–illustrating that wonderful law of identity which is the great discovery of modern science. Every child knows this peculiarity of the water-lily, but the extent of it seems to vary with season and locality, and sometimes one finds a succession of flowers almost entirely free from this confusion of organs.
Our readers may not care to know that the order of Nymphaeaceae “differs from Ranunculaceae in the consolidation of its carpels, from Papaveraceae in the placentation not being parietal, and from Nelumbiaceae in the want of a large truncated disc containing monospermous achenia”; but they may like to know that the water-lily has relations on land, in all gradations of society, from poppy to magnolia, and yet does not conform its habits precisely to those of any of them. Its great black roots, sometimes as large as a man’s arm, form a network at the bottom of the water. Its stem floats, an airy four-celled tube, adapting itself to the depth, though never stiff in shallows, like the stalk of the yellow lily: and it contracts and curves when seed-time approaches, though not so ingeniously as the spiral threads of the European Vallisneria, which uncoil to let the flowers rise to the surface, and then cautiously retract, that the seeds may ripen on the very bottom of the lake. The leaves show beneath the magnifier beautiful adaptations of structure. They are not, like those of land-plants, constructed with deep veins to receive the rain and conduct it to the stem, but are smooth and glossy, and of even surface. The leaves of land-vegetation have also thousands of little breathing-pores, principally on the under side: the apple-leaf, for instance, has twenty-four thousand to a square inch. But here they are fewer; they are wholly on the upper side, and, whereas in other cases they open or shut according to the moisture of the atmosphere, here the greedy leaves, secure of moisture, scarcely deign to close them. Nevertheless, even these give some recognition of hygrometric necessities, and, though living on the water, and not merely christened with dewdrops like other leaves, but baptized by immersion all the time, they are yet known to suffer in drought and to take pleasure in the rain.
We have spoken of the various kindred of the water-lily; but we must not leave our fragrant subject without due mention of its most magnificent, most lovely relative, at first claimed even as its twin sister, and classed as a Nymphaea. We once lived near neighbor to a Victoria Regia. Nothing, in the world of vegetable existence, has such a human interest. The charm is not in the mere size of the plant, which disappoints everybody, as Niagara does, when tried by that sole standard. The leaves of the Victoria, indeed, attain a diameter of six feet; the largest flowers, of twenty-three inches,–less than four times the size of the largest of our water-lilies. But it is not the mere looks of the Victoria, it is its life which fascinates. It is not a thing merely of dimensions, nor merely of beauty, but a creature of vitality and motion. Those vast leaves expand and change almost visibly. They have been known to grow half an inch an hour, eight inches a day. Rising one day from the water, a mere clenched mass of yellow prickles, a leaf is transformed the next day to a crimson salver, gorgeously tinted on its upturned rim. Then it spreads into a raft of green, armed with long thorns, and supported by a frame-work of ribs and cross-pieces, an inch thick, and so substantial, that the Brazil Indians, while gathering the seed-vessels, place their young children on the leaves;–_yrupe_, or water-platter, they call the accommodating plant. But even these expanding leaves are not the glory of the Victoria; the glory is in the opening of the flower.
We have sometimes looked in, for a passing moment, at the green-house, its dwelling-place, during the period of flowering,–and then stayed for more than an hour, unable to leave the fascinating scene. After the strange flower-bud has reared its dark head from the placid tank, moving it a little, uneasily, like some imprisoned water-creature, it pauses for a moment in a sort of dumb despair. Then trembling again, and collecting all its powers, it thrusts open, with an indignant jerk, the rough calyx-leaves, and the beautiful disrobing begins. The firm, white, central cone, first so closely infolded, quivers a little, and swiftly, before your eyes, the first of the hundred petals detaches its delicate edges, and springs back, opening towards the water, while its white reflection opens to meet it from below. Many moments of repose follow,–you watch,–another petal trembles, detaches, springs open, and is still. Then another, and another, and another. Each movement is so quiet, yet so decided, so living, so human, that the radiant creature seems a Musidora of the water, and you almost blush with a sense of guilt, in gazing on that peerless privacy. As petal by petal slowly opens, there still stands the central cone of snow, a glacier, an alp, a jungfrau, while each avalanche of whiteness seems the last. Meanwhile, a strange rich odor fills the air, and Nature seems to concentrate all fascinations and claim all senses for this jubilee of her darling.
So pass the enchanted moments of the evening, till the fair thing pauses at last, and remains for hours unchanged. In the morning, one by one, those white petals close again, shutting all their beauty in, and you watch through the short sleep for the period of waking. Can this bright transfigured creature appear again, in the same chaste beauty? Your fancy can scarcely trust it, fearing some disastrous change; and your fancy is too true a prophet. Come again, after the second day’s opening, and you start at the transformation which one hour has secretly produced. Can this be the virgin Victoria,–this thing of crimson passion, this pile of pink and yellow, relaxed, expanded, voluptuous, lolling languidly upon the water, never to rise again? In this short time every tint of every petal is transformed; it is gorgeous in beauty, but it is “Hebe turned to Magdalen.”
But our rustic water-lily, our innocent Nymphaea, never claiming such a hot-house glory, never drooping into such a blush, blooms on placidly in the quiet waters, till she modestly folds her leaves for the last time, and bows her head beneath the surface forever. Next year she lives for us only in her children, fair and pure as herself.
Nay, not alone in them, but also in memory. The fair vision will not fade from us, though the paddle has dipped its last crystal drop from the waves, and the boat is drawn upon the shore. We may yet visit many lovely and lonely places,–meadows thick with violet, or the homes of the shy Rhodora, or those sloping forest-haunts where the slight Linnaea hangs its twin-born heads,–but no scene will linger on our vision like this annual Feast of the Lilies. On scorching mountains, amid raw prairie-winds, or upon the regal ocean, the white pageant shall come back to us again, with all the luxury of summer heats, and all the fragrant coolness that can relieve them. We shall fancy ourselves again among these fleets of anchored lilies,–again, like Urvasi, sporting amid the Lake of Lotuses.
For that which is remembered is often more vivid than that which is seen. The eye paints better in the presence, the heart in the absence, of the object most dear. “He who longs after beautiful Nature can best describe her,” said Bettine; “he who is in the midst of her loveliness can only lie down and enjoy.” It enhances the truth of the poet’s verses, that he writes them in his study. Absence is the very air of passion, and all the best description is _in memoriam_. As with our human beloved, when the graceful presence is with us, we cannot analyze or describe, but merely possess, and only after its departure can it be portrayed by our yearning desires; so is it with Nature: only in losing her do we gain the power to describe her, and we are introduced to Art, as we are to Eternity, by the dropping away of our companions.
FIFTY AND FIFTEEN.
With gradual gleam the day was dawning, Some lingering stars were seen,
When swung the garden-gate behind us,– He fifty, I fifteen.
The high-topped chaise and old gray pony Stood waiting in the lane:
Idly my father swayed the whip-lash, Lightly he held the rein.
The stars went softly back to heaven, The night-fogs rolled away,
And rims of gold and crowns of crimson Along the hill-tops lay.
That morn, the fields, they surely never So fair an aspect wore;
And never from the purple clover
Such perfume rose before.
O’er hills and low romantic valleys
And flowery by-roads through,
I sang my simplest songs, familiar, That he might sing them too.
Our souls lay open to all pleasure,– No shadow came between;
Two children, busy with their leisure,– He fifty, I fifteen.
* * * * *
As on my couch in languor, lonely,
I weave beguiling rhyme,
Comes back with strangely sweet remembrance That far-removed time.
The slow-paced years have brought sad changes, That morn and this between;
And now, on earth, my years are fifty, And his, in heaven, fifteen.
ILLINOIS IN SPRING-TIME: WITH A LOOK AT CHICAGO.
I remember very well, that, when I studied the “Arabian Nights,” with a devotion which I have since found it difficult to bestow on the perusal of better books, the thing that most excited my imagination was the enchanted locomotive carpet, granted by one of the amiable genii to his favorite, to whom it gave the power of being in a moment where nobody expected him, paying visits at the most unfashionable hours, and making himself generally ubiquitous when interest or curiosity prompted. The other wonders were none of them inexhaustible. Donkeys that talked after their heads were cutoff, just as well as some donkeys do with them on,–old cats turned into beautiful damsels,–birds that obligingly carried rings between parted lovers,–one soon had enough of. Caves full of gold and silver, and lighted by gems resplendent as the stars, were all very well, but soon tired. After your imagination had selected a few rings and bracelets, necklaces and tiaras, and carried off one or two chests full of gold, what could it do with the rest,–especially as they might vanish or turn to pebbles or hazel-nuts in your caskets?
But flying carpets! They could never tire. You seated yourself just in the middle, in the easiest possible attitude, and at a wish you were off, (not off the carpet, but off this work-a-day world,) careering through sunny fields of air with the splendid buoyancy of the eagle, steering your intelligent vehicle by a mere thought, and descending, gently as a snow-flake, to garden-bower or palace-window, moonlit kiosk or silent mountain-peak, as whim suggested or affairs urged. This was magic indeed, and worthy the genii of any age.
The sense of reality with which I accepted this wonder of wonders has furnished forth many a dream, sleeping and waking, since those days; and it is no uncommon thing for me, even now, to be sailing through the air, feeling its soft waves against my face, and the delicious refreshment of the upper ether in my breast, only to wake as if I had dropped into bed with a celerity that made the arrival upon earth anything but pleasant. I am not sure but there is some reality in these flights, after all. These aerial journeys may be foretastes of those we shall make after we are freed from the incumbrance of avoirdupois. I hope so, at least.
Yet there are good things of the kind here below, too. After all, what were a magic carpet that could carry a single lucky wight,–at best, but a species of heavenly sulky,–compared with a railroad train that speeds along hundreds of men, women, and children, over land and water, with any amount of heavy baggage, as well as a boundless extent of crinoline? And if this equipage, gift of genii of our age, seem to lack some of the celerity and secrecy which attended the voyagers of the flying carpet, suppose we add the power of whispering to a friend a thousand miles off the inmost thoughts of the heart, the most desperate plans, the most dangerous secrets! Do not the two powers united leave the carpet immeasurably behind?
Shakspeare is said, in those noted lines,–
“Dear as the ruddy drops
That visit this sad heart,”
to have anticipated the discovery of the circulation of the blood: did not the writers of the Oriental stories foresee rail and telegraph, and describe them in their own tropical style?
