We laughed, and followed, well content. But after he had gone perhaps an eighth of a mile, his speed slackened down to the former jog-trot. Three times we attempted to pass before we really comprehended the fact that that infamous woman was deliberately detaining and annoying us. The third time, when we had so nearly passed them that our horse was turning into the road again, she struck hers up so suddenly and unexpectedly that her wheels almost grazed ours. Of course, understanding her game, we ceased the attempt, having no taste for horse-racing; and nearly all the way from Newburyport to Rowley, she kept up that brigandry, jogging on, and forcing us to jog on, neither going ahead herself nor suffering us to do so,–a perfect and most provoking dog in a manger. Her girl-associate would look behind every now and then to take observations, and I mentally hoped that the frisky Bucephalus would frisk his mistress out of the cart and break her ne– arm, or at least put her shoulder out of joint. If he did, I had fully determined in my own mind to hasten to her assistance, and shame her to death with delicate and assiduous kindness. But fate lingered like all the rest of us. She reached Rowley in safety, and there our roads separated. Whether she stopped there, or drove into Ethiopian wastes beyond, I cannot say; but have no doubt that the milk which she carried into Newburyport to market was blue, the butter frowy, and the potatoes exceedingly small.
Now do you mean to tell me that any man would have been guilty of such a thing? I don’t mean, would have committed such discourtesy to a woman? Of course not; but would a man ever do it to a man? Never. He might try it once or twice, just for fun, just to show off his horse, but he never would have persisted in it till a joke became an insult, not to say a possible injury.
Still, as I was about to say, when that Rowley jade interrupted me, though I have small faith in Di-Vernonism generally, and no large faith in my own personal prowess, I did feel myself equal to the task of holding the reins while our Rosinante walked along an open road to a pump. I therefore resented Halicarnassus’s contemptuous tones, mounted the wagon with as much dignity as wagons allow, sat straight as an arrow on the driver’s seat, took the reins in both hands,–as they used to tell me I must not, when I was a little girl, because that was women’s way, but I find now that men have adopted it, so I suppose it is all right,–and proceeded to show, like Sam Patch, that some things can be done as well as others. Halicarnassus and the Anakim took up their position in line on the other side of the road, hat in hand, watching.
“Go fast, and shame them,” whispered Grande, from the back-seat, and the suggestion jumped with my own mood. It was a moment of intense excitement. To be or not to be. I jerked the lines. Pegasus did not start.
“C-l-k-l-k!” No forward movement.
“Huddup!” Still waiting for reinforcements.
“H-w-e.” (Attempt at a whistle. Dead failure.)
(Sotto voce.) “O you beast!” (Pianiassimo.) “Gee! Haw! haw! haw!” with a terrible jerking of the reins.
A voice over the way, distinctly audible, utters the cabalistic words, “Two forty.” Another voice, as audible, asks, “Which’ll you bet on?” It was not soothing. It did seem as if the imp of the perverse had taken possession of that terrible nag to go and make such a display at such a moment. But as his will rose, so did mine, and my will went up, my whip went with it; but before it came down, Halicarnassus made shift to drone out, “Wouldn’t Flora go faster, if she was untied?”
To be sure, I had forgotten to unfasten him, and there those two men had stood and known it all the time! I was in the wagon, so they were secure from personal violence, but I have a vague impression of some “pet names” flying wildly about in the air in that vicinity. Then we trundled safely down the lane. We were to go in the direction leading away from home,– the horse’s. I don’t think he perceived it at first, but as soon he did snuff the fact, which happened when he had gone perhaps three rods, he quietly turned around and headed the other way, paying no more attention to my reins or my terrific “whoas!” than if I were a sleeping babe. A horse is none of your woman’s-rights men. He is Pauline. He suffers not the woman to usurp authority over him. He never says anything nor votes anything, but declares himself unequivocally by taking things into his own hands, whenever he knows there is nobody but a woman behind him,–and somehow he always does know. After Halicarnassus had turned him back and set him going the right way, I took on a gruff, manny voice, to deceive. Nonsense! I could almost see him snap his fingers at me. He minded my whip no more than he did a fly,–not so much as he did some flies. Grande said she supposed his back was all callous. I acted upon the suggestion, knelt down in the bottom of the wagon, and leaned over the dasher to whip him on his belly, then climbed out on the shafts and snapped about his ears; but he stood it much better than I. Finally I found that by taking the small end of the wooden whip-handle, and sticking it into him, I could elicit a faint flash of light; so I did it with assiduity, but the moderate trot which even that produced was not enough to accomplish my design, which was to outstrip the two men and make them run or beg. The opposing forces arrived at the pump about the same time.
Halicarnassus took the handle, and gave about five jerks. Then the Anakim took it and gave five more. Then they both stopped and wiped their faces.
“What do you suppose this pump was put here for?” asked Halicarnassus.
“A milestone, probably,” replied the Anakim.
Then they resumed their Herculean efforts till the water came, and then they got into the wagon, and we drove into the blackberries once more, where we arrived just in season to escape a thunder-shower, and pile merrily into one of several coaches waiting to convey passengers in various directions as soon as the train should come.
It is very selfish, but fine fun, to have secured your own chosen seat and bestowed your own luggage, and have nothing to do but witness the anxieties and efforts of other people. The exquisite pleasure we enjoyed for fifteen minutes, edified at the last by hearing one of our coachmen call out, “Here, Rosey, this way!”–whereupon a manly voice, in the darkness, near us, soliloquized, “Respectful way of addressing a judge of the Supreme Court!” and, being interrogated, the voice informed us that “Rosey” was the vulgate for Judge Rosecranz; whereupon Halicarnassus over the rampant democracy by remarking that the diminutive was probably a term of endearment rather than familiarity; whereupon the manly voice–if I might say it– snickered audibly in the darkness, and we all relapsed into silence. But could anything be more characteristic of a certain phase of the manners of our great and glorious country? Where are the Trollopes? Where is Dickens? Where is Basil Hall?
It is but a dreary ride to Lake George on a dark and rainy evening, unless people like riding for its own sake, as I do. If there are suns and stars and skies, very well. If there are not, very well too: I like to ride all the same. I like everything in this world but Saratoga. Once or twice our monotony was broken up by short halts before country inns. At one an excitement was going on. “Had a casualty here this afternoon,” remarked a fresh passenger, as soon as he was fairly seated. A casualty is a windfall to a country village. It is really worth while to have a head broken occasionally, for the wholesome stirring-up it gives to the heads that are not broken. On the whole, I question whether collisions and collusions do not cause as much good as harm. Certainly, people seem to take the most lively satisfaction in receiving and imparting all the details concerning them. Our passenger-friend opened his budget with as much complacence as ever did Mr. Gladstone or Disraeli, and with a confident air of knowing that he was going not only to enjoy a piece of good-fortune himself, but to administer a great gratification to us. Our “casualty” turned out to be the affair of a Catholic priest, of which our informer spoke only in dark hints and with significant shoulder-shrugs and eyebrow-elevations, because it was “not exactly the thing to get out, you know”; but if it wasn’t to get out, why did he let it out? and so from my dark corner I watched him as a cat does a mouse, and the lamp-light shone full upon him, and I understood every word and shrug, and I am going to tell it all to the world. I translated that the holy father had been “skylarking” in a boat, and in gay society had forgotten his vows of frugality and abstinence and general mortification of the flesh, and had become, not very drunk, but drunk enough to be dangerous, when he came ashore and took a horse in his hands, and so upset his carriage, and gashed his temporal artery, and came to grief, which is such a casualty as does not happen every day, and I don’t blame people for making the most of it. Then the moral was pointed, the tale adorned, and the impression deepened, solemnized, and struck home by the fact that the very horse concerned in the “casualty” was to be fastened behind our coach, and the whole population came out with interns and umbrellas to tie him on,–all but one man, who was deaf, and stood on the piazza, anxious and eager to know everything that had been and was still occurring, and yet sorry to give trouble, and so compromising the matter and making it worse, as compromisers generally do, by questioning everybody with a deprecating, fawning air.
Item. We shall all, if we live long enough, be deaf, but we need not be meek about it. I for one am determined to walk up to people and demand what they are saying at the point of the bayonet. Deafness, if it must be so, but independence at any rate.
And when the fulness of time is come, we alight at Fort-William-Henry Hotel, and all night long through the sentient woods I hear the booming of Johnson’s cannon, the rattle of Dieskan’s guns, and that wild war-whoop, more terrible than all. Again old Monro watches from his fortress-walls the steadily approaching foe, and looks in vain for help, save to his own brave heart. I see the light of conquest shining in his foeman’s eye, darkened by the shadow of the fate that waits his coming on a bleak Northern hill but, generous in the hour of victory, he shall not be less noble in defeat,–for to generous hearts all generous hearts are friendly, whether they stand face to face or side by side.
Over the woods and the waves, when the morning breaks, like a bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, comes up the sun in his might and crowns himself king. All the summer day, from morn to dewy eve, we sail over the lakes of Paradise. Blue waters, and blue sky, soft clouds and green islands, and fair, fruitful shores, sharp-pointed hills, long, gentle slopes and swells, and the lights and shadows of far-stretching woods; and over all the potence of the unseen past, the grand, historic past,–soft over all the invisible mantle which our fathers flung at their departing,–the mystic effluence of the spirits that trod these wilds and sailed these waters,–the courage and the fortitude, the hope that battled against hope, the comprehensive outlook, the sagacious purpose, the resolute will, the unhesitating self-sacrifice, the undaunted devotion which has made this heroic ground; cast these into your own glowing crucible, O gracious friend, and crystallize for yourself such a gem of days as shall worthily be set forever in your crown of the beatitudes.
PART III.
Sometimes I become disgusted with myself. Not very often, it is true, for I don’t understand the self-abhorrence that I occasionally see long drawn out in the strictly private printed diaries of good dead people. A man’s self-knowledge, as regards his Maker, is a matter that lies only between his Maker and himself, of which no printed or written (scarcely even spoken) words can give, or ought to give, a true transcript; but in respect of our relations to other people I suppose we may take tolerably accurate views, and state them without wickedness, if it comes in the way; and since the general trend of opinion seems to be towards excessive modesty, I will sacrifice myself to the good of society, and say that, in the main, I think I am a rather “nice” sort of person. Of course I do a great many things, and say a great many things, and think a great many things, that I ought not; but when I think of the sins that I don’t commit,–the many times when I feel cross enough to “bite a ten-penny nail in two,” and only bite my lips,–the sacrifices I make for other people, and don’t mention it, and they themselves never know it,–the quiet cheerfulness I maintain when the fire goes out, or unexpected guests arrive and there is no bread in the house, or my manuscript is respectfully declined by that infatuated editor,– when I reflect upon these things, and a thousand others like unto them, I must say, I am lost in admiration of my own virtues. You may not like me, but that is a mere difference of taste. At any rate, I like myself very well, and find myself very good company. Many a laugh, and “lots” or “heaps” (according as you are a Northern or a Southern provincial) of conversation we have all alone, and are usually on exceeding good terms, which is a pleasure, even when other people like me, and an immense consolation when they don’t. But as I was saying, I do sometimes fall out with myself, and with human nature in general (and, in fact, I rather think the secret of self-complacence lurks somewhere hereabouts,–in a mental assumption that our virtues are our own, but our faults belong to the race). But to think that we were so puny and puerile that we could not stand the beauty that breathed around us! I do not mean that it killed us, but it drained us. It did not cease to be beautiful, but we ceased to be overpowered. When the day began, eye and soul were filled with the light that never was on sea or shore. We spoke low and little, gazing with throbbing hearts, breathless, receptive, solemn, and before twelve o’clock we flatted out and made jests. This is humiliation,–that our dullard souls cannot keep up to the pitch of sublimity for two hours; that we could sail through Glory and Beauty, through Past and Present, and laugh. Low as I sank with the rest, though, I do believe I held out the longest: but what can one frail pebble do against a river? “How pretty cows look in a landscape,” I said; for you know, even if you must come down, it is better to roll down an inclined plane than to drop over a precipice; and I thought, since I saw that descent was inevitable, I would at least engineer the party gently through aesthetics to puns. So I said, “How pretty cows look in a landscape, so calm and reflective, and sheep harmoniously happy in the summer-tide.”
