The Complete PG Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (page 5)

Now in building of chaises, I tell you what, There is always SOMEWHERE a weakest spot, – In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill, In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill, In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace, – lurking still Find it somewhere you must and will, –
Above or below, or within or without, – And that’s the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise BREASTS DOWN, but doesn’t WEAR OUT.

But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an “I dew vum,” or an “I tell YEOU,”) He would build one shay to beat the taown ‘n’ the keounty ‘n’ all the kentry raoun’; It should be so built that it COULDN’ break daown – – “Fur,” said the Deacon, “‘t’s mighty plain Thut the weakes’ place mus’ stan the strain; ‘n’ the way t’ fix it, uz I maintain,
Is only jest
T’ make that place uz strong uz the rest.”

So the Deacon inquired of the village folk Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn’t be split nor bent nor broke, – That was for spokes and floor and sills; He sent for lancewood to make the thills; The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees; The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese, But lasts like iron for things like these; The hubs of logs from the “Settler’s ellum,” – Last of its timber, – they couldn’t sell ’em, Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way he “put her through.” – “There!” said the Deacon, “naow she’ll dew.”

Do! I tell you, I father guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less! Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grand-children – where were they? But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED; – it came and found The Deacon’s Masterpiece strong and sound. Eighteen hundred increased by ten; –
“Hahnsum kerridge” they called it then. Eighteen hundred and twenty came; –
Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.

Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth, So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large; Take it. – You’re welcome. – No extra charge.)

FIRST OF NOVEMBER, – the Earthquake-day. – There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay. A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn’t be, – for the Deacon’s art Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn’t a chance for one to start. For the wheels were just as strong as the thills, And the floor was just as strong as the sills, And the panels just as strong as the floor, And the whippletree neither less nor more, And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore, And spring and axle and hub ENCORE.
And yet, AS A WHOLE, it is past a doubt In another hour it will be WORN OUT!

First of November, ‘Fifty-five!
This morning the parson takes a drive. Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay, Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
“Huddup!” said the parson. – Off went they.

The parson was working his Sunday’s text, – Had got to FIFTHLY, and stopped perplexed At what the – Moses – was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet’n-house on the hill. – First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill, – And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet’n-house clock, – Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
– What do you think the parson found, When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound, As if it had been to the mill and ground! You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce, How it went to pieces all at once, –
All at once, and nothing first, –
Just as bubbles do when they burst.

End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

– I think there is one habit, – I said to our company a day or two afterwards – worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories, – FAST or SLOW. Man’s chief end was to be a BRICK. When the great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken of as being a GOOD DEAL CUT UP. Nine-tenths of human existence were summed up in the single word, BORE. These expressions come to be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy; – you may fill them up with what idea you like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the treasury upon which they are drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi spring up most luxuriantly. Don’t think I undervalue the proper use and application of a cant word or phrase. It adds piquancy to conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce. But it is no better than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear flash phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a three- volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the pictured urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial climate.

– The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was “rum” to hear me “pitchin’ into fellers” for “goin’ it in the slang line,” when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.

– I replied with my usual forbearance. – Certainly, to give up the algebraic symbol, because A or B is often a cover for ideal nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have been sufficiently explained by the participle – BORED. I have seen a country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a brother-minister’s discourse which would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped sophomore in the one word – SLOW. Let us discriminate, and be shy of absolute proscription. I am omniverbivorous by nature and training. Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.

Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something. They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them. They are useful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, which, but for them, would deteriorate, and become, what some old fools would have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and art. Yes, I like dandies well enough, – on one condition.

– What is that, Sir? – said the divinity-student.

– That they have pluck. I find that lies at the bottom of all true dandyism. A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him, looks very silly. But if he turns red in the face and knotty in the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his assailants, throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned jacket, if necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened Astyanax. You remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were his best officers. The “Sunday blood,” the super-superb sartorial equestrian of our annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous. But such fellows as Brummel and D’Orsay and Byron are not to be snubbed quite so easily. Look out for “la main de fer sous le gant de velours,” (which I printed in English the other day without quotation-marks, thinking whether any SCARABAEUS CRITICUS would add this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers, – which he didn’t do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London language, and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the same.) A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a decided dash of dandyism about them. There was Alcibiades, the “curled son of Clinias,” an accomplished young man, but what would be called a “swell” in these days. There was Aristoteles, a very distinguished writer, of whom you have heard, – a philosopher, in short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again. Regular dandy, he was. So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost his game, he played for big stakes, and it wasn’t his dandyism that spoiled his chance. Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar or a poet, but he was one of the same sort. So was Sir Humphrey Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly, if I am not forgetful. Yes, – a dandy is good for something as such; and dandies such as I was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle, – aye, and left it swinging to this day. – Still, if I were you, I wouldn’t go to the tailor’s, on the strength of these remarks, and run up a long bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your next suit. ELEGANS “NASCITUR, NON FIT.” A man is born a dandy, as he is born a poet. There are heads that can’t wear hats; there are necks that can’t fit cravats; there are jaws that can’t fill out collars – (Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are TOURNURES nothing can humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different styles of dandyism.

We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country, – not a GRATIA-DEI, nor a JUREDIVINO one, – but a DE-FACTO upper stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves, – very splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race, – I don’t mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton. When the spring-chickens come to market – I beg your pardon, – that is not what I was going to speak of. As the young females of each successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other things being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the expensive luxury of beauty. The physical character of the next generation rises in consequence. It is plain that certain families have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and figure, and that in a small circle of city-connections one may sometimes find models of both sexes which one of the rural counties would find it hard to match from all its townships put together. Because there is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life, among the richer classes, you must not overlook the equally obvious fact I have just spoken of, – which in one or two generations more will be, I think, much more patent than just now.

The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded to in connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of its windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach- panels. It is very curious to observe of how small account military folks are held among our Northern people. Our young men must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to count heroism among its virtues. Still I don’t believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when the time comes, if it ever does come.

– These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual GREEN FRUIT of all the places in the world. I think so, at any rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like unripe gooseberries, – get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the “Proverbial Philosophy,” while the author’s admiring countrymen have been buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises? Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among its fruits. There are literary green-groceries at every corner, which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple. It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr. – we won’t say who, – editor of the – we won’t say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents PER double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.

– Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.

– I don’t believe one word of what you are saying, – spoke up the angular female in black bombazine.

I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam, – I said, and added softly to my next neighbor, – but you prove it.

The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student said, in an undertone, – OPTIME DICTUM.