It is often said, that, although medical science leaves us pretty much as it found us with regard to the days of the years of our pilgrimage, and has as yet, with all its discoveries, done little towards prolonging “this pleasing, anxious being,” yet the material improvements of our day do in effect lengthen mortal life for us. And truly, what must Indian life have been worth, when it took a month to cut down a tree with a stone hatchet, and when the shaping of a canoe was the work of a year? When two hundred miles of travel consumed a week’s time, every two hundred miles’ journey was worth a week’s life; and if we accept the idea of a certain celebrated character, (not “Quintus Curtius,” but Geoffrey Crayon, I believe,) that the time we spend in journeying is just so much subtracted from our little span of days, what a fearful loss of life must have resulted from our old modes of locomotion! And yet we inconsiderately grumble at an occasional smash-up! So easily are we spoiled!
There are grave doubts, however, in some minds, whether our present celerity of travel be wholly a gain upon the old methods. It must depend upon circumstances. If agreeable people virtually live longer now, so do bores, cheats, slanderers, hypocrites, and people who eat onions and chew tobacco; and the rail enables these to pursue their victims with inevitable, fatal swiftness.
Some hold that the pleasure of travelling is even impaired by this increase of speed. There is such a thing as fatal facility. As well eat a condensed dinner, or hear a concert in one comprehensive crash, ear-splitting and soul-confounding, as see miles of landscape at a glance. Willis says, travelling on an English railway is equivalent to having so many miles of green damask unrolled before your weary eyes. And one may certainly have too much of a good thing.
But, instead of discussing railroads in general,–too grand a theme for me,–let me say that nobody can persuade me it is not delightful to fly over ground scarcely yet trodden by the foot of man; to penetrate, with the most subtle resources of inventive art, the recesses in which Nature has enshrined herself most privately,–her dressing-room, as it were, where we find her in her freshness, before man-milliners have marred her beauty by attempts at improvement. The contrast between that miracle of art, a railroad-train at full speed, and a wide, lonely prairie, or a dusky forest, leafless, chilly, and silent,–save for the small tinkling of streams beginning to break from their frosty limits,–is one of the most striking in all the wide range of rural effects. It reminds me, though perhaps unaccountably to some, of Browning’s fine image,–
“And ever and anon some bright white shaft Burnt through the pine-tree roof, here burnt and there,
As if God’s messenger through the close wood-screen
Plunged and re-plunged his weapon at a venture.”
Even where fields have begun to be tilled and houses and barns to be built, the scared flying of domestic animals at sound of the terrific visitor,–the resistless chariot of civilization with scythed axles mowing down ignorance and prejudice as it whirls along,–tells a whole story of change and wonder. We can almost see the shadows of the past escaping into the dim woods, or flitting over the boundless prairie, shivering at the fearful whistle, and seeking shelter from the wind of our darting.
The season for this romantic pleasure of piercing primeval Nature on the wings of subtilest Art is rapidly drawing to a close. How few penetrable regions can we now find where the rail-car is a novelty! The very cows and horses, in most places, know–when to expect it, and hardly vouchsafe a sidelong glance as they munch their green dinner. A railroad to the Pacific may give excitement of this kind a somewhat longer date, but those who would enjoy the sensation on routes already in use must begin their explorings at once. There is no time to be lost. If we much longer spend all our summers in beating the changeless paths of the Old World, our chance for the fresh but fleeting delight I have been speaking of will have passed by, never to return. It were unwise to lose this, one of the few remaining avenues to a new sensation. Europe will keep; but the prairies will not, the woods will not, hardly the rivers. Already the flowery waving oceans of Illinois begin to abound in ships, or what seem such,–houses looming up from the horizon, like three-masters sometimes, sometimes schooners, and again little tentative sloops. These are creeping nearer and nearer together, filling and making commonplace those lovely deserts where the imagination can still find wings, and world-wearied thought a temporary repose. “Where neighbors were once out of beacon-sight, they are now within bell-sound; and however pleasant this may be for the neighbors, it is not so good for the traveller, especially the traveller who has seen Europe. Only think of a virgin forest or prairie, after over-populated Belgium or finished England! Europeans understand the thing, and invariably rush for the prairies; but we Americans, however little we may have seen of either world, care little for the wonders of our own. Yet, when we go abroad, we cannot help blushing to acknowledge that we have not seen the most striking features of our own country. I speak from experience. Scott, describing the arid wastes of the Hebrides,–
“Placed far amid the melancholy main,”
and swept bare by wintry-cold sea-breezes, said,–
“Yes! ’twas sublime, but sad; the loneliness Loaded thy heart, the desert tired thine eye.”
But how different the loneliness of a soft-waving prairie,–soft even before the new grass springs; soft in outline, in coloring, in its whispering silence! Nothing sad or harsh; no threat or repulsion; only mild hope, and promise of ease and abundance. Whether the glad flames sport amid the long dry grass of last year, or the plough turn up a deep layer of the exhaustless soil, or flocks of prairie-chickens fly up from every little valley, images of life, joy, and plenty belong to the scene. The summer flowers are not more cheerful than the spring blaze, the spring blackness of richness, or the spring whirr and flutter. The sky is alive with the return of migratory birds, swinging back and forth, as if hesitating where to choose, where all is good. Frogs hold noisy jubilees, (“Anniversary Meetings,” perhaps,)–very hoarse, and no wonder, considering their damp lodging,–but singing, in words more intelligible than those of the opera-choruses, “Winter’s gone! Spring’s come! No, it isn’t! Yes, it is!”–and the Ayes have it. The woodpecker’s hammer helps the field-music, wherever he can find a tree. He seems to know the carpenter is coming, and he makes the most of his brief season. All is life, movement, freedom, joy. Not on the very Alps, where their black needles seem to dart into the blue depths, or snow-fields to mingle with the clouds, is the immediate, vital sympathy of Earth with Heaven more evident and striking.
The comparative ease with which prairie regions are prepared for the advent of the great steam-car is exactly typical of the facilities which they offer to other particulars of civilization. As the smoothing of the prairie path, preparatory to railway speed, is but short work, compared with the labor required in grading and levelling mountainous tracts for the same purpose, so the introduction of all that makes life desirable goes on with unexampled rapidity where the land requires no felling of heavy timber to make it ready for the plough, and where the soil is rich to such a depth that no man fears any need of new fertilizing in his life-time or his son’s. We observe this difference everywhere in prairiedom; and it is perhaps this thought, this close interweaving of marked outward aspect with great human interests, that gives the prairie country its air of peculiar cheerfulness. To man the earth was given; for him its use and its beauty were created; it is his idea which endows it–with expression, whether savage or kindly. Rocks and mountains suggest the force required to conquer difficulties, and the power with which the lord of creation is endowed to subdue them; and the chief charm and interest of such regions is derived, consciously or unconsciously, from this suggestion. Prairie images are more domestic, quiet, leisurely. No severe, wasting labor is demanded before corn and milk for wife and little ones are wrung from reluctant clods. No danger is there of sons or daughters being obliged to quit their homes and roam over foreign lands for a precarious and beggarly subsistence. No prairie-boy will ever carry about a hand-organ and a monkey, or see his sister yoked to the plough, by the side of horse or ox. Blessed be God that there are still places where grinding poverty is unfelt and unfeared! “Riches fineless” belong to these deep, soft fields, and they become picturesque by the thought, as the sea becomes so by the passing of a ship, and the burning desert by the foot-print of a traveller or the ashes of his fire.
It was in spring weather, neither cold nor warm, now and then shiny, and again spattering with a heavy shower, or misty under a warm, slow rain,–the snow still lying in little streaks under shady ridges,–that I first saw the prairies of Illinois. Everybody–kind everybody!–said, “Why didn’t you come in June?” But I, not being a bird of the air, who alone travels at full liberty, the world before him where to choose and Providence his guide, cared not to answer this friendly query, but promised to be interested in the spring aspect of the prairies, after my fashion, as sincerely as more fastidious travellers can be in the summer one. It is very well to be prepared when company is expected, but friends may come at any time. “Brown fields and pastures bare” have no terrors for me. Green is gayer, but brown softer. Blue skies are not alone lovely; gray ones set them off–Rain enhances shine. Mud, to be sure;–but then railroads are the Napoleons of mud. Planks and platforms quench it completely. One may travel through tenacious seas of it without smirching one’s boot-heel. There is even a feeling of triumph as we see it lying sulky and impotent on either side, while we bowl along dry-shod. When Noah and his family came out of the Ark, and found all “soft with the Deluge,” it was very different. The prospect must have been discouraging. I thought of it as we went through, or rather over, the prairies. But if there had been in those days an Ararat Central, with good “incline” and stationary engine, they need not have sent out dove or raven, but might have started for home as soon as the rails shone in the sun and they could get the Ark on wheels. It would have been well to move carefully, to be sure; and it is odd to think what a journey they might have had, now and then stopping or switching-off because of a dead Mastodon across the track, or a panting Leviathan lashing out, thirstily, with impertinent tail,–to say nothing of sadder sights and impediments.
There were only pleasant reminiscences of the Great Deluge as we flew along after a little one. Happy we! in a nicely-cushioned car, berthed, curtained, and, better than all, furnished with the “best society,” _sans_ starch, _sans_ crinoline; the gentlemen sitting on their hats as much as they pleased, and the ladies giving curls and collars the go-by, all in tip-top humor to be pleased. I could imagine but one improvement to our equipage,–that a steam-organ attached to it should have played, very softly, Felicien David’s lovely level music of “The Desert,” as we bowled along. There were long glittering side-streams between us and the black or green prairie,–streams with little ripples on their faces, as the breeze kissed them in passing, and now and then a dimple, under the visit of a vagrant new-born beetle. To call such shining waters mud or puddles did not accord with the spirit of the hour; so we fancied them the “mirroring waters” of the poet, and compared them to fertilizing Nile,–whose powers, indeed, they share, to some extent. By their sides _ought_ to be planted willows and poplars, and alders of half a dozen kinds, but are not yet. All in good time. Thirsty trees would drink up superfluous moisture, and in return save fuel by keeping off sweeping winds, and money by diverting heavy snows, those Russian enemies to the Napoleon rail, and by preserving embankments, to which nothing but interlacing roots can give stability. Rows of trees bordering her railroads would make Illinois look more like France, which in many respects she already resembles.