“Yes,” said the Anakim, who is New Hampshire born; “but you ought to see the New Hampshire sheep, if you want the real article.”
“I don’t,” I responded. “I only want the picture.”
“Ever notice the difference between Vermont and New Hampshire sheep?” struck up Halicarnassus, who must always put in his oar.
“No,” I said, “and I don’t believe there is any.”
“Pooh! Tell New Hampshire sheep as far off as you can see ’em,” he persisted, “by their short legs and long noses. Short legs to bring ’em near the grass, and long noses to poke under the rocks and get it.”
“Yes, my boy, yes,” said the Anakim pleasantly. “I O U 1”
“He hath made everything beautiful in his time,” murmured Grande, partly because, gazing at the distant prospect, she thought so, and partly as a praiseworthy attempt, in her turn, to pluck us out of the slough into which we had fallen.
“I have heard,” said Halicarnassus, who is always lugging in little scraps of information apropos to everything,–“I have been told that Dr. Alexander was so great an admirer of the Proverbs of Solomon, that he used to read them over every three months.”
“I beg your pardon,” I interposed, glad of the opportunity to correct and humiliate him, “but that was not one of the Proverbs of Solomon.”
“Who said it was?” asked the Grand Mogul, savagely.
“Nobody; but you thought it was when she said it,” answered his antagonist, coolly.
“And whose proverb is it, my Lady Superior?”
“It is in Ecclesiastes,” I said.
“Well, Ecclesiastes is next door to Solomon. It’s all one.” Halicarnassus can creep through the smallest knot-hole of any man of his size it has ever been my lot to meet, provided there is anything on the other side he wishes to get at. If there is not, and especially if anything is there which he wishes to shun, a four hundred and fifty pounder cannot crash a hole large enough for you to push him through. By such a pitiful chink as that did his Infallible Highness wriggle himself out of the range of my guns, and pursue his line of remark.
“But I really cannot say that I have been able to detect the excessive superiority of Solomon’s proverbs. If it were not for the name of it, I think Sancho Panza’s much better.”
“Taisez-vous. Hold your tongue,” I said, without mitigation. If there is anything I cannot away with, it is trivial apostasy. I tolerate latitudinarianism when it is hereditary. Where people’s fathers and mothers before them have been Pagans, and Catholics, and Mohammedans, you don’t blame THEM for being so. You regret their error, and strive to lead them back into the right path; only they are not inflammatory. But to have people go out from the faith of their fathers with malice aforethought and their eyes open–well, that is not exactly what I mean either. That is a sorrowful, but not necessarily an exasperating thing. What I mean is this: I see people Orthodox from their cradles, (and probably only from their cradles, certainly not from their brains,) who think it is something pretty to become Unitarianistic. They don’t become Unitarians, as they never were Orthodox, because they have not thought enough or sense enough to become or to be anything; but they like to make a stir and attract attention. They seem to think it indicates great liberality of character, and great breadth of view, to be continually flinging out against their own faith, ridiculing this, that, and the other point held by their Church, and shocking devout and simple-minded Orthodox by their quasi-profanity. Now for good Orthodox Christians I have a great respect; and for good Unitarian Christians I have a great respect; and for sincere, sad seekers, who can find no rest for the sole of their foot, I have a great respect; but for these Border State men, who are neither here nor there, on whom you never can lay your hand, because they are twittering everywhere, I have a profound contempt. I wish people to be either one thing or another. I desire them to believe something, and know what it is, and stick to it. I have no patience with this modern outcry against creeds. You hear people inveigh against them, without for a moment thinking what they are. They talk as if creeds were the head and front of human offending, the infallible sign of bigotry and hypocrisy, incompatible alike with piety and wisdom. Do not these wise men know that the thinkers and doers of the earth, in overwhelming majority, have been creed men? Creeds may exist without religion, but neither religion, nor philosophy, nor politics, nor society, can exist without creeds. There must be a creed in the head, or there cannot be religion in the heart. You must believe that Deity exists, before you can reverence Deity. You must believe in the fact of humanity, or you cannot love your fellows. A creed is but the concentration, the crystallization, of belief. Truth is of but little worth till it is so crystallized. Truth lying dissolved in oceans of error and nonsense and ignorance makes but a feeble diluent. It swashes everywhere, but to deluge, not to benefit. Precipitate it, and you have the salt of the earth. Political opposition, inorganic, is but a blind, cumbrous, awkward, inefficient thing; but construct a platform, and immediately it becomes lithe, efficient, powerful. Even before they set foot on these rude shores, our forefathers made a compact, and a nation was born in that day. It is on creeds that strong men are nourished, and that which nourishes the leaders into eminence is necessary to keep the masses from sinking. A man who really thinks, will think his way into light. He may turn many a somersault, but he will come right side up at last. But people in general do not think, and if they refuse to be walled in by other people’s thoughts, they inevitably flop and flounder into pitiable prostration. So important is it, that a poor creed is better than none at all. Truth, even adulterated as we get it, is a tonic. Bring forward something tangible, something positive, something that means something, and it will do. But this flowery, misty, dreamy humanitarianism,–I say humanitarianism, because I don’t know what that is, and I don’t know what the thing I am driving at is, so I put the two unknown quantities together in a mathematical hope that minus into minus may give plus,–this milk-and-watery muddle of dreary negations, that remits the world to its original fluidic state of chaos, I spew it out of my mouth. It was not on such pap our Caesars fed that made them grow so great. I believe that the common people of early New England were such lusty men, because they strengthened themselves by gnawing at their tough old creeds. Give one something to believe, and he can get at it and believe it; but set out butting your head against nothing, and the chances are that you will break your neck. Take a good stout Christian, or a good sturdy Pagan, and you find something to bring up against; but with nebulous vapidists you are always slumping through and sprawling everywhere.
Of course, I do not mean that sincere and sensible people never change nor modify their faith. I wish to say, for its emphasis, if you will allow me, that they never do anything else; but generally the change is a gradual and natural one,– a growth, not a convulsion,–a reformation, not a revolution. When it is otherwise, it is a serious matter, not to be lightly done or flippantly discussed. If you really had a religious belief, it threw out roots and rootlets through all your life. It sucked in strength from every source. It intertwined itself through love and labor, through suffering and song, about every fibre of your soul. You cannot pull it up or dig it up, or in any way displace it, without setting the very foundations of your life a-quivering. True, it may be best that you should do this. If it was but a cumberer of the ground, tear it up, root and branch, and plant in its stead the seeds of that tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. But such things are done with circumspection,–not as unto man. If you are gay and jovial about it, if you feel no darts of torture flashing through be fastnesses of your life, do not flatter yourself that you are making radical changes. You are only pulling up pig-weed to set out smart-weed, and the less you say about it the better.
Now Halicarnassus is really just as Orthodox as I. He would not lie or steal any quicker than I. He would not willingly sacrifice one jot or tittle of his faith, and yet he is always startling you with small heresies. He is like a calf tied to a tree in the orchard by a long rope. In the exuberance of his glee Bossy starts from the post, tail up, in a hand gallop. You would think, from the way he sets out, that he was going to race around the whole orchard, and probably he thinks he is himself. But by the time he is fairly under full headway, his rope tightens up with a jerk, and away he goes heels over head. The only difference is, that Halicarnassus knows the length of his tether, and always fetches up in time to escape an overturn; but other people do not know it, and they imagine he is going pell-mell into infidelity. Now I was determined to have none of this trash in a steamboat. One has no desire to encounter superfluous risks in a country where life and limb are held on so uncertain a tenure as in this. There are quite chances enough of shipwreck without having any Jonahs aboard. Besides, in point of the fine arts, heterodoxy is worse than puns. So I headed him off at the first onset. But I should not have been so entirely successful in the attempt had I not been assisted by a pair of birds who came to distract his and our attention from a neighboring thicket. They wheeled–the gentle, graceful, sly, tantalizing things–in circles and ellipses, now skimming along the surface of the water, now swooping away in great smooth curves, then darting off in headlong flight and pursuit. “My kingdom for a gun!” exclaimed Halicarnassus with amateur ardor.
“I am glad you have no gun,” said compassionate Grande. “Why should you kill them?”
“Do not be alarmed,” I said, soothingly, “a distaff would be as deadly in his hands.”
“Do you speak by the book, Omphale?” asked the Anakim, who still carried those New Hampshire sheep on his back.
“We went a-ducking once down in Swampshire,” I answered.
“Did you catch any?” queried Grande.
“Duckings? no,” said Halicarnassus.
“Nor ducks either,” I added. “He made great ado with his guns, and his pouches, and his fanfaronade, and knocking me with his elbows and telling me to keep still, when no mouse could be more still than I, and after all he did not catch one.”
“Only fired once or twice,” said Halicarnassus, “just for fun, and to show her how to do it.”
“How not to do it, you mean,” said the Anakim.
“You fired forty times,” I said quietly, but firmly, “and the ducks would come out and look at you as interested as could be. You know you didn’t scare a little meadow-hen. They knew you couldn’t hit.”
“Trade off your ducks against my sheep, and call it even?” chuckled the Anakim; and so, chatting and happy, we glided along, enjoying, not entranced, comfortable, but not sublime, content to drink in the sunny sweetness of the summer day, happy only from the pleasant sense of being, tangling each other in silly talk out of mere wantonness, purling up bubbles of airy nothings in sheer effervescence of animal delight; falling into periodic fits of useful knowledge, under the influence of which we consulted our maps and our watches in a conjoint and clamorous endeavor to locate ourselves, which would no sooner be satisfactorily accomplished than something would turn up and set our calculations and islands adrift, and we would have to begin new. Dome Island we made out by its shape, unquestionably; Whortleberry we hazarded on the strength of its bushes; “Hen and Chicks,” by a biggish island brooding half a dozen little ones; Flea Island, from a certain snappishness of aspect; Half-Way Island, by our distance from dinner; Anthony’s Nose, by its unlikeness to anything else, certainly not from its resemblance to noses in general, let alone the individual nose of Mark Antony, or Mad Anthony, or any Anthony between. And then we disembarked and posted ourselves on the coach-top for a six-mile ride to Champlain; and Grande said, her face still buried in the map, “Here on the left is ‘Trout Brook’ running into the lake, and a cross on it, and ‘Lt. Howe fell, 1758.’ That is worth seeing.”
