reverential to all that bears the mark of genius, – that is, of a new influx of truth or beauty, – as a nun over her missal. In short, he is one of those men that know everything except how to make a living. Him would I keep on the square next my own royal compartment on life’s chessboard. To him I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young woman, whom he would of course take – to wife. For all contingencies I would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive phrase, “put him through” all the material part of life; see him sheltered, warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk when I liked, – with the privilege of shutting it off at will.
A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with about a dozen ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord of the macrocosm. They do well to dine together once in a while. A dinner-party made up of such elements is the last triumph of civilization over barbarism. Nature and art combine to charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the system is soothed by well- studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into their natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a short jacket.
The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out; nothing short of the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies their dull apprehensions. But look at two masters of that noble game! White stands well enough, so far as you can see; but Red says, Mate in six moves; – White looks, – nods; – the game is over. Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they are good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table. That blessed clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them, – that glorious license, which, having shut the door and driven the reporter from its key-hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop her academic poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the MEDIUS LECTUS, – that carnival-shower of questions and replies and comments, large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from professional mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored fire, and the mischief-making rain of BON-BONS pelting everybody that shows himself, – the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is one which the old Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce in their –
– “Oh, oh, oh!” cried the young fellow whom they call John, – “that is from one of your lectures!”
I know it, I replied, – I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.
“The trail of the serpent is over them all!”
All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually sliding. Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still June evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum of air, and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere beyond? Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back Bay, – where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating the “Metropolitan” boat-clubs, – find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back to the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking with any of the characters above referred to, one not unfrequently finds a sudden change in the style of the conversation. The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street door- plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf and an imbecile, – you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before you! – Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture. – As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the air before the astonished passer-by, – silver-footed, diamond- crowned, rainbow-scarfed, – from the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less elevated order of REPTILIA in other latitudes.
– Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India, – a white, superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark- skinned, inferior, but still “Caucasian” race, – and where are English and American sympathies? We can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the same nature in the inferior animals, – tame it or crush it. The India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe- killers. England takes down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and makes a correction thus: [DELPHI] DELE. The civilized world says, Amen.
– Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly, that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did with their MELAS OINOS, – that black sweet, syrupy wine (?) which they used to alloy with three parts or more of the flowing stream. [Could it have been MELASSES, as Webster and his provincials spell it, – or MOLOSSA’S, as dear old smattering, chattering, would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the “Magnalia”? Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in “Notes and Queries!” – ye Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars! – ye Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have “made a Golgotha” of your pages! – ponder thereon!]
– Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses. You will understand by the title that they are written in an imaginary character. I don’t doubt they will fit some family-man well enough. I send it forth as “Oak Hall” projects a coat, on A PRIORI grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody. There is no loftier illustration of faith than this. It believes that a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and nurtured it; that its mysterious COMPAGES or frame-work has survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity; that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to the traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial clothing; that he will, having all the world to choose from, select the very locality where this audacious generalization has been acted upon. It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it. There is a prophecy in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration. – Now hear the verses.
THE OLD MAN DREAMS.
O for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I’d rather laugh a bright-haired boy Than reign a gray-beard king!
Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
Away with learning’s crown!
Tear out life’s wisdom-written page, And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’s fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!
– My listening angel heard the prayer, And calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.
“But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”
– Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I’ll take – my – precious wife!
– The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
“The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!”
– “And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled With those dissolving years!”
Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
I could not bear to leave them all; I’ll take – my – girl – and – boys!
The smiling angel dropped his pen, –
“Why this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”
And so I laughed, – my laughter woke
The household with its noise, –
And wrote my dream, when morning broke, To please the gray-haired boys.
CHAPTER IV.
[I AM so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to remain there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of different tone and on different subjects. The talks are like the breakfasts, – sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must take them as they come. How can I do what all these letters ask me to? No. 1. want serious and earnest thought. No. 2. (letter smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a “good storey” which he has copied out for me. (I suppose two letters before the word “good” refer to some Doctor of Divinity who told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand) – more poetry. No. 4. wants something that would be of use to a practical man. (PRAHCTICAL MAHN he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged, sweet-scented) – “more sentiment,” – ” heart’s outpourings.” –
My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will depend on many accidents, – a good deal on the particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don’t expect all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein, – possibly prefer it to a livelier one, – serious young men, and young women generally, in life’s roseate parenthesis from – years of age to – inclusive.
Another privilege of talking is to misquote. – Of course it wasn’t Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair, – but IRIS. (As I have since told you) it was the former lady’s regular business, but Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d’Enfer stood firm on the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here – Juno, in Latin – sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for the celebrated “Oceanic Miscellany” misquoted Campbell’s line without any excuse. “Waft us HOME the MESSAGE” of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the correction?]
– The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be governed, not by, but ACCORDING TO laws, such as we observe in the larger universe. – You think you know all about WALKING, – don’t you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels, (“cotyloid” – cup-like – cavities,) and held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don’t you? – On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.
[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain German physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which, however, he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my own use; what can one do better than this, when one has a friend that tells him anything worth remembering?
The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it already. – Why, – said the Professor, – they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for less money!]
Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the bodily movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its regular cycles. Such or such a thought comes round periodically, in its turn. Accidental suggestions, however, so far interfere with the regular cycles, that we may find them practically beyond our power of recognition. Take all this for what it is worth, but at any rate you will agree that there are certain particular thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but that a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way. Some one speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of assent in the listener or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often been struck by it.
ALL AT ONCE A CONVICTION FLASHES THROUGH US THAT WE HAVE BEEN IN THE SAME PRECISE CIRCUMSTANCES AS AT THE PRESENT INSTANT, ONCE OR MANY TIMES BEFORE.
O, dear, yes! – said one of the company, – everybody has had that feeling.
The landlady didn’t know anything about such notions; it was an idee in folks’ heads, she expected.
The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew the feeling well, and didn’t like to experience it; it made her think she was a ghost, sometimes.
The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had just lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all at once came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so many times before. I looked severely at him, and his countenance immediately fell – ON THE SIDE TOWARD ME; I cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh with either half of his face without the other half’s knowing it.
– I have noticed – I went on to say – the following circumstances connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial, – one that might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it was familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I have had the same convictions in my dreams.
How do I account for it? – Why, there are several ways that I can mention, and you may take your choice. The first is that which the young lady hinted at; – that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous existence. I don’t believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to know told me he had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his boots, and I can’t think he had ever lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.
Some think that Dr. Wigan’s doctrine of the brain’s being a double organ, its hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it. One of the hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old. But even allowing the centre of perception to be double, I can see no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening of the time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most likely that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but that we take this partial resemblance for identity, as we occasionally do resemblances of persons. A momentary posture of circumstances is so far like some preceding one that we accept it as exactly the same, just as we accost a stranger occasionally, mistaking him for a friend. The apparent similarity may be owing perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to the outward circumstances.
– Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have said it, and heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in books, – somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, I think, and in one of the works of Mr. Olmsted, I know.
MEMORY, IMAGINATION, OLD SENTIMENTS AND ASSOCIATIONS, ARE MORE READILY REACHED THROUGH THE SENSE OF SMELL THAN BY ALMOST ANY OTHER CHANNEL.
Of course the particular odors which act upon each person’s susceptibilities differ. – O, yes! I will tell you some of mine. The smell of PHOSPHORUS is one of them. During a year or two of adolescence I used to be dabbling in chemistry a good deal, and as about that time I had my little aspirations and passions like another, some of these things got mixed up with each other: orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient; reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks; – EHEU!
“Soles occidere et redire possunt,”
but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen hundred and – spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their penetrating odor throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense “trailing clouds of glory.” Only the confounded Vienna matches, OHNE PHOSPHOR-GERUCH, have worn my sensibilities a little.
Then there is the MARIGOLD. When I was of smallest dimensions, and wont to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a low, brown, “gambrel-roofed” cottage. Out of it would come one Sally, sister of its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending over her flower-bed, would gather a “posy,” as she called it, for the little boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head, lichen- crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage, garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions, – stateliest of vegetables, – all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back to me.
Perhaps the herb EVERLASTING, the fragrant IMMORTELLE of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.
– I should not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve – so my friend, the Professor, tells me – is the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly the olfactory “nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether this anatomical arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have mentioned, I will not decide, but it is curious enough to be worth remembering. Contrast the sense of taste, as a source of suggestive impressions, with that of smell. Now the Professor assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no immediate connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation of the spinal cord.
[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to this hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense of smell he nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in getting out a large red bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a little to the other side, and after much tribulation at last extricated an ample round snuff-box. I looked as he opened it and felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean lying therein. I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the long unused stimulus – O boys, – that were, – actual papas and possible grandpapas, – some of you with crowns like billiard-balls, – some in locks of sable silvered, and some of silver sabled, – do you remember, as you doze over this, those after-dinners at the Trois Freres when the Scotch-plaided snuff-box went round, and the dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our happy sensoria? Then it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came in, slumbering in its straw cradle. And one among you, – do you remember how he would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was hearing the cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep- breathing kine came home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture, in the old home a thousand leagues towards the sunset?]
Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born! On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses.
– Do I remember Byron’s line about “striking the electric chain”? – To be sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What can be more trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that used to lie in some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of Christmas pastry between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo! as one looks on these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again, and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine, promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the Sieur Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic the Indians are tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all the dead people who have been in the dust so long – even to the stout-armed cook that made the pastry – are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the dial of heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust!
– I will thank you for that pie, – said the provoking young fellow whom I have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands to his eyes as if moved. – I was thinking, – he said indistinctly –
– How? What is’t? – said our landlady.
– I was thinking – said he – who was king of England when this old pie was baked, – and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been dead.
[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; CELA VA SANS DIRE. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn that had been ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a special narrative. There was the wooing and the wedding, – the start in life, – the disappointments, – the children she had buried, – the struggle against fate, – the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts, – the broken spirits, – the altered character of the one on whom she leaned, – and at last the death that came and drew the black curtain between her and all her earthly hopes.
I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I often cried, – not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our neighbors’ grounds, the STILLICIDIUM of self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features; – such I did shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house Inferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]
Young man, – I said, – the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but courtesy to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of the weaker sex, is very old, and yet well worth retaining. May I recommend to you the following caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing with a woman, or an artist, or a poet – if you are handling an editor or politician, it is superfluous advice. I take it from the back of one of those little French toys which contain pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: “QUOIQU’ELLE SOIT TRES SOLIDEMENT MONTEE, IL FAUT NE PAS BRUTALISER LA MACHINE.” – I will thank you for the pie, if you please.
[I took more of it than was good for me – as much as 85 degrees, I should think, – and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled them all “Pie-crust,” and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as they have great names on their title-pages, – Doctors of Divinity, some of them, – it wouldn’t do.]
– My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or twice, told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some of the journals of his calling. I told him that I didn’t doubt he deserved it; that I hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally, and would for a number of years to come; that nobody could do anything to make his neighbors wiser or better without being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to have their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing something of the kind. – The Professor smiled. – Now, said I, hear what I am going to say. It will not take many years to bring you to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing and talking men, do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay. I don’t know what it is, – whether a spontaneous change, mental or bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the thanklessness of critical honesty, – but it is a fact, that most writers, except sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the time when they are beginning to grow old. As a general thing, I would not give a great deal for the fair words of a critic, if he is himself an author, over fifty years of age. At thirty we are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut up our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less to hinder any, because nobody’s elbows are in our way. So I am glad you have a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in a few years.
– Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just now spoke of the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you know that in the gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters sometimes have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young children? I have heard it said, but I cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old age. An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind, used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to him. One who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as very gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I remember a person of singularly stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways in the later period of his life.
And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way of coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles, and must be made the most of, for their day is soon over. Some come into their perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better than the summer fruit. And some, that, like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and uninviting until all the rest have had their season, get their glow and perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with the orchards. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were swelling when he ripened.
– There is no power I envy so much – said the divinity-student – as that of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don’t understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.
[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs, – give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only contains lifeless albumen.]
You call it MIRACULOUS, – I replied, – tossing the expression with my facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear. – Two men are walking by the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all, – and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made HIS speech about the ocean, – the child and the pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!
So, – to return to OUR walk by the ocean, – if all that poetry has dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed in the fancies of women, – if the dreams of colleges and convents and boarding-schools, – if every human feeling that sighs, or smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat, – the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac, would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies that rolls through the universe.
[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he received this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at his leisure.]
– Here is another remark made for his especial benefit. – There is a natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together in TRIADS, as I have heard them called, – thus: He was honorable, courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you could separate a paper in the “Rambler” into three distinct essays. Many of our writers show the same tendency, – my friend, the Professor, especially. Some think it is in humble imitation of Johnson, – some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only. I don’t think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought or image with the THREE DIMENSIONS that belong to every solid, – an unconscious handling of an idea as if it had length, breadth, and thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this than to prove it, and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But mind this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the range of the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind, and morals, and the narrower the limits of the self-determining conscious movement.