The haze or _mirage_ of the prairies is wonderfully fantastic and deceptive. The effect which seamen call _looming_ is one of the commonest of its forms. This brings real but distant objects into view, and dignifies them in size and color, till we can take a farm-house for a white marble palace, and leafless woods with sunset clouds behind them for enchanted gardens hung with golden fruit. But the most gorgeous effects are, as is usual with air-castles, created out of nothing,–that is, nothing more substantial than air, mist, and sun- or moon- or star-beams. Fine times the imagination has, riding on purple and crimson rays, and building Islands of the Blest among vapors that have just risen from the turbid waters of the Mississippi! No Loudon or Downing is invoked for the contriving or beautifying of these villa-residences and this landscape-gardening. Genius comes with inspiration, as inspiration does with genius; and we are our own architects and draughtsmen, rioting at liberty with Nature’s splendid palette at our command, and no thought of rule or stint. Why should we not, in solider things, derive more aid, like the poor little “Marchioness” of Dickens, from this blessed power of imagination? Those who do so are always laughed at as unpractical; but are they not most truly practical, if they find and use the secret of gilding over, and so making beautiful or tolerable, things in themselves mean or sad?
Once upon a time, then, the great State of Illinois was all under water;–at least, so say the learned and statistical. If you doubt it, go count the distinctly-marked ridges in the so-called bluffs, and see how many years or ages this modern deluge has been subsiding. Where its remains once lay sweltering under the hot sun, and sucking miasms from his beams, now spread great green expanses, wholesome and fertile, making the best possible use of sunbeams, and offering, by their aid, every earthly thing that men and animals need for their bodily growth and sustenance, in almost fabulous abundance.
The colored map of Illinois, as given in a nice, new book, called, “Illinois as it is,” looks like a beautiful piece of silk, brocaded in green (prairies) on a brownish ground (woodland tracts),–the surface showing a nearly equal proportion of the two; while the swampy lands, designated by dark blue,–in allusion, probably, to the occasional state of mind of those who live near them,–take up a scarce appreciable part of the space. Long, straggling “bluffs,” on the banks of the rivers, occupy still less room; but they make, on land and paper, an agreeable variety. People thus far go to them only for the mineral wealth with which they abound. It will be many years, yet, before they will be thought worth farming; not because they would not yield well, but because there is so much land that yields better.
Some parts of the State are hilly, and covered with the finest timber. The scenery of these tracts is equal to any of the kind in the United States; and much of it has been long under cultivation, having been early chosen by Southern settlers, who have grown old upon the soil. Here and there, on these beautiful highlands, we find ancient ladies, bright-eyed and cheerful, who tell us they have occupied the selfsame house–built, Kentucky-fashion, with chimney outside–for forty years or so. The legends these good dames have to tell are, no doubt, quite as interesting in their way as those which Sir Walter Scott used to thread the wilds of Scotland to gather up; but we value them not. By-and-by, posterity will anathematize us for letting our old national stories die in blind contempt or sheer ignorance of their value.
The only thing to be found fault with in the landscape is the want of great fields full of stumps. It does not seem like travelling in a new country to see all smooth and ready for the plough. Trees are not here looked upon as natural enemies; and so, where they grow, there they stand, and wave triumphant over the field like victors’ banners. No finer trees grow anywhere, and one loves to see them so prized. Yet we miss the dear old stumps. My heart leaps up when I behold hundreds of them so close together that you can hardly get a plough between. Long, long years ago, I have seen a dozen men toiling in one little cleared spot, jollily engaged in burning them with huge fires of brush-wood, chopping at them with desperate axes, and tearing the less tenacious out by the roots, with a rude machine made on the principle of that instrument by the aid of which the dentist revenges you on an offending tooth. The country looks tame, at first, without these characteristic ornaments, so suggestive of human occupancy. The ground is excellently fertile where stumps have been, and association makes us rather distrustful of its goodness where nothing but grass has ever grown.
The prairies are not as flat in surface as one expects to find them. Except in the scarcity of trees, their surface is very much like other portions of what is considered the best farming land. There are great tracts of what are called bushy prairies, covered with a thick growth of hazel and sassafras, jessamine and honey-suckle, and abounding in grape-vines. These tracts possess springs in abundance. The “islands” so often alluded to by travellers are most picturesque and beautiful features in the landscape. They must not be compared to oases, for they are surrounded by anything but sterility; but they are the evidence of springs, and generally of a slight rise in the ground, and the timber upon them is of almost tropical luxuriance. Herds of deer are feeding in their shade, the murmur of wild bees fills the air, and the sweet vine-smell invites birds and insects of every brilliant color. Prairie-chickens are in flocks everywhere, and the approach of civilization scarcely ever disturbs them. No engine-driver in the southern part of the State but has often seen deer startled by the approach of his train, and many tell tales of more ferocious denizens of the wilds. Buffalo have all long since disappeared; but what times they must have had in this their paradise, before they went! On the higher prairies the grass is of a superior quality, and its seed almost like wheat On those which are low and humid it grows rank and tough, and sometimes so high that a man on horseback may pass through it unobserved. The crowding of vegetation, owing to the over-fertility of the soil, causes all to tend upward, so that most of the growth is extra high, rather than spreading in breadth. In the very early spring, the low grass is interspersed with quantities of violets, strawberry-blossoms, and other delicate flowers. As the grass grows taller, flowers of larger size and more brilliant hues diversify it, till at length the whole is like a flowery forest, but destined to be burnt over in the autumn, leaving their ashes to help forward the splendid growth of their successors.
One of the marvels of this marvellous prairiedom, at the present hour, is the taste and skill displayed in houses and gardens. One fancies a “settler” in the Western wilds so occupied with thoughts of shelter and sustenance as hardly to remember that a house must be perpendicular to be safe, and a garden fenced before it is worth planting. But every mile of our prairie-flight reminds us, that, where no time and labor are to be consumed in felling trees and “toting” logs to mill,–planks and joists, and such like, walking in, by rail, all ready for the framing,–there is leisure for reflection and choice as to form; and also, that, where fertility is the inevitable attendant upon the first incision of the plough, _what_ we shall plant and _how_ we shall plant it become the only topics for consideration. Setting aside the merely temporary residences of the poorer class of farmers,–houses sure to be replaced by palaces of pine-boards, at least, before a great while, provided the owner does not “move West,” or take to whiskey,–the cottages we catch glimpses of from car-windows are pretty and well-planned, and some of them show even better on the inside than on the out. I must forbear to enlarge on the comfort and abundance of these dwellings, lest I trench upon private matters; but I may mention, by way of illustrating my subject, and somewhat as the painter introduces human figures into his picture to give an idea of the height of a tower or the vastness of a cathedral, that I have found an abundant and even elegant table, under frescoed ceiling, in a cottage near the Illinois Central, and far south of the mid-line of this wonderful State, so lately a seeming waste through much of its extent.
And thus throughout. At one moment a bare expanse, looking man-despised, if not God-forgotten,–and at the next, a smiling village, with tasteful dwelling, fine shrubbery, great hotels, spires pointing heavenward, and trees that look down with the conscious dignity of old settlers, as if they had stood just so since the time of good Father Marquette, that stout old missionary, who first planted the holy cross in their shade, and, “after offering to the Mightiest thanks and supplications, fell asleep to wake no more.”
There are many interesting reminiscences or traditions of the early European settlers of Illinois. After Father Marquette,–whom I always seem to see in Hicks’s sweet picture of a monk inscribing the name JESU on the bark of a tree in the forest,–came La Salle, an emissary of the great Colbert, under Louis XIV.; an explorer of many heroic qualities, who has left in this whole region important traces of his wanderings, and the memory of his bloody and cruel murder at the impious hands of his own followers, who had not patience to endure to the end. Counted as part of Florida, under Spanish rule, and part of Louisiana, under that of the French,–falling into the hands of the celebrated John Law, in the course of his bubble Mississippi scheme, and afterwards ceded with Canada and Nova Scotia to the English, Illinois was never Americanized until the peace of ’83. The spongy turf of her prairies bore the weight of many a fort, and drank the blood of the slain in many a battle, when all around her was at peace. The fertility of her soil and the comparative mildness of her climate caused her to be eagerly contended for, as far back as 1673, when the pioneers grew poetical under the inspiration of “a joy that could not be expressed,” as they passed her “broad plains, all garlanded with majestic forests and checkered with illimitable prairies and island groves.” “We are Illinois,” said the poor Indians to Father Marquette,–meaning, in their language, “We are men.” And the Jesuits treated them as men; but by traders they soon began to be treated like beasts; and of course–poor things!–they did their best to behave accordingly. All the forts are ruins now; there is no longer occasion for them. The Indians are nothing. There can scarcely be found the slightest trace of their occupancy of these rich acres. Nations that build nothing but uninscribed burial-places foreshadow their own doom,–to return to the soil and be forgotten. But the mode of their passing away is not, therefore, a matter of indifference.
On the stronger and more intelligent rests the responsibility of such changes; and in the case of our Indians, it is certain that a load of guilt, individual and national, rests somewhere. Necessity is no Christian plea, “It must needs be that offences come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh!” The Indian and the negro shall rise up in judgment against our rich and happy land, and condemn it for inhumanity and selfishness. Have they not already done so? Blood and treasure, poured out like water, have been the beginnings of retribution in one case; a deeper and more vital punishment, such as belongs to bosom-sins, awaits us in the other. Shall no penitence, no sacrifice, attempt to avert it?
Illinois, level, fertile, joyous, took French rule very kindly. The missionaries, who were physicians, schoolmasters, and artisans, as well as preachers, lived among the people, instructed them in the arts of life as well as in the ceremonies and spirit of the Catholic faith; and natives and foreigners seem to have dwelt together in peace and love. The French brought with them the regularity and neatness that characterize their home-settlements, and the abundance in which they lived enabled them to be public-spirited and to deal liberally even with the Indians. They raised wheat in such plenty that Indian corn was cultivated chiefly for provender, although they found the _voyageurs_ glad to buy it as they passed back and forth on their adventurous journeys. The remains of their houses show how substantially they built; two or three modern sudden houses could be made out of one old French picketed and porticoed cottage.
The appearance of an Illinois settler in those days was rather picturesque than elegant,–substance before show being the principle upon which it was planned. While the Indian still wore his paint and feathers when he came to trade, the rural swain appeared in a _capote_ made of blanket, with a hood that served in cold weather instead of a Leary, buck-skin overalls, moccasins of raw-hide, and, generally, only a natural shock of Sampsonian locks between his head and the sun; while his lady-love was satisfied with an outfit not very different,–save that there is no tradition that she ever capped the climax of ugliness by wearing Bloomers. There were gay colors for holidays, no doubt; but not till 1830, we are told, did the genuine Illinois settler adopt the commonplace dress of this imitative land. What pity when people are in such haste to do away with everything characteristic in costume!