“Yes,” I said, “America loved his brother.”
“America loved HIM,” howled Halicarnassus, thinking to correct me and avenge himself. Now I knew quite well that America loved him, and did not love his brother, but with the mention of his name came into my mind the tender, grieved surprise of that pathetic little appeal, and I just said thought it aloud,– assuming historic knowledge enough in my listeners to prevent misconception. But to this day Halicarnassus persists in thinking or at least in asserting, that I tripped over Lord Howe. As he does not often get such a chance, I let him comfort himself with it as much as he can; but that is the way with your whippersnapper critics. They put on their “specs,” and pounce down upon some microscopic mote, which they think to be ignorance, but which is really the diamond-dust of imagination. “But let us see the place,” said Grande. “We must drive within sight of it.”
“Yes,” I said. “Halicarnassus, ask the driver to he sure to tell us where Lord Howe fell.”
“Fell into the brook,” said that Oracle, and sat as stiff as a post.
Ticonderoga,–up-hill and down-hill for six miles, white houses and dark, churches and shops, and playing children and loungers, and mills, and rough banks and haggard woods, just like any other somewhat straggling country village. O no! O no! There are few like this. _I_ have seen no other. Churches and shops and all the paraphernalia of busy, bustling common life there may be, but we have no eyes for such. Yonder on the green high plain which we have already entered is a simple guide-post, guiding you, not on to Canada, to New York, to Boston, but back into the dead century that lived so fiercely and lies so still. We stand on ground over-fought by hosts of heroes. Here rise still the breastworks, grass-grown and harmless now, behind which men awaited bravely the shock of furious onset, before which men rushed as bravely to duty and to death. Slowly we wind among the little squares of intrenchments, whose deadliest occupants now are peaceful cows and sheep, slowly among tall trees,–ghouls that thrust out their slimy, cold fingers everywhere, battening on horrid banquets,–nay, sorrowful trees, not so. Your gentle, verdant vigor nourishes no lust of blood. Rather you sprang in pity from the cold ashes at your feet, that every breeze quivering through your mournful leaves may harp a requiem for Polydorus. Alighting at the landing-place we stroll up the hill and among the ruins of the old forts, and breast ourselves the surging battle-tide. For war is not to this generation what it has been. The rust of long disuse has been rubbed off by the iron hand of fate,–shall we not say, rather, by the good hand of our God upon us?–and the awful word stands forth once more, red-lettered and real. Marathon, Waterloo, Lexington, are no longer the conflict of numbers against numbers, nor merely of principles against principles, but of men against men. And as we stand on this silent hill, the prize of so many struggles, our own hearts swell with the hopes and sink with the fears that its green old bluffs have roused. Up from yon water-side came stealing the Green-Mountain Boys, with their grand and grandiloquent leader, and, at the very gateway where we stand, as tradition says, (et potius Dii numine firment,) he thundered out, with brave, barbaric voice, the imperious summons, “In the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress.” No wonder the startled, half-dressed commander is confounded, and “the pretty face of his wife peering over his shoulder” is filled with terror. Well may such a motley crew frighten the fair Europeanne. “Frenchmen I know, and Indians I know, but who are ye?” Ah! Sir Commander, so bravely bedight, these are the men whom your parliamentary knights are to sweep with their brooms into the Atlantic Ocean. Bring on your besoms, fair gentlemen; yonder is Champlain, and a lake is as good to drown in as an ocean. Look at them, my lords, and look many times before you leap. They are a rough set, roughly clad, a stout-limbed, stout-hearted race, insubordinate, independent, irrepressible, almost as troublesome to their friends as to their foes; but there is good stock in them,–brain and brawn, and brain and brawn will yet carry the day over court and crown, in the name of the right, which shall overpower all things. We clamber down into arched passages, choked with debris, over floors tangled with briers, and join in the wild wassail of the bold outlaw, fired by his victorious career. We clamber up the rugged sides and wind around to the headland. Brilliant in the “morning-shine,” exultant in the pride and pomp of splendid preparation, ardent for conquest and glory, Abercrombie sails down the lovely inland sea, to sail back dismantled and disgraced. The retrieving fleet of Amherst follows, as brilliant and as eager,–to gain the victory of numbers over valor, but to lose its fruit, as many a blood- bought prize has since been lost, snatched from the conqueror’s hand by the traitor, doubt. But this is only the prologue of our great drama. Allen leaps first upon the scene, bucklered as no warrior ever was since the days of Homer or before. Then Arnold comes flying in, wresting laurels from defeat,–Arnold, who died too late. Here Schuyler walks up at night, his military soul vexed within him by the sleeping guards and the intermittent sentinels, his gentle soul harried by the rustic ill-breeding of his hinds, his magnanimous soul cruelly tortured by the machinations of jealousy and envy and evil-browed ambition. Yonder on the hill Burgoyne’s battery threatens death, and Lincoln avenges us of Burgoyne. Let the curtain fall; a bloodier scene shall follow.
* * * * *
And then we re-embark on Lake Champlain, and all the summer afternoon sail down through phantom fleets, under the frowning ramparts of phantom forts, past grim rows of deathful-throated cannon, through serried hosts of warriors, with bright swords gleaming and strong arms lifted and stern lips parted; but from lips of man or throat of cannon comes no sound. A thousand oars strike through the leaping waves, but not a plash breaks on the listening ear. A thousand white sails swell to the coming breeze, that brings glad greeting from the inland hills, but nothing breaks the silences of time.
And of all beautiful things that could have been thought of or hoped for, what should come to crown our queen of days but a thunder-storm, a most real and vivid thunder-storm, marshalling up from the west its grand, cumulose clouds; black, jagged, bulging with impatient, prisoned thunder biding their time, sharp and fierce against the brilliant sky, spreading swiftly over the heavens, fusing into one great gray pall, dropping a dim curtain of rain between us and the land, closing down upon us a hollow hemisphere pierced with shafts of fire and deafening with unseen thunders, wresting us off from the friendly skies and shores, wrapping us into an awful solitude. O Princess Rohan, come to me! come from the hidden caves, where you revel in magical glories, come up from your coralline caves in the mysterious sea, come from those Eastern lands of nightingale, roses, and bulbuls, where your tropical soul was born and rocked in the lap of the lotus! O sunny Southern beauty, lost amongst Northern snows, flush forth in your mystical splendor from the ruby wine of Hafiz, float down from your clouds of the sunset with shining garments of light, open the golden door of your palace domed in a lily, glide over these inky waves, O my queen of all waters, come to me wherever you are, with your pencil dipped in darkness, starry with diamond dews and spanned with the softness of rainbows, and set on this land-locked Neptune your cross of the Legion of Honor, assure to the angry god his bowl in Valhalla, that the thunder-vexed lake may be soothed with its immortality!
But the storm passes on, the clouds sweep magnificently away, and the glowing sky flings up its arch of promise. The lucent waters catch its gleam and spread in their depths a second arch as beautiful and bright. So, haloed with magnificence, an earth-born bark on fairy waters, completely circled by this glory of the skies and seas, we pass through our triumphal gateway “deep into the dying day,” and are presently doused in the mud at Rouse’s Point. Rouse’s Point is undoubtedly a very good place, and they were good women there, and took good care of us; but Rouse’s Point is a dreadful place to wake up in when you have been in Dream-Land,–especially when a circus is there, singing and shouting under your windows all night long. I wonder when circus-people sleep, or do they not sleep at all, but keep up a perpetual ground and lofty tumbling? From Rouse’s Point through Northern New York, through endless woods and leagues of brilliant fire-weed, the spirit of the dead flames that raved through the woods, past corn-fields that looked rather “skimpy,” certainly not to be compared to a corn-field I wot of, whose owner has a mono-mania on the subject of corn and potatoes, and fertilizes his fields with his own blood and brain,–a snort, a rush, a shriek, and the hundred miles is accomplished, and we are at Ogdensburg, a smart little town, like all American towns, with handsome residences up, and handsomer ones going up, with haberdashers’ shops, and lawyers’ offices, and judges’ robes, and most hospitable citizens,–one at least,–and all the implements and machinery of government and self-direction, not excepting a huge tent for political speaking and many political speeches, and everybody alert, public-spirited, and keyed up to the highest pitch. All this is interesting, but we have seen it ever since we were born, and we look away with wistful eyes to the north; for this broad, majestic river stretching sky-ward like the ocean, is the Lawrence. Up this river, on the day of St. Lawrence, three hundred years ago, came the mariner of St. Malo,–turning in from the sea till his straining eyes beheld on both sides land, and planted the lilies of France. Now it is the boundary line of empires. Those green banks on the other side are a foreign country, and for the first time I am not monarch of all I survey. That fine little city, with stately trees towering from the midst of its steeples and gray roofs, is Prescott. At the right rise the ramparts of Fort Wellington, whence cannon-balls came hissing over to Ogdensburg some fifty years ago. We stand within a pretty range, suppose they should try it again! Farther on still is a plain, gray tower, where a handful of “patriots” intrenched and destroyed themselves with perverse martyrophobia in a foolish and fruitless endeavor. The afternoon is before us; suppose we row over; here is a boat, and doubtless a boatman, or the ferry-steamer will be here directly. By no means; a ferry-steamer is thoroughly commonplace; you can ferry-steam anywhere. Row, brothers, row, perhaps you will never have the chance again. Lightly, lightly row through the green waters of the great St. Lawrence, through the sedge and rank grass that wave still in his middle depths, over the mile and a half of great rushing billows that rock our little boat somewhat roughly: but I am not afraid,–for I can swim.
“You can, can you?” says the Anakim, incredulously.
“Indeed I can, can’t I, Halicarnassus?” appealingly.
