THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
DAVIS
GIFT OF
Mrs* Paul M. Grant
George Sidnnond Dal . ( Brom a drawing in. the pos
HALF-HOURS
WITH THE
BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
SELECTED AND ARRANGED BY
CHARLES MORRIS.
VOL. III.
PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
1891.
LIBRARY
.UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
PAVIS
Copyright, 1886, by J. B. LIPPTNCOTT COMPANY.
CONTENTS.
SUBJECT. AUTHOR. PAQB
Squire Paine's Conversion ROSE TERRY COOKE .... 7
Discomfited Hunters CHARLES C. ABBOTT .... 20
Sonnets VARIOUS 32
Children JOHN NEAL 39
Oration on La Fayette . . CHARLES SUMNER 43
A Hymn to the Types CHARLES G. HALPINE ... 47
Political Parties DE WITT CLINTON 51
Obliterated Continents ALEXANDER WINCHELL . . 55
Pedestrianism in Europe BAYARD TAYLOR 69
A Western Reception FRANCES C. BAYLOR .... 80
Drifting T. B. READ 92
The Influence of Educated Women .... BENJAMIN RUSH 95
Tobacco " " 98
A Terrible Ride ALBION W. TOURGEE . ... 100
Newspaper Characteristics FISHER AMES 110
Alexander Hamilton " " 113
Advice to Farmers HORACE GREELEY 116
Life in Nature VARIOUS 123
Robert of Lincoln W. C. BRYANT 123
To the Mocking-Bird ALBERT PIKE 125
Birds and Thoughts R. H. STODDARD 127
The Voice of the Grass SARAH ROBERTS 128
The Coral Grove J. G. PERCIVAL 129
The Chambered Nautilus 0. W. HOLMES 130
'J he Humble-Bee R. W. EMERSON 132
My Strawberry HELEN HUNT 134
The Petrified Fern MARY L. BOLLES 135
Washington Resigns his Commission . . . DAVID RAMSAY 137
Specimen of a Collegiate Examination . . FRANCIS HOPKINSON .... 140
On Whitewashing " " .... 144
Characteristics of Arabian Poetry .... HENRY COPPEE 148
3
4 CONTENTS.
SUBJECT. AUTHOR. PAGE
The Secret Chamber NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE . . 156
Shakespeare Ode CHARLES SPRAGUE 167
Novel- Writing before Waverley R. S. MACKENZIE 173
Restricted Development of Poetry in
America . E. C. STEDMAN 183
The Gulf Stream M. F. MAURY 192
The Storming of the Bastille JOHN S. C. ABBOTT .... 206
An Astonished Gambler MARY N. MURFREE .... 214
The Black Regiment GEORGE H. BOKEK .... 227
First Impressions of Japan JAMES BROOKS 229
Keimer's Attempt to found a New Religion . MASON L. WEEMS 237
Jack and Gill : A Criticism JOSEPH DENNIE 247
After tne Ball NORA PERRY 253
Oration on the Death of Washington . . . HENRY LEE 256
Religion in its Relations to Literature . . W. E. CHANNING 260
Sunday Morning in Wallencamp SALLIE PRATT McLEAN . . 264
The Lady Riberta's Harvest MARGARET J. PRESTON . . . 273
Domestic Life in 1800 SAMUEL G. GOODRICH ... 277
A Visit to Sunnyside J. G. WILSON 283
The Art of the Future CHARLES G. LELAND .... 289
In the Depths of the Mine MARY H. FOOTE 299
Aspects of Nature VARIOUS 308
A Forest Nook ALFRED B. STREET .... 308
A Day ROBERT KELLY WEEKS . . . 310
The Fall of Niagara JOHN G. C. BRAINARD . . . 312
The Sky R. H. STODDARD 313
To Seneca Lake J. G. PERCIVAL 313
Twilight ISAAC MCLELLAN 314
Sunrise from Mount Washington . . . . RUFUS DAWES 316
The Brook WM. B. WRIGHT 317
The Rain ANONYMOUS 320
Death and the Future Life CHAUNCEY GILES 321
A Pretty Time of Night JOSEPH C. NEAL 330
Our Familiar Birds MARY TREAT 339
The Dancers of the Nile G. W. CURTIS 348
Instructions in the Art of Duelling .... HUGH H. BRACKENRIDGE . . 359
The Wants of Man JOHN QUINCY ADAMS .... 364
A Royal Seat EUGENE BENSON 372
A Traitor Discomfited F. M. CRAWFORD 379
Death of Charles the Bold JOHN FOSTER KIRK .... 390
New England Weather S. L. CLEMENS 400
CONTENTS. 5
SUBJECT. AUTHOR. PAGE
Old Roads and Wood-Paths WILSON FLAGG 404
Modern Business Methods C. A. BARTOL 414
Boating down the Grand Canon W. II. RIDEING 422
The Rivulet, the River, and the Ocean . . VARIOUS 433
The Rivulet W. C. BRYANT 433
The Connecticut River LYDIA H. SIGOURNEY . . . 435
By the Sea-Shore JOHN WHITE CHADWICK . . 436
Song of the Ocean ANONYMOUS 438
Inside Pluin Island HARRIET P. SPOFFORD . . . 440
My Ships at Sea R. B. COFFIN 441
Minute Forms of Life G. P. MARSH ....... 443
Development of Religious Ideas D. G. BRINTON 448
A South-Sea Idyl C. W. STODDARD 459
The Man without a Country E. E. HALE 467
The Vagabonds J. T. TROWBRIDGE 480
The Bible and the Iliad FRANCIS WAYLAND .... 484
The Terror of the Earthquake MARY AGNES TINCKER . . . 489
The Eternal Goodness J. G. WHITTIER 500
A Mine-Explosion FRANCES H. BURNETT . . . 504
HALF-HOURS
WITH THE
BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
SQUIRE PAINE'S CONVERSION.
ROSE TERRY COOKE.
[The short stories which Mrs. Cooke has been for years contributing
to our leading magazines are among the best specimens extant of the
American humorous tale, and for happy handling of the New England
dialect, and versatility in character-drawing, are of unsurpassed excel
lence. Under her maiden name of Kose Terry she formerly published
a volume of poems, of marked merit, from which we have made an ex
tract in a preceding volume. She is a native of "West Hartford, Connec
ticut, where she was born in 1827. The story whose concluding por
tions we give opens with a description of Squire Paine's masterful way
of " managing" his wife into the grave, and his high respect for the
"Golden Kewl" as applied to others, not to himself. Miss Koxy
succeeds Mrs. Paine as manager of the household.]
IN the library of Squire Larkin's time the next hour
was spent by Samuel Paine and Boxy Keep in a passage
of arms. He was determined to secure Boxy to manage
his establishment on his own terms ; and she was willing
to be secured, but it must be on her terms ; and, being a
tailoress, she carried the day. In consideration of the
little home she left in Hermon, and the lucrative trade
7
8 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CooKE
she left, she required of the squire a written guaranty
that her services should continue for two years in any
case, subject only to her own change of mind ; that her
salary should be paid quarterly, under pain of her im
mediate departure if it failed to come to hand ; and that
the aforesaid salary should be a sufficient equivalent for
the trade she gave up. After much conversation, the
squire yielded all these points, though with no good grace.
" Well, now I've gi'n up to ye," said he, " I'd like to
know how soon ye can come, Boxy. Things is a-goin'
every which way here. Lowisy's a good girl, she's a
good enough girl ; but she ain't nothin' but a girl, an' she
ain't no more fit to run a house'n she is to preach a ser
mon : so I'd like ye to come back's quick as ye can."
" I dono's I need to go," curtly and promptly answered
Miss Roxy. " I reckoned I should stay when I come : so
I sold out my house to Deacon Treadwell's widder, an' I
fetched my trunks along. They're over to Reading de
pot ; and the stage-driver he'll take the checks to-morrer
and fetch 'em back. I don't never let no grass grow under
my feet, Squire Paine."