– I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such strange motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted to laugh at them. “Where did our friends pick up all these fine ecstatic airs?” I would say to myself. Then I would remember My Lady in “Marriage a la Mode,” and amuse myself with thinking how affectation was the same thing in Hogarth’s time and in our own. But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and hung him up in a cage at my window. By-and-by he found himself at home, and began to pipe his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming and waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing side-turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I should like to ask, WHO taught him all this? – and me, through him, that the foolish head was not the one swinging itself from side to side and bowing and nodding over the music, but that other which was passing its shallow and self-satisfied judgment on a creature made of finer clay than the frame which carried that same head upon its shoulders?
– Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable restrictions? A drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may see such a one in any mineralogical collection. One little fluid particle in the crystalline prism of the solid universe!
– Weaken moral obligations? – No, not weaken, but define them. When I preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to lay down some principles not fully recognized in some of your text- books.
I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary. You saw an article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in which some old Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very apt to be fools and cowards. But a great many of the clergyman’s patients are not only fools and cowards, but also liars.
[Immense sensation at the table. – Sudden retirement of the angular female in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion – as they say in the Chamber of Deputies – on the part of the young fellow they call John. Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite’s lower jaw – (gravitation is beginning to get the better of him.) Our landlady to Benjamin Franklin, briskly, – Go to school right off, there’s a good boy! Schoolmistress curious, – takes a quick glance at divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly flushed draws his shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood – or truth – had hit him in the forehead. Myself calm.]
– I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having pretty substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit should be disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin, (for B. F. had NOT gone right off, of course,) and bring down a small volume from the left upper corner of the right-hand shelves?
[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed, vellum-papered 32mo. “DESIDERII ERASMI COLLOQUIA. Amstelodami. Typis Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650.” Various names written on title- page. Most conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn. Anim. 1725. Oxon.
– O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford, – then writing as I now write, – now in the dust, where I shall lie, – is this line all that remains to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at least once more spoken by living men; – is it a pleasure to thee? Thou shalt share with me my little draught of immortality, – its week, its month, its year, – whatever it may be, – and then we will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion’s Uncatalogued Library!]
– If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to read something to you out of the book of this keen and witty scholar, – the great Erasmus, – who “laid the egg of the Reformation which Luther hatched.” Oh, you never read his NAUFRAGIUM, or “Shipwreck,” did you? Of course not; for, if you had, I don’t think you would have given me credit – or discredit – for entire originality in that speech of mine. That men are cowards in the contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the extraordinary antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they are fools, by their praying to the sea, and making promises to bits of wood from the true cross, and all manner of similar nonsense; that they are fools, cowards, and liars all at once, by this story: I will put it into rough English for you. – “I couldn’t help laughing to hear one fellow bawling out, so that he might be sure to be heard, a promise to Saint Christopher of Paris – the monstrous statue in the great church there – that he would give him a wax taper as big as himself. ‘Mind what you promise!’ said an acquaintance that stood near him, poking him with his elbow; ‘you couldn’t pay for it, if you sold all your things at auction.’ ‘Hold your tongue, you donkey!’ said the fellow, – but softly, so that Saint Christopher should not hear him, – ‘do you think I’m in earnest? If I once get my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him so much as a tallow candle!'”
Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in their talk about the great subject of which we were speaking have not necessarily been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the contrary, have very often been wanting in one or two or all of the qualities these words imply, I should expect to find a good many doctrines current in the schools which I should be obliged to call foolish, cowardly, and false.
– So you would abuse other people’s beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell us your own creed! – said the divinity-student, coloring up with a spirit for which I liked him all the better.
– I have a creed, – I replied; – none better, and none shorter. It is told in two words, – the two first of the Paternoster. And when I say these words I mean them. And when I compared the human will to a drop in a crystal, and said I meant to DEFINE moral obligations, and not weaken them, this was what I intended to express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human beings is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization, education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but “Give me neither poverty nor riches” was the prayer of Agur, and with good reason. If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in getting out of the region of pure abstractions and taking these every-day working forces into account. The great theological question now heaving and throbbing in the minds of Christian men is this:-
No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be repeated, and it would give my friends pain to see with what personal incivilities I should be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be talking about such things at a breakfast- table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a quarto “Concilium Tridentinum.” He has also heard many thousand theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not at all to the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this time to express an opinion on theological matters.
I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal rather see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of thought. Does not my friend, the Professor, receive at least two letters a week, requesting him to. . . . , – on the strength of some youthful antic of his, which, no doubt, authorizes the intelligent constituency of autograph-hunters to address him as a harlequin?
– Well, I can’t be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like to make you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this: if the sense of the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all. I have often heard the Professor talk about hysterics as being Nature’s cleverest illustration of the reciprocal convertibility of the two states of which these acts are the manifestations; But you may see it every day in children; and if you want to choke with stifled tears at sight of the transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and see Mr. Blake play JESSE RURAL.
It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love for the ridiculous. People laugh WITH him just so long as he amuses them; but if he attempts to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and so they laugh AT him. There is in addition, however, a deeper reason for this than would at first appear. Do you know that you feel a little superior to every man who makes you laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so far as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your royal delight? Now if a man can only be allowed to stand on a dais, or raised platform, and look down on his neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right! – first-rate performance! – and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and, stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him, – ah, that wasn’t in the programme!
I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith – who, as everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman, every inch of him – ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of Royalty. The “Quarterly,” “so savage and tartarly,” came down upon him in the most contemptuous style, as “a joker of jokes,” a “diner-out of the first water,” in one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insulting him, as nothing but a toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever have been mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to any decent person even. – If I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two or three facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit in the background until after he had made a reputation by his more solid qualities. And so to an actor: HAMLET first, and BOB LOGIC afterwards, if you like; but don’t think, as they say poor Liston used to, that people will be ready to allow that you can do anything great with MACBETH’S dagger after flourishing about with PAUL PRY’S umbrella. Do you know, too, that the majority of men look upon all who challenge their attention, – for a while, at least, – as beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as cheaply as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a literary man – pardon the forlorn pleasantry! – is the FUNNY-bone. That is all very well so far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and makes a good many angry, as I told you on a former occasion.
– Oh, indeed, no! – I am not ashamed to make you laugh, occasionally. I think I could read you something I have in my desk which would probably make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of these days, if you are patient with me when I am sentimental and reflective; not just now. The ludicrous has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we always consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive of half their faculties and then call BLESSED! There are not a few who, even in this life, seem to be preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to which they look forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition, – something as if he were one of Heaven’s assessors, come down to “doom” every acquaintance he met, – that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the spot, and gone home with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don’t doubt he would cut his kitten’s tail off, if he caught her playing with it. Please tell me, who taught her to play with it?