Both sexes worked hard, bore rough weather without flinching, and attended carefully to their religious duties; but, withal, they were gay and joyous, ready for dance and frolic, and never so anxious to make money that they forgot to make fun.
What must the ghosts of these primitive Christians think of their successors, ploughing in broadcloth and beaver, wading through the mud in patent-leather boots, and all the while wrinkled with anxiety, gaunt with ambition, and grudging themselves three holidays a year!
Immigrants in time changed the character of the population as well as its dress, and for a while there seems to have been something of a jumble of elements, new laws conflicting with old habits, hungry politicians preying upon a simple people, who only desired to be let alone, and who, when they discovered some gross imposition, were philosophical enough to call it, jokingly, being “greased and swallowed.” This anarchical condition resulted, as usual, in habits of personal violence; and, at one time, an adverse vote was considered matter for stabbing or gouging, and juries often dismissed indictments, fearing private vengeance in case of a discharge of their duty. They made a wide distinction, in murder trials, between him who committed the crime in a passion and those who did the thing quietly; so that you had only to walk up to the person who had offended you, and shoot him in the open street, to feel tolerably sure of impunity. In short, there seems to have prevailed, at that time, north of Mason and Dixon’s line, very much the same state of things that still prevails south of it; but there was other leaven at work, and the good sense of the people gradually got the better of this short-sighted folly of violence.
It is reported as fact, by all writers on the earlier history of this State, that the holding of courts was conducted very much in the style reported of the back counties of Georgia and Alabama in our day. The sheriff would go out into the court-yard and say to the people, “Come in, boys,–the court is going to begin,”–or sometimes, “Our John is going to open court now,”–the judge being just one of the “boys.”
Judges did not like to take upon themselves the _onus_ of deciding cases, but shared it with the jury as far as possible. One story, well authenticated, runs thus: A certain judge, having to pass sentence of death upon one of his neighbors, did it in the following form: “Mr. Green, the jury in their verdict say you are guilty of murder, and the law in that case says you are to be hung. Now I want you and all your friends down on Indian Creek to know that it is not me that condemns you, but the jury and the law. What time would you like to be hung, Sir?” The poor man replied, that it made no difference to him; he would rather the court should appoint a time. “Well, then, Mr. Green,” says the judge, “the court will allow you four weeks’ time to prepare for death and settle up your business.” It was here suggested by the Attorney-General that it was usual in such cases for the court to recapitulate the essential parts of the evidence, to set forth the nature and enormity of the crime, and solemnly to exhort the prisoner to repent and fit himself for the awful doom awaiting him. “Oh!” said the judge, “Mr. Green understands all that as well as if I had preached to him a month. Don’t you, Mr. Green? You understand you’re to be hung this day four weeks?” “Yes, Sir,” replied Mr. Green, and so the matter ended.
One legal brilliant blazes on the forehead of youthful Illinois, in the shape of a summary remedy for duelling. One of those heroes who think it safer to appeal to chance than to logic in vindication of tarnished honor, and who imagine the blood of a dead friend the only salve to be relied on for the cure of wounded feelings, killed his opponent in a duel. The law of Illinois very coolly hanged the survivor; and from that time to this, other remedies have been found for spiritual hurts, real or imaginary. Nobody has fancied it necessary to fight with a noose round his neck. If ever capital punishment were lawful, (which I confess I do not think it ever can be,) it would be as a desperate remedy against this horrid relic of mediaeval superstition and impiety, no wiser or more Christian than the ordeal by burning ploughshares or poisoned wine. The rope in judicial hands is certainly as lawful as the pistol in rash ones; so the duellist has no reason to complain.
Some of the later days of Illinois, the days of Indian wars and Mormon wars, pro-slavery wars and financial wars, are too red and black for peaceful pages; and as they were incidental rather than characteristic, they do not come within our narrow limits. There is still too large an infusion of the cruel slavery spirit in the laws of Illinois; but the immense tide of immigration will necessarily remedy that, by overpowering the influence introduced over the southern border. So nearly a Southern State was Illinois once considered to be, that, in settling the northern boundary, it was deemed essential to give her a portion of the lake-shore, that her interests might be at least balanced. They have proved to be more than balanced by this wise provision.
The little excuse there is in this favored region for a sordid devotion to toil, a journey through the State, even at flying pace, is sufficient to show. The fertility of the soil is the despair of scientific farming. Who cares for rules, when he has only to drop a seed and tread on it, to be sure of a hundred-fold return? Who talks of succession of crops, when twelve burdens of wheat, taken from the same soil in as many years, leave the ground black and ready for another yield of almost equal abundance? An alluvial tract of about three hundred thousand acres, near the Mississippi, has been cultivated in Indian corn a hundred and fifty years,–indeed, ever since the French occupation of Illinois. What of under-draining? Some forty or fifty rivers threading the State, besides smaller streams innumerable, always will do that, as soon as the Nilic floods of spring have accomplished their work by floating to the surface the finest part of the soil. Irrigation? You may now grow rice on one farm and grapes on another, without travelling far between. It is true, there must be an end to this universality of power and advantage, some day; but nobody can see far enough ahead to feel afraid, and it is not in the spirit of our time to think much about the good of our grandchildren. “What has posterity done for me?” is the instinctive question of the busy Westerner, as he sits down under vine and fig-tree which his own hands have planted, to enjoy peace and plenty, after suffering the inevitable hardships of pioneer life. You may tell him he is not wise to scorn good rules; but he will reply, that he did not come so far West, and begin life anew, for the sake of being wise, but of making money, and that as rapidly as possible. He has forgotten the care and economy learned among the cold and stony hills of New England, and wants to do everything on a large scale. He likes to hear of patent reapers, Briarean threshing-machines, and anything that will save him most of the time and trouble of gathering in his heavy crops,–but that is all. The growth of those crops he has nothing to do with. That is provided for by Nature in Illinois; if it were not, he would move “out West”
Stories of this boundless fertility are rife here. One pioneer told us, that, when a fence is to be made and post-holes are wanted, it is only necessary to drop beet-seed ten feet apart all around the field, and, when the beet is ripe, you pull it up and your post-hole is ready! To be sure, there was a twinkle in the corner of his eye as he stated this novel and interesting fact; but, after all, the fertility in question was not so extravagantly “poefied” by this _canard_ as some may suppose. Our friend went on to state, that, in his district, they had a kind of corn which produced from a single grain a dozen stalks of twelve ears each; and not content with this, on _most_ of the stalks you would find, somewhere near the top, a small calabash full of shelled corn! To put the matter beyond doubt, he pulled a handful of the corn from his pocket, which he invited us to plant, and satisfy ourselves.
The reader has probably concluded, by this time, that beets and corn are not the only enormous things grown in Illinois.
A friend told us, in perfectly good faith, that a tract of his, some fourteen thousand acres, in the southern part of the State, contained coal enough to warm the world, and more iron than that coal would smelt,–salt enough for all time, and marble and rich metallic ores of various kinds besides. In one region are found inexhaustible beds of limestone, the smoke of whose burning fills the whole spring air, and the crevices of whose formation make very pokerish-looking caves, which young and adventurous ladies are fond of exploring; in another we come to quantities of that snow-white porcelain clay of which some people suppose themselves to have been originally formed, but which has been, in a commercial point of view, hitherto a _desideratum_ in these United States of ours. The people at Mound City (an aspiring rival of Cairo, on the banks of the Ohio) are about building a factory for the exploitation of this clay, not into ladies and gentlemen, (unpopular articles here,) but into china-ware, the quality of which will be indisputable.
One soon ceases wondering at the tropicality of the Illinoisian imagination. Ali Baba’s eye-straining experiences were poor, compared to these every-day realities.
The “Open Sesame” in this case has been spoken through the railroad-whistle. Railroads cannot make mines and quarries, and fat soil and bounteous rivers; yet railroads have been the making of Illinois. Nobody who has ever seen her spring roads, where there are no rails, can ever question it. From the very fatness of her soil, the greater part of the State must have been one Slough of Despond for three quarters of the year, and her inhabitants strangers to each other, if these iron arms had not drawn the people together and bridged the gulfs for them. No roads but railroads could possibly have threaded the State, a large and the best portion of whose surface is absolutely devoid of timber, stone, gravel, or any other available material. The prairies must have remained flowery deserts, visited as a curiosity every year by strangers, but without dwellings for want of wood. The vast quarries must, of course, have lain useless, for want of transporting power,–our friend’s coal and iron undisturbed, waiting for an earthquake,–and the poetical pioneer’s beets and Indian corn unplanted, and therefore uncelebrated. Well may it be said here, that iron is more valuable than gold. Population, agriculture, the mechanic arts, literature, taste, civilization, in short, are all magnetized by the beneficent rail, and follow wherever it leads. The whole southern portion of Illinois has been nicknamed “Egypt,” –whether because at its utmost point, on a dampish delta, reposes the far-famed city of Cairo,–or whether, as wicked satirists pretend, its denizens have been found, in certain particulars, rather behind our times in intellectual light. Whatever may have been the original excuse for the _sobriquet_, the derogatory one exists no more. Light has penetrated, and darkness can reign no longer. Every day, a fiery visitant, bearing the collective intelligence of the whole world’s doings and sayings, dashes through Egypt into Cairo, giving off scintillations at every hamlet on the way,–and every day the brilliant marvel returns, bringing northward, not only the good things of the Ohio and Mississippi, but tropic _on-dits_ and oranges, only a few hours old, to the citizens of Chicago, far “in advance of the (New York) mail.” With the rail comes the telegraph; and whispers of the rise and fall of fancies and potatoes, of speculations and elections, of the sale of corner-lots and the evasion of bank-officers, are darting about in every direction over our heads, as we unconsciously admire the sunset, or sketch a knot of rosy children as they come trooping from a quaint school-house on the prairie edge. Fancy the rail gone, and we have neither telegraph, nor school-house, nor anything of all this but the sunset,–and even that we could not be there to see in spring-time, at least, unless we could transmigrate for the time into the relinquished forms of some of these aboriginal bull-frogs, which grow to the nice size of two feet in length, destined, no doubt, to receive the souls of habitual croakers hereafter.