"Land alive! I should think not!" ejaculated the as
tonished squire. So Miss Roxy stayed, and the house was
stirred up from beneath to meet her. Bridget gave notice
just in time not to have it given to her; and, brush in
hand, the fiercest of bandanna handkerchiefs tied over
her crisp black hair, Miss Roxy began that awful " setting
to rights" which is at once the privilege and the necessity
of strenuous souls like hers. At first Louise was half in
clined to rebel : the slipshod family rule, or misrule, had
just suited her youthful carelessness. But Miss Roxy's
keen humor, pleasant common sense, and comfortable effi
ciency soon enlisted Louise on her side ; and the girl could
not help enjoying the bright order, the speckless comfort,
COOKE] SQUIRE PAINED CONVERSION. 9
the savory meals, the thrift that was not meanness, and the
frugality that could be discreetly generous, which followed
Miss Roxy's reign ; and at the end of two years the squire
was glad enough to renew the guaranty which this fore
seeing woman still demanded of him. Well for her, well
for all of them, was it that he did so sign.
In the mean time Squire Paine had gone his way, buying
and selling, and talking much about the " Golden Rewl,"
and many small tiffs had ensued between him and Miss
Roxy on points of domestic economy. But the squire
knew, if he had never read, that discretion is the better
part of valor, and, considering just in time that house
keeping was not his forte and was Miss Roxy's, he always
beat a retreat after these battles, and not always with fly
ing colors. But now, toward the beginning of this third
year, there began to be trouble in the camp. Elisha
Squires, in common with various other youths of Bassett,
had found out that Louise Paine was charming above all
other girls of the vicinity ; and the squire's house became
a sort of besieged castle, greatly to his disgust and indig
nation.
" I won't hev it ! I won't hev it !" stormed he one fine
night, when the last of seven callers had gone from the
front door, and Louise judiciously slipped off to bed.
" Won't hev what ?" calmly inquired Boxy, who sat by
the " keeping-room" table, toeing off a stocking.
" Why, I won't hev so many fellers a-comin' here the
hull etarnal time. There ain't no use on't, an' I tell ye I
won't hev it. I won't, as sure's ye live."
" What be you goin' to do about it ?" was Roxy's cool
rejoinder.
'" I'll lock the doors."
" Then they'll come into the back-winder," smiled the
exasperating spinster. "Look here, Squire Paine," and
10 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [COOKE
she laid down her knitting, and confronted him as one who
" Drinks delight of battle with his peers,"
"you're a master-hand to talk about the Golden Eewl:
how'd you ha' liked it ef Squire Larkin had locked the
door to this house on you ?"
" He hadn't no call to : he was dead."
" Now don't jump no fences that way. 'Spose he'd ben
alive ?"
" I dono's I'm called to tell ye. I'm a professor in good
an' reg'lar standin', an' the Golden Rewl hes allers ben my
standard o' livin' ; an' the sperrit and principle o' the
Golden Rewl is to do to others as you'd wish to be done
by ; an' ef I was a gal I should be glad to hev the doors
locked on a passel o' fellers that come foolin' around nights."
" You're life-everlastin' sure o' that, be ye ?" was the dry
rejoinder.
"Well, ef she ain't, she'd orter be; an' I'm free to con
clude that Lowisy does what she'd orter, bein' my child
and her ma's."
"I don't believe no great in hinderin' young folks's
ways, Squire Paine. It's three wheels to a wagon to be
young, an' hinderin' don't overset nothin' : it's more apt
to set it, a long sight. Don't you never expect Lowisy to
git married ?"
" I dono's I do, an' I dono as I do. Married life is an
onsartin state. Mebbe Lowisy 'd be better off to stay to
hum with me. Anyway, there ain't no sech hurry ; 'tain't
the best goods go off the fust. An' I tell ye what, Eoxy ?
I do expect she'll hark to me about who she marries, and
not go an' git tied up to some poor Jack."
"Then I tell you what, Samwell Paine, you expect
nothin', an' you'll sup sorrow. Girls will pick out their
own husbands to the day after never, for all you. I
COOKE] SqUIRE PAINE 'S CONVERSION. 11
always hold that there's two things a woman had oughter
pick out for herself, spite o' fate; and them two is her
husband an' her carpets."
" An' I expect to pick 'em both out for Lowisy," answered
the undaunted squire, as he marched off to bed, holding
his tallow candle askew, and dropping hot tears of tallow
as he went.
But, as fate, or Louise, would have it, Squire Paine was
not to pick out either of these essentials for his daughter.
She was fast drifting into that obstinate blessedness which
is reserved for youth and love, which laughs at parents
and guardians, defies time and circumstance, and too often
blinds the brightest eyes, and brings the most fastidious
hands to
"Wreathe thy fair large ears, my gentle joy,"
and finds out too late it is Bottom the weaver.
In Louise's case, however, there was no danger of such
waking : she had good reason for her preference. Elisha
Squires, her father's clerk, was a handsome, well-educated,
energetic young fellow, a gentleman by nature and breed
ing both. Louise had pitied him ten thousand times for
his unfit position in her father's employment, before he
perceived that she was interested the least in him or his
occupation; and, when it dawned on the busy and weary
soul that one bright blossom looked over the paling into
his desert life, what was the natural impulse that followed ?
It is not a young man who " loves the wild rose, and leaves
it on its stalk," literally or figuratively ; and these juvenile
idiots fell fathoms deep in love with each other, entirely
unconscious of the melancholy fact that one was the
richest girl in Bassett, and the other working for daily
bread. Arcadia could not have shown more divine sim
plicity. But Bassett was not Arcadia ; and when sundry
12 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CooKK
jealous and disappointed swains discovered that " Lowisy
Paine" would go home from prayer-meetings with 'Lisha
Squires, had actually been seen lingering with him at her
father's front gate in the starry May darkness, even after
the nine-o'clock bell had rung, and was sure to welcome
him on a Sunday night, though she might snap and snarl
at them, then Louise's troubles began. Prayer-meetings
must be attended ; but the squire went to and fro with
her himself, and Elisha could not be spared from the store
to attend them at all. Squire Paine hated to lose his clerk,
but he would not lose his daughter : so, with the obtuse
perception of the heavy father from time immemorial, he
rushed into the melee like some floundering elephant into
a flower-bed.
"Lowisy," said he, one Sunday night, after the row of
adorers were dispersed, Elisha Squires among them, " hear
to me now ! I ain't a-goin' to hev you courted the hull
time by these here fellers. You've got to stop it. 'Spe
cially I won't hev ye careerin' around with 'Lisha : he's
poorer'n poverty, an' as stuck up as though he was mighty
Caesar. I've fetched ye up, an' gi'n ye a good eddication,.
an' you ain't a-goin' to throw yourself away on no sech
trash."
The hot color rushed up to Louise's forehead, her red
lip curled, and unspeakable disdain expressed itself, as she
looked straight into her father's face ; but she did not say
a word. She left the room with perfect composure, stop
ping to pick a dry leaf from her pet geranium, and walked
up the stairs with a slow precision that ought to have
spoken volumes to her father's ear, as it did to Eoxy's.
" Well, you've done it now," remarked that respectable
woman.
"Yes, I guess I hev," was the squire's complacent an
swer, quite misapprehending the sense in which he had
COOKE] SQUIRE PAINE ''S CONVERSION. 13
done it. "I guess I've put a spoke inter that wheel, an'
sideways too."
Roxy gave one of the silent chuckles which meant deep
amusement, and took herself off to bed. She was not a
woman to interfere with the course of true love between
Louise and Elisha, both of whom had become special
favorites of hers since their first acquaintance ; but, as
she said to herself, she would not " make nor meddle" in
this matter, having full confidence in Louise's power of
managing her own affairs, and far too much reverence
and delicacy in her own nature to be a match-maker.