“Like a brick!” ejaculates that worthy, pulling away at the oars, and on we shoot, steadily nearing the rustic stone city that looks so attractive, so different from our hasty, brittle, shingly American half-minute houses,–massive, permanent, full of character and solid worth. And now our tiny craft butts against the pier, and we ascend from the Jesuit river and stand on British soil. No stars and stripes here, but Saint George and his dragon fight out their never-ending brawl. No war, no volunteering, no Congress here; but peace and a Parliament and a Queen, God bless her! and this is her realm, a kingdom. Now if it had been a year ago I do not know that I should not, like Columbus, have knelt to kiss these dingy stones, so much did I love and reverence England, and whatever bore the dear English name. But we–they, rather–have changed all that. Among the great gains of this memorable year,–among the devotions, the sacrifices, the heroisms,–all the mighty, noble, and ennobling deeds by which we stand enriched forevermore,–there broods the shadow of one irreparable loss,– the loss of England. Success or failure can make no difference there. English gold, English steel, English pluck, stand today as always; but English integrity, English staunchness, English love, where are they? Just where Prescott is, now that we have come to it; for the substantial stone city a mile and a half away turns out to be a miserable little dirty, butty, smutty, stagnant owl-cote when you get into it. What we took for stone is stolidity. It is old, but its age is squalid, not picturesque. We stumble through the alleys that answer for streets, and come to the “Dog and Duck,” a dark, dingy ale-room, famous for its fine ale, we are told, or perhaps it was beer: I don’t remember. It is not in male nature to go by on the other side of such a thing, and we enter,–they to test the beverage, Grande and I to make observation of the surroundings. We take position in the passage between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon child, with bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door, and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward glances over his shoulder. The parlor is taken bodily out of old English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,–homely, clean, and comfortless. A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought into its crocheted gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom. This I cannot stand. Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh. “O, you did Uncle-Tom it famously,” I hurl out, doubling my fist at the British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy. “I remember those days. O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom. You are a famous friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls, and your Lord Shaftesburys, and your Duchess of Sutherlands! Cry your pretty eyes out over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted British women. Write appealing letters to your sisters over the waters, affectionate, conscientious kindred; canonize your saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and Christmas slippers,–we know how to take you now; we have found out what all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle–in pounds, shillings, and pence.” But the beer-men curtail my harangue, so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion, and, leaving this British institution, proceed to investigate another British institution,–the undaunted English army, in its development in Fort Wellington. A wall shuts the world out from those sacred premises; a stile lets the world in,–over which stile we step and stand on the fort grounds. A party of soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of the pasture,– perhaps I ought to say parade-ground. As no sentinel accosts us, we hunt up one, and inquire if the fort is accessible. He does not know, but inclines to the opinion that it is. We go up the hill, walk round the wall, and mark well her bulwarks, till we come to a great gate, but it refuses to turn. The walls are too high to scale, besides possible pickets on the other side. I have no doubt in the world that we could creep under, for the gate has shrunk since it was made, and needs to have a tuck let down; but what would become of dignity? Grande and the Anakim make a reconnaissance in force, to see if some unwary postern-gate may not permit entrance. Halicarnassus fumbles in his pockets for edge-tools, as if Queen Victoria, who rules the waves, on whose dominions the sun never sets, whose morning drum-beat encircles the world, would leave the main gate of her main fort on one of the frontiers of her empire so insecurely defended that a single American can carry it with his fruit-knife. Such ideas I energetically enforce, till I am cut short by the slow retrogression of the massive gate on ponderous hinges turning.
“What about the fruit-knife?” inquires Halicarnassus as I pass in. The reconnoitering party return to report a bootless search, and are electrified to find the victory already gained.
“See the good of having been through college,” exults Halicarnassus.
“How did you do it?” asks Grande, admiringly.
“By genius and assiduity,” answers Halicarnassus.
“And lifting the latch,” I append, for I have been examining the mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by assault and battery on the latch? Halicarnassus hit upon it by mere accident, and I therefore remorselessly expose him. Then we saunter about the place, and, seeing a woman eying us suspiciously from an elevated window, we show the white feather and ask her if we may come in, which, seeing we have been in for some ten minutes, we undoubtedly may; and then we mount the ramparts and peer into Labrador and Hudson’s Bay and the North Pole, and, turning to a softer sky, gaze from a “foreign clime” upon our own dear land, home of freedom, hope of the nations, eye-sore of the Devil, rent by one set of his minions, and ridiculed by another, but coming out of her furnace-fires, if God please and man will, heartier and holier, because freer and truer, than ever before. O my country, beautiful and beloved, my hope, my desire, my joy, and my crown of rejoicing, immeasurably dearer in the agony of your bloody sweat than in the high noon of your proud prosperity! standing for the first time beyond your borders, and looking upon you from afar, now and forevermore out of a full heart I breathe to you benedictions.
PART IV.
Down the St. Lawrence in a steamer, up the St. Lawrence on the maps, we sail through another day full of eager interest. Everything is fresh, new, novel. Is it because we are in high latitudes that the river and the country look so high? I could fancy that we are on a plateau, overlooking a continent. Now the water expands on all sides like an ocean meeting the sky, and now we are sailing through hay-fields and country orchards, as if the St. Lawrence had taken a turn into our back-yard. We hug the Canada shore, and thick woods come down the banks dipping their summer tresses in the cool Northern river,–broad pasture-lands stretch away, away from river to sky,–brown, dubious villages sail by at long intervals. On the distant southern shore America has stationed her outposts, and unfrequent spires attest a civilized, if remote life. In the sunny day all things are sunny, save when a Claude Lorraine glass lends a dark, rich mystery to every hill and cloud. The Claude Lorraine glass is a rara avus, and not only gives new lights to the scenery, but brings out the human nature on board in great force. The Anakim tells us of one man who asked him in a confidential aside, if it was a show, whereat we all laugh. Even I laugh at the man’s ignorance,–I, a thief, an assassin, a traitor, who six weeks ago had never heard of a Claude Lorraine glass; but nobody can tell who has not tried it how much credit one gets for extensive knowledge, if only he holds his tongue. In all my life I am afraid I shall never learn as much as I have been inferred to know simply because I kept still.
Down the St. Lawrence in an English steamer, where everything is not so much English as John Bull-y. The servants at the table are thoroughly and amusingly yellow-plush,–if that is the word I want, and if it is not that, it is another; for I am quite sure of my idea, though not of the name that belongs to it. The servants are smooth and sleek and intense. They serve as if it was their business, and a weighty business at that, demanding all the energies of a created being. Accordingly they give their minds to it. The chieftain yonder, in white choker and locks profusely oiled and brushed into a resplendent expanse, bears Atlas on his shoulders. His lips are compressed, his brow contracted, his eyes alert, his whole manner as absorbed as if it were a nation, and not a plum-pudding, that he is engineering through a crisis. Lord Palmerston is nothing to him, I venture to say. I know the only way to accomplish anything is to devote yourself to it; still I cannot conceive how anybody can give himself up so completely to a dinner, even if it is his business and duty. However, I have nothing to complain of in the results, for we are well served, only for a trifle too much obviousness. Order and system are undoubtedly good things, but I don’t like to see an ado made about them. Our waiters stand behind, at given stations, with prophetic dishes in uplifted hands, and, at a certain signal from the arch-waiter, down they come like the clash of fate. Now I suppose this is all very well, but for me I never was fond of military life. Under my housekeeping we browse indiscriminately. When we have nothing else to do, we have a meal. If it is nearer noon than morning, we call it dinner. If it is nearer night than noon, we call it supper, unless we have fashionable friends with us, and then we call it dinner, and the other thing lunch; and ten to one it is so scattered about that it has no name at all. At breakfast you will be likely to find me on the door-step with a bowl of bread and milk, while Halicarnassus sits on the bench opposite and brandishes a chicken-bone with the cat mewing furiously for it at his feet. A surreptitious doughnut is sweet and dyspeptic over the morning paper, and gingerbread is always to be had by systematic and intelligent foraging. Consequently this British drill and discipline are thoroughly alarming to me, and I am surprised and grateful to find that we are not individually regulated by a time-table. I expect a drum-beat;–one, incision; two, mastication; three, deglutition;–but what tyranny does one not expect to find under monarchical institutions? Put that into your next volume, intelligent British tourist.
Down the St. Lawrence with millionaires, and artists, and gay young girls, and sallow-faced invalids, and weary clergymen and men of business who do not know what to do with their unwonted leisure and find pleasuring a most unmitigated bore, and mothers with sick children, dear little unnatural pale faces and heavy eyes,–may your angels bring you health, tiny ones!– and, most interesting of all to me, a party of priests and nuns on their travels. They sit near me, and I can see them without turning my head, and hear them without marked listening. The priests are sleekheaded men, and such as sleep o’ nights, ruddy, rotund, robust, with black hair and white bands, well-dressed, well-fed, well-to-do, jolly, gentlemanly, clique-y, sensible, shrewd, au fait. The nuns–now I am vexed to look at them. Are nuns expected to be any more dead to the world than priests? Then I should like to know why they must make such frights of themselves, while priests go about like Christians? Why shall a nun walk black, and gaunt, and lank, with a white towel wrapped around her face, all possible beauty and almost all attractiveness despoiled by her hideously unbecoming dress, while priests wear their hair and their hats and their coats and their collars like any other gentleman? Why are the women to be set up as targets, while the men may pass unnoticed and unknown? If the woman’s head must be shorn and shaven, why not the man’s? It is not fair. I can think of no reason, pretext, or excuse, unless it is to be found in the fact that women are more beautiful than men, and need greater disfigurement to make them ugly. That is a fact which I have long suspected, and observations made on this journey confirm my suspicions,–intensify them into certainty. An ugly woman is handsomer than a handsome man,–if you examine them closely. She is finer-grained, more soft, more delicate. Men are animals more than women. I do not now mean the generic sense in which we are all animals, but specifically and superficially. Men look more like horses and cows. See our brave soldiers returning from the wars–Heaven’s blessing rest upon them!–grand, but are they not gruff? A woman’s face may be browned, roughened, and reddened by exposure, yet her skin is always skin; but often when a man’s face has been sheltered from storm and shine, his skin is hide. His mane is not generally so long and flowing as a horse’s, but there it is. Once, in a car, a man in front of me put his arm on the back of his seat and fell asleep. Presently his hand dropped over, and I looked at it,–a mass of broad, brawny vitality, great pipes of veins, great crescents of nails, great furrows at the joints, and you might cut a fine sirloin of beef off the ball of the thumb; and this is a hand! _I_ call it an ox. A woman’s hand, by hard labor, spreads and cracks, and sprouts bunches at the joints, and becomes tuberous at the ends of the fingers, but you can see that it is a deformity and not nature. It tells a sad story of neglect, of labor, perhaps of heartlessness, cruelty, suffering. But this man’s hand was born so. You would not think of pitying him any more than you would pity an elephant for being an elephant instead of an antelope. A woman’s hair is silky and soft, and, if not always smooth, susceptible of smoothness. A man’s hair is shag. If he tries to make it anything else, he does not mend the matter. Ceasing to be shag, it does not become beauty, but foppishness, effeminacy, Miss Nancy-ism. A man is a brute by the law of his nature. Let him ape a woman, and he does not cease to he brutal, though be does become ridiculous. The only thing for him to do is to be the best kind of a brute.
In all of which remarks there is nothing derogatory to a man,– nothing at which any one need take offence. I do not say that manhood is not a very excellent kind of creation. Everything is good in its line. I would just as soon have been a beetle as a woman, if I had never been a woman, and did not know what it was. I don’t suppose a horse is at all crestfallen because he is a horse. On the contrary, if he is a thorough-bred, blood horse, he is a proud and happy fellow, prancing, spirited, magnificent. So a man may be so magnificently manly that one shall say, Surely this is the monarch of the universe; and hide and shag and mane shall be vitalized with a matchless glory. Let a man make himself grand in his own sphere, and not sit down and moan because he is only a connecting link between a horse and a woman.