But if the railroads have been the making of the land, it is not to be denied that the land has been the making of the railroads. Egyptian minds they must have been, that grudged the tracts given by the United States to the greatest of roads, the greatest road in the world. Having bestowed a line of alternate sections on this immense undertaking,–vital in importance, and impossible without such aid,–the Government at once doubled the price of the intermediate sections, _and sold them at the doubled price_, though they had been years, and might have been ages, in market unsold, without means of communication and building. Who, then, was the loser? Not the United States; for they received for half the land just what they would otherwise have received for the whole. Not the State; for it lays hands on a good slice of the annual profits, not to speak of incalculable benefits beside. Not the farmer, surely; for what would his now high-priced land be worth, if the grand road were annihilated? Not the bond-holder; for he receives a fair, full interest on his money. Not the stock-holder; for he looks with eyes of faith toward a great future. It was a sort of triangular or quadrangular or pentangular bargain, in which all these parties were immensely benefited. The traveller blesses such liberal policy, as he flies along towards the land of oranges, or turns aside to measure mammoth beets or weigh extra-supernal corn, to “bore” or to “prospect,” to pick at ooelite and shale or to “peep and botanize” through an inexhaustible Flora. The present writer has certainly reason to be grateful,–not, alas! with that gushing warmth of feeling which the owners of shares or bonds naturally experience,–but as an “‘umble individual” who could not have found material for this valuable article, if certain gentlemen who do own the said shares had not been very enterprising.
The man who may be said to have devised the land-basis for railroads through unsettled tracts–a financier of unsurpassed sagacity, and once the soul of commercial honor as well as intelligence–should not, in his dishonored grave, and far beyond the reach of human scorn or vengeance, be denied the credit of what he accomplished before the fatal madness seized his soul and dragged him to perdition. Let it be enough that his name has come to be an epithet of infamy in his land’s language. Let not the grandeur of his views, the intent with which he set out, and the good he achieved, be lost in oblivion. Pride–“by that sin fell the angels!”–cast him headlong down the irrecoverable steep,–
“And when he fell, he fell like Lucifer,”–
aye! like Wolsey and Bacon,–
“Never to rise again!”
It is no sin to hope that the All-seeing eye discerned in those noble undertakings and beneficent results the germ of wings that shall one day bear him back to light and mercy. Let us, who benefit by his good deeds, not insist on remembering only the evil!
Chicago, the Wondrous, sits amid her wealth, like a magnificent sultana, half-reclining over a great oval mirror, supplied by that lake of lakes, the fathomless Michigan. Perhaps the resemblance might be unpoetically traced to particulars; for we are told by lotos-eating travellers, that Oriental beauties, with all their splendor, are not especially clean. Certain it is that our Occidental sultana dresses her fair head with towers and spires, and hangs about her neck long rows of gems in the shape of stately and elegant dwellings,–yet, descending to her feet, we sink in mud and mire, or tumble unguardedly into excavations set like traps for the unwary, or oust whole colonies of rats from beneath plank walks where they have burrowed securely ever since “improvements” began. At some seasons, indeed, there is no mud; because the high winds from the lake or the prairies turn the mud into dust, which blinds our eyes, fills our mouths, and makes us Quakers in appearance and anything but saints in heart. Chicago-walking resembles none but such as Christian encountered as he fled from the City of Destruction; yet in this case the ills are those of a City of _Con_struction.–sure to disappear as soon as the builders find time to care for such trifles. Chicago people, it is well known, walk with their heads in the clouds, and, naturally, do not mind what happens to their feet. It is only strangers who exclaim, and sometimes more than exclaim, at the dangers of the way. Cast-away carriages lie along the road-side, like ships on Fire Island beach. Nobody minds them. If you see a gentleman at a distance, progressing slowly with a gliding or floundering pace, you conclude he has a horse under him, and, perhaps, on nearer approach, you see bridle and headstall. This is in early spring, while the frost is coming out of the ground. As the season advances, the horse emerges, and you are just getting a fair sight of him when the dust begins and he disappears again. So say the scoffers, and those who would, but do not, own any city-lots in that favored vicinity; and to the somewhat heated mind of the traveller who encounters such things for the first time, the story does not seem so very much exaggerated. Simple wayfarers like myself, however, tell no such wicked tales of the Garden City; but remember only her youth, her grandeur, her spirit, her hospitality, her weight of cares, her immense achievements, and her sure promise of future metropolitan splendors.
The vicinity of Chicago is all dotted with beautiful villa-residences. To drive among them is like turning over a book of architectural drawings,–so great is their variety, and so marked the taste which prevails. Many of them are of the fine light-colored stone found in the neighborhood, and their substantial excellence inspires a feeling that all this prosperity is of no ephemeral character. People do not build such country-houses until they feel settled and secure. The lake-shore is of course the line of attraction, for it is the only natural beauty of the place. But what trees! Several of the streets of Chicago may easily become as beautiful drives as the far-famed Cascine at Florence, and will be so before her population doubles again,–which is giving but a short interval for the improvement. No parks as yet, however. Land on the lake-shore is too precious, and the flats west of the town are quite despised. Yet city parks do not demand very unequal surface, and it would not require a very potent landscape-gardener or an unheard-of amount of dollars to make a fine driving-and riding-ground, where the new carriages of the fortunate might be aired, and the fine horses of the gay exercised, during a good part of the year.
To describe Chicago, one would need all the superlatives set in a row. Grandest, flattest,–muddiest, dustiest,–hottest, coldest,–wettest, driest,–farthest north, south, east, and west from other places, consequently most central,–best harbor on Lake Michigan, worst harbor and smallest river any great commercial city ever lived on,–most elegant in architecture, meanest in hovel-propping,–wildest in speculation, solidest in value,–proudest in self-esteem, loudest in self-disparagement,–most lavish, most grasping,–most public-spirited in some things, blindest and darkest on some points of highest interest.
And some poor souls would doubtless add,–most fascinating, or most desolate,–according as one goes there, gay and hopeful, to find troops of prosperous friends, or, lonely and poor, with the distant hope of bettering broken fortunes by struggling among the driving thousands already there on the same errand. There is, perhaps, no place in the world where it is more necessary to take a bright and hopeful view of life, and none where this is more difficult. There is too much at stake. Those who have visited Baden-Baden and her Kursaal sisters in the height of the season need not be told that no “church-face” ever equalled in solemnity the countenances of those who surround the fatal tables, waiting for the stony lips of the croupier to announce “_Noir perd_” or “_Rouge gagne_.” At Chicago are a wider table, higher stakes, more desperate throws, and Fate herself presiding, or what seems Fate, at once partial and inexorable.
But, on this great scale, even success fails to bring smiles. The winners sit “with hair on end at their own wonders,” and half-fearing that such golden showers have some illusion about them and may prove fairy favors at last. Next to this fueling comes the thirst for more. Enlarged means bring enlarged desires and ever-extending plans. The repose and lightness of heart that were at first to be the reward of success recede farther and farther into the dim distance, until at last they are lost sight of entirely, confessed, with a sigh, to be unattainable. How can people in this State wear cheerful countenances? When one looks at the gay and social faces and habits of some little German town, where are cultivated people, surrounded by the books and pictures they love, with leisure enough for music and dancing and tea-garden chat, for deep friendships and lofty musings, it would seem as if our shrewd Yankee-land and its outcroppings at the West had not yet found out everything worth knowing. Froissart’s famous remark about the English in France–“They take their pleasure sadly, after their fashion”–may apply to the population of Chicago, and it will be some time yet, I fancy, before they will take it very gayly.
At a little country-town, the other day, not within a thousand miles of Chicago, a family about leaving for a distant place advertised their movables for sale at auction. There was such a stir throughout the settlement as called forth an expression of wonder from a stranger, “Ah!” said a good lady, “auctions are the only gayety we have here!”
Joking apart, there was a deep American truth in this seeming _niaiserie_.
Chicago has, as we have said, with all her wealth, no public park or other provision for out-door recreation. She has no gallery of Art, or the beginning of one,–no establishment of music, no public library,–no social institution whatever, except the church. Without that blessed bond, her people would be absolute units, as independent of each other as the grains of sand on the seashore, swept hither and thither by the ocean winds.
But even before these words have found their way to the Garden City, they will, perhaps, be inapplicable,–so rapid is progress at the West. The people are like a great family moving into a new house. There is so much sweeping and dusting to do, so much finding of places for the furniture, so much time to spend in providing for breakfast, dinner, and tea, lodging and washing, that nobody thinks of unpacking the pictures, taking the books out of their boxes, or getting up drives or riding-parties. All these come in good time, and will be the better done for a little prudent delay.
There is, to the stranger, an appearance of extreme hurry in Chicago, and the streets are very peculiar in not having a lady walking in them. Day after day I traversed them, meeting crowds of men, who looked like the representatives of every nation and tongue and people,–and every class of society, from the greenest rustic, or the most undisguised sharper, to the man of most serious respectability, or him of highest _ton_. Yet one lady walking in the streets I saw not; and when I say not one lady, I mean that I did not meet a woman who seemed to claim that title, or any title much above that of an ordinary domestic. Perhaps this is only a spring symptom, which passes off when the mud dries up a little,–but it certainly gave a rather forlorn or funereal aspect to the streets for the time.
There is, nevertheless, potent inspiration in the resolute and occupied air of these crowds. Hardly any one stays long among them without feeling a desire to share their excitement, and do something towards the splendid future which is evidently beckoning them on. Preparing the future! It is glorious business. No wonder it makes the pulse quicken and the eye look as if it saw spirits. It may be said, that in some sense we are all preparing the future; but in the West there is a special meaning in the expression. In circumstances so new and wondrous, first steps are all-important. Those who have been providentially led to become early settlers have immense power for good or evil. One can trace in many or most of our Western towns, and even States, the spirit of their first influential citizens. Happy is it for Chicago that she has been favored in this respect,–and to her honor be it said, that she appreciates her benefactors. Of one citizen, who has been for twenty years past doing the quiet and modest work of a good genius in the city of his adoption, it is currently said, that be has built a hundred miles of her streets,–and there is no mark of respect and gratitude that she would not gladly show him. Other citizens take the most faithful and disinterested care of her schools; and to many she is indebted for an amount of liberality and public spirit which is constantly increasing her enormous prosperity. Happy the city which possesses such citizens! Happy the citizens who have a city so nobly deserving of their best services!
AN EVENING WITH THE TELEGRAPH-WIRES.
My cousin Moses has made the discovery that he is a powerful magnetizer.