No, no! – give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and you need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about entertaining you, if I can do it, as well as giving you some of my serious thoughts, and perhaps my sadder fancies. I know nothing in English or any other literature more admirable than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne “EVERY MAN TRULY LIVES, SO LONG AS HE ACTS HIS NATURE, OR SOME WAY MAKES GOOD THE FACULTIES OF HIMSELF.”
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, – but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very sad thing in old friendships, to every mind that is really moving onward. It is this: that one cannot help using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress. Every now and then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a string of thought tied to him, and look – I am afraid with a kind of luxurious and sanctimonious compassion – to see the rate at which the string reels off, while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow! and we are dashing along with the white foam and bright sparkle at our bows; – the ruffled bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it! But this is only the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we outgrow all that we love.
Don’t misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you. It is merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get our reckoning from them with painful accuracy. We see just what we were when they were our peers, and can strike the balance between that and whatever we may feel ourselves to be now. No doubt we may sometimes be mistaken. If we change our last simile to that very old and familiar one of a fleet leaving the harbor and sailing in company for some distant region, we can get what we want out of it. There is one of our companions; – her streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea, then by and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another, the waves swept her deck, and as night came on we left her a seeming wreck, as we flew under our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at dawn she is still in sight, – it may be in advance of us. Some deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong, but silent, – yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until they are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last the black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the mist sooner or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes off panting and groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all wrecks are refitted, and where, alas! we, towering in our pride, may never come.
So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships, because we cannot help instituting comparisons between our present and former selves by the aid of those who were what we were, but are not what we are. Nothing strikes one more, in the race of life, than to see how many give out in the first half of the course. “Commencement day” always reminds me of the start for the “Derby,” when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the season are brought up for trial. That day is the start, and life is the race. Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just “graduating.” Poor Harry! he was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit; step out here into the grass back of the church; ah! there it is:-
“HUNC LAPIDEM POSUERUNT
SOCII MOERENTES.”
But this is the start, and here they are, – coats bright as silk, and manes as smooth as EAU LUSTRALE can make them. Some of the best of the colts are pranced round, a few minutes each, to show their paces. What is that old gentleman crying about? and the old lady by him, and the three girls, what are they all covering their eyes for? Oh, that is THEIR colt which has just been trotted up on the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can do anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these next forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that comes to some of us when we begin to look through the silvered rings of the ARCUS SENILIS!
TEN YEARS GONE. First turn in the race. A few broken down; two or three bolted. Several show in advance of the ruck. CASSOCK, a black colt, seems to be ahead of the rest; those black colts commonly get the start, I have noticed, of the others, in the first quarter. METEOR has pulled up.
TWENTY YEARS. Second corner turned. CASSOCK has dropped from the front, and JUDEX, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they have thinned out! Down flat, – five, – six, – how many? They lie still enough! they will not get up again in this race, be very sure! And the rest of them, what a “tailing off”! Anybody can see who is going to win, – perhaps.
THIRTY YEARS. Third corner turned. DIVES, bright sorrel, ridden by the fellow in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is getting to be the favourite with many. But who is that other one that has been lengthening his stride from the first, and now shows close up to the front? Don’t you remember the quiet brown colt ASTEROID, with the star in his forehead? That is he; he is one of the sort that lasts; look out for him! The black “colt,” as we used to call him, is in the background, taking it easily in a gentle trot. There is one they used to call THE FILLY, on account of a certain feminine air he had; well up, you see; the Filly is not to be despised my boy!
FORTY YEARS. More dropping off, – but places much as before.
FIFTY YEARS. Race over. All that are on the course are coming in at a walk; no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the winning-post a slab of white or gray stone standing out from that turf where there is no more jockeying or straining for victory! Well, the world marks their places in its betting-book; but be sure that these matter very little, if they have run as well as they knew how!
– Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean of similitudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley, or Burns, or Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were suggested to them by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower or a leaf; but I will read you a few lines, if you do not object, suggested by looking at a section of one of those chambered shells to which is given the name of Pearly Nautilus. We need not trouble ourselves about the distinction between this and the Paper Nautilus, the ARGONAUTA of the ancients. The name applied to both shows that each has long been compared to a ship, as you may see more fully in Webster’s Dictionary, or the “Encyclopedia,” to which he refers. If you will look into Roget’s Bridgewater Treatise, you will find a figure of one of these shells, and a section of it. The last will show you the series of enlarging compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that inhabits the shell, which is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no lesson in this?
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign, Sails the unshadowed main, –
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings, And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl; Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every clambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell, As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell, Before thee lies revealed, –
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new, Stole with soft step its shining archway through, Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn! While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:-
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
CHAPTER V.
A LYRIC conception – my friend, the Poet, said – hits me like a bullet in the forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck, and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of centipedes running down the spine, – then a gasp and a great jump of the heart, – then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the head, – then a long sigh, – and the poem is written.
It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly, – I replied.
No, – said he, – far from it. I said written, but I did not say COPIED. Every such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the copy, that men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an instant in the poet’s soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet words, – words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language, but have never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it. It is enough to stun and scare anybody, to have a hot thought come crashing into his brain, and ploughing up those parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common ideas were jogging along in their regular sequences of association. No wonder the ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] Goddess, – Muse, – divine afflatus, – something outside always. I never wrote any verses worth reading. I can’t. I am too stupid. If I ever copied any that were worth reading, I was only a medium.
[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand, – telling them what this poet told me. The company listened rather attentively, I thought, considering the literary character of the remarks.]
The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read anything better than Pope’s “Essay on Man”? Had I ever perused McFingal? He was fond of poetry when he was a boy, – his mother taught him to say many little pieces, – he remembered one beautiful hymn; – and the old gentleman began, in a clear, loud voice, for his years, –
“The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens,” –
He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up beneath the thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek. As I looked round, I was reminded of a show I once saw at the Museum, – the Sleeping Beauty, I think they called it. The old man’s sudden breaking out in this way turned every face towards him, and each kept his posture as if changed to stone. Our Celtic Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a sentiment. She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high- shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are known in public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop forwards, and a headlong and as it were precipitous walk, – the waist plunging downwards into the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall. Bridget, constituted for action, not for emotion, was about to deposit a plate heaped with something upon the table, when I saw the coarse arm stretched by my shoulder arrested, – motionless as the arm of a terra-cotta caryatid; she couldn’t set the plate down while the old gentleman was speaking!
He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on his cheek. Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever WERE there, they ARE there still!
By and by we got talking again. – Does a poet love the verses written through him, do you think, Sir? – said the divinity- student.
So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal heat about them, I KNOW he loves them, – I answered. When they have had time to cool, he is more indifferent.
A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes, – said the young fellow whom they call John.