Your talking Latin, – said I, – reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them. – You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal to say about “aestivation,” as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to HIBERNATION. Intramural aestivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:-

AESTIVATION.

AN UNPUBLISHED POEM, BY MY LATE LATIN TUTOR

IN candent ire the solar splendor flames; The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames; His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.

How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes, Dorm on the herb with none to supervise, Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine, And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!

To me, alas! no verdurous visions come, Save yon exiguous pool’s conferva-scum, – No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!

Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids! Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, – Depart, – be off, – excede, – evade, – erump!

– I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains. – No, I am not going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you. But this difference there is: you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is FERAE NATURAE. You may have a hut, or know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light half- way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and you might share it. You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in October, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round the walls of your memory’s chamber. – The sea remembers nothing. It is feline. It licks your feet, – its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die. The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see their joints, – but their shining is that of a snake’s belly, after all. – In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.

Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury. – And then, – to look at it with that inward eye, – who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at intervals, – to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?

– What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence? – Constitution, first of all. How much snow could you melt in an hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it? Comfort is essential to enjoyment. All sensitive people should remember that persons in easy circumstances suffer much more cold in summer – that is, the warm half of the year – than in winter, or the other half. You must cut your climate to your constitution, as much as your clothing to your shape. After this, consult your taste and convenient. But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must have an ocean in your soul. Nature plays at dominos with you; you must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you.

– The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic.

Have you ever read the little book called “The Stars and the Earth?” – said I. – Have you seen the Declaration of Independence photographed in a surface that a fly’s foot would cover? The forms or conditions of Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing in themselves, – only our way of looking at things. You are right, I think, however, in recognizing the category of Space as being quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world. Every man of reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-defined circle which is drawn about his intellect. He has a perfectly clear sense that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of many other minds of which he is cognizant. He often recognizes these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius. On the other hand, when we find a portion of an are on the outside of our own, we say it INTERSECTS ours, but are very slow to confess or to see that it CIRCUMSCRIBES it. Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread these to fit it.

– If I thought I should ever see the Alps! – said the schoolmistress.

Perhaps you will, some time or other, – I said.

It is not very likely, – she answered. – I have had one or two opportunities, but I had rather be anything than governess in a rich family.

[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman! Well, I can’t say I like you any the worse for it. How long will school-keeping take to kill you? Is it possible the poor thing works with her needle, too? I don’t like those marks on the side of her forefinger.

TABLEAU. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of – oh, – ah, – yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on his shoulder. – The ingenuous reader will understand that this was an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one instant on the background of my own consciousness, and abolished into black nonentity by the first question which recalled me to actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over some poor but honest shop-boy’s head, just taken off by its sudden and unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come down in front of it “by the run.”]

– Should you like to hear what moderate wishes life brings one to at last? I used to be very ambitious, – wasteful, extravagant, and luxurious in all my fancies. Read too much in the “Arabian Nights.” Must have the lamp, – couldn’t do without the ring. Exercise every morning on the brazen horse. Plump down into castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of young sparrows. All love me dearly at once. – Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive, – almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires of my maturity.

CONTENTMENT.

“Man wants but little here below.”

LITTLE I ask, my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A VERY PLAIN brown stone will do,) That I may call my own; –
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.

Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten; – If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank heaven for three. Amen!
I always thought cold victual nice; – My CHOICE would be vanilla-ice.

I care not much for gold or land; –
Give me a mortgage here and there, – Some good bank-stock, – some note of hand, Or trifling railroad share; –
I only ask that Fortune send
A LITTLE more than I shall spend.

Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names; –
I would, PERHAPS, be Plenipo, –
But only near St. James; –
I’m very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator’s chair.

Jewels are baubles; ’tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things; – One good-sized diamond in a pin, –
Some, NOT SO LARGE, in rings, –
A ruby and a pearl, or so,
Will do for me; – I laugh at show.

My dame should dress in cheap attire; (Good, heavy silks are never dear;) –
I own perhaps I MIGHT desire
Some shawls of true cashmere, –
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.

I would not have the horse I drive
So fast that folks must stop and stare An easy gait – two, forty-five –
Suits me; I do not care; –
Perhaps, for just a SINGLE SPURT,
Some seconds less would do no hurt.

Of pictures, I should like to own
Titians and Raphaels three or four, – I love so much their style and tone, –
One Turner, and no more, –
(A landscape, – foreground golden dirt The sunshine painted with a squirt.)

Of books but few, – some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor; –
Some LITTLE luxury THERE
Of red morocco’s gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.

Busts, cameos, gems, – such things as these, Which others often show for pride,
I value for their power to please,
And selfish churls deride; –
ONE Stradivarius, I confess,
TWO Meerschaums, I would fain possess.

Wealth’s wasteful tricks I will not learn, Nor ape the glittering upstart fool; –
Shall not carved tables serve my turn, But ALL must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share, – I ask but ONE recumbent chair.

Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas’ golden touch,
If Heaven more generous gifts deny, I shall not miss them MUCH, –
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!

MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS. (A PARENTHESIS.)

I can’t say just how many walks she and I had taken together before this one. I found the effect of going out every morning was decidedly favorable on her health. Two pleasing dimples, the places for which were just marked when she came, played, shadowy, in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to me from the school-house-steps.

I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any rate, if I should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen walks we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint from my friends the publishers, that a separate volume, at my own risk and expense, would be the proper method of bringing them before the public.

– I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over again, even to her bones and marrow. – Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a moving mortal of her. Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them. – Proud she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride in the sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the two lowest circles of a vulgar woman’s Inferno, where the punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy. – She who nips off the end of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize, proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of bad blood. Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people gracious in proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with her real equals, she has something about herself or her family she is ashamed of, or ought to be. Middle, and more than middle-aged people, who know family histories, generally see through it. An official of standing was rude to me once. Oh, that is the maternal grandfather, – said a wise old friend to me, – he was a boor. – Better too few words, from the woman we love, than too many: while she is silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is working for herself. – Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men; therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman’s speech can dissolve more of it than a man’s heart can hold.

– Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress, or not, – whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon, – whether I cribbed them from Balzac, – whether I dipped them from the ocean of Tupperian wisdom, – or whether I have just found them in my head, laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I cannot say. Wise men have said more foolish things, – and foolish men, I don’t doubt, have said as wise things. Anyhow, the schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, all of which I do not feel bound to report.

– You are a stranger to me, Ma’am. – I don’t doubt you would like to know all I said to the schoolmistress. – I sha’n’t do it; – I had rather get the publishers to return the money you have invested in this. Besides, I have forgotten a good deal of it. I shall tell only what I like of what I remember.

