science safe, we say,
With one who treats Trustees this way?
Who knows but he may snub, some day,
A well-conducted planet?
Who knows what mischief he may brew
With such a telescope brand-new
At the four-hundredth power?
He may bring some new comet down
So near that it'll singe the town
And do the Burgess-Corps crisp-brown
Ere they can storm his tower.
We wanted (having got our show)
Some man, that had a name or so,
To be our public showman;
But this one shuts and locks the gate:
Who'll answer but he'll peculate,
(And, faith, some stars are missed of late,)
Now that he's watched by no man?
Our own discoveries he may steal,
Or put night's candles out, to deal
At junkshops with the sockets:
_Savants_, in other lands or this,
If any theory you miss
Whereon your cipher graven is,
Don't fail to search his pockets!
Lock up your comets: if that fails,
Then notch their ears and clip their tails,
That you at need may swear to 'em;
And watch your nebulous flocks at night,
For, if your palings are not tight,
He may, to gratify his spite,
Let in the Little Bear to 'em.
Then he's so quarrelsome, we've fears
He'll set the very Twins by the ears,--
So mad, if you resist him,
He'd get Aquarius to play
A milkman's trick, some cloudy day,
And water all the Milky Way
To starve some sucking system.
But plaints are vain! through wrath or pride,
The Council all espouse his side
And will our missives con no more;
And who that knows what _savants_ are,
Each snappish as a Leyden jar,
Will hope to soothe the wordy war
'Twixt Ologist and Onomer?
Search a Reform Convention, where
He- and she-resiarehs prepare
To get the world in _their_ power,
You will not, when 'tis loudest, find
Such gifts to hug and snarl combined
As drive each astronomic mind
With fifty-score Great-Bear-power!
No! put the Bootees on your foot,
Elope with Virgo, strive to shoot
That arrow of O'Ryan's,
Drain Georgian Ciders to the lees,
Attempt what crackbrained thing you please,
But dream not you can e'er appease
An angry man of science!
Ah, would I were, as I was once,
To fair Astronomy a dunce,
Or launching _jeux d'esprit_ at her,
Of light zodiacal making light,
Deaf to all tales of comets bright,
And knowing but such stars as might
Roll r-rs at our theatre!
Then calm I drew my night-cap on,
Nor bondsman was for what went on
Ere morning in the heavens;
Twas no concern of mine to fix
The Pleiades at seven or six,--
But now the _omnium genitrix_
Seems all at sixes and sevens.
Alas, 'twas in an evil hour
We signed the paper for the tower,
With Mrs. D. to head it!
For, if the Council have their way,
We've merely had, as Frenchmen say,
The painful _maladie du_ pay,
While they get all the credit!
Boys, henceforth doomed to spell Trustees,
Think not it ends in double ease
To those who hold the office;
Shun Science as you would Despair,
Sit not in Cassiopeia's chair,
Nor hope from Berenice's hair
To bring away your trophies!
THE POCKET-CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH.
Well, it has happened, and we have survived it pretty well. The
Democratic Almanacs predicted a torrent, a whirlwind, and we know not
what meteoric phenomena,--but the next day Nature gave no sign, the
dome of the State-House was in its place, the Monument was as plumb as
ever, no chimney mourned a ravished brick, and the Republican Party
took its morning tea and toast in peace and safety. On the whole, it
must be considered a wonderful escape. Since Partridge's time there
had been no such prophecies,--since Miller's, no such perverse
disobligingness in the event.
But what had happened? Why, the Democratic Young Men's Celebration, to
be sure, and Mr. Choate's Oration.
The good city of Boston in New England, for we know not how many
years, had been in the habit of celebrating the National Birthday,
first, with an oration, as became the Athens of America, and second,
with a dinner, as was meet in the descendants of Teutonic forefathers.
The forenoon's oration glorified us in the lump as a people, and every
man could reckon and appropriate his own share of credit by the simple
arithmetical process of dividing the last census by the value he set
upon himself, a divisor easily obtained by subtracting from the total
of inhabitants in his village the number of neighbors whom he
considered ciphers. At the afternoon's dinner, the pudding of praise
was served out in slices to favored individuals; dry toasts were drunk
by drier dignitaries; the Governor was compared to Solon; the Chief
Justice to Brutus; the Orator of the Day to Demosthenes; the Colonel
of the Boston Regiment to Julius Caesar; and everybody went home happy
from a feast where the historic parallels were sure to hold out to the
last Z in Lempriere.