The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized female in black bombazine . – Buckwheat is skerce and high, – she remarked. [Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady, – pays nothing, – so she must stand by the guns and be ready to repel boarders.]
I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things I wanted to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again. – I don’t think the poems I read you sometimes can be fairly appreciated, given to you as they are in the green state.
– You don’t know what I mean by the GREEN STATE? Well, then, I will tell you. Certain things are good for nothing until they have been kept a long while; and some are good for nothing until they have been long kept and USED. Of the first, wine is the illustrious and immortal example. Of those which must be kept and used I will name three, – meerschaum pipes, violins, and poems. The meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned a thousand offerings to the cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without complexion or flavor, – born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless as PALLIDA MORS herself. The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and gradually the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had sucked up from an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through its thirsting pores. First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich, glowing, umber tint spreading over the whole surface. Nature true to her old brown autumnal hue, you see, – as true in the fire of the meerschaum as in the sunshine of October! And then the cumulative wealth of its fragrant reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a thousand whiffs in a single breath; and one cannot touch it without awakening the old joys that hang around it as the smell of flowers clings to the dresses of the daughters of the house of Farina!
[Don’t think I use a meerschaum myself, for I DO NOT, though I have owned a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the Mohawk species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and beaded knife-sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his right check. On the maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver- mounted tobacco-stopper you ever saw. It is a little box-wood Triton, carved with charming liveliness and truth; I have often compared it to a figure in Raphael’s “Triumph of Galatea.” It came to me in an ancient shagreen case, – how old it is I do not know, – but it must have been made since Sir Walter Raleigh’s time. If you are curious, you shall see it any day. Neither will I pretend that I am so unused to the more perishable smoking contrivance that a few whiffs would make me feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral- wound bundle of chopped stems and miscellaneous incombustibles, the CIGAR, so called, of the shops, – which to “draw” asks the suction- power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish, the leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even if my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under such Nicotian regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.]
Violins, too, – the sweet old Amati! – the divine Stradivarius! Played on by ancient MAESTROS until the bow-hand lost its power and the flying fingers stiffened. Bequeathed to the passionate, young enthusiast, who made it whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and scream his untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair. Passed from his dying hand to the cold VIRTUOSO, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till, when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the stormy symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of their lord and leader. Into lonely prisons with improvident artists; into convents from which arose, day and night, the holy hymns with which its tones were blended; and back again to orgies in which it learned to howl and laugh as if a legion of devils were shut up in it; then again to the gentle DILETTANTE who calmed it down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the days of the old MAESTROS. And so given into our hands, its pores all full of music; stained, like the meerschaum, through and through, with the concentrated hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which have kindled and faded on its strings.
Now I tell you a poem must be kept AND USED, like a meerschaum, or a violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum; – the more porous it is, the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of absorbing an indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity, – its tenderness, its heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through with a divine secondary color derived from ourselves. So you see it must take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature, by staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can penetrate.
Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from the maker’s hands? Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each other, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.
Don’t you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don’t understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind’s muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world’s crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin. Here is a Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its hundredth birthday, – (Pedro Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,) – the sap is pretty well out of it. And here is the song of an old poet whom Neaera cheated. –
“Nox erat, et coelo fulgebat Luna sereno Inter minora sidera,
Cum tu magnorum numen laesura deorum In verba jurabas mea.”
Don’t you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin phrases? Now I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary brings with it a certain succulence; and though I cannot expect the sheets of the “Pactolian,” in which, as I told you, I sometimes print my verses, to get so dry as the crisp papyrus that held those words of Horatius Flaccus, yet you may be sure, that, while the sheets are damp, and while the lines hold their sap, you can’t fairly judge of my performances, and that, if made of the true stuff, they will ring better after a while.
[There was silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate exposition of these self-evident analogies. Presently A PERSON turned towards me – I do not choose to designate the individual – and said that he rather expected my pieces had given pretty good “sahtisfahction.” – I had, up to this moment, considered this complimentary phrase as sacred to the use of secretaries of lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by a small pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm. But as a reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a little below that blood-heat standard which a man’s breath ought to have, whether silent, or vocal and articulate. I waited for a favorable opportunity, however, before making the remarks which follow.]
– There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that fix a man’s position for you before you have done shaking hands with him. Allow me to expand a little. There are several things, very slight in themselves, yet implying other things not so unimportant. Thus, your French servant has DEVALISE your premises and got caught. EXCUSEZ, says the SERGENT-DE-VILLE, as he politely relieves him of his upper garments and displays his bust in the full daylight. Good shoulders enough, – a little marked, – traces of smallpox, perhaps, – but white. . . . . CRAC! from the SERGENT- DE-VILLE’S broad palm on the white shoulder! Now look! VOGUE LA GALERE! Out comes the big red V – mark of the hot iron; – he had blistered it out pretty nearly, – hadn’t he? – the old rascal VOLEUR, branded in the galleys at Marseilles! [Don’t! What if he has got something like this? – nobody supposes I INVENTED such a story.]
My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females which I told you I had owned, – for, look you, my friends, simple though I stand here, I am one that has been driven in his “kerridge,” – not using that term, as liberal shepherds do, for any battered old shabby-genteel go-cart which has more than one wheel, but meaning thereby a four-wheeled vehicle WITH A POLE, – my man John, I say, was a retired soldier. He retired unostentatiously, as many of Her Majesty’s modest servants have done before and since. John told me, that when an officer thinks he recognizes one of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really been in the service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful country, he comes suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, “Strap!” If he has ever worn the shoulder-strap, he has learned the reprimand for its ill adjustment. The old word of command flashes through his muscles, and his hand goes up in an instant to the place where the strap used to be.
[I was all the time preparing for my grand COUP, you understand; but I saw they were not quite ready for it, and so continued, – always in illustration of the general principle I had laid down.]
Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody thinks of. There was a legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the English coast, they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape of Saxons, who would not let them go, – on the contrary, insisted on their staying, and, to make sure of it, treated them as Apollo treated Marsyas, or an Bartholinus has treated a fellow-creature in his title-page, and, having divested them of the one essential and perfectly fitting garment, indispensable in the mildest climates, nailed the same on the church-door as we do the banns of marriage, IN TERROREM.
[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I looked at our landlady, I saw that “the water stood in her eyes,” as it did in Christiana’s when the interpreter asked her about the spider, and I fancied, but wasn’t quite sure that the schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy did in the same conversation, as you remember.]
That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story, – said the young fellow whom they call John. I abstained from making Hamlet’s remark to Horatio, and continued.
Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying an old Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other things thought the doors should be attended to. One of them particularly, the front-door, looked very badly, crusted, as it were, and as if it would be all the better for scraping. There happened to be a microscopist in the village who had heard the old pirate story, and he took it into his head to examine the crust on this door. There was no mistake about it; it was a genuine historical document, of the Ziska drum-head pattern, – a real CUTIS HUMANA, stripped from some old Scandinavian filibuster, and the legend was true.
My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and financial question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute fragment of a similar document. Behind the pane of plate-glass which bore his name and title burned a modest lamp, signifying to the passers-by that at all hours of the night the slightest favors (or fevers) were welcome. A youth who had freely partaken of the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, following a moth-like impulse very natural under the circumstances, dashed his fist at the light and quenched the meek luminary, – breaking through the plate-glass, of course, to reach it. Now I don’t want to go into MINUTIAE at table, you know, but a naked hand can no more go through a pane of thick glass without leaving some of its cuticle, to say the least, behind it, than a butterfly can go through a sausage-machine without looking the worse for it. The Professor gathered up the fragments of glass, and with them certain very minute but entirely satisfactory documents which would have identified and hanged any rogue in Christendom who had parted with them. – The historical question, WHO DID IT? and the financial question, WHO PAID FOR IT? were both settled before the new lamp was lighted the next evening.
You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and forms of speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you want to know about a person. Thus, “How’s your health?” (commonly pronounced HAALTH) – instead of, How do you do? or, How are you? Or calling your little dark entry a “hall,” and your old rickety one-horse wagon a “kerridge.” Or telling a person who has been trying to please you that he has given you pretty good “sahtisfahction.” Or saying that you “remember of” such a thing, or that you have been “stoppin”‘ at Deacon Somebody’s, – and other such expressions. One of my friends had a little marble statuette of Cupid in the parlor of his country-house, – bow, arrows, wings, and all complete. A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the figure, asked the lady of the house “if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?” What a delicious, though somewhat voluminous biography, social, educational, and aesthetic in that brief question!
[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in the particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my fellow-boarders, without too personal an attack on the individual at whose door it lay.]
That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, EX PEDE HERCULEM. He might as well have said, “From a peck of apples you may judge of the barrel.” EX PEDE, to be sure! Read, instead, EX UNGUE MINIMI DIGITI PEDIS, HERCULEM, EJUSQUE PATREM, MATREM, AVOS ET PROAVOS, FILIOS, NEPOTES ET PRONEPOTES! Talk to me about your [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]! Tell me about Cuvier’s getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz’s drawing a portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the “O” revealed Giotto, – as the one word “moi” betrayed the Stratford atte-Bowe-taught Anglais, – so all a man’s antecedents and possibilities are summed up in a single utterance which gives at once the gauge of his education and his mental organization.
Possibilities, Sir? – said the divinity-student; can’t a man who says HAOW? arrive at distinction?
Sir, – I replied, – in a republic all things are possible. But the man WITH A FUTURE has almost of necessity sense enough to see that any odious trick of speech or manners must be got rid of. Doesn’t Sydney Smith say that a public man in England never gets over a false quantity uttered in early life? OUR public men are in little danger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are in the habit of introducing Latin into their speeches, – for good and sufficient reasons. But they are bound to speak decent English, – unless, indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like General Jackson or General Taylor; in which case, a few scars on Priscian’s head are pardoned to old fellows who have quite as many on their own, and a constituency of thirty empires is not at all particular, provided they do not swear in their Presidential Messages.
However, it is not for me to talk. I have made mistakes enough in conversation and print. I never find them out until they are stereotyped, and then I think they rarely escape me. I have no doubt I shall make half a dozen slips before this breakfast is over, and remember them all before another. How one does tremble with rage at his own intense momentary stupidity about things he knows perfectly well, and to think how he lays himself open to the impertinences of the CAPTATORES VERBORUM, those useful but humble scavengers of the language, whose business it is to pick up what might offend or injure, and remove it, hugging and feeding on it as they go! I don’t want to speak too slightingly of these verbal critics; – how can I, who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears silk or broadcloth.
[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making this record of the date that nobody may think it was written in wrath, on account of any particular grievance suffered from the invasion of any individual SCARABAEUS GRAMMATICUS.]
– I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this table when it is repeated? I hope they do, I am sure. I should be very certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they did not.
Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its edges, – and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to herself, “It’s done brown enough by this time”? What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or horny-shelled, – turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat- pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs – and some of them have a good many – rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.
– The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very familiar way, – at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I sometimes think it necessary to repress, – that I was coming it rather strong on the butterflies.
No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images, – the butterfly as well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by it. The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the sunshine. Then shall God’s minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty – Divinity taking outlines and color – light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.
You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.
– Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other. As soon as his breath comes back, he very probably begins to expend it in hard words. These are the best evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to say. Dr. Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his pamphlets. “I think I have not been attacked enough for it,” he said; – “attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds.”
– If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I. Do you think I don’t understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF CONTROVERSY?
Don’t know what that means? – Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, – AND THE FOOLS KNOW IT.
– No, but I often read what they say about other people. There are about a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like the tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the bellows, in one of those domestic avalanches that everybody knows. If you get one, you get the whole lot.
What are they? – Oh, that depends a good deal on latitude and longitude. Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately. Grouping them in two families, one finds himself a clever, genial, witty, wise, brilliant, sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished, celebrated, illustrious scholar and perfect gentleman, and first writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, pert, shallow, ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted outcast, and disgrace to civilization.
What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets? – Well, I should say a set of influences something like these: – 1st. Relationships, political, religious, social, domestic. 2d. Oyster, in the form of suppers given to gentlemen connected with criticism. I believe in the school, the college, and the clergy; but my sovereign logic, for regulating public opinion – which means commonly the opinion of half a dozen of the critical gentry – is the following MAJOR PROPOSITION. Oysters AU NATUREL. MINOR PROPOSITION. The same “scalloped.” CONCLUSION. That – (here insert entertainer’s name) is clever, witty, wise, brilliant, – and the rest.
– No, it isn’t exactly bribery. One man has oysters, and another epithets. It is an exchange of hospitalities; one gives a “spread” on linen, and the other on paper, – that is all. Don’t you think you and I should be apt to do just so, if we were in the critical line? I am sure I couldn’t resist the softening influences of hospitality. I don’t like to dine out, you know, – I dine so well at our own table, [our landlady looked radiant,] and the company is so pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction among the boarders]; but if I did partake of a man’s salt, with such additions as that article of food requires to make it palatable, I could never abuse him, and if I had to speak of him, I suppose I should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a string of sleigh-bells. Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of us, – not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its sharp corners get terribly rounded. I love truth as chiefest among the virtues; I trust it runs in my blood; but I would never be a critic, because I know I could not always tell it. I might write a criticism of a book that happened to please me; that is another matter.