JBut the squire went on from bad to worse, and, in his
blind zeal to have his own way, brought things to a swift
conclusion ; for, having given Elisha notice that he should
need him no longer, he was more than surprised one fine
July morning to find that Louise had left him too, that
the pair had gone together. The squire was black with
rage when the fact was announced to him by Miss Roxy,
and a brief and defiant note from Louise put into his hand.
He raved, raged, even swore, in his first wild fury, and
paced up and down the kitchen like a wild animal.
Miss Roxy eyed him with a peculiar expression. She
felt that her hour had come. As she afterward said, " I
should ha' bust ef I hadn't spoke. I'd ben a-hankerin' to
give it to him quite a spell, but I held my tongue for
Lowisy's sake. But thinks sez I, now's your time, Rox-
anny Keep ; pitch in an' do your dooty. An' I tell ye it
whistled of itself. Seemed as though 'twa'n't me re'lly,
.but somethin' makin' a tin horn out o' my lips to rouse
him up to judgment." And certainly Miss Roxy was
roused herself: she confronted the squire like a Yankee
lioness.
"Look a-here ? Samwell Paine: it's time somebody took
ye to do. You've ben a-buyin' an' a-sellin', an' a-rakin' an'
in. 2
14 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CooKE
a-scrapin', till your soul ef you've got any is nigh about
petered out. You call yourself a Christian an' a professor,
an' a follerer of the Golden Rewl, do ye ? An' here you
he, cussin' an' swearin' like a Hivite an' a Jeboosite, an' all
the rest on 'em, because things ain't jest as you would
have 'em to be. You hain't had no bowels of compassion
for Lowisy no more'n ef you was her jailer, instead of
her pa. What's the matter with 'Lisha Squires? He's
a honest, good-disposed, reliable feller as ever was, good
enough for anybody's girl ; a Christian, too, not one o'
the sugar-sandin', rum-waterin', light-weight kind, but a
real one. He don't read the Golden Rewl t'other side up,
as you do, I tell ye. You make it doin' to other folks just
what you want to do, an' lettin' them go hang. I tell ye
the hypocrite's hope shall perish ; an' you're one on 'em,
as sure as the world. 'Tain't sayin' Lord, Lord, that
makes folks pious : it's doin' the will o' God, justice, an'
mercy, an' lovin'-kindness."
Here Roxy paused for breath ; and the astounded squire
ejaculated, " Roxanny Keep !"
" Yes, that's my name : I ain't afeared to own it, nor to
set it square to what I've said. I hain't lived here goin'
on three year, an' seen your ways, for nothin'. I've had
eyes to behold your pinchin' an' sparin' an' crawlin' ;
grindin' poor folks's faces, an' lickin' rich folks's platters ;
actin' as though your own daughter was nothin' but a,
bill of expense to ye, an' a block to show off your pride
an' vanity, not a livin', lovin' soul to show the way to
heaven to. An' now she's quit. She's got a good, lovin',
true-hearted feller to help her along where you didn't
know the way, an' didn't want to, neither; an' you're
ravin' mad 'cause he hain't got -no money, when you've
got more'n enough for all on ye. Sam well Paine, you ain't
no Christian, not 'cordin' to gospel truth, ef you have
COOKE] SqUIRE PAINE 'S CONVERSION. 15
been a professor nigh on to forty year. You no need to
think you was converted, for you never was. Folks ain't
converted to meanness an' greediness an' self-seekin' an'
wrath an' malice. The Lord don't turn 'em into the error
of their ways : he turns 'em out on't. Ef you was a
minister in the pulpit, or a deacon handin' the plate, you
ain't no Christian 'thout you act like one; an' that's the
etarnal fact on't. You've ben a livin' lie all these years ;
an' you've ended by drivin' your only daughter, your own
flesh an' blood, the best thing the Lord ever give ye, out
o' house an' home 'cause you was mad after money. An'
it'll happen unto ye accordin' to the word o' the Lord
about sech folks: you'll be drownded in destruction an'
perdition, an' pierce yourself through with many sorrers,
ef you don't flee for your life from sech things, an' foller
after righteousness, godliness, an' the rest on 'em. You'd
oughter go down on your poor old knees an' pray to be
converted at the 'leventh hour. There, I've freed my
mind, thank the Lord ! an' there won't be none o' your
blood found on my skirts ef the last day comes in to-
morrer mornin'." With which the exhausted lecturer
heaved a long breath, and began to mop her heated face
vigorously with her inseparable bandanna handkerchief,
which might have symbolized to the audience, had there
been any, a homely victorious banner.
The squire stood amazed and afraid. In all the long
course of his life nobody had ever before gainsaid him.
Outward respect and consideration had been his portion :
now the ground cracked under his feet, and he found him
self in a new land. He did not go to the store that day :
he stumbled out of Roxy's sight, and shut himself up in
the unused parlor, where alternate storms of rage, convic
tion, despair, and scorn assailed him for many hours. It
was, indeed, a dreadful battle that he fought in the musty
16 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CooKK
Bilence of that darkened room, pacing up and down like a
caged tiger. Eoxy had spoken awful words ; but they
were milk and honey compared to the echo which his late-
awakened conscience gave them: still he fought with a
certain savage courage against the truths that were top
pling over to crush him, and justified himself to his own
accusing soul with a persistent hardihood that had better
served a better cause. It was reserved for God's owe
ntroke to bring sweet waters out of this rock : Moses and
the rod had smitten it in vain. Just as his courage seemed
to aid him, and he had resolved to send Roxy back to
Hermon and her tailoring, and brave out the judgment of
his fellow-men and the desertion of Louise, nay, more, to
revenge himself for that desertion by refusing her aid or
comfort, or even recognition of any kind, just then, as he
had settled down into his self-complacency, and wilful dis
regard of God's own words, pelted at him as they had
been by Boxy, he heard an outer door open, invading
steps, voices of low tumult, a sort of whispering horror
and stifled grief drawing nearer to his retreat, and the
door opened very slowly, disclosing the stern features of
Parson Peters, the village minister. Not altogether stern
now was that long and meagre visage : a sort of terror
mingled with pit} 7 softened its rigid lines.
"My brother," he said, lifting one hand, as he was wont
to do when praying over a coffin, and facing the troubled
and inflamed countenance of Squire Paine, " my brother,
the hand of the Lord is upon you this day. Your child
has been taken. There has been a terrible accident to the
train by which they left Reading Station, and news has
come that both are gone."
Like a forest tree into which the woodman sets his last
stroke, the squire tottered, paused for one instant of time,
and fell forward prostrate.
COOKE] SqUIRE PAINE 'S CONVERSION. 17
Koxy was behind Parson Peters as the old man fell ;
and, pushing that eminent divine out of her way like a
spider, she was at once on her knees by his side, promptly
administering the proper remedies. It was only a fainting
fit ; but, when the squire recovered, he was weak, humble,
and gentle as a little child. He lay on the sofa in the
par'or all day. The unused windows were opened, and
the sweet summer air flowed in and out with scents of
late roses and new hay on its delicdte wings ; but Squire
Paine did not notice it. He took the broth Eoxy brought
him without a complaint, and actually thanked her for it.
She herself guarded the outside door like a dragon, and
even refused admittance to Parson Peters.
"No," said she; "it's good to let him be to-day. I tell
ye the Lord's a-dealin' with the poor old creter, an' we
hadn't ought to meddle. Human nater is everlastin' queer,
an' there is some folks nobody can tune so well as Him
that made 'em. He'll take up his bed an' walk as soon as
the merracle works, an' we can't hurry it up any; but I've
faith to believe it's a-workin'."
And it was according to Roxy's faith. As soon as the
sun went down, the squire rose up, ate what was set
before him, put his disordered dress to rights, and walked
feebly over to the weekly prayer-meeting; for these things
happened of a Thursday.