– My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque spots which the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes. I know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company with my young friend. There were the shrubs and flowers in the Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them. Then there are certain small seraglio- gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high fences, – one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it, – here and there one at the North and South Ends. Then the great elms in Essex Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head, (as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were whispering, “May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!” – and the rest of that benediction. Nay, there are certain patches of ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life with each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. The Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch- and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and puts everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way about everything. I hold any man cheap, – he said, – of whom nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans. – How is that, Professor? – said I; – I should have set you down for one of that sort. – Sir, – said he, – I am proud to say, that Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the garden of the Luxembourg. And the Professor showed the whites of his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.

I don’t know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth which was green once. The trees look down from the hill-sides and ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe, – “What are these people about?” And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper back, – “We will go and see.” So the small herbs pack themselves up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to them at night and whispers, “Come with me.” Then they go softly with it into the great city, – one to a cleft in the pavement, one to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich gentleman’s bones, and one to the grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried, – and there they grow, looking down on the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery- railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other, – “Wait awhile!” The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each other, – “Wait awhile!” By-and-by the flow of life in the streets ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants – the smaller tribes always in front – saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have encamped in the market-place. Wait long enough and you will find an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-House. Oh, so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

– Let us cry! –

But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you something about them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I ought to, probably. We never tell our secrets to people that pump for them.

Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know something of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her reading and mine was like that of a man’s and a woman’s dusting a library. The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman goes to work softly with a cloth. She does not raise half the dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it, – but she goes into all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers. – Books are the NEGATIVE pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced. A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.

But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together. I thought I knew something about that, – that I could speak or write about it somewhat to the purpose.

To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up water, – to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit, – to have winnowed every wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through the flume upon its float-boards, – to have curled up in the keenest spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing- sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or four score years, – to have fought all the devils and clasped all the angels of its delirium, – and then, just at the point when the white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of spring and temper in it. All this I thought my power and province.

The schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes before it. As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed all which this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a bauble in the palm of their slender hands. This was one of them. Fortune had left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor and the loneliness of almost friendless city-life were before her. Yet, as I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness which was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and lip and every shifting lineament were made for love, – unconscious of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of Duty with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of nothing less than the Great Passion.

– I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in the course of these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we talked of everything but love on that particular morning. There was, perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house. In fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but, somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as usual. The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer which was to leave at noon, – with the condition, however, of being released in case circumstances occurred to detain me. The schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.

It was on the Common that we were walking. The MALL, or boulevard of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston Street. We called it the long path, and were fond of it.

I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we came opposite the head of this path on that morning. I think I tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible. At last I got out the question, – Will you take the long path with me? – Certainly, – said the schoolmistress, – with much pleasure. – Think, – I said, – before you answer; if you take the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more! – The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow had struck her.

One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by, – the one you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. – Pray, sit down, – I said. – No, no, she answered, softly, – I will walk the LONG PATH with you!

– The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm, about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly, – “Good morning, my dears!”

CHAPTER XII.

[I DID not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks with our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could into every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd, miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I should not have a chance to tell them habitually at our breakfast-table. – We’re very free and easy, you know; we don’t read what we don’t like. Our parish is so large, one can’t pretend to preach to all the pews at once. One can’t be all the time trying to do the best of one’s best if a company works a steam fire-engine, the firemen needn’t be straining themselves all day to squirt over the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash some of those lower-story windows a little. Besides, there is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out when you get through this paper.]

– Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of travel as it was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a net; one finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of water have run through it without sticking. I can prove some facts about travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed, – such as these:- He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues. – To- day’s dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday’s revolution. A mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould’s private planets. – Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist. – Old jokes are dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends travelling than at home, – which shows that their minds are in a state of diminished, rather than increased vitality. There was a story about “strahps to your pahnts,” which was vastly funny to us fellows – on the road from Milan to Venice. – CAELUM, NON ANIMUM, – travellers change their guineas, but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street. – Parties of travellers have a morbid instinct for “establishing raws” upon each other. – A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and they will take up the question they had been talking about under “the great elm,” and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all fighting about the propriety of one fellow’s telling another that his argument was ABSURD; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as proved by the phrase “reductio ad absurdum;” the rest badgering him as a conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for PADUS, the Po, “a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone,” and the times when Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was swinging back and forward every ten minutes!

– Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed, or implied.

Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely from the side; a scene or incident in UNDRESS often affects us more than one in full costume.

“Is this the mighty ocean? – is this all?”

says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World’s Mistress in her stone girdle – ALTA MAENIA ROMAE – rose before me and whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.

I used very often, when coming home from my morning’s work at one of the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St. Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (FILLES DE LA PAROISSE) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest treble in the Te Deum. (Look at Carlyle’s article on Boswell, and see how he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one evening.) All the crowd gone but these two “filles de la paroisse,” – gone as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.

Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which Theobald Weinzapfli’s restive horse sprung with him and landed him more than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken, and no longer a wild youth, but God’s servant from that day forward. I have forgotten the famous bears, and all else. – I remember the Percy lion on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick, – the leaden lion with his tail stretched out straight like a pump-handle, – and why? Because of the story of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over the water, – which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.

Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine- axe must have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definate pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer. “The Royal George” went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf which holds it is smooth, while that which bears the lines on his mother’s portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is still young. You remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here is one I never heard mentioned; – if any of the “Note and Query” tribe can tell the story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of considerable size and pretensions. – What is that? – I said. – That, – answered the coachman, – is THE HANGMAN’S PILLAR. Then he told me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one’s twenty digits. While I was on it, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane,” a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o’nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and forward, – I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril’s in an old journal, – the “Magazin Encyclopedique” for L’AN TROISIEME, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake it so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass on it,) swinging like a reed, in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a thing’s happening in a stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend in the blast like a blade of grass? I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way; – perhaps we will have some philosophy by and by; – let me work out this thin mechanical vein. – I have something more to say about trees. I have brought down this slice of hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852. Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth; – nine feet, where I got my section, higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about eighteen inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious. Three hundred and forty-two rings. Started, therefore, about 1510. The thickness of the rings tells the rate at which it grew. For five or six years the rate was slow, – then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year 1550 it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then for the most part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and uniformly until within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on sluggishly.

Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of its growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare’s. The tree was seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died. A little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he died. Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson’s life, during which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon’s career; – the tree doesn’t seem to have minded it.

I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section. I have seen many wooden preachers, – never one like this. How much more striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless existence!

