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 the natives productive. The German Governor constructed a great palisaded park, into which he managed to drive all the Indians of the neighborhood, and then informed them that they could issue from it only as slaves, unless they paid a certain ransom, whose value he fixed. They were deliberately starved into adopting one or the other alternative. Those who could procure gold were let out to collect it, leaving their wives and children as pledges of their return. Many of the others preferred to die of hunger and thirst. When the ransomed natives departed with their families, the Governor had them pursued, reparked, and subjected to a repetition of this sponging process, and again a third time, so admirably did it work. This strikes Las Casas as a refinement of cruelty, which can be attributed only to the fact that these Germans were Lutheran heretics, and never assisted at the mass. “This is the way,” he says, “that they conformed to the royal intention of establishing Christianity in these countries!”
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.]
METHODS OF STUDY IN NATURAL HISTORY.
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 the Coast-Survey is seen to be the right arm of our navy. Most of the leaders in our late naval expeditions have been men trained in its service, and familiar with all the harbors, with every bay and inlet of our Southern coasts, from having been engaged in the extensive researches undertaken by Dr. Bache and carried out under his guidance. Many, even, of the pilots of our Southern fleets are men who have been employed upon this work, and owe their knowledge of the coast to their former occupation. It is a singular fact, that at this very time, when the whole country feels its obligation to the men who have devoted so many years of their lives to these investigations, a proposition should have been brought forward in Congress for the suspension of the Coast-Survey on economical grounds. Happily, the almost unanimous rejection of this proposition has shown the appreciation in which the work is held by our national legislature. Even without reference to their practical usefulness, it is a sad sign, when, in the hour of her distress, a nation sacrifices first her intellectual institutions. Then more than ever, when she needs all the culture, all the wisdom, all the comprehensiveness of her best intellects, should she foster the institution that have fostered them, in which they have been trained to do good service to their country in her time of need.
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 may ask why the Reef does not rise evenly to the level of the sea, and form a continuous line of land, instead of here and there an island. This is accounted for by the sensitiveness of the Corals to any unfavorable circumstances impeding their growth, as well as by the different rates of increase of the different kinds. Wherever any current from the shore flows over the Reef, bringing with it impurities from the land, there the growth of the Corals will be less rapid, and consequently that portion of the Reef will not reach the surface so soon as other parts, where no such unfavorable influences have interrupted the growth. But in the course of time the outer Reef will reach the surface for its whole length and become united to the inner one by the filling up of the channel between them, while the inner one will long before that time become solidly united to the present shore-bluffs of Florida by the consolidation of the mud-flats, which will one day transform the inner channel into dry land.
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 of Maeandrina upon it a little more than half an inch in thickness. Mr. Allen also sent me from Key West a number of fragments of Maeandrina from the breakwater at Fort Taylor; they had been growing from twelve to fifteen years, and have an average thickness of about an inch. The specimens vary in this respect,–some of them being a little more than an inch in thickness, others not more than half an inch. Fragments of Oculina gathered at the same place and of the same age are from one to three inches in length; but these belong to the lighter, more branching kinds of Corals, which, as we have seen, cannot, from their brittle character, be supposed to add their whole height to the solid mass of the Coral wall. Millepore gives a similar result.
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 of progress of the former, cannot have reached their present condition in less than twenty thousand years. Their growth must have been successive, since, as we have seen, all Corals need the fresh action of the open sea upon them, and if either of the outer Reefs had begun to grow before the completion of the inner one, it would have effectually checked the growth of the latter. The absence of an incipient Reef outside of the outer Reef shows these conclusions to be well founded. The islands capping these three do not exceed in height the level to which the fragments accumulated upon their summits may have been thrown by the heaviest storms. The highest hills of this part of Florida are not over ten or twelve feet above the level of the sea, and yet the luxuriant vegetation with which they are covered gives them an imposing appearance.
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:–
STRUCTURAL SERIES.
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 places them in the succession in which he finds them in the rocks,–it is not the embryologist who devises the changes through which the living Polyps pass as he watches their growth; they only read what they see, and when they compare their results they all tell the same story. He who reads most correctly from the original is the best naturalist. What unites all their investigations and makes them perfectly coherent with each other is the coincidence of thought expressed in the facts themselves. In other words, it is the working of the same Intellect through all time, everywhere.