The lights in the little school-house were dim and few,
for the night's warm atmosphere made even the heat of
the two necessary lamps oppressive ; but Squire Paine
took no advantage of this darkness, though the room was
unusually full. He walked to the very front bench, and
seated himself before the deacon who conducted the meet
ing; and, as soon as the opening hymn was sung, he
waved the good man, who was about to follow with a
prayer, aside with a certain rugged dignity, and rose,
in. & 2*
18 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CooKE
facing the assembly, and beginning with broken voice to
speak.
" Brethring," he said, " I come here to-night to make a
confession. I've lived amongst you for sixty odd year,
man an' boy, an' the last forty on 'em I've ben a livin' lie.
Brethring, I hev ben a professor in this here church all
that time, an' I wa'n't never converted. I was a real
stiddy-goin' hypocrite, an' I hain't but jest found it out.
The marciful Lord has kinder spared me for a day of re
pentance, an' it's come : I tell ye it's come ! There was
one that dealt with me mightily, an' shook me some, one,
I may say, that drilled the hole, an' put in the powder of
the Word, an' tamped it down with pretty stiff facts ; but
it didn't do no good. I was just like a rock bored an'
charged, but pooty rugged an' hard yet. But, brethring,
THE LORD HAS FIRED THE BLAST HIMSELF, an' the nateral
man is broken to pieces. I give up right here. The Lord
is good. God be merciful to me, a sinner! Brethring,
can't you pray ?"
There was but one answer to the pathetic agony of that
appeal. Deacon Adkins rose, and prayed as if his lips had
been touched with a coal from the altar, and there were
sympathetic tears in the hardest eyes there before he
finished ; while Squire Paine's low sobs were heard at
intervals, as if they were the very convulsions of a break
ing heart.
" Let us sing
" ' Praise God, from whom all blessings flow,' "
said the deacon, after his prayer was over. And, when
the last line of that noble Doxology floated away into the
rafters, they all gathered round to shake hands, and ex
press their deep sympathy with the repentant and bereaved
father. It was almost too much for Squire Paine. Tho
COOKE] SQUIRE PAINE' S CONVERSION. 19
breaking-up of the great deep within had worn upon him
exceedingly: humbled, sad, yet wonderfully peaceful a
his spirit felt, still the flesh trembled, and was weak. He
was glad when Roxy came up, and, taking hold of his
arm, led him homeward.
Was he glad, or death-smitten, or, as he thought, sud
denly in the heavenly places, when his own door opened
before his hand touched the latch, and Louise, darting
forward, threw her arms about his neck?
"Land o' liberty!" shrieked Roxy. "Do you want to
kill your pa outright ? An' how came ye here anyway ?
We heered you an' him was both stun-dead !"
Roxy's curt and curious interposition seemed to restore
the equilibrium suddenly. Squire Paine did not faint,
and Louise actually laughed. Here was something natu
ral and homely to shelter in after the dream-like agita
tion of the day.
"No," said Louise's clear voice: "we wa'n't hurt, not
much, only stunned, and scared a bit. But there was
two in the next seat who well, they won't come* home to
their folks, Aunt Roxy. We thought maybe you would
be anxious ; and then somebody said right before us thaf
we were both killed, and they'd sent the news over to
Bassett : so we thought the best thing to do was to come
back and show ourselves. Here's 'Lisha."
Squire Paine must have been converted ; for he shook
his son-in-law's hand with all good will, and kissed his
daughter heartily. His voice was somewhat weak and
husky; but he managed to say, so as to be heard, "An'
now ye've got home re'lly, you've got to stay home. I
sha'n't hev no more sech risks run. And, 'Lisha, we'll
open the store real early to-morrer. I dono when it's ben
shut twenty-four hours before."
This was all he said ; for the New-England man, saint
20 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
or sinner, has few words when feeling is strongest. But
the squire's actions spoke for him. He never referred to
the past, but strove with his might to live a new and
righteous life. Not all at once the granite gave place to
gold : there were roots of bitterness, and strivings of the
old Adam, many and often ; but none who had once known
him doubted that Squire Paine was a changed man. At
his own earnest request, he was allowed to make a new
profession of religion ; and, after relating his experiences
in due form to the assembled deacons, he wound up the
recital in this fashion : " It was the Lord's hand done it
fin'lly, brethring ; but, next to him, I owe this here real
conversion to Roxanny Keep."
"Halleloojah!" exclaimed Aunt Eoxy, when Mrs. Dea
con Adkins betrayed her good husband's confidence far
enough to tell her this. " I tell ye, Mrs. Adkins, I took
my life in my hand that mornin' ; but I felt a call to do it.
Ye know David killed Goliath with a pebble, nothin' more ;
an' I allers could sling straight."
DISCOMFITED HUNTERS.
CHARLES C. ABBOTT.
[Dr. Abbott, a native of Trenton, New Jersey, where he was born
in 1843, is known in science as an energetic archaeologist, the author
of a work on " Primitive Industry," and the collector of many ancient
Indian relics from the Trenton gravels. He has recently published
two attractively- written books of popular science, " Rambles of a
Naturalist" and " Upland and Meadow," which show the close obser
vation of an ardent lover of nature, and an unusual facility of making
pleasant reading out of ordinarily dry subjects. From the last-named
work we select a brace of amusing hunting-stories, to which the quaint
ABBOTT] DISCOMFITED HUNTERS. 21
Quaker phraseology of the one "quoted from an old diary" adds a
highly agreeable flavor.]
BETTER repeat the twelve labors of Hercules than
attempt to catalogue the varied forms of life found in the
area of an average ramble. Indeed, I have seldom seen a
half-acre that was not a " Zoo" which the study of a life
time would fail to exhaust; but, if this is the sole incen
tive to take a recreative stroll in the upland or meadow,
it were better to stay at home.
On the other hand, to feel that whatever creature we
may meet will prove companionable that it is no stranger,
but rather an amusing and instructive friend assures us
both pleasure and profit whenever we chance abroad.
He who has this interest in the life about him can never
be lonely, wander wheresoever he will, nor return from
a contemplative ramble other than a wiser and happier
man.
"When I talked, years ago, to the old men of the neigh
borhood, there is not one of them left, I invariably
wished that I had been my grandfather. I felt fully a
Century too late.
If half the tales they told me were true, nothing of to
day equals that which was found here when they were
young. If this had been an old man's fancy it would
have only provoked a smile ; but, alas ! it was so far true
as to cause me at the time endless regret. It was by no
means a sugar-coated pill that I was forced to swallow
when one of these gray-beards quietly remarked, "You
seem to know something about animals, but we had the
critters themselves."
This was not cheering to one who was ambitious of
seeing something of wild life, but I had one consolation :
mv old friend had not seen the country in its best days,
22 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
as judged from his point of view. As proof of this, com
pare his remarks with the following from an old diary :
"Ninth mo., 1734. Father reports Friend Stacy as
saying that formerly ducks and geese were more abundant
than they now are. He thinks the use of great noisy
guns has reduced their numbers. How they could be
more abundant than of late puzzleth me to comprehend.
Watson's Creek is often truly black with them, and gather
ings of fowl of many kinds do now pass up the Cross
weeksen, such as take several minutes to pass by. The
geese are always in wedge-shaped companies, and are never
BO numerous as in the smaller sorts. I do seldom see the
great swans, but father says they are not unusual in the
wide stretches of the Delaware. The Indians that lately
tarried by the great . spring on our hill-side did shoot
several near where the creek joins the river. . . . Father
allowed me to accompany Oconio, my Indian friend, to
Watson's Creek, that we might gather wild fowl after the
[ndian manner. With great eagerness I accompanied
Oconio, and thus happened it. We did reach the widest
part of that creek early in the morning. I think the
sun was scarcely an half-hour high. Oconio straightway
hid himself in the tall grass by the water, while I was
bidden to lie in the tall grass at a little distance. With
his bow and arrows, Oconio quickly shot a duck that came
near by, swimming within a short space from him. I
marvelled much with what skill he shot, for his arrow
pierced the head of the duck, which gave no alarming cry.