I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is one of great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections of the former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary clock strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came, it was the bell tolling deaths, and people’s ages, as they do in the country. He swore – (ministers’ sons get so familiar with good words that they are apt to handle them carelessly) – that the children were dying by the dozen, of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess, when it began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through striking.] At the foot of “the hill,” down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm, which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian tomahawks, (CREDAT HAHNEMANNUS,) and to have grown round its hoops and buried them in its wood. Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.

Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling me of two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and twenty-seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that? And gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises! And that in a town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich! – Only the dear people there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the mere accident of spelling.

NorWICH.
PorCHmouth.
CincinnatAH.

What a sad picture of our civilization!

I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the Colman farm, in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for many years, and did not like to trust my recollection. But I had it in memory, and even noted down, as one of the finest trees in symmetry and beauty I had ever seen. I have received a document, signed by two citizens of a neighboring town, certified by the postmaster and a selectman, and these again corroborated, reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary college- class to which it is the good fortune of my friend the Professor to belong, who, though he has FORMERLY been a member of Congress, is, I believe, fully worthy of confidence. The tree “girts” eighteen and a half feet, and spreads over a hundred, and is a real beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its branches yet; if we don’t have “youth at the prow,” we will have “pleasure at the ‘elm.”

And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in Maine, and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything but thanks.

[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many communications, in prose and verse since I began printing these notes. The last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem, from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public, though sometimes requested to do so. Some of them have given me great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen. If you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr very loud over a good, honest letter that says pretty things to me.]

– Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but, on the whole, thought it best not to send. It is not fair to single out one for such sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of it.

DEAR SIR, – You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than I was at your age. I don’t wish to be understood as saying too much, for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.

You long to “leap at a single bound into celebrity.” Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else, – very rarely to those who say to themselves, “Go to, now, let us be a celebrated individual!” The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in notoriety; – that ladder is easy to climb, but it leads to the pillory which is crowded with fools who could not hold their tongues and rogues who could not hide their tricks.

If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it. The world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true originality; if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and newspapers will find you out, as the school-boys find out where the ripe apples and pears are. Produce anything really good, and an intelligent editor will jump at it. Don’t flatter yourself that any article of yours is rejected because you are unknown to fame. Nothing pleases an editor more than to get anything worth having from a new hand. There is always a dearth of really fine articles for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred pieces received, ninety are at or below the sea-level; some have water enough, but no head; some head enough, but no water; only two or three are from full reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to climb.

You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable, but it is not demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you want it. It has not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark of genius that shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in our national pasture that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one, among his friends, and no takers, that he is the real, genuine, no- mistake Osiris.

QU’EST CE QU’IL A FAIT? What has he done? That was Napoleon’s test. What have you done? Turn up the faces of your picture- cards, my boy! You need not make mouths at the public because it has not accepted you at your own fancy-valuation. Do the prettiest thing you can and wait your time.

For the verses you send me, I will not say they are hopeless, and I dare not affirm that they show promise. I am not an editor, but I know the standard of some editors. You must not expect to “leap with a single bound” into the society of those whom it is not flattery to call your betters. When “The Pactolian” has paid you for a copy of verses, – (I can furnish you a list of alliterative signatures, beginning with Annie Aureole and ending with Zoe Zenith,) – when “The Rag-bag” has stolen your piece, after carefully scratching your name out, – when “The Nut-cracker” has thought you worth shelling, and strung the kernel of your cleverest poem, – then, and not till then, you may consider the presumption against you, from the fact of your rhyming tendency, as called in question, and let our friends hear from you, if you think it worth while. You may possibly think me too candid, and even accuse me of incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half so plain- spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time. If you prefer the long jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try it like a man. Only remember this, – that, if a bushel of potatoes is shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes always get to the bottom. Believe me, etc., etc.

I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these are by far the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless, querulous, unreasonable literary persons one is like to meet with. Is a young man in the habit of writing verses? Then the presumption is that he is an inferior person. For, look you, there are at least nine chances in ten that he writes POOR verses. Now the habit of chewing on rhymes without sense and soul to match them is, like that of using any other narcotic, at once a proof of feebleness and a debilitating agent. A young man can get rid of the presumption against him afforded by his writing verses only by convincing us that they are verses worth writing.

All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed to any individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of these pages. I would always treat any given young person passing through the meteoric showers which rain down on the brief period of adolescence with great tenderness. God forgive us if we ever speak harshly to young creatures on the strength of these ugly truths, and so sooner or later, smite some tender-souled poet or poetess on the lips who might have sung the world into sweet trances, had we not silenced the matin-song in its first low breathings! Just as my heart yearns over the unloved, just so it sorrows for the ungifted who are doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self- estimate. I have always tried to be gentle with the most hopeless cases. My experience, however, has not been encouraging.

– X. Y., aet. 18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and broad, bony, cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls in his village, and “got the mitten” (pronounced mittIn) two or three times, falls to souling and controlling, and youthing and truthing, in the newspapers. Sends me some strings of verses, candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in which I learn for the millionth time one of the following facts: either that something about a chime is sublime, or that something about time is sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with time, or that something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned with time or with a chime. Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice as to his future course.

What shall I do about it? Tell him the whole truth, and send him a ticket of admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth? One doesn’t like to be cruel, – and yet one hates to lie. Therefore one softens down the ugly central fact of donkeyism, – recommends study of good models, – that writing verse should be an incidental occupation only, not interfering with the hoe, the needle, the lapstone, or the ledger, – and, above all that there should be no hurry in printing what is written. Not the least use in all this. The poetaster who has tasted type is done for. He is like the man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency. He feeds on the madder of his delusion all his days, and his very bones grow red with the glow of his foolish fancy. One of these young brains is like a bunch of India crackers; once touch fire to it and it is best to keep hands off until it has done popping, – if it ever stops. I have two letters on file; one is a pattern of adulation, the other of impertinence. My reply to the first, containing the best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous language, had brought out the second. There was some sport in this, but Dulness is not commonly a game fish, and only sulks after he is struck. You may set it down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your OPINION really want your PRAISE, and will be contented with nothing less.

There is another kind of application to which editors, or those supposed to have access to them, are liable, and which often proves trying and painful. One is appealed to in behalf of some person in needy circumstances who wishes to make a living by the pen. A manuscript accompanying the letter is offered for publication. It is not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably deficient. If Rachel’s saying is true, that “fortune is the measure of intelligence,” then poverty is evidence of limited capacity which it too frequently proves to be, notwithstanding a noble exception here and there. Now an editor is a person under a contract with the public to furnish them with the best things he can afford for his money. Charity shown by the publication of an inferior article would be like the generosity of Claude Duval and the other gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so much they robbed the rich to have the means of relieving them.

Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the trials to which they are submitted. They have nothing to do but to develope enormous calluses at every point of contact with authorship. Their business is not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect. They must reject the unfit productions of those whom they long to befriend, because it would be a profligate charity to accept them. One cannot burn his house down to warm the hands even of the fatherless and the widow.

THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.

– You haven’t heard about my friend the Professor’s first experiment in the use of anaesthetics, have you?

He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his about the chaise. He spoke to me once or twice about another poem of similar character he wanted to read me, which I told him I would listen to and criticize.

One day, after dinner, he came in with his face tied up, looking very red in the cheeks and heavy about the eyes. – Hy’r’ye? – he said, and made for an arm-chair, in which he placed first his hat and then his person, going smack through the crown of the former as neatly as they do the trick at the circus. The Professor jumped at the explosion as if he had sat down on one of those small CALTHROPS our grandfathers used to sow round in the grass when there were Indians about, – iron stars, each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a half long, – stick through moccasins into feet, – cripple ’em on the spot, and give ’em lockjaw in a day or two.

At the same time he let off one of those big words which lie at the bottom of the best man’s vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in his life, – just as every man’s hair MAY stand on end, but in most men it never does.

After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript, together with a smaller scrap, on which, as he said, he had just been writing an introduction or prelude to the main performance. A certain suspicion had come into my mind that the Professor was not quite right, which was confirmed by the way he talked; but I let him begin. This is the way he read it:-

PRELUDE.

I’M the fellah that tole one day
The tale of the won’erful one-hoss-shay. Wan’ to hear another? Say.
– Funny, wasn’it? Made ME laugh, –
I’m too modest, I am, by half, –
Made me laugh’S THOUGH I SH’D SPLIT, – Cahn’ a fellah like fellah’s own wit? –
– Fellahs keep sayin’, – “Well, now that’s nice; Did it once, but cahn’ do it twice.” –
Don’ you b’lieve the’z no more fat; Lots in the kitch’n ‘z good ‘z that.
Fus’-rate throw, ‘n’ no mistake, –
Han’ us the props for another shake; – Know I’ll try, ‘n’ guess I’ll win;
Here sh’ goes for hit ‘m ag’in!

Here I thought it necessary to interpose. – Professor, – I said, – you are inebriated. The style of what you call your “Prelude” shows that it was written under cerebral excitement. Your articulation is confused. You have told me three times in succession, in exactly the same words, that I was the only true friend you had in the world that you would unbutton your heart to. You smell distinctly and decidedly of spirits. – I spoke, and paused; tender, but firm.

Two large tears orbed themselves beneath the Professor’s lids, – in obedience to the principle of gravitation celebrated in that delicious bit of bladdery bathos, “The very law that moulds a tear,” with which the “Edinburgh Review” attempted to put down Master George Gordon when that young man was foolishly trying to make himself conspicuous.

One of these tears peeped over the edge of the lid until it lost its balance, – slid an inch and waited for reinforcements, – swelled again, – rolled down a little further, – stopped, – moved on, – and at last fell on the back of the Professor’s hand. He held it up for me to look at, and lifted his eyes, brimful, till they met mine.

I couldn’t stand it, – I always break down when folks cry in my face, – so I hugged him, and said he was a dear old boy, and asked him kindly what was the matter with him, and what made him smell so dreadfully strong of spirits.

Upset his alcohol lamp, – he said, – and spilt the alcohol on his legs. That was it. – But what had he been doing to get his head into such a state? – had he really committed an excess? What was the matter? – Then it came out that he had been taking chloroform to have a tooth out, which had left him in a very queer state, in which he had written the “Prelude” given above, and under the influence of which he evidently was still.

I took the manuscript from his hands and read the following continuation of the lines he had begun to read me, while he made up for two or three nights’ lost sleep as he best might.

PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY:
OR THE PRESIDENT’S OLD ARM-CHAIR.
A MATHEMATICAL STORY.

FACTS respecting an old arm-chair.
At Cambridge. Is kept in the College there. Seems but little the worse for wear.
That’s remarkable when I say
It was old in President Holyoke’s day. (One of his boys, perhaps you know,
Died, AT ONE HUNDRED, years ago.)
HE took lodging for rain or shine
Under green bed-clothes in ’69.

Know old Cambridge? Hope you do. –
Born there? Don’t say so! I was, too. (Born in a house with a gambrel-roof, –
Standing still, if you must have proof. – “Gambrel? – Gambrel?” – Let me beg
You’ll look at a horse’s hinder leg, – First great angle above the hoof, –
That’s the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.) – Nicest place that ever was seen, –
Colleges red and Common green,
Sidewalks brownish with trees between. Sweetest spot beneath the skies
When the canker-worms don’t rise, – When the dust, that sometimes flies
Into your mouth and ears and eyes.
In a quiet slumber lies,
NOT in the shape of unbaked pies
Such as barefoot children prize.

A kind of harber it seems to be,
Facing the flow of a boundless sea. Rows of gray old Tutors stand
Ranged like rocks above the sand;
Rolling beneath them, soft and green, Breaks the tide of bright sixteen, –
One wave, two waves, three waves, four, Sliding up the sparkling floor;
Then it ebbs to flow no more,
Wandering off from shore to shore
With its freight of golden ore!
– Pleasant place for boys to play; – Better keep your girls away;
Hearts get rolled as pebbles do
Which countless fingering waves pursue, And every classic beach is strown
With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone.

But this is neither here nor there; – I’m talking about an old arm-chair.
You’ve heard, no doubt, of PARSON TURELL? Over at Medford he used to dwell;
Married one of the Mathers’ folk;
Got with his wife a chair of oak, – Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
Sharp behind and broad front edge, – One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings, – But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand, – Fit for the worthies of the land, –
Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in, Or Cotton Mather to sit – and lie – in.
– Parson Turell bequeathed the same To a certain student, – SMITH by name;
These were the terms, as we are told: “Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde; When he doth graduate, then to passe
To ye oldest Youth in ye Senior Classe. On Payment of” -(naming a certain sum) – “By him to whom ye Chaire shall come;
He to ye oldest Senior next,
And soe forever,” – (thus runs the text,) – “But one Crown lesse then he gave to claime, That being his Debte for use of same.”