– Listen, Benjamin Franklin! This is for you, and such others of tender age as you may tell it to.
When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to us a youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his left spheres like marbles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on each is written in letters of gold – TRUTH. The spheres are veined and streaked and spotted beneath, with a dark crimson flush above, where the light falls on them, and in a certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the three letters L, I, E. The child to whom they are offered very probably clutches at both. The spheres are the most convenient things in the world; they roll with the least possible impulse just where the child would have them. The cubes will not roll at all; they have a great talent for standing still, and always keep right side up. But very soon the young philosopher finds that things which roll so easily are very apt to roll into the wrong corner, and to get out of his way when he most wants them, while he always knows where to find the others, which stay where they are left. Thus he learns – thus we learn – to drop the streaked and speckled globes of falsehood and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. But then comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all Polite-behavior, all insisting that truth must ROLL, or nobody can do anything with it; and so the first with her coarse rasp, and the second with her broad file, and the third with her silken sleeve, do so round off and smooth and polish the snow-white cubes of truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it becomes hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.
The schoolmistress was polite enough to say that she was pleased with this, and that she would read it to her little flock the next day. But she should tell the children, she said, that there were better reasons for truth than could be found in mere experience of its convenience and the inconvenience of lying.
Yes, – I said, – but education always begins through the senses, and works up to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first thing the child has to learn about this matter is, that lying is unprofitable, – afterwards, that it is against the peace and dignity of the universe.
– Do I think that the particular form of lying often seen in newspapers, under the title, “From our Foreign Correspondent,” does any harm? – Why, no, – I don’t know that it does. I suppose it doesn’t really deceive people any more than the “Arabian Nights” or “Gulliver’s Travels” do. Sometimes the writers compile TOO carelessly, though, and mix up facts out of geographies, and stories out of the penny papers, so as to mislead those who are desirous of information. I cut a piece out of one of the papers, the other day, which contains a number of improbabilities, and, I suspect, misstatements. I will send up and get it for you, if you would like to hear it. – Ah, this is it; it is headed
“OUR SUMATRA CORRESPONDENCE.
“This island is now the property of the Stamford family, – having been won, it is said, in a raffle, by Sir – Stamford, during the stock-gambling mania of the South-Sea Scheme. The history of this gentleman may be found in an interesting series of questions (unfortunately not yet answered) contained in the ‘Notes and Queries.’ This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean, which here contains a large amount of saline substance, crystallizing in cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and frequently displays on its surface, during calm weather, the rainbow tints of the celebrated South-Sea bubbles. The summers are oppressively hot, and the winters very probably cold; but this fact cannot be ascertained precisely, as, for some peculiar reason, the mercury in these latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern regions, and thus the thermometer is rendered useless in winter.
The principal vegetable productions of the island are the pepper tree and the bread-fruit tree. Pepper being very abundantly produced, a benevolent society was organized in London during the last century for supplying the natives with vinegar and oysters, as an addition to that delightful condiment. [Note received from Dr. D. P.] It is said, however, that, as the oysters were of the kind called NATIVES in England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedience to a natural instinct, refused to touch them, and confined themselves entirely to the crew of the vessel in which they were brought over. This information was received from one of the oldest inhabitants, a native himself, and exceedingly fond of missionaries. He is said also to be very skilful in the CUISINE peculiar to the island.
“During the season of gathering the pepper, the persons employed are subject to various incommodities, the chief of which is violent and long-continued sternutation, or sneezing. Such is the vehemence of these attacks, that the unfortunate subjects of them are often driven backwards for great distances at immense speed, on the well-known principle of the aeolipile. Not being able to see where they are going, these poor creatures dash themselves to pieces against the rocks or are precipitated over the cliffs and thus many valuable lives are lost annually. As, during the whole pepper-harvest, they feed exclusively on this stimulant, they become exceedingly irritable. The smallest injury is resented with ungovernable rage. A young man suffering from the PEPPER-FEVER as it is called, cudgelled another most severely for appropriating a superannuated relative of trifling value, and was only pacified by having a present made him of a pig of that peculiar species of swine called the PECCAVI by the Catholic Jews, who, it is well known, abstain from swine’s flesh in imitation of the Mahometan Buddhists.
“The bread-tree grows abundantly. Its branches are well known to Europe and America under the familiar name of MACCARONI. The smaller twigs are called VERMICELLI. They have a decided animal flavor, as may be observed in the soups containing them. Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite habitat of a very dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious by being boiled. The government of the island, therefore, never allows a stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston with which its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out. These are commonly lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives among us. It therefore always contains many of these insects, which, however, generally die of old age in the shops, so that accidents from this source are comparatively rare.
“The fruit of the bread-tree consists principally of hot rolls. The buttered-muffin variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the cocoa-nut palm, the cream found on the milk of the cocoa-nut exuding from the hybrid in the shape of butter, just as the ripe fruit is splitting, so as to fit it for the tea-table, where it is commonly served up with cold” –
– There, – I don’t want to read any more of it. You see that many of these statements are highly improbable. – No, I shall not mention the paper. – No, neither of them wrote it, though it reminds me of the style of these popular writers. I think the fellow who wrote it must have been reading some of their stories, and got them mixed up with his history and geography. I don’t suppose HE lies; – he sells it to the editor, who knows how many squares off “Sumatra” is. The editor, who sells it to the public – By the way, the papers have been very civil haven’t they? – to the – the what d’ye call it? – “Northern Magazine,” – isn’t it? – got up by some of those Come-outers, down East, as an organ for their local peculiarities.