I suppose Mother Church is fully cognizant of the true state of affairs, and thinks men already sufficiently Satyric, but woman must be ground down as much as possible, or the world will not be fended off. And ground down they are in body and soul. O Mother Church! as I look upon these nuns, I do not love you. You have done many wise and right deeds. You have been the ark of the testimony, the refuge of the weary, the dispenser of alms, the consoler of the sorrowful, the hope of the dying, the blessing of the dead. You are convenient now, wieldy in an election, effective when a gold ring is missing from the toilette cushion, admirable in your machinery, and astonishing in your persistency and power. But what have you done with these women? In what secret place, in what dungeon of darkness and despair, in what chains of torpidity and oblivion, have you hidden away their souls? They are twenty-five and thirty years old, but they are not women. They are nothing in the world but grown-up children. Their expression, their observation, their interests, are infantile. There is no character in their faces. There are marks of pettishness, but not of passion. Nothing deep, tender, beneficent, maternal, is there. Time has done his part, but life has left no marks. Their smiles and laughter are the merriment of children, beautiful in children, but painful here. Mother Church, you have dwarfed these women, helplessly, hopelessly. You accomplish results, but you deteriorate humanity.
Down the St. Lawrence, the great, melancholy river, grand only in its grandeur, solitary, unapproachable, cut off from the companionship, the activities, and the interests of life by its rocks and rapids; yet calm and conscious, working its work in silent state.
The rapids are bad for traffic, but charming for travellers; and what is a little revenue more or less, to a sensation? There is not danger enough to awaken terror, but there is enough to require vigilance; just enough to exhilarate, to flush the cheek, to brighten the eye, to quicken the breath; just enough for spice and sauce and salt; just enough for you to play at storm and shipwreck, and heroism in danger. The rocking and splashing of the early rapids is mere fun; but when you get on, when the steamer slackens speed, and a skiff puts off from shore, and an Indian pilot comes on board, and mounts to the pilot-house, you begin to feel that matters are getting serious. But the pilot is chatting carelessly with two or three bystanders, so it cannot be much. Ah! this sudden cessation of something! This unnatural quiet. The machinery has stopped. What! the boat is rushing straight on to the banks. H-w-k! A whole shower of spray is dashed into our faces. Little shrieks and laughter, and a sudden hopping up from stools, and a sudden retreat from the railing to the centre of the deck. Staggering, quivering, aghast, the boat reels and careens. Seethe and plunge the angry waters, whirling, foaming, furious. Look at the pilot. No chatting now, no bystanders, but fixed eyes and firm lips, every muscle set, every nerve tense. Yes, it is serious. Serious! close by us, seeming scarcely a yard away, frowns a black rock. The maddened waves dash up its sullen back, the white, passionate surf surges into its wrathful jaws. Here, there, before, behind, black rocks and a wild uproar of waters, through all which Providence and our pilot lead us safely into the still deep beyond, and we look into each other’s faces and smile.
And now the sunset reddens on the water, reddens on the bending sky and the beautiful clouds, and men begin to come around with cards and converse of the different hotels in the Montreal that is to be; one tells us that the Prince of Wales beamed royal light upon the St. Lawrence Hall, and we immediately decide to make the balance true by patronizing its rival Donegana, whereupon a man–a mere disinterested spectator of course– informs us in confidence that the Donegana is nothing but ruins; he should not think we would go there; burnt down a few years ago,–a shabby place, kept by a grass widow; but when was American ever scared off by the sound of a ruin? So Donegana it is, the house with the softly flowing Italian name; and then we pass under the arch of the famous Victoria Bridge, whose corner-stone, or cap-stone, or whatever it is that bridges have, was laid by the Prince of Wales. (And to this day I do not know how the flag-staff of our boat cleared the arch. It was ten feet above it, I should think, and I looked at it all the time, and yet it shrivelled under in the most laughable yet baffling manner.) In the mild twilight we disembarked, and were quickly omnibused to the relics of Donegana, which turned out to be very well, very well indeed for ruins, with a smart stone front, and I don’t know but stone all the way through, with the usual allowance of lace curtains, and carpets, and gilding in the parlors, notwithstanding flames and conjugal desolation; also a hand welcomed us in the gas-lit square adjoining, and we were hospitably entreated and transmitted to the breakfast-table next morning in perfect sight-seeing trim; only the Anakim was cross, and muttered that they had sent him out in the village to sleep among the hens, and there was a cackling and screaming and chopping off of heads all night long. But the breakfast-table assured us that many a cackle must have been the swan-song of death. Halicarnassus wondered if something might not be invented to consume superfluous noise, as great factories consume their own smoke, but the Anakim said there was no call for any new invention in that line so long as Halicarnassus continued in his present appetite,–with a significant glance at the plump chicken which the latter was vigorously converting into mammalia, and which probably was the very one that disturbed the Anakim’s repose. And then we discussed the day’s plan of operations. Halicarnassus said he had been diplomatizing for a carriage. The man in the office told him he could have one for five dollars. He thought that was rather high. Man said it was the regular price; couldn’t get one for any less in the city. Halicarnassus went out and saw one standing idle in the market-place. Asked the price. Three dollars. For how long? Drive you all round the city, Sir; see all the sights. Then he went back and told the man at the office.
“Well,” I said, after he had swallowed a wassail-bowl of coffee, and showed no disposition to go on, “what did you do then?”
“Came in to breakfast.”
“Didn’t you tell the clerk you would not take his carriage?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you tell the other man you would take his?”
“No.”
“What DID you do?”
“Let it work. Don’t be in a hurry. Give a thing time to work.”
“And suppose it should work you out of any carriage at all?”
“No danger.” And to be sure, when we had finished breakfast, the three-dollar hack was there awaiting our pleasure. Our pleasure was to drive out into the British possessions, first around the mountain, which is quite a mountain for a villa, though nothing to speak of as a mountain, with several handsome residences on its sides, and a good many not so handsome; but the mountain is a pet of Montreal, and, as I said, quite the thing for a cockney mountain. Then we went to the French Cathedral, which is, I believe, the great gun of ecclesiastical North America, but it hung fire with me. It was large, but not great. There was no unity. It was not impressive. It was running over with frippery,–olla podrida cropping out everywhere. It confused you. It distracted you. It wearied you. You sighed for somewhat simple, quiet, restful. The pictures were pronounced poor. I don’t know whether they were or not. I never can tell a picture as a cook tells her mince-pie meat, by tasting it. One picture is a revealer and one is a daub; but they are alike to me at first glance. For a picture has an individuality all its own. You must woo it with tender ardor, or it will not yield up its heart. The chance look sees only color and contour; but as you gaze the color glows, the contour throbs, the hidden soul heaves the inert canvas with the solemn palpitations of life. Art is dead no longer, but informed with divine vitality. There is no picture but Hope crowned and radiant, or pale and patient Sorrow, or the tender sanctity of Love. The landscape of the artist is neither painting nor nature, but summer fields and rosy sunsets over-flooded with his own inward light. Only from her Heaven-anointed monarch, man, can Nature receive her knightly accolade. And shall one detect the false or recognize the true by the minute-hand? I suppose so, since some do. But I cannot. People who live among the divinities may know the goddess, for all her Spartan arms, her naked knee, and knotted robe; but I, earth-born among earth-born, must needs behold the auroral blush, the gliding gait, the flowing vestment, and the divine odor of her purple hair.
In the vestibule of the French Cathedral, I believe it is, you will behold a heart-rending sight in a glass case, namely, a group of children, babies in long clothes and upwards, in a dreadful state of being devoured by cotton-flannel pigs. Their poor little white frocks are stained with blood, and they are knocked about piteously in various stages of mutilation. A label in front informs you that certain innocents in certain localities are subject to this shocking treatment; and you are earnestly conjured to drop your penny or your pound into the box, to rescue them from a fate so terrible. You must be a cannibal if you can withstand this appeal. Suffering that you only hear of, you can forget, but suffering going on right under your eyes is not so easily disposed of.
Leaving the pigs and papooses, we will go to–which of the nunneries? The Gray? Yes. But when you come home, everybody will tell you that you ought to have visited the Black Nunnery. The Gray is not to be mentioned in the same year. Do not, however, flatter yourself that in choosing the Black you will be any more enviable; there will not be wanting myriads who will assure you, that, not having seen the Gray, you might as well have seen nothing at all. To the Gray Nunnery went we, and saw pictures and altars and saints and candlesticks, and little dove-cot floors of galleries jutting out, where a few women crossed, genuflected, and mumbled, and an old woman came out of a door above one of them, and asked the people below not to talk so loud, because they disturbed the worshippers; but the people kept talking, and presently she came out again, and repeated her request, with a little of the Inquisition in her tones and gestures,–no more than was justifiable under the circumstances: but she looked straight at me; and O old woman! it was not I that talked, nor my party. We were noiseless as mice. It was that woman over there in a Gothic bonnet, with a bunch of roses under the roof as big as a cabbage. Presently the great doors opened, and a procession of nuns marched in chanting their gibberish. Of course they wore the disguise of those abominable caps, with gray, uncouth dresses, the skirts taken up in front and pinned behind, after the manner of washerwomen. Yet there were faces among them on which the eye loved to linger,–some not too young for their years, some furtive glances, some demure looks from the yet undeadened youth under those ugly robes,–some faces of struggle and some of victory. O Mother Church, here I do not believe in you! These natures are gnarled, not nurtured. These elaborately reposeful faces are not natural. These downcast eyes and droning voices are not natural. Not one thing here is natural. Whisk off these clinging gray washing-gowns, put these girls into crinoline and Gothic bonnets, and the innocent finery that belongs to them, and send them out into the wholesome daylight to talk and laugh and make merry,–the birthright of their young years. A religion that deprives young girls or old girls of this boon is not the religion of Jesus Christ. Don’t tell me!
The nuns pass out, and we wander through the silent yard, cut off by all the gloom of the medieval times from the din, activity, and good cheer of the street beyond, and are conducted into the Old Men’s Department. The floors and furniture are faultlessly and fragrantly clean. The kitchen is neat and susceptible of warmth and comfort, even when the sun’s short wooing is over. The beds are ranged along the walls plump and nice; yet I hope that, when I am an old man, I shall not have to sleep on blue calico pillow-cases. Here and there, within and without, old men are basking in the rare sweet warmth of summer, and with their canes and their sunshine seem very well bestowed. Now I like you, Mother Church. You do better by your old men than you do by your young women,– simply because you know more about them. How can you, Papa and Messrs. Cardinals, be expected to understand what is good for a girl? If only you would confine yourself to what you do comprehend,–if only you would apply your admirable organizations to legitimate purposes, and not run mad on machinery, you would do angels’ work.
From the old men’s quarters we go upstairs where sewing and knitting and all manner of fancy-work, especially in beads, are taught to long and lank little girls by longer and lanker large girls, companioned by a few old women, with commonplace knitting-work. Everything everywhere is thoroughly neat and comfortable; but I have a desperate pang of home-sickness; for if there is one condition of life more intolerable than any other, it is a state of unvarying, hopeless comfort.