SMITH transferred it to one of the BROWNS, And took his money, – five silver crowns. BROWN delivered it up to MOORE,
Who paid, it is plain, not five, but four. MOORE made over the chair to LEE,
Who gave him crowns of silver three. LEE conveyed it unto DREW,
And now the payment, of course, was two. DREW gave up the chair to DUNN, –
All he got, as you see, was one.
DUNN released the chair to HALL,
And got by the bargain no crown at all. – And now it passed to a second BROWN,
Who took it, and likewise CLAIMED A CROWN. When BROWN conveyed it unto WARE,
Having had one crown, to make it fair, He paid him two crowns to take the chair; And WARE, being honest, (as all Wares be,) He paid one POTTER, who took it, three.
Four got ROBINSON; five got DIX;
JOHNSON PRIMUS demanded six;
And so the sum kept gathering still Till after the battle of Bunker’s Hill
– When paper money became so cheap, Folks wouldn’t count it, but said “a heap,”

A certain RICHARDS, the books declare, (A. M. in ’90? I’ve looked with care
Through the Triennial, – NAME NOT THERE.) This person, Richards, was offered then
Eight score pounds, but would have ten; Nine, I think, was the sum he took, –
Not quite certain, – but see the book. – By and by the wars were still,
But nothing had altered the Parson’s will. The old arm-chair was solid yet,
But saddled with such a monstrous debt! Things grew quite too bad to bear,
Paying such sums to get rid of the chair! But dead men’s fingers hold awful tight, And there was the will in black and white, Plain enough for a child to spell.
What should be done no man could tell, For the chair was a kind of nightmare curse, And every season but made it worse.

As a last resort, to clear the doubt, They got old GOVERNOR HANCOCK out.
The Governor came, with his Light-horse Troop And his mounted truckmen, all cock-a-hoop; Halberds glittered and colors flew,
French horns whinnied and trumpets blew, The yellow fifes whistled between their teeth And the bumble-bee bass-drums boomed beneath; So he rode with all his band,
Till the President met him, cap in hand. – The Governor “hefted” the crowns, and said, – “A will is a will, and the Parson’s dead.” The Governor hefted the crowns. Said he, – “There is your p’int. And here’s my fee. These are the terms you must fulfil, –
On such conditions I BREAK THE WILL!” The Governor mentioned what these should be. (Just wait a minute and then you’ll see.) The President prayed. Then all was still, And the Governor rose and BROKE THE WILL! – “About those conditions?” Well, now you go And do as I tell you, and then you’ll know. Once a year, on Commencement-day,
If you’ll only take the pains to stay, You’ll see the President in the CHAIR,
Likewise the Governor sitting there. The President rises; both old and young
May hear his speech in a foreign tongue, The meaning whereof, as lawyers swear,
Is this: Can I keep this old arm-chair? And then his Excellency bows,
As much as to say that he allows.
The Vice-Gub. next is called by name; He bows like t’other, which means the same. And all the officers round ’em bow,
As much as to say that THEY allow.
And a lot of parchments about the chair Are handed to witnesses then and there,
And then the lawyers hold it clear
That the chair is safe for another year.

God bless you, Gentlemen! Learn to give Money to colleges while you live.
Don’t be silly and think you’ll try To bother the colleges, when you die,
With codicil this, and codicil that, That Knowledge may starve while Law grows fat; For there never was pitcher that wouldn’t spill, And there’s always a flaw in a donkey’s will!

– Hospitality is a good deal a matter of latitude, I suspect. The shade of a palm-tree serves an African for a hut; his dwelling is all door and no walls; everybody can come in. To make a morning call on an Esquimaux acquaintance, one must creep through a long tunnel; his house is all walls and no door, except such a one as an apple with a worm-hole has. One might, very probably, trace a regular gradation between these two extremes. In cities where the evenings are generally hot, the people have porches at their doors, where they sit, and this is, of course, a provocative to the interchange of civilities. A good deal, which in colder regions is ascribed to mean dispositions, belongs really to mean temperature.

Once in a while, even in our Northern cities, at noon, in a very hot summer’s day, one may realize, by a sudden extension in his sphere of consciousness, how closely he is shut up for the most part. – Do you not remember something like this? July, between 1 and 2, P. M., Fahrenheit 96 degrees, or thereabout. Windows all gaping, like the mouths of panting dogs. Long, stinging cry of a locust comes in from a tree, half a mile off; had forgotten there was such a tree. Baby’s screams from a house several blocks distant; – never knew there were any babies in the neighborhood before. Tinman pounding something that clatters dreadfully, – very distinct, but don’t remember any tinman’s shop near by. Horses stamping on pavement to get off flies. When you hear these four sounds, you may set it down as a warm day. Then it is that one would like to imitate the mode of life of the native at Sierra Leone, as somebody has described it: stroll into the market in natural costume, – buy a water-melon for a halfpenny, – split it, and scoop out the middle, – sit down in one half of the empty rind, clap the other on one’s head, and feast upon the pulp.

– I see some of the London journals have been attacking some of their literary people for lecturing, on the ground of its being a public exhibition of themselves for money. A popular author can print his lecture; if he deliver it, it is a case of QUAESTUM CORPORE, or making profit of his person. None but “snobs” do that. ERGO, etc. To this I reply, – NEGATUR MINOR. Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Queen, exhibits herself to the public as a part of the service for which she is paid. We do not consider it low-bred in her to pronounce her own speech, and should prefer it so to hearing it from any other person, or reading it. His Grace and his Lordship exhibit themselves very often for popularity, and their houses every day for money. – No, if a man shows himself other than he is, if he belittles himself before an audience for hire, then he acts unworthily. But a true word, fresh from the lips of a true man, is worth paying for, at the rate of eight dollars a day, or even of fifty dollars a lecture. The taunt must be an outbreak of jealousy against the renowned authors who have the audacity to be also orators. The sub-lieutenants (of the press) stick a too popular writer and speaker with an epithet in England, instead of with a rapier, as in France. – Poh! All England is one great menagerie, and, all at once, the jackal, who admires the gilded cage of the royal beast, must protest against the vulgarity of the talking-bird’s and the nightingale’s being willing to become a part of the exhibition!

THE LONG PATH.
(LAST OF THE PARENTHESES.)

Yes, that was my last walk with the SCHOOLMISTRESS. It happened to be the end of a term; and before the next began, a very nice young woman, who had been her assistant, was announced as her successor, and she was provided for elsewhere. So it was no longer the schoolmistress that I walked with, but – Let us not be in unseemly haste. I shall call her the schoolmistress still; some of you love her under that name.