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.
THE AUTHOR OF “CHARLES AUCHESTER.”
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 book being just sufficiently remote from every-day to preserve the unities of the supposition. Gradually this theory was sought to be displaced by one concerning a German baroness acquainted neither with Jews nor with music, humored as it was by that foreign trick in the book, the idioms of another tongue; but the latter theory was too false on its face to be tenable, and then people left off caring about it. It is perhaps an idle infirmity, this request for the personality of authors; yet it is indeed a response to the fact that there never was one who did not prefer to be esteemed for himself rather than for his writing,–and, ascending, may we love the works of God and not the Lord himself? However, none were a whit the wiser for knowing Miss Sheppard’s name. It came to be accepted that we were to have the books,–whence was no matter; they were so new, so strange, so puzzling,–the beautiful, the quaint, and the faulty were so interwoven, that nobody cared to separate these elements, to take the trouble to criticize or to thank; and thus, though we all gladly enough received, we kept our miserly voices to ourselves, and she never met with any adequate recognition. After her first book, England quietly ignored her,–they could not afford to be so startled; as Sir Leicester Dedlock said, “It was really–really–“; she did very well for the circulating libraries; and because Mr. Mudie insists on his three volumes or none at all, she was forced to extend her rich webs to thinness. It is this alone that injures “Counterparts” for many;–not that they would not gladly accept the clippings in a little supplementary pamphlet, but dissertations, they say, delay the action. In this case, though, that is not true; for, besides the incompleteness of the book without the objectionable dissertation, (that long conversation between Miss Dudleigh and Sarona,) it answers the purpose of very necessary by-play on the stage during preparation for the last and greatest scene. But had this been a fault, it was not so much hers as the publishers’. Subject to the whims of those in London, and receiving no reply to the communication of her wishes from those in Edinburgh, she must have experienced much injustice at the hands of her booksellers, and her title-pages show them to have been perpetually changed. She herself accepts with delight propositions from another quarter of the globe; the prospect of writing for those across the water was very enticing to her; and in one of her letters she says,–“It is my greatest ambition to publish in America,–to have no more to do personally with English publishers”; and finding it, after serious illness, impossible to fulfil this engagement in season, the anxiety, regret, and subsequent gratitude, which she expressed, evinced that she had been unaccustomed to the courteous consideration then received.
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 were so long that one got lost in them, and had finally to go back and clutch a nominative case and drag it down the page with him; there were ambiguities and obscurities in plenty: her thoughts were so bright that they darkened her words; one must go through a process of initiation,–but having mastered the style, one knew the writer. It was well worth while, this shrouding rhetoric, for beneath it were no reserves; superficially no one ever kept more out of sight, but the real reader could not fail to know that here he had the freedom of the author’s nature: and although she somewhere said that a woman “thus intensely feminine, thus proud and modest, betraying herself to the world in her writings, is an exception, and one in the whole world the most rare,” she knew not that she sketched herself in that exception. But there are not elsewhere to be found pages so drenched with beauty as hers; and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose. Not to mention Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris, having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her head,–or Clotilda at her books, “looking very much like an old picture of a young person sitting there,”–or the charming one of Laura’s _pas_, which the little boy afterwards describes in saying, “She quite swam, and turned her eyes upward,”–or, better, yet, that portrait of a Romagnese woman: “of the ancient Roman beauty, rare now, if still remembered, with hair to her knees, wrapping her form in a veil vivid as woven gold, with the emerald eyes of Dante’s Beatrice, a skin of yellow whiteness, and that mould of figure in which undulating softness quenches majesty,–the mould of the mystical Lucretia.” There are sea-sketches scattered among these leaves which no painter’s brush will ever equal, and morning and twilight gain new splendor and tenderness beneath her touch.