– The Professor has been to see me. Came in, glorious, at about twelve o’clock, last night. Said he had been with “the boys.” On inquiry, found that “the boys,” were certain baldish and grayish old gentlemen that one sees or hears of in various important stations of society. The Professor is one of the same set, but he always talks as if he had been out of college about ten years, whereas. . . [Each of these dots was a little nod, which the company understood, as the reader will, no doubt.] He calls them sometimes “the boys,” and sometimes “the old fellows.” Call him by the latter title, and see how he likes it. – Well, he came in last night glorious, as I was saying. Of course I don’t mean vinously exalted; he drinks little wine on such occasions, and is well known to all the Peters and Patricks as the gentleman who always has indefinite quantities of black tea to kill any extra glass of red claret he may have swallowed. But the Professor says he always gets tipsy on old memories at these gatherings. He was, I forget how many years old when he went to the meeting; just turned of twenty now, – he said. He made various youthful proposals to me, including a duet under the landlady’s daughter’s window. He had just learned a trick, he said, of one of “the boys,” of getting a splendid bass out of a door-panel by rubbing it with the palm of his hand. Offered to sing “The sky is bright,” accompanying himself on the front-door, if I would go down and help in the chorus. Said there never was such a set of fellows as the old boys of the set he has been with. Judges, mayors, Congress-men, Mr. Speakers, leaders in science, clergymen better than famous, and famous too, poets by the half-dozen, singers with voices like angels, financiers, wits, three of the best laughers in the Commonwealth, engineers, agriculturists, – all forms of talent and knowledge he pretended were represented in that meeting. Then he began to quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained that he could “furnish out creation” in all its details from that set of his. He would like to have the whole boodle of them, (I remonstrated against this word, but the Professor said it was a diabolish good word, and he would have no other,) with their wives and children, shipwrecked on a remote island, just to see how splendidly they would reorganize society. They could build a city, – they have done it; make constitutions and laws; establish churches and lyceums; teach and practise the healing art; instruct in every department; found observatories; create commerce and manufactures; write songs and hymns, and sing ’em, and make instruments to accompany the songs with; lastly, publish a journal almost as good as the “Northern Magazine,” edited by the Come- outers. There was nothing they were not up to, from a christening to a hanging; the last, to be sure, could never be called for, unless some stranger got in among them.
– I let the Professor talk as long as he liked; it didn’t make much difference to me whether it was all truth, or partly made up of pale Sherry and similar elements. All at once he jumped up and said, –
Don’t you want to hear what I just read to the boys?
I have had questions of a similar character asked me before, occasionally. A man of iron mould might perhaps say, No! I am not a man of iron mould, and said that I should be delighted.
The Professor then read – with that slightly sing-song cadence which is observed to be common in poets reading their own verses – the following stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about two feet and a half, with an occasional movement back or forward for better adjustment, the appearance of which has been likened by some impertinent young folks to that of the act of playing on the trombone. His eyesight was never better; I have his word for it.
MARE RUBRUM.
FLASH out a stream of blood-red wine! – For I would drink to other days;
And brighter shall their memory shine, Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
The roses die, the summers fade;
But every ghost of boyhood’s dream
By Nature’s magic power is laid
To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.
It filled the purple grapes that lay
And drank the splendors of the sun
Where the long summer’s cloudless day Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;
It pictures still the bacchant shapes That saw their hoarded sunlight shed, –
The maidens dancing on the grapes, – Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.
Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
Those flitting shapes that never die, The swift-winged visions of the past.
Kiss but the crystal’s mystic rim,
Each shadow rends its flowery chain, Springs in a bubble from its brim
And walks the chambers of the brain.
Poor Beauty! time and fortune’s wrong No form nor feature may withstand, –
Thy wrecks are scattered all along, Like emptied sea-shells on the sand; –
Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain, The dust restores each blooming girl,
As if the sea-shells moved again
Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.
Here lies the home of school-boy life, With creaking stair and wind-swept hall, And, scarred by many a truant knife,
Our old initials on the wall;
Here rest – their keen vibrations mute – The shout of voices known so well,
The ringing laugh, the wailing flute, The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell.
Here, clad in burning robes, are laid Life’s blossomed joys, untimely shed;
And here those cherished forms have strayed We miss awhile, and call them dead.
What wizard fills the maddening glass What soil the enchanted clusters grew?
That buried passions wake and pass
In beaded drops of fiery dew?
Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine, – Our hearts can boast a warmer grow,
Filled from a vantage more divine, – Calmed, but not chilled by winter’s snow! To-night the palest wave we sip
Rich as the priceless draught shall be That wet the bride of Cana’s lip, –
The wedding wine of Galilee!
CHAPTER VI.
SIN has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
– I think, Sir, – said the divinity-student, – you must intend that for one of the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were speaking of the other day.
I thank you, my young friend, – was my reply, – but I must say something better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the number.
– The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there were on record, and what, and by whom said.
– Why, let us see, – there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, “the great Bostonian,” after whom this lad was named. To be sure, he said a great many wise things, – and I don’t feel sure he didn’t borrow this, – he speaks as if it were old. But then he applied it so neatly! –
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my friend, the Historian, in one of his flashing moments:-
“Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.”
To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of men:-
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.” –
The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.
The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn’t think the wit meant any irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is a heavenly place after New York or Boston.
A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they call John, – evidently a stranger, – said there was one more wise man’s saying that he had heard; it was about our place, but he didn’t know who said it. – A civil curiosity was manifested by the company to hear the fourth wise saying. I heard him distinctly whispering to the young fellow who brought him to dinner, SHALL I TELL IT? To which the answer was, GO AHEAD! – Well, – he said, – this was what I heard:-
“Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar.”
Sir, – said I, – I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with pleasing vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered with malignant dulness. The satire of the remark is essentially true of Boston, – and of all other considerable – and inconsiderable – places with which I have had the privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys think London is the only place in the world. Frenchmen – you remember the line about Paris, the Court, the World, etc. – I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that city which ran thus: “Hotel l’Univers et des Etats Unis”; and as Paris IS the universe to a Frenchman, of course the United States are outside of it. – “See Naples and then die.” – It is quite as bad with smaller places. I have been about, lecturing, you know, and have found the following propositions to hold true of all of them.
1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.
2. If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it is affectionately styled by the inhabitants the “GOOD OLD town of” – (whatever its name may happen to be.)
3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen to a stranger is invariably declared to be a “remarkably intelligent audience.”
4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity.
5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world. (One or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short pieces to the “Pactolian” some time since, which were “respectfully declined.”)
Boston is just like other places of its size; – only perhaps, considering its excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior monthly publications, and correct habit of spelling the English language, it has some right to look down on the mob of cities. I’ll tell you, though, if you want to know it, what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send away its first-rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known exceptions, of which we are always proud,) we should be spared such epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country, until the biggest centre can drain the lesser ones of their talent and wealth. – I have observed, by the way, that the people who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous of each other, as are those of smaller cities situated within the intellectual basin, or SUCTION-RANGE, of one large one, of the pretensions of any other. Don’t you see why? Because their promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the neighboring big city, – their prettiest girl has been exported to the same market; all their ambition points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there. I hate little toad-eating cities.
– Would I be so good as to specify any particular example? – Oh, – an example? Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn’t you like to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest consideration I must beg leave to be excused.
Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there an old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience of shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their tomahawks,) – if they have, scattered about, those mighty square houses built something more than half a century ago, and standing like architectural boulders dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left them as its monument, – if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that push their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the side-walk, – if they have a little grass in the side-streets, enough to betoken quiet without proclaiming decay, – I think I could go to pieces, after my life’s work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as sweetly as in any cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in. I visit such spots always with infinite delight. My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns are most unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man live in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and, as you hold it up, you may see the sun