When it became known among the boarders that two of their number had joined hands to walk down the long path of life side by side, there was, as you may suppose, no small sensation. I confess I pitied our landlady. It took her all of a suddin, – she said. Had not known that we was keepin company, and never mistrusted anything particular. Ma’am was right to better herself. Didn’t look very rugged to take care of a femily, but could get hired haalp, she calc’lated. – The great maternal instinct came crowding up in her soul just then, and her eyes wandered until they settled on her daughter.

– No, poor, dear woman, – that could not have been. But I am dropping one of my internal tears for you, with this pleasant smile on my face all the time.

The great mystery of God’s providence is the permitted crushing out of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed. LAUS DEO!] There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls; – her bosom is heaving; but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor girl’s story in the “Book of Martyrs.” The “dry-pan and the gradual fire” were the images that frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger Inquisition which we call Civilization!

Yes, my surface-thought laughs at you, you foolish, plain, overdressed, mincing, cheaply-organized, self-saturated young person, whoever you may be, now reading this, – little thinking you are what I describe, and in blissful unconsciousness that you are destined to the lingering asphyxia of soul which is the lot of such multitudes worthier than yourself. But it is only my surface- thought which laughs. For that great procession of the UNLOVED, who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the locks of brown or gray, – under the snowy cap, under the chilling turban, – hide it even from themselves, – perhaps never know they wear it, though it kills them, – there is no depth of tenderness in my nature that Pity has not sounded. Somewhere, – somewhere, – love is in store for them, – the universe must not be allowed to fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the small, half- unconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by their God- given instincts!

Read what the singing-women – one to ten thousand of the suffering women – tell us, and think of the griefs that die unspoken! Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman; and there are women enough lying in the next churchyard with very commonplace blue slate- stones at their head and feet, for whom it was just as true that “all sounds of life assumed one tone of love,” as for Letitia Landon, of whom Elizabeth Browning said it; but she could give words to her grief, and they could not. – Will you hear a few stanzas of mine?

THE VOICELESS.

WE count the broken lyres that rest
Where the sweet wailing singers slumber, – But o’er their silent sister’s breast
The wild flowers who will stoop to number? A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them; – Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone
Whose song has told their hearts’ sad story, – Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O’er Sappho’s memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless sorrow’s churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses, Till Death pours out his cordial wine
Slow-dropped from Misery’s crushing presses, – If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!

I hope that our landlady’s daughter is not so badly off, after all. That young man from another city who made the remark which you remember about Boston State-house and Boston folks, has appeared at our table repeatedly of late, and has seemed to me rather attentive to this young lady. Only last evening I saw him leaning over her while she was playing the accordion, – indeed, I undertook to join them in a song, and got as far as “Come rest in this boo-oo,” when, my voice getting tremulous, I turned off, as one steps out of a procession, and left the basso and soprano to finish it. I see no reason why this young woman should not be a very proper match for a man that laughs about Boston State-house. He can’t be very particular.

The young fellow whom I have so often mentioned was a little free in his remarks, but very good-natured. – Sorry to have you go, – he said. – School-ma’am made a mistake not to wait for me. Haven’t taken anything but mournin’ fruit at breakfast since I heard of it. – MOURNING fruit, – said I, – what’s that? – Huckleberries and blackberries, – said he; – couldn’t eat in colors, raspberries, currants, and such, after a solemn thing like this happening. – The conceit seemed to please the young fellow. If you will believe it, when we came down to breakfast the next morning, he had carried it out as follows. You know those odious little “saas-plates” that figure so largely at boarding-houses, and especially at taverns, into which a strenuous attendant female trowels little dabs, sombre of tint and heterogeneous of composition, which it makes you feel homesick to look at, and into which you poke the elastic coppery tea-spoon with the air of a cat dipping her foot into a wash-tub, – (not that I mean to say anything against them, for, when they are of tinted porcelain or starry many-faceted crystal, and hold clean bright berries, or pale virgin honey, or “lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon,” and the teaspoon is of white silver, with the Tower- stamp, solid, but not brutally heavy, – as people in the green stage of millionism will have them, – I can dally with their amber semi-fluids or glossy spherules without a shiver,) – you know these small, deep dishes, I say. When we came down the next morning, each of these (two only excepted) was covered with a broad leaf. On lifting this, each boarder found a small heap of solemn black huckleberries. But one of those plates held red currants, and was covered with a red rose; the other held white currants, and was covered with a white rose. There was a laugh at this at first, and then a short silence, and I noticed that her lip trembled, and the old gentleman opposite was in trouble to get at his bandanna handkerchief

– “What was the use in waiting? We should be too late for Switzerland, that season, if we waited much longer.” – The hand I held trembled in mine, and the eyes fell meekly, as Esther bowed herself before the feet of Ahasuerus. – She had been reading that chapter, for she looked up, – if there was a film of moisture over her eyes there was also the faintest shadow of a distant smile skirting her lips, but not enough to accent the dimples, – and said, in her pretty, still way, – “If it please the king, and if I have found favor in his sight, and the thing seem right before the king, and I be pleasing in his eyes” –

I don’t remember what King Ahasuerus did or said when Esther got just to that point of her soft, humble words, – but I know what I did. That quotation from Scripture was cut short, anyhow. We came to a compromise on the great question, and the time was settled for the last day of summer.

In the mean time, I talked on with our boarders, much as usual, as you may see by what I have reported. I must say, I was pleased with a certain tenderness they all showed toward us, after the first excitement of the news was over. It came out in trivial matters, – but each one, in his or her way, manifested kindness. Our landlady, for instance, when we had chickens, sent the LIVER instead of the GIZZARD, with the wing, for the schoolmistress. This was not an accident; the two are never mistaken, though some landladies APPEAR as if they did not know the difference. The whole of the company were even more respectfully attentive to my remarks than usual. There was no idle punning, and very little winking on the part of that lively young gentleman who, as the reader may remember, occasionally interposed some playful question or remark, which could hardly be considered relevant, – except when the least allusion was made to matrimony, when he would look at the landlady’s daughter, and wink with both sides of his face, until she would ask what he was pokin’ his fun at her for, and if he wasn’t ashamed of himself. In fact, they all behaved very handsomely, so that I really felt sorry at the thought of leaving my boarding-house.

I suppose you think, that, because I lived at a plain widow-woman’s plain table, I was of course more or less infirm in point of worldly fortune. You may not be sorry to learn, that, though not what GREAT MERCHANTS call very rich, I was comfortable, – comfortable, – so that most of those moderate luxuries I described in my verses on CONTENTMENT – MOST of them, I say – were within our reach, if we chose to have them. But I found out that the schoolmistress had a vein of charity about her, which had hitherto been worked on a small silver and copper basis, which made her think less, perhaps, of luxuries than even I did, – modestly as I have expressed my wishes.