Then, with a second arrow, he struck down another, but
not so quickly, at which the great company of fowl flew
away, with great clamor. Very many returned quickly,
much to our pleasure. Oconio did now fashion a circlet
of green boughs, and so placed them about his head and
shoulders that I saw not his face, and, thus arrayed, he
ABBOTT] DISCOMFITED HUNTERS. 23
otherwise disrobed and walked into the stream. He held
in one hand a shotten duck, so that it swam lustily, and,
so equipped, was in the midst of a cluster of fowl, of which
he deftly seized several so quickly that its fellows took no
alarm. These he strangled beneath the water, and, when
he had three of them, came back, with caution, to where
the thick bushes concealed him. He desired that I should
do the same, and with much hesitation I disrobed and
assumed the disguise Oconio had fashioned; then I put
forth boldly towards the gathered fowl, at which they
did rise with a great clamor, and were gone. I marvel
much why this should have been, but Oconio did not make
it clear, and I forbore, through foolish pride, to ask of
him. And let it not be borne against me that, when I
reached my home, I wandered to the barn, and, writing
an ugly word upon the door, sat long and gazed at it.
Chagrin doth make one feel very weak, I find ; but I set
no one an example, by speech or act, in thus soothing my
feelings in so worldly a manner.
" While I do yet write of our wild beestes of this
country, let me here remark that while we rejoice that
great bears have mostly gone far towards the unsettled
mountains, still a few do linger with us ; and Oconio
recently did assure me that he knoweth of a small one
that liveth in a great chestnut-tree, not far within the
great east woods. . . . With much misgiving that we
were to go without my parents' knowledge, but hoping
success would secure forgiveness, for a longing heart
offers tid-bits to our scruples, we set out, while it was
yet dark, on third day ; and it was frostful and stingy for
so early in the ninth month. As we passed the growth
of dwarf chestnuts bordering the common road, I mar
velled at the great companies of squirrels that were then
gathering the harvest of nuts ; but Oconio chided me for
24 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
lingering, and, following chiefly his footsteps, we strode
straightway and silently through the wood. There waa
yet a proper pathway that was readily to be seen, which,
as I have learned, was that used by the Indians when
they passed to Amboy, where they gathered the bounty
of the sea. When we had gone so far as an hour's walk
taketh one, suddenly Oconio turned into a dense and track
less thicket ; first looking at his gunne, and the flint and
priming thereof. I could not .readily keep to him in the
midst of the bushes, and labored much to force my way
where he moved silently. But it rejoiced me to know we
had but a short distance to go, for suddenly he turned
about and pointed to a great tree. It was the greatest of
all trees that I have seen. I confess to being puzzled to
know what Oconio was to do, that a bear should come
from the tree and be shotteri. I ventured a question, but
it was only answered by an impatient ' See,' so I remained
standing, eager to know, yet doubtful of my safety should
there be even a small bear in the great tree. Oconio di
rectly gathered a bundle of sticks and of crisp leaves, and
the store thereof he placed at the foot of the tree, where
I saw was a hole that even he could have entered. With
his tinder and flint in a moment he added fire to the leaves,
and with a great roaring the smoke rushed through the
trunk of that tree. This was answered by a louder mur
mur, which I took to be the voice of the enraged bear,
and Oconio stood bravely with his gunne should it appear.
Account it not against me that I desired to flee, and 1
should have turned had I known just where to seek
safety; and then came a greater terror as the enraged
bear growled with fiercer anger. I turned, and Oconio
exclaimed, * Ugh !' as I did so. The bear was upon us,
not as one creature, but as thousands ; for we had driven
from the tree a hiving of bees. I turned so quickly that
ABBOTT] DISCOMFITED HUNTERS. 25
I fell, and the maddened bees were quickly covering me,
as I thought ; but I regained my feet, and was soon fleeing
from their torment. Whether Oconio did lead or follow I
knew not, but we met at a brook, where I bathed my
smarting flesh.
" We walked home in silence ; and to this day I feel
chagrined when my father talketh of bears ; nor is honey
a sweet morsel to me."
Almost my last conversation with my venerable friend
was much the longest. He seemed far more disposed to
talk than walk, and, while sitting in the dense shade of
my three beeches, he remarked, " There was a spice in
livin' when the country was younger you don't get now
that all the big critters are about gone," and, pointing to
a little woodpecker near by, asked, " Do you see that sap-
sucker? I can remember when the big log-cocks were
about as plenty as those are nowadays. Back towards
the great Cat-tail Swamp, where there was yaller-pine
woods, the log-cocks used to run up and down the trees
like mad, and the way they sent the bark flyin' was a cau
tion. If they thought there was a bug or grub under the
bark, they'd lift it out, and, to get it, sometimes ripped a
bit of bark oif big as a dinner-plate. Now you see nothin'
of all this, but have come down to little sap-suckers."
" Not quite," I replied : " there are flickers and red-heads
left us."
" That's so j but they're not much better, nor many of
'em ; and who livin', but me, ever heard a wolf growl or
a painter screech ?"
" Did you ever see a panther about here ?" I asked.
" Didn't I as much as say so just now ? See one ? yes,
once, and that was enough."
" Tell me the circumstances, please," I requested, with
much pleasurable anticipation,
in. B 3
26 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
" Tell you the circumstances ? If you mean the main
p'ints of the matter, I can give 'em to you. It was during
a January thaw, and a big fresh on the lowlands. It's
such times, you know, when all the fun comes in round
here. Well, I'd lost a new boat, and found it in the woods
near the mouth of Crosswicks Creek. It was left up in
the bushes after the water had gone down a bit. I
scrambled out of my skiff to reach to it, when the critter
looked up and grinned right in my face. He'd been curled
up in the boat, and didn't show any notion of leavin' ; but
I did, and, makin* one big jump for my skiif, the critter
follered suit, and made for the woods. I didn't look be
hind, thirikin' he was comin' for me ; but it seems he
wasn't, and that was the last of him."
" Is that all ?" I asked, with a show of disappointment
"All? Yes, and if you'd been in my place half the facts
would have satisfied you. Critters like painters might
go. and bears weren't always pleasant to meet with, but
all the others were good in their way, and, along with the
miles of big woods, made it a pleasant country. I don't
say it to tease you none, but you've got now to take up
with small fry, and only think about them that's gone for
good. When I hear the tap-tap of the sapsuckers I think
of the log-cocks ; and when there's a bayin' hound in the
fields I can hear the wolves, which, 'long late as '95, used
to keep me 'wake o' nights. Things have littled down
since I was a boy, sure enough. What you call trees we'd
Bay were saplins', and such trees as I've cut are too scarce
to count. Afore you're fairly in a woods now you're on
t'other side of 'em."
But, in spite of the changes wrought by the deforesting
of the country and the increased population, even in these
later days unfrequented corners can be found, and one may
have a bit of adventure if one chooses.
ABBOTT] DISCOMFITED HUNTERS. 27
The average farmer is eminently practical, and quite
properly so, but if an acre cannot bo reclaimed for culti
vation, or if its wood be not worth cutting for fuel, it is
pretty sure to be abandoned to the few who love to see
nature free from all artificiality. I know of an island in
a creek, planted with swamp-sumach, where I can roam at
will, because this tree does not poison me, and all my
neighbors have to give it a wide berth or suffer the con
sequences ; and here I can sit as much alone as though in
the deepest cafion of the Colorado Eiver of the West.
But, while I have outgrown the feeling of disappointment
that I live in so tame a country, and now prefer a mouse
to a muskrat for a playfellow, very often finding my in
terest in animal life to be inversely to the bulk of its body,
still an occasional exciting episode is not distasteful, as a
recent occurrence proved.
Bitter cold though it happened to be, Miles Overfield
moved with deliberation across the snow-clad fields, and
even stopped at times to look backward and meadow-ward,
as though he feared something he had left behind him
might disappear in his absence.