Like many others who have newly come into possession of a small tract in those mysterious, outlying, unexplored wildernesses of Nature, which we call by so many names, but which as yet refuse to be defined or classed, he has been naturally eager to commence operations, and _exploit_ and farm it a little. He is making experiments on a narrow border of his wild lands. He is a man of will and of strong _physique_, with an inquiring and scientific turn of mind, which inclines him chiefly to metaphysical studies. It is not to be wondered at, that, having lately discovered that he possesses the mesmeric gift, he should not sufficiently discriminate as to its application. Later he will see that it is an agent not to be tampered with, and never to be used on healthy subjects, but applied only to invalids. To-day he is like a newly-armed knight-errant, bounding off on his steed at sunrise, in search of adventures.
One afternoon, not long since, he was telling me of his extraordinary successes with somnambulists and _somnoparlists_,–of old ladies cured of nervous headaches and face-twitches, and of young ones put to sleep at a distance from the magnetizer, dropping into a trance suddenly as a bird struck by a gun-shot, simply by an act of his volition,–of water turned into wine, and wine into brandy, to the somnambulic taste,–and so on, till we got wandering into crooked by-paths of physics and metaphysics, that seemed to lead us nowhere in particular,–when I said, “Come, Cousin Moses, suppose you try it on me, by way of experiment. But I have my doubts if you’ll ever put me to sleep.”
My cousin yielded to my request with alacrity;–every subject for mesmerism was for him legitimate;–and I relinquished myself to his passes with the docility of a man about to be shaved.
The passes from the head downward were kept up perseveringly for half an hour, without my experiencing any change, or manifesting the least symptom of drowsiness. At last the charm began to work. I began to be conscious of a singular trickling or creeping sensation following the motion of his passes down my arms. My respiration grew short. I experienced, however, no tendency to sleep, and my mind was perfectly calm and unexcited. My cousin was satisfied with his experiment so far, but we both concluded it had better end here. So he made the reverse passes, in order to undo the knot he was beginning to tie in my nerves. He did not, however, entirely succeed in untying it. I was a healthy subject, and the magnetism continued to affect my nerves, in spite of the untangling passes.
Soon after, I rose and took my leave. I was strangely excited, but it was a purely physical, and not a mental excitement. Thinking that a walk would quiet me, I went through street after street, until I reached the outskirts of the city. It was a mild September evening. The fine weather and the sight of the trees and fields tempted me to continue my walk. It was near sunset, and I strolled on and on, watching the purple gray and ruddy gold of the clouds, until I had got fairly into the country.
As I rambled on, I was suddenly seized with a fancy to climb a tree which stood by the roadside, and rest myself in a convenient notch which I observed between two of the limbs. I was soon seated in among the branches, with a canopy of leaves around and over me,–feeling, in my still nervous condition, as I leaned my back against the mossy bark, like a magnified tree-toad in clothes.
The air was balmy and fragrant, and against the amber of the western sky rose and fell numberless little clouds of insects. The birds were chirping and fluttering about me, and made their arrangements for their night’s lodging, in manifest dread of the clothed tree-toad who had invaded their leafy premises.
The peculiar nervousness which had taken possession of me was now passing off, to be replaced by a species of mental exaltation. I was becoming conscious of something approaching semi-clairvoyance, and yet not in the ordinary form. Sensation, emotion, thought were intensified. The landscape around me was dotted with farm-houses, pillowed in soft, dark clumps of trees. One by one, the lights began to appear at the windows,–soft rising stars of home-joys. The glorious September sunset was fading, but still resplendent in the west. The landscape was pervaded with a deeper repose, the glowing clouds with a diviner splendor than that which filled the eye. Then thronging memories awoke. My remembrances of all my past life in the crowded cities of America and Europe rose vividly before me. In the long strata of solid gray clouds, where the sun had gone down, leaving only a few vapory gold-fishes swimming in the clear spaces above, I could fancy I saw the lonely Roman Campagna and the wondrous dome of St. Peter’s, as when first beheld on the horizon ten years ago. Then, as from the slopes of San Miniato at sunset, gray, red-tiled Florence, with its Boboli gardens, full of nightingales, its old towers and cathedrals, and its soaring Giotto Campanile. Then Genoa, with its terraces and marble palaces, and that huge statue of Andre Doria. Then Naples, gleaming white in the eye of day over her pellucid depths of sea. The golden days of Italy floated by me. Then came the memories, glad or sad, of days that had passed in my own native land,–in the very city that lay behind me,–the intimate communings with dear friends,–the musical and the merry nights,–the trials, anxieties, sorrows—-
But all this is very egotistical and unnecessary. I merely meant to say that I was in a peculiar, almost abnormal state of mind, that evening. The spirit had, as it were, been drawn outwards, and perhaps slightly dislocated, by those mesmeric passes of my cousin, and I had not succeeded as yet in adjusting it quite satisfactorily in its old bodily grooves and sockets. The condition I was in was not as pleasant as I could have wished; for I was as alive to painful remembrances and imaginations, as to pleasant ones. I seemed to myself like a revolving lantern of a light-house,–now dark, now glowing with a fiery radiance.
I asked myself, Is it that I have been blind and deaf and dull all my life, and am just waking into real existence? or am I developing into a _medium_,–Heaven forbid!–and the spirits pushing at some unguarded portal of the nervous system, and striving to take possession? Shall I hear raps and knockings when I return to my solitary chamber, and sit a powerless beholder of damaged furniture, which the spirits will never have the conscience to promise payment for, when my landlady’s bill comes in? (By the way, have the spirits _ever_ behaved like gentlemen in this respect, and settled up fair and square for the breakages they have indulged in by way of exemplifying the doctrine of a future state?)
As I soliloquized thus, I was attracted by a low vibrating note among the leaves. Looking through them, I saw, for the first time, that two or three telegraph-wires, which I had observed skirting the road, ran directly through the tree in which I was seated. It was a strange sort of sound, that came in hurried jerks, as it were, accompanied with a corresponding jerk of the wire.
A gigantic fancy flashed across me:–This State of New York is a great guitar; yonder, at Albany, are the legislative pegs and screws; down there in Manhattan Island is the great sounding-board; these iron wires are the strings! The spirits are singing, perhaps, with their heads up there in the sweet heavens and the rosy clouds,–and this vibration of the wires is a sort of loose jangling accompaniment of their unpractised hands on earth. The voice is always above the strings.–This I thought in my semi-mesmeric condition, perhaps. I soon laughed at my Brobdignagian nonsense, and said,–There is a telegraphic despatch passing. Now if I could only find out what it is!–that would be something new in science,–a discovery worth knowing,–to be able to hear or feel the purport of a telegraphic message, simply by touching the wire along which it runs!
So, regardless of any electric shock I might receive, I thrust out my hand through the leaves of the tree, and boldly grasped the wire. The jerks instantly were experienced in my elbow, and it was not long before certain short sentences were conveyed, magnetically, to my brain. In my amazement at the discovery, I almost dropped out of the tree. However, I kept firm hold of the wire, and my sensorium made me aware of something passing like this:–“Market active. Fair demand for exchange. Transactions from five to ten thousand shares. Aristides railroad-stock scarce. Rates of freight to Liverpool firm. Yours respectfully, Grabber and Holdham.”
Upon my word, said I, this is rather dry!–only a merchant! I expected something better than this, to commence with.
The wire being now quiet, I fell into a musing upon the singular discovery I had made,–and whether I should get anything from the public or the government for revealing it. And then my thoughts wandered across the Atlantic, and I remembered those long rows of telegraphic wires in France, ruled along the tops of high barrier-walls, and looking against the sky like immense music-lines,–and those queer inverted-coffee-cup-like supports for the wires, on the tall posts. Then I thought of music and coffee at the Jardin Mabille. Then my fancy wandered down the Champs Elysees to those multitudinous spider-web wires that radiate from the palace of the Tuileries, where the Imperial spider sits plotting and weaving his meshes around the liberties of France. Then I thought, What a thing this discovery of mine would be for political conspirators,–to reverse the whispering-gallery of Dionysius, and, instead of the tyrant hearing the secrets of the people, the people hearing the secrets of the tyrant! Then I thought of Robespierre, and Marat, and Charlotte Corday, and Marie Antoinette,–then of Delaroche’s and Mueller’s pictures of the unfortunate Queen,–then of pictures in general,–then of landscape-scenery,–till I almost fell into a doze, when I was startled by a faint sound along the wire, as of a sigh, like the first thrill of the AEolian harp in the evening wind. Another message was passing. I reached my hand out to the iron thread. A confused sadness began to oppress me. A mother’s voice weeping over her sick child pulsed along the wire. Her husband was far away. Her little daughter lay very ill. “Come quick,” said the voice. “I have little hope; but if you were only here, I should be calmer. If she must die, it would be such a comfort to have you here!”
I drew my hand away. I saw the whole scene too vividly. Who this mother was I knew not; but the news of the death of a child whom I knew and loved could not have affected me more strangely and keenly than this semi-articulate sob which quivered along the iron airtrack, in the silence of the evening, from one unknown–to another unknown.
I roused myself from my sadness, and thought I would descend the tree and stroll home. The moon was up, and a pleasant walk before me, with enough to meditate upon in the singular discovery I had made. I was about to get down from my crotch in the tree, and was just reaching out my dexter leg to feel if I could touch a bough below me, when a low, wild shriek ran along the wire,–as when the wind-harp, above referred to for illustration, is blown upon by some rude, sharp northwester. In spite of myself, I touched the vibrating cord. The message was brief and abrupt, like a sea-captain’s command:–“Ship Trinidad wrecked off Wildcat’s Beach,–all hands lost,–no insurance!”
Do you recollect, when sitting alone sometimes in your room, at midnight, in the month of November, how, after a lull in the blast, the bleak wind will all at once seem to clutch at the windows, with a demoniac howl that makes the house rock? Do you remember the half-whistles and half-groans through the key-holes and crevices,–the cries and shrieks that rise and fall,–the roaring in the chimney,–the slamming of distant doors and shutters? Well, all this seemed to be suggested in the ringing of the iron cord. The very leaves, green and dewy, and the delicate branches, seemed to quiver as the dreary message passed.
I thought,–This is a little too much! This old tree is getting to be a very lugubrious spot. I don’t want to hear any more such messages. I almost wish I had never touched the wire. Strange! one reads such an announcement in a newspaper very coolly;–why is it that I can’t take it coolly in a telegraphic despatch? We can read a thing with indifference which we hear spoken with a shudder,–such prisoners are we to our senses! I have had enough of this telegraphing. I sha’n’t close my eyes to-night, if I have any more of it.