Gradually matters took a new course; the Union was suddenly supposed
to lie at the point of dissolution, and what we may call the
Doctor-Brandreth style of oratory began. Every orator mounted the
rostrum, like a mountebank at a fair, to proclaim the virtues of his
private panacea for the morbid Commonwealth, and, as was natural in
young students of political therapeutics, fancied that he saw symptoms
of the dread malady of Disunion in a simple eruption of Jethro Furber
at a convention of the Catawampusville Come-outers, or of Pyrophagus
Quattlebum at a training of the Palmetto Plug-Uglies,--neither of
which was skin-deep. The dinners became equally dreary. Did the eye of
a speaker light on the national dish of beans, he was reminded of the
languid pulse of the sentiment of union; did he see a broiled chicken,
it called up to his mind's eye the bird of our _un_common
country, with the gridiron on his breast, liable to be reduced at any
moment to the heraldic duality of his Austrian congener by the strife
of contending sections pulling in opposite directions; an innocent
pippin was enough to suggest the apple of discord; and with the
removal of the cloth came a dessert of diagnoses on the cancer that
was supposed to be preying on the national vitals. The only variety
was a cringing compliment, in which Bunker Hill curtsied to King's
Mountain, to any Southern brother who chanced to be present, and who
replied patronizingly,--while his compatriots at the warmer end of the
Union were probably, with amiable sincerity, applying to the Yankees
that epithet whose expression in type differs but little from that of
a doctorate in divinity, but which precedes the name it qualifies, as
that follows it, and was never, except by Beaumarchais and Fielding,
reckoned among titles of honor or courtesy.
A delusion seemed to have taken possession of our public men, that the
people wanted doctors of the body-politic to rule over them, and, if
those were not to be had, would put up with the next best
thing,--quacks. Every one who was willing to be an Eminent Statesman
issued his circulars, like the Retired Physician, on all public
occasions, offering to send his recipe in return for a vote. The
cabalistic formula always turned out to be this:--"Take your humble
servant for four years at the White House; if no cure is effected,
repeat the dose."
Meanwhile were there any symptoms of disease in the Constitution? Not
the least. The whole affair was like one of those alarms in a
country-town which begin with the rumor of ten cases of confluent
small-pox and end with the discovery that the doctor has been called
to a case of nettle-rash at Deacon Scudder's. But sober men, who
loved the Union in a quiet way, without advertising it in the
newspapers, and who were willing to sacrifice everything to the
Constitution but the rights it was intended to protect, began to fear
that the alarmists might create the disease which they kept up so much
excitement about.
This being the posture of affairs, the city of Boston, a twelvemonth
since, chose for their annual orator a clergyman distinguished for
eloquence, and for that important part of patriotism, at least, which
consists in purity of life. This gentleman, being neither a candidate
for office nor the canvasser of a candidate, ventured upon a new kind
of address. He took for his theme the duties consequent upon the
privileges of Freedom, ventured to mention self-respect as one of
them, and commented upon the invitation of a Virginia Senator, the
author of the Fugitive Slave Bill, to a Seventeenth-of-June
Celebration, while the Senators of Massachusetts were neglected. In
speaking of this, he used, we believe, the word "flunkeyism." It is
not an elegant word; it is not even an English one;--but had the
speaker sought for a Saxon correlative, he could hardly have found one
that would have seemed more satisfactory, especially to those who
deserved it; for Saxon is straightforward, and a reluctance to be
classified (fatal to science) is characteristic of the human animal.
An orator who suggests a new view of any topic is a disturber of the
digestive organs,--this was very properly a matter of offence to the
Aldermen who were to dine after the oration,--but an orator who
tampers with the language we have inherited from Shakspeare and
Milton, and which we share with Tupper, was an object for deeper
reprobation. The Young Men's Democratic Association of Boston are
purists; they are jealous for their mother-tongue,--and it is the more
disinterested in them as a large proportion of them are Irishmen; they
are exclusive,--a generous confusion of ideas as to the meaning of
democracy, even more characteristically Hibernian; they are
sentimental, too,--melancholy as gibcats,--and feared (from last
year's example) that the city might not furnish them with a
sufficiently lachrymose Antony to hold up before them the bloody
garment of America, and show what rents the envious Blairs and Wilsons
and Douglasses had made in it. Accordingly they resolved to have a
public celebration all to themselves,--a pocket-edition of the
cumbrous civic work,--and as the city provided fireworks in the
evening, in order to be beforehand with it in their pyrotechnics, they
gave Mr. Choate in the forenoon.
We did not hear Mr. Choate's oration; we only read it in the
newspapers. Cold fireworks, the morning after, are not enlivening.
You have the form without the fire, and the stick without the soar.
But we soon found that we were to expect no such disappointment from
Mr. Choate. He seems to announce at the outset that he has closed his
laboratory. The Prospero of periods had broken his wand and sunk his
book deeper than ever office-hunter sounded. The boys in the street
might wander fancy-free, and fire their Chinese crackers as they
listed; but for him this was a solemn occasion, and he invited his
hearers to a Stoic feast of Medford crackers and water, to a
philosophic banquet of metaphors and metaphysics.
We confess that we expected a great deal. Better a crust with Plato
than nightingales' tongues with Apicius; and if Mr. Choate promised
only the crust, we were sure of one melodious tongue, at least, before
the meal was over. He is a man of whom any community might be
proud. Were society an organized thing here, as in Europe, no dinner
and no drawing-room would be perfect without his talk. He would have
been heard gladly at Johnson's club. The Hortensins of our courts,
with a cloud of clients, he yet finds time to be a scholar and a
critic, and to read Plato and Homer as they were read by Plato's and
Homer's countrymen. Unsurpassed in that eloquence which, if it does
not convince, intoxicates a jury, he was counted, so long as Webster
lived, the second advocate of our bar.