I saw him before he reached the yard, for I had beeij
out for a ramble on home-made snow-shoes, my first and
last experience of the kind, and we met at the garden gate.
" 'St !" he hissed, in a half-whisper, and raised his fore
finger as he spoke, to suggest that I should stand still and
hear him through ; though why all this mystery on his
part is to this day a mystery to me.
" Nobody knows, I guess," Miles continued, " for they're
in a mean quicksandy tangle in the three-corner meadow.
All snug in a hollow tree, and all briers and stuff about.
'Spose we're in for a hunt; go along?"
u Please tell me, first, what are in the hollow tree ?" I
replied.
28 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
" Why, a couple of big 'coons. I just got a glimpse of
one, but I know there's two of 'em."
"How do you know?" I asked.
" Can't say ; but I know it, and I'm in for a hunt to
night : so can't you go ?" Miles asked, somewhat impa
tiently.
" If you know where they are, it won't be much of a
hunt, Miles, for you've simply to go to the tree and take
them out, provided they don't give you the slip. Where
will the fun come in, such a cold night as this will be ?"
" All right, if you don't want to go ; I can get 'em
alone, I guess. I wouldn't have hurried over here, but I
thought you would like the fun." And he turned about
with a look of mingled disappointment and disgust. See
ing this, after a moment's reflection I concluded to go, and
called to him to that effect.
He turned about, but did not approach, and said, "All
right ; and, as my house is nearer than yours to the
meadow, come down by eight o'clock. Put on boots, and,
if the clouds threaten, whistle to 'em on your way over
to keep oif the moon." And again Miles started for his
home, walking with a brisker step than when he came,
because the meadows and the 'coon-tree were now in full
view before him.
Before eight o'clock I was ready, and duly reported at
Miles's cottage. In a few minutes we were under way, he
carrying a gun and axe, and I leading a snarling cur, which
Miles thought might be useful.
The full moon made the wintry night a perfect one ;
not a breath of wind sighed through the bare trees ; the
whole earth seemed silent and motionless under the firm
white crust we trod upon. There was merit enough and
beauty enough in the night alone to warrant a moonlight
walk, even though I went home empty-handed.
ABBOTT] DISCOMFITED HUNTERS. 23
" The critters are in there," said Miles, pointing to a big
maple.
" Suppose they are, how are you going to get them out ?
"Wait for them ?" I asked.
"Root 'em out. The tree hasn't any holler so we can
smoke 'em ; but you get up there and punch 'em out with
a stick, and when they crawl out on the branches shake
'cm down to me and the dog."
" Oh !" I exclaimed, drawing a long breath : " that's
your plan. Why didn't you tell me before?"
" Because you might have thought best not to come.
Now you're here, you won't mind the job, will you?" he
asked, with a grin that explained the disappointment I
had noticed when I half declined his invitation.
" Your theory, Miles, about punched 'coons coming out
of their holes, and all that, is no doubt good ; but suppose
I can't punch them ?" I asked, and, somehow, my doubts
increased as I thought of the bear proving to be bees, as
in my great-great-grandfather's case.
While Miles started a little fire at a short distance from
the tree, I considered the matter, and concluded to fall in
with his plans as soon as my fingers were sufficiently
warmed to enable me to climb. Of course Miles wouldn't
climb the tree and let me catch the falling 'coon. He
always took advantage of his years, and had that conve
nient form of rheumatism which prevented his doing any
thing he could get others to do. It was much the same as
the boy's nine-o'clock fever, which secures to him an occa
sional holiday when the outside of the school-house is
more attractive than the inside.
While we were crouching before a few flickering flames,
a low growl was heard by both of us, and the curious
antics of the dog at the same time called us at once to our
feet, to discover the precise whereabouts of the 'coons.
in. 3*
30 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
Miles stepped back a few paces, and, gazing intently at
the main crotch of the maple, cried out, after a few seconds,
" There it is !" I looked in the direction indicated by him,
and, sure enough, there was the animal. From where it
sat no amount of shaking could dislodge it. and to climb
the tree would be to put your hand on the animal before
you could secure a firm footing. I thought we were baf
fled, unless we shot it, which Miles was averse to doing,
as he did not wish to have it known he was able to hunt,
or work would be expected of him.
"What shall we do?" I asked, impatiently, for the
whole affair was growing monotonous.
" Do ?" remarked Miles ; " why, I mean to snowball the
critter till it climbs out on a limb, and then you climb up."
A dozen big snowballs induced the 'coon to move, and
we got a better view of him. " He's got no tail," I re
marked, as the animal crept out a short distance on a
nearly horizontal branch.
"Yes, he has; it's the moonlight blinds you," Miles re
plied ; and so, accepting the decision that it was a 'coon, i
commenced to climb. Securing, at last, a firm foothold
where the 'coon had been, I took a general survey of the
situation. The bright moonlight rendered every object
distinct, and I had a full view of the " critter." There it
sat, staring me full in the face, and with as wicked a coun
tenance as I ever met; but it was no ordinary 'coon. Its
broad, blunt face, its gray fur, arched back, and short tail,
told quite another story. I was facing a wild-cat !
There are occasions when a man's thoughts outspeed
the lightning, and this was one of them ; but my actions
could not keep pace. I had a thousand plans, and followed
none. An angry scream is all I remember now, as it
seemed to hurl me headlong to the ground. Down into
the snow I plunged, burying my arms and legs far below
ABBOTT] DISCOMFITED HUNTERS. 31
the frozen crust, and there, for the moment, I lay helpless.
My next remembered thought was that Miles was attacked,
as his rapid ejaculations, mingled with the yelping of the
dog, seemed to indicate. It acted as a restorative, and,
struggling to my feet, I was astonished to find that the
cat had disappeared, and that Miles was some distance off,
rapidly pursuing a homeward course. I hurried after,
but he was safely housed before I could overtake him.
Entering the door he had so recently slammed behind
him, I found the man, pale as a ghost, and shivering
before the empty andirons. It was a long time before he
could speak intelligibly, but at last he calmed down suffi
ciently to tell me his story.
" While I was waitin' to see what you were goin' to do,
I saw you sail out into the air ; and such a yell as that
critter gave ! It took me all aback, and 'fore I knew what
was comin' the thing struck me on the head. I jumped
clear o' my hat, and put for home, but the critter held on.
I cleared fence, ditch, and snow-bank without touchin' 'em,
so it seemed, and not till I teched the garden-gate did the
critter let up. Where it's gone, I don't know."
"Here it is," I replied, and from Miles's coat-collar I took
half a yard of green brier that had been scratching him
at every leap.
Miles looked at the thorny branch a moment in silence,
and then found courage to whisper,
" Suppose we don't say anything about this 'coon-
hunt?"
" Suppose we don't ?" I replied, and went home.
32 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [LONGFELLOW
SONNETS.
The sonnet, whose popularity as a species of poetical composition
is mainly due to Petrarch, has never become so great a favorite with
the Germanic nations as with the Spanish and Italian, whose flexible
languages easily adapt themselves to its requirements. Yet the English
tongue possesses many beautiful sonnets, some of which stand out
like royal gems in the crown of poetic fame. Nor have the poets of
America worked this field of song in vain, as will appear from the
selected group of sonnets we give below. In several of these the
strictly regular form of the Italian sonnet has not been adhered to,
but the poets have broken from the chains of conventionalism, and
rhymed as suited their fancies, under the higher conception that the
thought and not the sound should dominate the poetic soul, and that
one fine idea is of more value than a multitude of fine rhymes.
We owe many of the most graceful and thoughtful of American
sonnets to the facile pen of Longfellow. Two of the most beautiful
of these we quote.
THE holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart ;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows ;
The happy days unclouded to their close ;
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes ; swift desires that dart
Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are, a Fairy Tale
Of some enchanted land we know not where,
But lovely as a landscape in a dream.