From the Gray Nunnery to the English Church, which I like much better than the French Cathedral. There is a general tone of oakiness, solid, substantial, sincere, like the England of tradition,–set off by a brilliant memorial window and a memorial altar, and other memorial things which I have forgotten, but which I make no doubt the people who put them there have not forgotten. Here also we find, as all along in Canada, vestiges of his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. We are shown the Bible which he presented to the Church, and we gaze with becoming reverence upon the august handwriting,– the pew in which he worshipped; and the loyal beadle sees nothing but reverence in our momentary occupation of that consecrated seat. Evidently there is but a very faint line of demarcation in the old man’s mind between his heavenly and earthly king; but an old man may have a worse weakness than this,–an unreasoning, blind, faithful fondness and reverence for a blameless prince. God bless the young man, in that he is the son of his father and mother. God help him, in that he is to be King of England.
Chancel and window, altar, and arches and aisles and treasures,–is there anything else? Yes, the apple that Eve ate, transfixed to oak,–hard to understood, but seeing is believing. And then past Nelson’s monument, somewhat battered, like the hero whom it commemorates; past the Champ de Mars, a fine parade-ground, hard and smooth as a floor; past the barracks and the reservoir, to the new Court-House, massive and plain. Then home to dinner and lounging; then travelling-dresses, and the steamer, and a most lovely sunset on the river; and then a night of tranquillity running to fog, and a morning approach to the unique city of North America,– the first and the only walled city _I_ ever saw, or you either, I dare say, if you would only be willing to confess it. The aspect of the city, as one first approaches it, is utterly strange and foreign,–a high promontory jutting into the river, with a shelf of squalid, crowded, tall and shaky, or low and squatty tenements at its base, almost standing on the water and rising behind them, for the back of the shelf, a rough, steep precipice abutted with the solid masonry of wall and citadel. A board fastened somehow about half-way up the rocky cliff, inscribed with the name of Montgomery, marks the spot where a hero, a patriot, a gentleman, met his death. Disembarking, we wind along a stair of a road, up steep ascents, and enter in through the gates into the city,–the walled, upper city,- -walls thick, impregnable, gates ponderous, inert, burly. You did well enough in your day, old foes; but with Armstrongs and iron-clads, and Ericsson still living, where would you be?– answer me that. Quaint, odd, alien old city,–a faint phantasmagoria of past conflicts and forgotten plans, a dingy fragment of la belle France, a clinging reminiscence of England, a dim, stone dream of Edinburgh, a little flutter of modern fashion, planted upon a sturdy rampart of antiquity, a little cobweb of commerce and enterprise, netting over a great deal of church and priest and king with an immovable basis of stolid existence,–that is the Quebec I inferred from the Quebec I saw. Nothing in it was so interesting to me as itself. But passing by itself for the nonce, we prudently took advantage of the fine morning, and drove out to the Falls of Montmorency with staring eyes that wanted to take in all views, before, behind, on this side and that, at once; and because we could not, the joints of my neck at least became so dry with incessant action that they almost creaked. Low stone cottages lined the road-sides, with windows that opened like doors, with an inevitable big black stove whenever your eye got far enough in, with a pleasant stoop in front, with women perpetually washing the floors and the windows, with beautiful and brilliant flowers blooming profusely in every window, and often trailing and climbing about its whole area. Here, I take it, is the home of a real peasantry, a contented class, comfortable and looking for no higher lot. These houses seem durable and ultimate. The roofs of both houses and piazzas are broken, projected, picturesque, and often ornamented. They shelter, they protect, they brood, they embrace. There are little trellises and cornices and fanciful adornments. The solid homeliness is fringed with elegance. The people and the houses do not own each other, but they are married. There is love between them, and pride, and a hearty understanding. I can think of a country where you see little brown or red clapboarded houses that are neither solid nor elegant, that are both slight and awkward,–angular and shingly and dismal. The roofs are intended just to cover the houses, and are scanty at that. The sides are straight, the windows inexorable; and for flowers you have a hollyhock or two, and perhaps an uncomfortably tall sunflower, sovereign for hens. There is no home-look and no home-atmosphere. I love that country better than I like this; but, if you kill me for it, this drive is picturesque. These dumpy little smooth, white, flounced and flowered cottages look like wicker-gates to a happy valley,– born, not built. The cottages of the country, in my thoughts, yes, and in my heart, are neither born nor built, but “put up,”–just for convenience, just to lodge in while waiting for something better, or till the corn is grown. Coming man, benefactor of our race, you who shall show us how to be contented without being sluggish,–how to be restful, and yet aspiring,–how to take the goods the gods provide us, without losing out of manly hearts the sweet sense of providing,–how to plant happy feet firmly on the present, and not miss from eager eyes the inspiriting outlook of the future,–how to make a wife of today, and not a mistress of tomorrow,–come quickly to a world that sorely needs you, and bring a fresh evangel.
The current of our thoughts is broken in upon by a new and peculiar institution. Every single child, and every group of children on the road, leaves its play as we pass by, and all dart upon us on both sides of the carriage, almost under the wheels, almost under the horses’ feet, with out-stretched blackened hands, and intense bright black eyes, running, panting, shouting, “Un sou! un sou! un sou!” I do not think I am quite in love with this as an institution, but it is very lively as a spectacle; and the little fleet-footed, long-winded beggars show a touching confidence in human nature. There is no servility in their beggary; and when it is glossed over with a thin mercantile veneering, by the brown little paws holding out to you a gorgeous bouquet of one clover-blossom, two dandelions, and a quartette of sorrel-leaves, why, it ceases to be beggarly, and becomes traffic overlaid with grace, the acanthus capital surmounting the fluted shaft. We meet also continual dog-carts, something like the nondescript which “blind Carwell” used to drag. Did you never see it? Well, then, like the cart in which the ark went up to Kirjath-jearim. Now you must know. Stubborn two-wheeled vehicles, with the whole farm loaded into the body, and the whole family on the seat. Here comes one drawn by a cow, not unnatural. Unnatural! It is the key-note of the tune. Everything is cow-y,–slow and sure, firm, but not fast, kindly, sunny, ruminant, heavy, lumbering, basking, content. Calashes also we meet,–a cumbrous, old-fashioned “one-hoss shay,” with a yellow body, a suspicion of springlessness, wheels with huge spokes and broad rims, and the driver sitting on the dash-board. Now we are at the Falls of Montmorency. If you would know how they look, go and see them. If you have seen them, you don’t need a description; and if you have not seen them, a description would do no good. From the Falls, if you are unsophisticated, you will resume your carriage and return to the city; but if you are au fait, you will cross the high-road, cross the pastures, and wind down a damp, mossy wood-path to the steps of Montmorency,–a natural phenomenon, quite as interesting as, and more remarkable than, the Falls,– especially if you go away without seeing it. Any river can fall when it comes to a dam. In fact, there is nothing for it to do but fall; but it is not every river that can carve out in its rage such wonderful stairways as this,–seething and foaming and roaring and leaping through its narrow and narrowing channel, with all the turbulence of its fiery soul unquelled, though the grasp of Time is on its throat, silent, mighty, irresistible.
Montmorency,–Montmorenci,–sweet and storied name! You, too, have received the awful baptism. Blood has mingled with your sacrifices. The song of your wild waves has been lost in the louder thunders of artillery, and the breezes sweeping through these green woods have soothed the agonies of dying men. Into one heart this ancient name, heavy with a weight of disaster and fancied disgrace, sank down like lead,–a burden which only death could cast off, only victory destroy; and death came hand in hand with victory.
Driving home, we take more special note of what interested us aggressively before,–Lord Elgin’s residence,–the house occupied by the Duke of Kent when a young man in the army here, long I suppose before the throne of England placed itself at the end of his vista. Did the Prince of Wales, I wonder, visit this place, and, sending away his retinue, walk slowly alone under the shadows of these sombre trees, striving to bring back that far-off past, and some vague outline of the thoughts, the feelings, the fears and fancies of his grandfather, then, like himself, a young man, but, not like himself, a fourth son, poor and an exile, with no foresight probably of the exaltation that awaited his line,–his only child to be not only the lady of his land, but our lady of the world,–a warm-hearted woman worthily seated on the proud throne of Britain,–a noble and great-souled woman, in whose sorrow nations mourn, for whose happiness nations pray,–whose name is never spoken in this far-off Western world but with a silent blessing. Another low-roofed, many-roomed, rambling old house I stand up in the carriage to gaze at lingeringly with longing, misty eyes,– the sometime home of Field Marshal the Marquis de Montcalm. Writing now of this in the felt darkness that pours up from abandoned Fredericksburg, fearing not what the South may do in its exultation, but what the North may do in its despondency, I understand, as I understood not then, nor ever before, what comfort came to the dying hero in the certain thought, “I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec.”
Now again we draw near the city whose thousands of silver (or perhaps tin) roofs dazzle our eyes with their resplendence, and I have an indistinct impression of having been several times packed out and in to see sundry churches, of which I remember nothing except that I looked in vain to see the trophies of captured colors that once hung there, commemorating the exploits of the ancients,–and on the whole, I don’t think I care much about churches except on Sundays. Somewhere in Canada–perhaps near Lorette–is some kind of a church, perhaps the oldest, or the first Indian church in Canada,–or may be it was interesting because it was burnt down just before we got there. That is the only definite reminiscence I have of any church in Quebec and its suburbs, and that is not so definite as it might be. I am sure I inspected the church of St. Roque and the church of St. John, because I have entered it in my “Diary”; but if they were all set down on the table before me at this moment, I am sure I could not tell which was which, or that they had not been transported each and all from Boston.
But we ascend the cliff, we enter the citadel, we walk upon the Plains of Abraham, and they overpower you with the intensity of life. The heart beats in labored and painful pulsations with the pressure of the crowding past. Yonder shines the lovely isle of vines that gladdened the eyes of treacherous Cartier, the evil requiter of hospitality. Yonder from Point Levi the laden ships go gayly up the sparkling river, a festive foe. Night drops her mantle, and silently the unsuspected squadron floats down the stealthy waters, and debarks its fateful freight. Silently in the darkness, the long line of armed men writhe up the rugged path. The rising sun reveals a startling sight. The impossible has been attained. Now, too late, the hurried summons sounds. Too late the deadly fire pours in. Too late the thickets flash with murderous rifles. Valor is no substitute for vigilance. Short and sharp the grapple, and victor and vanquished alike lie down in the arms of all-conquering death. Where this little tree ventures forth its tender leaves, Wolfe felt the bullet speeding to his heart. Where this monument stands, his soldier-soul fled, all anguish soothed away by the exultant shout of victory,–fled from passion and pain, from strife and madness, into the eternal calm.
Again and again has this rock under my feet echoed to the tramp of marching men. Again and again has this green and pleasant plain been drenched with blood, this blue, serene sky hung with the black pall of death. This broad level of pasture-land, high up above the rushing waters of the river, but coldly wooed by the faint northern sun, and fiercely swept by the wrathful northern wind, has been the golden bough to many an eager seeker. Against these pitiless cliffs full many a hope has hurtled, full many a heart has broken. Oh the eyes that have looked longingly hither from far Southern homes! Oh the thoughts that have vaguely wandered over these bluffs, searching among the shouting hosts, perhaps breathlessly among the silent sleepers, for household gods! Oh the cold forms that have lain upon these unnoting rocks! Oh the white cheeks that have pressed this springing turf! Oh the dead faces mutely upturned to God!