I had now fairly got my foot on the branch below, and was slipping myself gradually down, when the wire began to ring like a horn, and in the merriest of strains. I paused and listened. I could fancy the joyful barking of dogs in accompaniment. Ah, surely, this is some sportsman,–“the hunter’s call, to faun and dryad known.” This smacks of the bright sunshine and the green woods and the yellow fields. I will stop and hear it.–It was just what I expected,–a jolly citizen telegraphing his country friend to meet him with his guns and dogs at such a place.
And immediately afterwards, in much the same key, came a musical note and a message babbling of green fields, from a painter:–“I shall leave town to-morrow. Meet me at Bullshornville at ten, A.M. Don’t forget to bring my field-easel, canvases, and the other traps.”
If there is more of this music, I said, I think I shall stay. I love the sportsmen and the artists, and am glad they are going to have a good time. The weather promises well for them.
There was a little pause, and then a strain of perfect jubilation came leaping along the wire, like the flying song of the bobolink over tracts of blowing clover and apple-blossoms. I expected something very rare,–a strain of poetry at least. It was only this:–“Mr. Grimkins, Sir, we shall expect rooms for the bridal party at your hotel, on the side overlooking the lake, if possible. Yours, P. Simpkins.”
Ah, I said, that’s all Greek to me,–poor, lonely bachelor that I am! I wonder, by the way, if they ever wrote their love-letters by telegraph.–But what is this coming? I am clearly getting back to my normal condition:–“Miss Polly Wogg wishes to say that she has been unable to procure the silk for Mrs. Papillon for less than five dollars a yard.”–Nonsense! I’m not in the dry-goods, nor millinery, nor young-lady department.
And here was another:–“I have found an excellent school for Adolphus in Birchville, near Mastersville Corners. Send him up without delay, with all the school-books you can find.”
And another,–important, very:–“I find that ‘One touch of Nature makes the whole world kin’ is in ‘Troilus and Cressida.’ Don’t send the MS. without this correction.”
But what’s this, accompanied with a long, low whistle?–“The cars have run off the track at Breakneck Hollow. Back your engine and wait for further orders.”
We are getting into the minor key again, I thought. Listen!–“Mr. S. died last night. You must be here to-morrow, if possible, at the opening of the will.”
Well, said I, I have had plenty of despatches, and have expended enough sympathy, for one night. I have been very mysteriously affected,–how, I can’t exactly tell. But who will ever believe my evening’s adventure? Who will not laugh at my pretended discovery? Even my cousin Moses will be incredulous. I shall be at least looked upon as a _medium_, and so settled.
And here allow me to remark,–Have you not observed how easily things apparently difficult and mysterious are arranged in the popular understanding by the use of certain stereotyped names applied to them? Only give a name to a wonder, or an unclassified phenomenon, or even an unsound notion, and you instantly clear away all the fog of mystery. Let an unprincipled fellow call his views Latitudinarianism or Longitudinarianism, he may, with a little adroitness, go for a respectable and consistent member of some sect. A filibuster may pass current under some such label as Political or Territorial Extensionist;–the name is a long, decent overcoat for his shabby ideas. So when wonderful phenomena in the nervous system are observed,–when tables are smashed by invisible hands,–when people see ghosts through stone walls, and know what is passing in the heart of Africa,–how easily you unlock your wardrobe of terms and clap on the back of every eccentric fact your ready-made phrase-coat,–Animal Magnetism, Biology, Odic Force, Optical Illusion, Second Sight, Spirits, and what not! It is a wonderful labor-saving and faith-saving process. People say, “Oh, is that all?” and pass on complacently. There are such explanatory labels to be met with everywhere. They save a deal of trouble. All the shops keep these overcoats,–shops ecclesiastical, medical, juridical, professional, political, social.
Now all I have to do is, not to go to the second-hand slop-shops for the phrase-coat I need for my naked discovery, but look for some unfamiliar robe,–some name more _recherche_, learned, and transcendental than my neighbors sport,–and then I shall pass muster. The classic togas seem to be the most imposing. The Germans, who weave their names out of their indigenous Saxon roots, are much too _naive_. I will get a Greek Lexicon and set about it this very night.
After all, why should it be thought so improbable, in this age of strange phenomena, that the ideas transmitted through the electro-magnetic wire may be communicated to the brain,–especially when there exist certain abnormal or semi-abnormal conditions of that brain and its nerves? Is it not reasonable to suppose that all magnetisms are one in essence? The singular experiences above related seem to hint at the truth of such a view. If it be true that certain delicately-organized persons have the power of telling the character of others, who are entire strangers to them, simply by holding in their hands letters written by those strangers, is it not full as much within the scope of belief that there are those who, under certain physical conditions, may detect the purport of an electro-magnetic message,–that message being sent by vibrations of the wire through the nerves to the brain? If all magnetisms are one in essence,–as I am inclined to believe,–and if the nerves, the brain, and the mind are so swayed by what we term animal magnetism, why not allow for the strong probability of their being also, under certain conditions, equally impressible by electro-magnetism? I put these questions to scientific men; and I do not see why they should be answered by silence or ridicule, merely because the whole subject is veiled in mystery.
It may be asked,–How can an electro-magnetic message be communicated to the mind, without a knowledge of the alphabet used by the telegraphers? This question may seem a poser to some minds. But I don’t see that it raises any grave difficulty. I answer the question by asking another:–How can persons in the somnambulic state read with the tops of their heads?
Besides, I once had the telegraph alphabet explained to me by one of the wire-operators,–though I have forgotten it,–and it is possible, that, in my semi-mesmeric condition, the recollection revived, so that I knew that such and such pulsations of the wire stood for such and such letters.
But is there not a certain spiritual significance, also, in these singular experiences here related?
We may safely lay down this doctrine,–a very old and much-thumbed doctrine, but none the less true for all its dog-ears:–No man lives for himself alone. He is related not only to the silent stars and the singing-birds and the sunny landscape, but to every other human soul. You say, This should not be stated so sermonically, but symbolically. That is just what I have been doing in my narrative of the wires.
It gives one a great idea of human communion,–this power of sending these spark-messages thousands of miles in a second. Far more poetical, too,–is it not?–as well as more practical, than tying billets under the wings of carrier-pigeons. It is removing so much time and space out of the way,–those absorbents of spirits,–and bringing mind into close contact with mind. But when one can read these messages without the aid of machinery, by merely touching the wires, how much greater does the symbol become!
All mankind are one. As some philosophers express it,–one great mind includes us all. But then, as it would never do for all minds to be literally one, any more than it would for all magnetisms to be identical in their modes of manifestation, or for all the rivers, creeks, and canals to flow together, so we have our natural barriers and channels, our _propriums_, as the Swedish seer has it,–and so we live and let live. We feel with others and think with others, but with strict reservations. That evening among the wires, for instance, brought me into wonderful intimate contact with a few of the joys and sorrows of some of my fellow-beings; but an excess of such experiences would interfere with our freedom and our happiness. It is our self-hood, properly balanced, which constitutes our dignity, our humanity. A certain degree, and a very considerable degree of insulation is necessary, that individual life and mental equanimity may go on.
But there may be a degree of insulation which is unbecoming a member of the human family. It may become brutish,–or it may amount to the ridiculous. In Paris, there was an old lady, of uncertain age, who lived in the apartment beneath mine. I think I never saw her but twice. She manifested her existence sometimes by complaining of the romping of the children overhead, who called her the “bonne femme.” Why they gave her the name I don’t know; for she seemed to have no human ties in the world, and wasted her affections on a private menagerie of parrots, canaries, and poodle-dogs. A few shocks of the electric telegraph might have raised her out of her desert island, and given her some glimpses of the great continents of human love and sympathy.
A man who lives for himself alone sits on a sort of insulated glass stool, with a _noli-me-tangere_ look at his fellow-men, and a shivering dread of some electric shock from contact with them. He is a non-conductor in relation to the great magnetic currents which run pulsing along the invisible wires that connect one heart with another. Preachers, philanthropists, and moralists are in the habit of saying of such a person,–“How cold! how selfish! how unchristian!” I sometimes fancy a citizen of the planet Venus, that social star of evening and morning, might say,–“How absurd!” What a figure he cuts there, sitting in solitary state upon his glass tripod,–in the middle of a crowd of excited fellow-beings, hurried to and fro by their passions and sympathies,–like an awkward country-bumpkin caught in the midst of a gay crowd of polkers and waltzers at a ball,–or an oyster bedded on a rock, with silver fishes playing rapid games of hide and seek, love and hate, in the clear briny depths above and beneath! If the angels ever look out of their sphere of intense spiritual realities to indulge in a laugh, methinks such a lonely tripod-sitter, cased over with his invulnerable, non-conducting cloak and hood,–shrinking, dodging, or bracing himself up on the defensive, as the crowd fans him with its rush or jostles up against him,–like the man who fancied himself a teapot, and was forever warning people not to come too near him,–might furnish a subject for a planetary joke not unworthy of translation into the language of our dim earth.
One need not be a lonely bachelor, nor a lonely spinster, in order to live alone. The loneliest are those who mingle with men bodily and yet have no contact with them spiritually. There is no desert solitude equal to that of a crowded city where you have no sympathies. I might here quote Paris again, in illustration,–or, indeed, any foreign city. A friend of mine had an _atelier_ once in the top of a house in the Rue St. Honore. He knew not a soul in the house nor in the neighborhood. There was a German tailor below, who once made him a pair of pantaloons,–so they were connected sartorically and pecuniarily, and, when they met, recognized one another: and there was the _concierge_ below, who knew when he came in and went out,–that was all. All day long the deafened roar of carts and carriages, and the muffled cry of the _marchands des legumes_, were faintly heard from below. And in an adjoining room a female voice (my friend could never tell whether child’s or woman’s, for he never saw any one) overflowed in tones of endearment on some unresponding creature,–he could never guess whether it was a baby, or a bird, or a cat, or a dog, or a lizard, (the French have such pets sometimes,) or an enchanted prince, like that poor half-marble fellow in the “Arabian Nights.” In that garret the painter experienced for six months the perfection of Parisian solitude. Now I dare say he or I might have found social sympathies, by hunting them up; but he didn’t, and I dare say he was to blame, as I should be in the same situation,–and I am willing to place myself in the same category with the menagerie-loving old lady, above referred to, omitting the feathered and canine pets.
As to my mesmerico-telegraphic discovery, it may pass for what it is worth. I shall submit it at least to my cousin Moses, as soon as he returns from the South. People may believe it or not. People may say it may be of practical use, or not. I shall overhaul my terminologies, and, with the “metaphysical aid” of my cousin, fit it with a scientific name which shall overtop all the _ologies_.