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 perfumes of Nature exhale a bliss as sweet, how far more unexpressed! This short movement, that in its oneness was complete, grew, as it were, by fragmentary harmonies, intricate, but most gradual, into another,–a prestissimo so delicately fitful that it was like moonlight dancing upon crested ripples; or, for a better similitude, like quivering sprays in a summer wind. And in less than fifty bars of regularly broken time–how ravishingly sweet I say not–the first subject in refrain flowed through the second, and they, interwoven even as creepers and flowers densely tangled, closed together simultaneously.” And if you have not the book by you, will you pardon another,–the awful and eternal flow of the Mer de Glace?
“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 of excitation, when in fact they saw only normal and healthy play. It is true that the power of modulated tones arouses everything most ethereal and lofty in our composition, and it must therefore be wrong to charge with extravagance any description of a life in music, which is a life in the highest, because truly it cannot be extravagant enough, since all words fail before that of which it discourses,–while it gives you the sense of the universe and of the eternities, and is to the other arts what the soul is to the body. And is it not, moreover, the voice of Nature, the murmur of wind and tree, the thrill of all the dropping influences of the heavens, the medium of spiritual communication, the universal language in which all can exchange thought and feeling, and through which the whole world becomes one nation? Out of the spirit blossom spirits, Bettine tells us, and we subject ourselves to their power: “Ah, wonderful mediation of the ineffable, which oppresses the bosom! Ah, music!” To go further, there is certainly no exaggeration in Charles Auchester’s treatment of his hero; for, reading the contemporaneous articles of musical journals, you will find them one and all speaking in even more unrestrained profligacy of praise, recognizing in the cloud of composers but nine worthy the name of Master, of whom Mendelssohn was one, and declaring that under his baton the orchestra was electrified. We all remember the solemnly pathetic and passionate beauty of Seraphael’s burial by night, with the music winding up among the stars; but did it in reality exceed the actual progress of the dead Master’s ashes from city to city, met in the twilight and the evening by music, gray-headed Capellmeisters receiving him with singing in the open midnight, and fresh songs being flung upon his coffin like wreaths with the sunrise?
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 her evident love of children. It is only by love that understanding comes, and no one ever understood children better or painted them half so well: they are no mites of puny perfection, no angels astray, no Psyches in all the agonies of the bursting chrysalis, but real little flesh-and-blood people in pinafores, approached by nobody’s hand so nearly as George Eliot’s. They are flawless: the boy who, having swung himself giddy, felt “the world turning round, as papa says it does, nurse,”–the other boy, who, immured in studies and dreams, found all life to be “a fairy-tale book with half the leaves uncut,”–the charming little snow-drop of a Carlotta, “who would sit next him, would stick her tiny fork into his face, with a morsel of turkey at the end of it, would poke crumbs into his mouth with her finger, would put up her lips to kiss him, would say, every moment, ‘I like you much,–much!’ with all Davy’s earnestness, though with just so much of her mother’s modesty as made her turn pink and shy, and put herself completely over the chair into Seraphael’s lap when we laughed at her.” And Philippa, and Philippa’s conversation, capers, and cat! an impossibility to those who have never experienced her whirlwinds of exuberance,–and to those who have, a reproduction of the drollest days of their existence. Never was there a personage so perfectly drawn, never such a grotesque storm of noisy health,–the matchless Philippa! After reading Miss Sheppard’s juveniles, you feel that you have been in most good and innocent company all day; and since it is necessary for an author to become for the moment that nature of which he writes, this author must have been something very good and innocent in herself in order to uphold this strain so long. Of those accessible, the best is that entitled, “Round the Fire,”–a series of tales purporting to be told by little girls, and each of extraordinary interest; but the one she herself preferred is yet with four others in the hands of an Edinburgh publisher, and perhaps yet in manuscript,–the name of this being “Prince Gentil, Prince Joujou, and Prince Bonbon, or the Children’s Cities.” This reminds one that cities, in the abstract, seem to have been with her a subject of unceasing wonder and pleasure,–from Venice, with its shadowy, slippery, silent water-ways to X, that ideal city of the North; and where is there anything to excel the Picture of Paris, drawn minutely and colored, his prison-prophecy, Paris as it was to be created, rather than restored, by Louis Napoleon? “Then he took from his pocket a strong magnifying-glass, and put it gently into Rodomant’s hand. Rodomant grasped it, and through it gazed long and eagerly. And from that hieroglyphic mist there started, sudden and distinct as morn without a cloud, a brilliant bird’s-eye view of a superb and stupendous city, a dream of imaginative architecture, almost in itself a poem. Each house of each street, each lamp and fountain, each line of road and pavement, marked as vividly as the glorious domes, the pointing pillars, grand gates and arches, proud palaces in inclosures of solemn leafage, the bridges traced like webs of shadow, the stately terraces and dim cathedrals. Green groves and avenues and vivid gardens interlaced and divided the city within the walls; and without, masses of delicate shrubbery, as perfectly defined, were studded with fair villas of every varied form, melting gradually and peacefully, as it seemed, to a bright champaign embroidered with fence and hedge-row…. A sort of visionary pageant unrolled to him, partly memorial, in part prophetic. He knew he had seen something like it,–but when and where? What planet boasted that star of cities for strength and lustre that must surpass new London and old Thebes? For Rodomant had the mathematical gift of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just and proper proportion in the real.” It must have been like heaven, this city so stilly and so fair,–for, you see, there were no people there.