Eiver, that steal est with such silent pace
Around the City of the Dead, where lies
ALCOTT] SONNETS. 33
A friend who bore thy name, and whom these eyes
Shall see no more in his accustomed place,
Linger and fold him in thy soft embrace
And say good-night, for now the western skies
Are red with sunset, and gray mists arise
Like damps that gather on a dead man's face.
Good-night ! good-night ! as we so oft have said
Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days
That are no more, and shall no more return.
Thou hast but taken thy lamp and gone to bed ;
I stay a little longer, as one stays
To cover up the embers that still burn.
From A. Bronson Alcott's " Book of Sonnets," addressed in grateful
remembrance to his many literary friends, we select the one dedicated
to Mrs. Elizabeth P. Peabody.
Daughter of Memory ! who her watch doth keep
O'er dull Oblivion's land of shade and dream,
Peers down into the realm of ancient Sleep,
Where .Thought uprises with a sudden gleam
And lights the devious path 'twixt Be and Seem ;
Mythologist ! thou dost thy legend steep
Plenteously with opiate and anodyne,
Inweaving fact with fable, line with line,
Entangling anecdote and episode,
Mindful of all that all men meant or said.
We follow, pleased, thy labyrinthine road,
By Ariadne's skein and lesson led ;
For thou hast wrought so excellently well,
Thou drop'st more casual truth than sages tell.
The work just named contains an essay on the Sonnet, written by
F. B. Sanborn, who proves his fitness for the task by the fine taste of
his own sonnets, one of which we here append. We give also several
of the illustrative examples from the same essay.
in. c
34 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
Ah, mournful Sea ! Yet to our eyes lie wore
The placid look of some great god at rest ;
With azure arms he clasped the embracing shore,
While gently heaved the billows of his breast ;
We scarce his voice could hear, and then it seemed
The happy murmur of a lover true,
Who, in the sweetness of his sleep, hath dreamed
Of kisses falling on his lips like dew.
Far off, the blue and gleaming hills above,
The Sun looked through his veil of thinnest hane,
As coy Diana, blushing at her love,
Half hid with her own light her earnest gaze,
When on the shady Latmian slope she found
Fair-haired Endymion slumbering on the ground.
Thou art like that which is most sweet and fair,
A gentle morning in the youth of spring,
When the few early birds begin to sing-
Within the delicate depths of the fine air.
Yet shouldst thou those dear beauties much impair,
Since thou art better than is everything
Which or the woods or skies or green fields bring
And finer thoughts hast thou than they can wear.
In the proud sweetness of thy face I see
What lies within, a pure and steadfast mind,
Which its own mistress is of sanctity,
And to all gentleness hath been refined,
So that thy least breath falleth upon me
As the soft breathing of midsummer wind.
W. E. CHANNINQ
As unto blooming roses summer dews,
Or morning's amber to the tree-top choirs,
So to my bosom are the beams that use
To rain on me from eyes that Love inspires ;
HOOPER] SONNETS. 35
Your love,' vouchsafe it, royal-hearted Few,
And I will set no common price thereon ;
Oh, I will keep, as Heaven his holy blue,
Or Night her diamonds, that dear treasure won.
But aught of inward faith must I forego,
Or miss one drop from Truth's baptismal hand,
Think poorer thoughts, pray cheaper prayers, and grow
Less worthy trust, to meet your heart's demand,
Farewell ! your wish I for your sake deny :
Rebel to love in truth to love am I.
D. A. WASSON.
O Death! what strange, deep secret dost thou hold,
To hallow those thou claimest for thine own?
That which the open book could never teach,
The closed one whispers, as we stand alone
By one, how more alone than we ! and strive
To comprehend the passion of that peace.
In vain our thoughts would wind within the heart,
The heart of this great mystery of release !
Baptism of Death, which steepest infant eyes
In grace of calm that saints might hope to wear,
Whose cold touch purifies the guilty brow,
And sets again the seal of childhood there,
Our line of life in vain would sound thy sea ;
That which we seek to know, we soon shall be.
MRS. E. S. HOOPER.
The deep problem of destiny is thus vigorously treated by James G.
Percival.
Whence ? whither ? where ? A taper point of light,
My life and world, the infinite around ;
A sea, not even highest thought can sound ;
A formless void ; unchanging, endless night.
36 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [PiATT
In vain the struggling spirit aims its flight
To the empyrean, seen as is a star
Sole glimmering through the hazy night afar ;
In vain it beats its wings with daring might.
What yonder gleams ? What heavenly shapes arise
From out the bodiless waste ? Behold the dawn.
Sent from on high ! Uncounted ages gone
Burst full and glorious on my wondering eyes,
Sun-clear the world around, and far away
A boundless future sweeps in golden day.
The verbal stumbling-block " If," over which so many a knightly
resolution has gone down, is the subject which John James Piatt so
skilfully handles below.
Strong little monosyllable between
Desire and joy, between the hand and heart
Of all our longing ! dreary death's-head seen
Ere our quick lips to touch the nectar part !
O giant dwarf, making the whole world cling
To thy cold arm before the infant feet
Of frail resolves can walk, man-like, complete,
Steep mountain-roads of high accomplishing !
Dim dragon in the way of our designing,
No Bed-Cross Knight may vanquish ! Though most brave,
Strong Will before thee crouches, a mute slave,
Faith dies to feel thee in her path declining !
If! thou dost seem to our poor human sense
The broken crutch of our blind providence !
The angel Opportunity, which comes at some time to all lives, but
quickly vanishes if not boldly seized and firmly held, is the theme of
one of Helen Hunt Jackson's most thoughtful sonnets.
I do not know if, climbing some steep hill
Through fragrant wooded pass, this glimpse I bought ;
HIGGINSON] SONNETS. 37
Or whether in some mid-day I was caught
To upper air, where visions of God's will
In pictures to our quickened sense fulfil
His word. But this I saw : A path I sought
Through wall of rock. No human fingers wrought
The golden gates which opened, sudden, still,
A.nd wide. My. fear was hushed by my delight.
Surpassing fair the lands ; my path lay plain ;
Alas ! so spell-bound, feasting on the sight,
I paused, that I but reached the threshold bright,
When, swinging swift, the golden gates again
Were rocky walls, by which I wept in vain !
The following pretty and charmingly-rendered conception is from
the pen of Thomas Wentworth Higginsoii.
THE BABY SORCERESS.
My baby sits beneath the tall elm-trees,
A wreath of tangled ribbons in her hands ;
She twines and twists the many-colored strands,
A little sorceress, weaving destinies.
Now the pure white she grasps, now naught can please
But strips of crimson, lurid as the brands
From passion's fires, or yellow, like the sands
That lend soft setting to the azure seas.
And so with sweet incessant toil she fills
A summer hour, still following fancies new,
Till through my heart a sudden terror thrills
Lest, as she weaves, her aimless choice prove true.
Thank God, our fates proceed not from our wills !
The power that spins the thread shall blend the hue.
A volume of description could not characterize the mocking-bird
more clearly than E. H. Wilde has done in his photographic sonnet.
Winged mimic of the woods! thou motley fool!
Who shall thy gay buffoonery describe ?
HI. 4
38 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BENJAMIN
Thine ever-ready notes of ridicule
Pursue thy fellows still with jest and gibe.
Wit, sophist, songster, Yorick of thy tribe,
Thou sportive satirist of Nature's school ;
To thee the palm of scoffing we ascribe,
Arch-mocker and mad Abbot of Misrule !
For such thou art by day but all night long
Thou pour'st a soft, sweet, pensive, solemn strain,
As if thou didst in this thy moonlight song
Like to the melancholy Jacques complain,
Musing on falsehood, folly, vice, and wrong.
And sighing for thy motley coat again.
We close with two sonnets of humorous character, as foil to the
sombreness of tone of some of the preceding ones.
SPORT.