Having dressed my new Fact in a respectable and scholarlike coat, I shall let him take his chance with the judicious public,–and content myself, for the present, with making him a sort of humble _colporteur_ of the valuable tract on Human Brotherhood of which I have herewith furnished a few dry specimens.
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.
The company looked a little flustered one morning when I came in,–so much so, that I inquired of my neighbor, the divinity-student, what had been going on. It appears that the young fellow whom they call John had taken advantage of my being a little late (I having been rather longer than usual dressing that morning) to circulate several questions involving a quibble or play upon words,–in short, containing that indignity to the human understanding, condemned in the passages from the distinguished moralist of the last century and the illustrious historian of the present, which I cited on a former occasion, and known as a _pun_. After breakfast, one of the boarders handed me a small roll of paper containing some of the questions and their answers. I subjoin two or three of them, to show what a tendency there is to frivolity and meaningless talk in young persons of a certain sort, when not restrained by the presence of more reflective natures.–It was asked, “Why tertian and quartan fevers were like certain short-lived insects.” Some interesting physiological relation would be naturally suggested. The inquirer blushes to find that the answer is in the paltry equivocation, that they _skip_ a day or two.–“Why an Englishman must go to the Continent to weaken his grog or punch.” The answer proves to have no relation whatever to the temperance-movement, as no better reason is given than that island–(or, as it is absurdly written, _ile and_) water won’t mix.–But when I came to the next question and its answer, I felt that patience ceased to be a virtue. “Why an onion is like a piano” is a query that a person of sensibility would be slow to propose; but that in an educated community an individual could be found to answer it in these words,–“Because it smell odious,” _quasi_, it’s melodious,–is not credible, but too true. I can show you the paper.
Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeating such things. I know most conversations reported in books are altogether above such trivial details, but folly will come up at every table as surely as purslain and chickweed and sorrel will come up in gardens. This young fellow ought to have talked philosophy, I know perfectly well; but he didn’t,–he made jokes.
I am willing,–I said,–to exercise your ingenuity in a rational and contemplative manner.–No, I do not proscribe certain forms of philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd or the ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio of the Reverend Father Thomas Sanchez, in his famous tractate, “De Sancto Matrimonio.” I will therefore turn this levity of yours to profit by reading you a rhymed problem, wrought out by my friend the Professor.
THE DEACON’S MASTERPIECE: OR THE WONDERFUL “ONE-HOSS-SHAY.”
A LOGICAL STORY.
Have you heard of the wonderful one-HOSS-shay, That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it—-ah, but stay, I’ll tell you what happened without delay, Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits,– Have you ever heard of that, I say?
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
_Georgius Secundus_ was then alive,– Snuffy old drone from the German hive!
That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock’s army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown.
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.
Now in building of chaises, I tell you what, There is always _somewhere_, a weakest spot,– In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill, In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill, In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace,–lurking still Find it somewhere you must and will,–
Above or below, or within or without,– And that’s the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise _breaks down_, but doesn’t _wear out_,
But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do, With an “I dew vum,” or an “I tell _yeou_,”) He would build one shay to beat the taown ‘n’ the keounty ‘n’ all the kentry raoun’; It should be so built that it _couldn’_ break daown: –“Fur,” said the Deacon, “‘t’s mighty plain Thut the weakes’ place mus’ stan’ the strain; ‘n’ the way t’ fix it, uz I maintain,
Is only jest
To make that place uz strong uz the rest.”
So the Deacon inquired of the village folk Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn’t be split nor bent nor broke,– That was for spokes and floor and sills; He sent for lancewood to make the thills; The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees; The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese, But lasts like iron for things like these; The hubs of logs from the “Settler’s ellum,”– Last of its timber,–they couldn’t sell ’em,– Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way he “put her through.”– “There!” said the Deacon, “naow she’ll dew!”
Do! I tell you, I rather guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less! Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away, Children and grand-children–where were they? But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED;—it came and found The Deacon’s Masterpiece strong and sound. Eighteen hundred increased by ten;–
“Hahnsum kerridge” they called it then. Eighteen hundred and twenty came;–
Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.
Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year Without both feeling and looking queer. In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth. (This is a moral that runs at large;
Take it.–You’re welcome–No extra charge.)
FIRST OF NOVEMBER,–the Earthquake-day.– There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay, A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say. There couldn’t be,–for the Deacon’s art Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn’t a chance for one to start. For the wheels were just as strong as the thills, And the floor was just as strong as the sills, And the panels just as strong as the floor, And the whippletree neither less nor more, And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore, And spring and axle and hub _encore_.
And yet, _as a whole_, it is past a doubt In another hour it will be _worn out_!
First of November, ‘Fifty-five!
This morning the parson takes a drive. Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-hoss-shay, Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
“Huddup!” said the parson.–Off went they.
The parson was working his Sunday’s text,– Had got to _fifthly_, and stopped perplexed At what the—Moses–was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still, Close by the meet’n’-house on the hill. –First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill,– And the parson was sitting upon a rock, At half-past nine by the meet’n’-house-clock,– Just the hour of the Earthquake-shock!
–What do you think the parson found, When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, As if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once,–
All at once, and nothing first,–
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.
–I think there is one habit,–I said to our company a day or two afterwards,–worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories,–_fast_ or _slow_. Man’s chief end was to be a _brick_. When the great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken of as being _a good deal cut up_. Nine-tenths of human existence were summed up in the single word, _bore_. These expressions come to be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy;–you may fill them up with what idea you like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the treasury upon which they are drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi spring up most luxuriantly. Don’t think I undervalue the proper use and application of a cant word or phrase. It adds piquancy to conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce. But it is no better than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear flash phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a three-volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the pictured urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial climate.
—-The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was “rum” to hear me “pitchin’ into fellers” for “goin’ it in the slang line,” when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.
—-I replied with my usual forbearance.–Certainly, to give up the algebraic symbol, because _a_ or _b_ is often a cover for ideal nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed sensation, (as it supposed,) all of which could have been sufficiently explained by the participle–_bored_. I have seen a country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a brother-minister’s discourse which would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped sophomore in the one word–_slow_. Let us discriminate, and be shy of absolute proscription. I am omniverbivorous by nature and training. Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.
Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something. They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them. They are useful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, which, but for them, would deteriorate, and become, what some old fools would have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and art. Yes, I like dandies well enough,–on one condition.
—-What is that, Sir?–said the divinity-student.
—-That they have pluck. I find that lies at the bottom of all true dandyism. A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him, looks very silly. But if he turns red in the face and knotty in the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his assailants, throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned jacket, if necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened Astyanax. You remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were his best officers. The “Sunday blood,” the super-superb sartorial equestrian of our annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous. But such fellows as Brummel and D’Orsay and Byron are not to be snubbed quite so easily. Look out for “la main de fer sous le gant de velours” (which I printed in English the other day without quotation-marks, thinking whether any _scarabaeus criticus_ would add this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers,–which he didn’t do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London language, and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the same). A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a decided dash of dandyism about them. There was Alcibiades, the “curled son of Clinias,” an accomplished young man, but what would be called a “swell” in these days. There was Aristoteles, a very distinguished writer, of whom you have heard,–a philosopher, in short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again. Regular dandy, he was. So was Marcus Antonius: and though he lost his game, he played for big stakes, and it wasn’t his dandyism that spoiled his chance. Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar or a poet, but he was one of the same sort. So was Sir Humphrey Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly, if I am not forgetful. Yes,–a dandy is good for something as such; and dandies such as I was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle,–aye, and left it swinging to this day.–Still, if I were you, I wouldn’t go to the tailor’s, on the strength of these remarks, and run up a long bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your next suit. _Elegans “nascitur, non fit._” A man is born a dandy, as he is born a poet. There are heads that can’t wear hats; there are necks that can’t fit cravats; there are jaws that can’t fill out collars–(Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are _tournures_ nothing can humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different styles of dandyism.
We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,–not a _gratia-Dei_, nor a _jure-divino_ one,–but a _de-facto_ upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life as the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,–very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race,–I don’t mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton. When the spring-chickens come to market—-I beg your pardon,–that is not what I was going to speak of. As the young females of each successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other things being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the expensive luxury of beauty. The physical character of the next generation rises in consequence. It is plain that certain families have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and figure, and that in a small circle of city-connections one may sometimes find models of both sexes which one of the rural counties would find it hard to match from all its townships put together. Because there is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life, among the richer classes, you must not overlook the equally obvious fact I have just spoken of,–which in one or two generations more will be, I think, much more patent than just now.
The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded to in connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of its windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach-panels. It is very curious to observe of how small account military folks are held among our Northern people. Our young men must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to count heroism among its virtues. Still I don’t believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when the time comes, if it ever does come.
—-These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual _green fruit_ of all the places in the world. I think so, at any rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like unripe gooseberries–get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the “Proverbial Philosophy,” while the author’s admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises? Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among its fruits. There are literary green-groceries at every corner, which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple. It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr. —- we won’t say who,–editor of the —- we won’t say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents _per_ double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning the fact that the _fifty cents_ was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.
—-Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.
—-I don’t believe one word of what you are saying,–spoke up the angular female in black bombazine.
I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,–I said, and added softly to my next neighbor,–but you prove it.
The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student said, in an undertone,–_Optime dictum_.
Your talking Latin,–said I,–reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them.–You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal to say about “aestivation,” as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to _hibernation_. Intramural festivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:–
AESTIVATION.
_An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor._
In candent ire the solar splendor flames; The foles, languescent, pend from arid rances; His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes, Dorm on the herb with none to supervise, Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine, And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!
To me, alas! no verdurous visions come, Save yon exigous pool’s conferva-scum,– No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades! Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,– Depart,–be off,–excede,–evade,–crump!
–I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains.–No, I am not going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you. But this difference there is: you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is _ferae naturae_. You may have a hut, or know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light half-way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and you might share it. You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in October, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round the walls of your memory’s chamber.–The sea remembers nothing. It is feline. It licks your feet,–its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see their joints,–but their shining is that of a snake’s belly, after all.–In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.
Yet I should love to have a little box by the sea-shore. I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.–And then,–to look at it with that inward eye,–who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at intervals,–to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?
–What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence?–Constitution, first of all. How much snow could you melt in an hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it? Comfort is essential to enjoyment. All sensitive people should remember that