Struggle, conflict, agony,–how many of earth’s Meccas have received their chrism of blood! Thrice and four times hopeless for humanity, if battle is indeed only murder, violence, lust of blood, or power, or revenge,–if in that wild storm of assault and defence and deathly hurt only the fiend and the beast meet incarnate in man. But it cannot be. Battle is the Devil’s work, but God is there. When Montgomery cheered his men up their toilsome ascent along this scarcely visible path over the rough rocks, and the treacherous, rugged ice, was he not upborne by an inward power, stronger than brute’s, holier than fiend’s, higher than man’s? When Arnold flung himself against this fortress, when he led his forlorn hope up to these sullen, deadly walls, when, after repulse and loss and bodily suffering and weakness, he could still stand stanch against the foe and exclaim, “I am in the way of my duty, and I know no fear!” was it not the glorious moment of that dishonored life? Battle is of the Devil, but surely God is there. The intoxication of excitement, the sordid thirst for fame and power, the sordid fear of defeat, may have its place; but there, too, stand high resolve, and stern determination,– pure love of country, the immortal longing for glory, ideal aspiration, god-like self-sacrifice, loyalty to soul, to man, to the Highest. The meanest passions of the brute may raven on the battle-field, but the sublimest exaltations of man have found there fit arena.
From the moment of our passing into the citadel enclosure, a young soldier has accompanied us,–whether from caution or courtesy,–and gives us various interesting, and sometimes startling information. He assures us that these guns will fire a ball eight miles,–a long range, but not so long as his bow, I fear. I perceive several gashes or slits in the stone wall of the buildings, and I ask him what they are. “Them are for the soldiers’ wives hin the garrison,” he replies promptly. I say nothing, but I do not believe they are for the soldiers’ wives. A soldier’s wife could not get through them. “How many soldiers in a regiment are allowed to have wives?” asks Halicarnassus. “Heighty, sir,” is the ready response. I am a little horror-struck, when we leave, to see Halicarnassus hold out his hand as if about to give money to this brave and British soldier, and scarcely less so to see our soldier receive it quietly. But I need not be, for my observation should have taught me that small change–fees I believe it is called–circulates universally in Canada. Out doors and in, it is all one. Everybody takes a fee, and is not ashamed. You fee at the falls, and you fee at the steps. You fee the church, and here we have feed the army; and if we should call on the Governor-General, I suppose one would drop a coin into his outstretched palm, and he would raise his hat and say, “Thank you, sir.” I do not know whether there is any connection between this fact and another which I noticed; but if the observation be superficial, and the connection imaginary, I shall be no worse off than other voyageurs, so I will hazard the remark, that I saw very few intellectual or elegant looking men and women in Quebec, or, for that matter, in Canada. Everybody looked peasant-y or shoppy, except the soldiers, and they were noticeably healthy, hale, robust, well kept; yet I could not help thinking that it is a poor use to put men to. These soldiers seem simply well-conditioned animals, fat and full-fed; but not nervous, intellectual, sensitive, spiritual. However, if the people of Canada are not intellectual, they are pious. “Great on saints here,” says Halicarnassus. “They call their streets St. Genevieve, St. Jean, and so on; and when they have run through the list, and are hard up, they club them and have a Street of All Saints.”
Canada seemed to be a kind of Valley of Jehoshaphat for Secessionists. We scented the aroma somewhat at Saratoga; nothing to speak of, nothing to lay hold of; but you were conscious of a chill on your warm loyalty. There were petty smirks and sneers and quips that you could feel, and not see or hear. You SENSED, to use a rustic expression, the presence of a class that was not palpably treasonable, but rather half cotton. But at Canada it comes out all wool. The hot South opens like a double rose, red and full. The English article is cooler and supercilious. I say nothing, for my role is to see; but Halicarnassus and the Anakim exchange views with the greatest nonchalance, in spite of pokes and scowls and various subtabular hints.
“What is the news?” says one to the other, who is reading the morning paper.
“Prospect of English intervention,” says the other to one.
“Then we are just in season to see Canada for the last time as a British province,” says the first.
“And must hurry over to England, if we design to see St. George and the dragon tutelizing Windsor Castle,” says the second; whereupon a John Bull yonder looks up from his ‘am and heggs, and the very old dragon himself steps down from the banner-folds, and glares out of those irate eyes, and the ubiquitous British tourist, I have no doubt, took out his notebook, and put on his glasses and wrote down for home consumption another instance of the insufferable assurance of these Yankees.
“Where have you been?” I ask Halicarnassus, coming in late to breakfast.
“Only planning the invasion of Canada,” says he, coolly, as if it were a mere pre-prandial diversion, all of which was not only rude, but quite gratuitous, since, apart from the fact that we might not be able to get Canada, I am sure we don’t want it. I am disappointed. I suppose I had no right to be. Doubtless it was sheer ignorance, but I had the idea that it was a great country, rich in promise if immature in fact,–a nation to be added to a nation when the clock should strike the hour,–a golden apple to fall into our hands when the fulness of time should come. Such inspection as a few days’ observation can give, such inspection as British tourists find sufficient to settle the facts and fate of nations, leads me to infer that it is not golden at all, and not much of an apple; and I cannot think what we should want of it, nor what we should do with it if we had it. The people are radically different from ours. Fancy those dark-eyed beggars and those calm-mouthed, cowy-men in this eager, self-involved republic. They might be annexed to the United States a thousand times and never be united, for I do not believe any process in the world would turn a French peasant into a Yankee farmer. Besides, I cannot see that there is anything of Canada except a broad strip along the St. Lawrence River. It makes a great show on the map, but when you ferret it out, it is nothing but show– and snow and ice and woods and barrenness; and I, for one, hope we shall let Canada alone.
“I think we shall be obliged to leave Quebec tomorrow evening,” says Halicarnassus, coming into the hotel parlor on Saturday evening.
“Not at all,” I exclaim, promptly laying an embargo on that iniquity.
“Otherwise we shall be compelled to remain till Monday afternoon at four o’clock.”
“Which we can very contentedly do.”
“But lose a day.”
“Keeping the Sabbath holy is never losing a day,” replies his guide, philosopher, and friend, sententiously and severely, partly because she thinks so, and partly because she is well content to remain another day in Quebec.
“But as we shall not start till five o’clock,” he lamely pleads, “we can go to church twice like saints.”
“And begin at five and travel like sinners.”
“It will only be clipping off the little end of Sunday.”
Now that is a principle the beginning of which is as when one letteth out water, and I will no tolerate it. Short weights are an abomination to the Lord. I would rather steal outright than be mean. A highway robber has some claims upon respect; but a petty, pilfering, tricky Christian is a damning spot on our civilization. Lord Chesterfield asserts that a man’s reputation for generosity does not depend so much on what he spends, as on his giving handsomely when it is proper to give at all; and the gay lord builded higher and struck deeper than he knew, or at least said. If a man thinks the Gospel does not require the Sabbath to be strictly kept, I have nothing to say; but if he pretends to keep it, let him keep the whole of it. It takes twenty-four hours to make a day, whether it be the first or the last of the week. I utterly reject the idea of setting off a little nucleus of Sunday, just a few hours of sermon, and then evaporating into any common day. I want the good of Sunday from beginning to end. I want nothing but Sunday between Saturday and Monday. Week-days filtering in spoil the whole. What is the use of having a Sabbath-day, a rest-day, if Mondays and Tuesdays are to be making continual raids upon it? What good do dinner-party Sundays and travelling Sundays and novel-reading Sundays do? You want your Sunday for a rest,–a change,–a breakwater. It is a day yielded to the poetry, to the aspirations, to the best and highest and holiest part of man. I believe eminently in this world. I have no kind of faith in a system that would push men on to heaven without passing through a novitiate on earth. What may be for us in the future is but vaguely revealed,–just enough to put hope at the bottom of our Pandora’s box; but our business is in this world. Right through the thick and thin of this world our path lies. Our strength, our worth, our happiness, our glory, are to be attained through the occupations and advantages of this world. Yet through discipline, and not happiness, is the main staple here, it is not the only product. Six days we must labor and do all work, but the seventh is a holiday. Then we may drop the absorbing now, and revel in anticipated joys,–lift ourselves above the dusty duties, the common pleasures that weary and ensoil, even while they ennoble us, and live for a little while in the bright clear atmosphere of another life,–soothed, comforted, stimulated by the sweetness of celestial harmonies.
“O day most calm, most bright,
The fruit of this, the next world’s bud, The indorsement of Supreme delight,
Writ by a Friend, and with his blood,– The couch of time, care’s balm and bay,– The week were dark but for thy light,
Thy torch doth show the way.”
He is no friend to man who would abate one jot or tittle of our precious legacy.
Afloat in literature may be found much objurgation concerning the enforced strictures of the old Puritan Sabbath. Perhaps there was a mistake in that direction; but I was brought up on them, and they never hurt me any. At least I was never conscious of any harm, certainly of no suffering. As I look back, I see no awful prisons and chains and gloom, but a pleasant jumble of best clothes,–I remember now their smell when the drawer was opened,–and Sunday-school lessons, and baked beans, and a big red Bible with the tower of Babel in it full of little bells, and a walk to church two miles through the lane, over the bars, through ten-acres, over another pair of bars, through a meadow, over another pair of bars, by Lubber Hill, over a wall, through another meadow, through the woods, over the ridge, by Black Pond, over a fence, across a railroad, over another fence, through a pasture, through the long woods, through a gate, through the low woods, through another gate, out upon the high-road at last. And then there was the long service, during which a child could think her own thoughts, generally ranging no higher than the fine bonnets around her, but never tired, never willing to stay at home; and then Sunday school, and library-books, and gingerbread, and afternoon service, and the long walk home or the longer drive, and catechism in the evening and the never-failing Bible. O Puritan Sabbaths! doubtless you were sometimes stormy without and stormy within; but looking back upon you from afar, I see no clouds, no snow, but perpetual sunshine and blue sky, and ever eager interest and delight,–wild roses blooming under the old stone wall, wild bees humming among the blackberry-bushes, tremulous sweet columbines skirting the vocal woods, wild geraniums startling their shadowy depths; and I hear now the rustle of dry leaves, bravely stirred by childish feet, just as they used to rustle in the October afternoons of long ago. Sweet Puritan Sabbaths! breathe upon a restless world your calm, still breath, and keep us from the evil!