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 his hands, were swollen and stood out, but colorless as the keys that stretched beneath. His calmness chilled her blood. She thought him dead, and all within her that lived seemed to pass out of her in the will, nay, the power also, to restore him. She grasped his arm. He was not dead, then, for he sighed,–an awful sigh; it shook him like a light reed in the tempest, he shuddered from head to foot; he leaned towards her, as if about to faint, but never removed his close-locked hands from his eyes…. She had only clasped his arm before; as hand met hand, or touch thrilled touch, he shivered, his grasping fingers relaxed in their hold on each other, but closed on hers…. She waited long,–she listened to his breathing, intermittent with tearless sobs. At last he gasped violently, a cold tear dropped on her hand, and he thrust it rudely from him.
“‘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 us, they breathe about us an atmosphere of gentle and delicious melancholy like the soft azure haze spread over meadow and hills by the faint south-wind. With fresh incident on every leaf, with a charm in every scene, its spell is enthralling, and its chapters are enchanted. There is no fault in it; nothing can be more perfect, nothing more beautiful. One may put “Consuelo” side by side with “Charles Auchester,” but what novel in the wide world deserves a place by “Counterparts”? It was worth having lived, to have once thrown broadcast such handfuls of beauty.
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, some bold and beautiful elucidation of one of the many mysteries in life; for the lack of appreciation in England was no longer to concern her, and, unshackled and unrestrained, she could feel herself surrounded by the genial atmosphere of loving listeners. But perhaps it was not lawful that she should further impart these great secrets which she had learned. “I sometimes think,” she murmurs, “when women try to rise too high either in their deeds or their desires, that the spirit which bade them so rise sinks back beneath the weakness of their earthly constitution, and never appeals again,–or else that the spirit, being too strong, does away with the mortal altogether,–they die, or rather they live again.” It was like forecasting her own horoscope. All suffering seems to have descended upon her,–and there are some natures whose power of enjoyment, so infinite, yet so deep as to be hidden, is balanced only by as infinite a power to endure; she learned anew, as she says, and intensely, “what a long dream of misery is life from which health’s bloom has been brushed,–that irreparable bloom,–and how far more terrible is the doom of those in whom the nerve-life has been untoned.” Sun-stroke and fever, vibration between opiates at night and tonics at noon,–but the flame was too strong to fan away lightly, it must burn itself out, the spirit was too quenchless,–pain, wretchedness, exhaustion. On one of those delicious days that came in the middle of this year’s April,–warmth and fresh earth-smells breathing all about,–the wide sprays of the lofty boughs lying tinged in rosy purple, a web-like tracery upon the sky whose azure was divine,–the air itself lucid and mellow, as if some star had been dissolved within it,–on such a day the little foreign letter came, telling that at length balm had dropped upon the weary eyelids,–Elizabeth Sheppard was dead.
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.
ASTRAEA AT THE CAPITOL.
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!
PERE ANTOINE’S DATE-PALM.
A LEGEND OF NEW ORLEANS.
I.
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!
II.
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.