It is a rather pleasant thing to tell a poor young woman, whom one has contrived to win without showing his rent-roll, that she has found what the world values so highly, in following the lead of her affections. That was an enjoyment I was now ready for.

I began abruptly:- Do you know that you are a rich young person?

I know that I am very rich, – she said. – Heaven has given me more than I ever asked; for I had not thought love was ever meant for me.

It was a woman’s confession, and her voice fell to a whisper as it threaded the last words.

I don’t mean that, – I said, – you blessed little saint and seraph! – if there’s an angel missing in the New Jerusalem, inquire for her at this boarding house! – I don’t mean that! I mean that I – that is, you – am – are – confound it! – I mean that you’ll be what most people call a lady of fortune. And I looked full in her eyes for the effect of the announcement.

There wasn’t any. She said she was thankful that I had what would save me from drudgery, and that some other time I should tell her about it. – I never made a greater failure in an attempt to produce a sensation.

So the last day of summer came. It was our choice to go to the church, but we had a kind of reception at the boarding-house. The presents were all arranged, and among them none gave more pleasure than the modest tributes of our fellow-boarders, – for there was not one, I believe, who did not send something. The landlady would insist on making an elegant bride-cake, with her own hands; to which Master Benjamin Franklin wished to add certain embellishments out of his private funds, – namely, a Cupid in a mouse-trap, done in white sugar, and two miniature flags with the stars and stripes, which had a very pleasing effect, I assure you. The landlady’s daughter sent a richly bound copy of Tupper’s Poems. On a blank leaf was the following, written in a very delicate and careful hand:-

Presented to . . . by . . .
On the eve ere her union in holy matrimony. May sunshine ever beam o’er her!

Even the poor relative thought she must do something, and sent a copy of “The Whole Duty of Man,” bound in very attractive variegated sheepskin, the edges nicely marbled. From the divinity- student came the loveliest English edition of “Keble’s Christian Year.” I opened it, when it came, to the FOURTH SUNDAY IN LENT, and read that angelic poem, sweeter than anything I can remember since Xavier’s “My God, I love thee.” – I am not a Churchman, – I don’t believe in planting oaks in flower-pots, – but such a poem as “The Rosebud” makes one’s heart a proselyte to the culture it grows from. Talk about it as much as you like, – one’s breeding shows itself nowhere more than in his religion. A man should be a gentleman in his hymns and prayers; the fondness for “scenes,” among vulgar saints, contrasts so meanly with that –

“God only and good angels look
Behind the blissful scene,”-

and that other, –

“He could not trust his melting soul
But in his Maker’s sight,” –

that I hope some of them will see this, and read the poem, and profit by it.

My laughing and winking young friend undertook to procure and arrange the flowers for the table, and did it with immense zeal. I never saw him look happier than when he came in, his hat saucily on one side, and a cheroot in his mouth, with a huge bunch of tea- roses, which he said were for “Madam.”

One of the last things that came was an old square box, smelling of camphor, tied and sealed. It bore, in faded ink, the marks, “Calcutta, 1805.” On opening it, we found a white Cashmere shawl with a very brief note from the dear old gentleman opposite, saying that he had kept this some years, thinking he might want it, and many more, not knowing what to do with it, – that he had never seen it unfolded since he was a young supercargo, – and now, if she would spread it on her shoulders, it would make him feel young to look at it.

Poor Bridget, or Biddy, our red-armed maid of all work! What must she do but buy a small copper breast-pin and put it under “Schoolma’am’s” plate that morning, at breakfast? And Schoolma’am would wear it, – though I made her cover it, as well as I could, with a tea-rose.

It was my last breakfast as a boarder, and I could not leave them in utter silence.

Good-by, – I said, – my dear friends, one and all of you! I have been long with you, and I find it hard parting. I have to thank you for a thousand courtesies, and above all for the patience and indulgence with which you have listened to me when I have tried to instruct or amuse you. My friend the Professor (who, as well as my friend the Poet, is unavoidably absent on this interesting occasion) has given me reason to suppose that he would occupy my empty chair about the first of January next. If he comes among you, be kind to him, as you have been to me. May the Lord bless you all! – And we shook hands all round the table.

Half an hour afterwards the breakfast things and the cloth were gone. I looked up and down the length of the bare boards over which I had so often uttered my sentiments and experiences – and – Yes, I am a man, like another.

All sadness vanished, as, in the midst of these old friends of mine, whom you know, and others a little more up in the world, perhaps, to whom I have not introduced you, I took the schoolmistress before the altar from the hands of the old gentleman who used to sit opposite, and who would insist on giving her away.

And now we two are walking the long path in peace together. The “schoolmistress” finds her skill in teaching called for again, without going abroad to seek little scholars. Those visions of mine have all come true.

I hope you all love me none the less for anything I have told you. Farewell!

THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.

The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a quarter of a century since these papers were written. Statements which were true then are not necessarily true now. Thus, the speed of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page 49 of the “Autocrat.” No doubt many other statements and opinions might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of having written before the war, when the world and I were both more than a score of years younger.

These papers followed close upon the track of the “Autocrat.” They had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected, which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest. Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his arrow of the danger of missing when he looses “his fellow of the selfsame flight.”

There is good reason why it should be so. The first juice that runs of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press the flow betrays the flavor of the skin. If there is any freshness in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated. Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this second series of papers to the first. The new papers were more aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism in others. It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they called forth. Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary. It required the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.

How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant! One day, in the time when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of “Tom Jones,” and glance at the title-page. There was one of those little engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of “T. Uwins,” as I remember it, and under it the words “Mr. Partridge bore all this patiently.” How many times, when, after rough usage from ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal effervescence! There is very little in them and very little of them; and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a catastrophe. The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect. All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow- passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.

But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne, and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and denunciation.

November, 1882.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades, and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten years. The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters. If the book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is natural that the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception of his more or less aggressive ideas. He wishes to convince, not to offend,–to obtain a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry opposition in those who do not accept it. There is commonly an anxious look about a first Preface. The author thinks he shall be misapprehended about this or that matter, that his well-meant expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those whom he looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier radicals. The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest part of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.

After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,–has got over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still read, and that he must write a new Preface. He comes smiling to his task. How many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty or thirty years since he came before his untried public in those almost plaintive paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his readers,–for the Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he may prove, comes on to the stage with his shield on his right arm and his sword in his left hand.

The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the “Atlantic Monthly” and introduced itself without any formal Preface. A quarter of a century later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had