Somewhat after this fashion I harangued Halicarnassus, who was shamed into silence, but not turned from his purpose; but the next morning he came up from below after breakfast, and informed me, with an air mingled of the condescension of the monarch and the resignation of the martyr, that, as I was so scrupulous about travelling on the Sabbath, he had concluded not to go till Monday afternoon. No, I said, I did not wish to assume the conduct of affairs. I had given my protest, and satisfied my own conscience; but I was not head of the party, and did not choose to assume the responsibility of its movements. I did not think it right to travel on Sunday, but neither do I think it right for one person to compel a whole party to change its plans out of deference to his scruples. So I insisted that I would not cause detention. But Halicarnassus insisted that he would not have my conscience forced. Now it would seem natural that so tender and profound a regard for my scruples would have moved me to a tender and profound gratitude; but nobody understands Halicarnassus except myself. He is a dark lane, full of crooks and turns,–a labyrinth which nobody can thread without the clew. That clew I hold. I know him. I can walk right through him in the darkest night without any lantern. He is fully aware of it. He knows that it is utterly futile for him to attempt to deceive me, and yet, with the infatuation of a lunatic, he is continually producing his flimsy little fictions for me as continually to blow away. For instance, when we were walking down the path to the steps of Montmorency, Grande called out in delight at some new and beautiful white flowers beside the path. What were they? I did not know. What are they, Halicarnassus? “Ah! wax-flowers,” says he, coming up, and Grande passed on content, as would ninety-nine out of a hundred; but an indescribable something in his air convinced me that he was not drawing on his botany for his facts. I determined to get at the root of the matter.
“Do you mean,” I asked, “that the name of those flowers is wax-flowers?”
“Of course,” he replied. “Why not?”
“Do you mean,” I persisted, confirmed in my suspicions by his remarkable question, “that you know that they are wax-flowers, or that you do not know that they are not wax-flowers?”
“Why, look at ’em for yourself. Can’t you see with your own eyes?” he ejaculated, attempting to walk on.
I planted myself full in front of him. “Halicarnassus, one step further except over my lifeless body you do not go, until you tell me whether those are or are not wax-flowers?”
“Well,” he said, brought to bay at last, and sheepishly enough whisking off the heads of a dozen or two with his cane, “if they are not that, they are something else.” There!
So when he showed his delicate consideration for my conscience, I was not grateful, but watchful. I detected under the glitter something that was not gold. I made very indifferent and guarded acknowledgments, and silently detached a corps of observation. In five minutes it came out that no train left Quebec on Sunday!
PART V.
So we remained over Sunday in Quebec, and in the morning attended service at the French Cathedral; and as we all had the American accomplishments of the “Nonne, a Prioresse,” who spoke French
“ful fayre and fetisly
After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, The Frenche of Paris was to hire unknowe,”
it may be inferred that we were greatly edified by the service. From the French, as one cannot have too much of a good thing, we proceeded without pause to the English Cathedral,–cathedral by courtesy?–and heard a sermon by a Connecticut bishop, which, however good, was a disappointment, because we wanted the flavor of the soil. And after dinner we walked on the high and sightly Durham terrace, and then went to the Scotch church, joined in Scotch singing, and heard a broad Scotch sermon. So we tried to worship as well as we could; but it is impossible not to be sight-seeing where there are sights to see, and for that matter I don’t suppose there is any harm in it. You don’t go to a show; but if the church and the people and the minister are all a show, what can you do about it?
As I sat listening in the French Cathedral to a service I but a quarter comprehended, the residual three fourths of me went wandering at its own sweet will, and queried why it is that a battle-ground should so stir the blood, while a church suffers one to pass calmly and coldly out through its portals. I do not believe it is total depravity; for though the church stands for what is good, the battle-field does not stand for all that is bad. The church does indeed represent man’s highest aspirations, his longings for holiness and heaven. But the battle-field speaks not, I think, of retrogression. It is in the same line as the church. It stands in the upward path. The church and its influences are the dew and sunshine and spring rains that nourish a gentle, wholesome growth. Battle is the mighty convulsion that marks a geologic era. The fierce throes of battle upheave a continent. The church clothes it with soft alluvium, adorns it with velvet verdure, enriches it with fruits and grains, glorifies it with the beauty of blooms. In the struggle all seems to be chaos and destruction; but after each shock the elevation is greater. Perhaps it is that always the concussion of the shock impresses, while the soft, slow, silent constancy accustoms us and is unheeded; but I think there is another cause. In any church you are not sure of sincerity, of earnestness. Church building and church organization are the outgrowth of man’s wants, and mark his upward path; but you do not know of a certainty whether this individual edifice represents life, or vanity, ostentation, custom, thrift. You look around upon the worshippers in a church, and you are not usually thrilled. You do not see the presence and prevalence of an absorbing, exclusive idea. Devotion does not fix them. They are diffusive, observant, often apparently indifferent, sometimes positively EXHIBITIVE. They adjust their draperies, whisper to their neighbors, took vacant about the mouth. The beat of a drum or the bleat of a calf outside disturbs and distracts them. An untimely comer dissipates their attention. They are floating, loose, incoherent, at the mercy of trifles. The most inward, vital part of religion does not often show itself in church, though it be nursed and nurtured there. So when we go into an empty church, it is–empty. Hopes, fears, purposes, ambitions, the eager hours of men, do not pervade and penetrate those courts. The walls do not flame with the fire of burning hearts. The white intensity of life may never have glowed within them. No fragrance of intimate, elemental passion lingers still. No fine aroma of being clings through the years and suffuses you with its impalpable sweetness, its subtile strength. You are not awed, because the Awful is not there. But on the battle- field you have no doubt. Imagination roams at will, but in the domains of faith. Realities have been there, and their ghosts walk up and down forever. There men met men in deadly earnest. Right or wrong, they stood face to face with the unseen, the inevitable. The great problem awaited them, and they bent fiery souls to its solution. But one idea moved them all and wholly. They threw themselves body and soul into the raging furnace. All minor distractions were burned out. Every self was fused and lost in one single molten flood, dashing madly against its barrier to whelm in rapturous victory or be broken in sore defeat.
And it is earnestness that utilizes the good. It is sincerity that makes the bad not infernal.
Monday gave us the Indian village, more Indian-y than village-y,–and the Falls of Lorette. For a description, see the Falls of Montmorency. Lorette is more beautiful, I think, more wild, more varied, more sympathetic,–not so precipitous, not so concentrated, not so forceful, but more picturesque, poetic, sylvan, lovely. The descent is long, broad, and broken. The waters flash and foam over the black rocks like a white lace veil over an Ethiop belle, and then rush on to other woodland scenes.
We left Quebec ignobly, crossing the river in a steamer to which the eminently English adjective nasty can fitly apply,– a wheezy, sputtering, black, crazy old craft, muddy enough throughout to have been at the bottom of the river and sucked up again half a dozen times. With care of the luggage, shawls, hackmen, and tickets, we all contrived to become separated, and I found myself crushed into one corner of a little Black Hole of Calcutta, with no chair to sit in, no space to stand in, and no air to breathe, on the sultriest day that Canada had known for years. What windows there were opened by swinging inwards and upwards, which they could not do for the press, and after you had got them up, there was no way to keep them there except to stand and hold them at arm’s length. So we waddled across the river. Now we have all read of shipwrecks, and the moral grandeur of resignation and calmness which they have developed. We have read of drowning, and the gorgeous intoxication of the process. But there is neither grandeur nor gorgeousness in drowning in a tub. If you must sink, you at least would like to go down gracefully, in a stately ship, in mid-ocean, in a storm and uproar, bravely, decorously, sublimely, as the soldiers in Ravenshoe, drawn up in line, with their officers at their head, waving to each other calm farewells. I defy anybody to be graceful or heroic in plumping down to the bottom of a city river amid a jam of heated, hurried, panting, angry passengers, mountains of trunks, carpet-bags, and indescribable plunder, and countless stratifications of coagulated, glutinous, or pulverized mud. To the credit of human nature it must be said, that the sufferers kept the peace with each other, though vigorously denouncing the unknown author of all their woes. After an age of suffocation and fusion, there came a stir which was a relief because it was a stir. Nobody seemed to know the cause or consequence, but everybody moved; so I moved, and bobbing, fumbling, groping through Egyptian darkness, stumbling over the beams, crawling under the boilers, creeping through the steam-pipes, scalping ourselves against the funnels, we finally came out gasping into the blessed daylight. “Here you are!” exclaimed cheerily the voice of Halicarnassus, as I went winking and blinking in the unaccustomed light. “I began to think I had lost my cane,”– he had given it to me when he went to look up the trunks. “Why?” I asked faintly, not yet fully recovered from my long incarceration. “It is so long since I saw you, that I thought you must have fallen overboard,” was his gratifying reply. I was still weak, but I gathered up my remaining strength and plunged the head of the cane, a dog’s head it was, into his heart. His watch, or his Bible, or something interposed, and rescued him from the fate he merited; and then we rode over the miserable, rickety farther end of the Grand Trunk Railway, and reached Island Pond at midnight,–in time to see the magnificent Northern Lights flashing, flickering, wavering, streaming, and darting over the summer sky; and as the people in the Pond were many and the rooms few, we had plenty of time to enjoy the sight. It was exciting, fascinating, almost bewildering; and feeling the mystic mood, I proposed to write a poem on it, to which Halicarnassus said he had not the smallest objection, provided he should not be held liable to read it, adding, as he offered me his pencil, that it was just the thing,–he wanted some narcotic to counteract the stimulus of the fresh cold air after the long and heated ride, or he should get no sleep for the night.
I do not believe there is in our beautiful but distracted country a single person who is the subject of so cold-blooded, unprovoked, systematic, malignant neglect and abuse on any one point as the writer of these short and simple annals on this. If there is one thing in the whole range of human possibilities on which I pride myself, it is my poetry. I cannot do much at prose. That requires a depth, an equilibrium, a comprehension, a sagacity, a culture, which I do not possess and cannot command. Nor in the domestic drudgery line, nor the parlor ornament line, nor the social philanthropic line, nor the ministering angel line, can I be said to have a determinate value. As an investment, as an economic institution, as an available force, I suppose I must be reckoned a failure; but I do write lovely poetry. That I insist on: and yet, incredible as it may seem, of that one little ewe lamb have I been repeatedly and remorselessly robbed by an unscrupulous public, and a still more unscrupulous private. Whenever I come into the room with a sheet of manuscript in my hand, Halicarnassus glances at it, and if the lines are not all of the same length, he finds at once that he has to go and shovel a path, or bank up the cellar, or get in the wood, unless I have taken the precaution to lock the door and put the key in my pocket. When, by force or fraud, I have compelled a reluctant audience, he is sure to strike in by the time I have got to the second stanza, breaking right into the middle of a figure or a rapture, and asking how much more there is of it. I know of few things better calculated to extinguish the poetic fire than this. I regret to be obliged to say that Halicarnassus, by his persistent hostility,–I believe I may say, persecution,–has disseminated his plebeian prejudices over a very large portion of our joint community, and my muse consequently is held in the smallest esteem. Not but that whenever there is a church to be dedicated, or a centennial to be celebrated, or a picnic to be sung, or a fair to be closed, I am called on to furnish the poetry, which, with that sweetness of disposition which forms a rare but fitting background to poetic genius, I invariably do, to be praised and thanked for a week, and then to be again as before told, upon the slightest provocation, “You better not meddle with verses.” “You stick to prose.” “Verses are not your forte.” “You can’t begin to come up with —-, and —-, and —-.” On that auroral night, crowned with the splendors of the wild mystery of the North, I am sure that the muse awoke and stirred in the depths of my soul, and needed but a word of recognition