To see a fellow of a summer's morning,
With a large foxhound of a slumberous eye
And a slim gun, go slowly lounging by,
About to give the feathered bipeds warning
That probably they may be shot hereafter,
Excites in me a quiet kind of laughter ;
For, though I am no lover of the sport
Of harmless murder, yet it is to me
Almost the funniest thing on earth to see
A corpulent person, breathing with a snort,
Go on a shooting frolic all alone ;
For well I know that when he's out of town,
He and his dog and gun will all lie down,
And undestructive sleep till game and light are flown.
PARK BENJAMIN.
TO THE CLAM.
Inglorious friend ! most confident I am
Thy life is one of very little ease ;
NEAL] CHILDREN. 39
Albeit men mock thee with their similes
And prate of being "happy as a clam!"
What though thy shell protects thy fragile head
From the sharp bailiffs of the briny sea ?
Thy valves are, sure, no safety-valves to thee,
While rakes are free to desecrate thy bed,
And bear thee oif, as foemen take their spoil,
Far from thy -friends and family to roam
Forced like a Hessian from thy native home,
To meet destruction in a foreign broil !
Though thou art tender, yet thy humble bard
Declares, O clam ! thy case is shocking hard.
J. G. SAXE.
CHILDREN.
JOHN NEAL.
[John Neal occupied at one time a sufficiently large place in Amer
ican literature to deserve some attention at our hands, though he was
too prolific to he careful, and his works novels, poems, plays, and
magazine miscellany are no longer read. They display power and
originality, hut little method or style. E. P. Whipple says of them,
" John Neal's forces are multitudinous, and fire "briskly at everything.
They occupy all the provinces of letters, and are nearly useless from
being spread over too much ground." Some of his essays possess
great merit. We give a short extract in illustration. He was born
in Portland, Maine, in 1793, and died in 1876.]
are children ? Step to the window with me. The
street is fall of them. Yonder a school is let loose, and
here, just within reach of our observation, are two or
three noisy little fellows, and there another party muster
ing for play. Some are whispering together, and plotting
so loudly and so earnestly as to attract everybody's atten-
40 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [NEAT,
tion, while others are holding themselves aloof, -with their
satchels gaping so as to betray a part of their plans for
to-morrow afternoon, or laying their heads together in
pairs for a trip to the islands. Look at them, weigh the
question I have put to you, and then answer it as it
deserves to be answered : What are children f
To which you reply at once, without any sort of hesi
tation, perhaps, " Just as the twig is bent, the tree's in
clined ;" or, " Men are but children of a larger growth "
or, peradventure, " The child is father of the man." And
then perhaps you leave me, perfectly satisfied with your
self and with your answer, having " plucked out the heart
of the mystery," and uttered, without knowing it, a string
of glorious truths. . . .
Among the children who are now playing together, like
birds among the blossoms of earth, haunting all the green
shadowy places thereof, and rejoicing in the bright air,
happy and beautiful creatures, and as changeable as happy,
with eyes brimful of joy and with hearts playing upon
their little faces like sunshine upon clear waters ; among
those who are now idling together on that slope, or pur
suing butterflies together on the edge of that wood, a
wilderness of roses, you would see not only the gifted and
the powerful, the wise and the eloquent, the ambitious and
the renowned, the long-lived and the long-to-be-lamented
of another age, but the wicked and the treacherous, the
liar and the thief, the abandoned profligate and the faith
less husband, the gambler and the drunkard, the robber,
the burglar, the ravish er, the murderer, and the betrayer
of his country. The child is father of the man.
Among them and that other little troop just appearing,
children with yet happier faces and pleasanter eyes, the
blossoms of the future, the mothers of nations, you
would see the founders of states and the destroyers of
NEAL] CHILDREN. 41
their country, the steadfast and the weak, the judge and
the criminal, the murderer and the executioner, the exalted
and the lowly, the unfaithful wife and the broken-hearted
husband, the proud betrayer and his pale victim, the living
and breathing portents and prodigies, the embodied virtues
and vices of another age and another world, and all play
ing together ! Men are but children of a larger growth. . . .
Even fathers and mothers look upon children with a
strange misapprehension of their dignity. Even with the
poets they are only the flowers and blossoms, the dew-
drops or the playthings, of earth. Yet " of such is the
kingdom of heaven." The Kingdom of Heaven ! with all
its principalities and powers, its hierarchies, dominations,
thrones! The Saviour understood them better; to him
their true dignity was revealed. Flowers ! They are the
flowers of the invisible world ; indestructible, self-perpetu
ating flowers, with each a multitude of angels and evil
spirits underneath its leaves, toiling and wrestling for do
minion over it ! Blossoms ! They are the blossoms of
another world, whose fruitage is angels and archangels.
Or dew-drops ! They are dew-drops that have their source,
not in the chambers of the earth, nor among the vapors
of the sky, which the next breath of wind, or the next
flash of sunshine, may dry up forever, but among the
everlasting fountains and inexhaustible reservoirs of mercy
and love. Playthings ! If the little creatures would but
appear to us in their true shape for a moment ! We should
fall upon our faces before them, or grow pale with conster
nation, or fling them off with horror and loathing.
What would be our feelings to see a fair child start up
before us a maniac or a murderer, armed to the teeth ? to
find a nest of serpents on our pillow? a destroyer, or a
traitor, a Harry the Eighth, or a Benedict Arnold, asleep
in our bosom ? A Catherine or a Peter, a Bacon, a Galileo,
in. 4*
42 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [NEAL
or a Bentham, a Napoleon, or a Yoltaire, clambering up
our knees after sugar-plums? Cuvier laboring to distin
guish a horse-fly from a blue-bottle, or dissecting a spider
with a rusty nail ? La Place trying to multiply his own
apples, or to subtract his playfellow's gingerbread ? What
should we say to find ourselves romping with Messalina,
Swedenborg, and Madame de Stael ? or playing bo-peep
with Murat, Robespierre, and Charlotte Corday? or puss
puss in the corner with George Washington, Jonathan
Wild, Shakespeare, Sappho, Jeremy Taylor, Alfieri, and
Harriet Wilson? Yet stranger things have happened.
These were all children but the other day, and clambered
about the knees and rummaged in the pockets and nestled
in the laps of people no better than we are. But if they
could have appeared in their true shape for a single
moment, while they were playing together, what a scam
pering there would have been among the grown folks!
How their fingers would have tingled !
Now, to me there is no study half so delightful as that
of these little creatures, with hearts fresh from the gardens
of the sky, in their first and fairest and most unintentional
disclosures, while they are indeed a mystery, a fragrant,
luminous, and beautiful mystery ! . . .
Then why not pursue the study for yourself? The
subjects are always before you. No books are needed, no
costly drawings, no lectures, neither transparencies nor
illustrations. Your specimens are all about you. They
come and go at your bidding. They are not to be hunted
for along the edge of a precipice, on the borders of the
wilderness, in the desert, nor by the sea-shore. They
abound not in the uninhabited or unvisited place, but in
your very dwelling-houses, about the steps of your doors,
in every street of every village, in every green field and
every crowded thoroughfare.
SUMNER] ORATION ON LA FAYETTE. 43
ORATION ON LA FAYETTE.
CHARLES SUMNER.
[From the many brilliant orations of the most celebrated and able
Congressional opponent of slavery we select an extract from that upon
La Fayette, alike for its biographical interest and the strong sympathy
between orator and subject on the question of human liberty. As a
writer Sumner was at once polished and vigorous, and as an orator no
man of his day more fully enchained the attention of the Senate
"With this the nobility and purity of his character had much to do.
He was born in Boston in 1811, first came into prominent notice
through his oration on " The True Grandeur of Nations" in 1845, and
was the subject of a treacherous assault in the Senate-chamber in 1856,
which disabled him for years. He died in 1874.]
OVERTOPPING all others in character, La Fayette was
conspicuous also in debate. Especially was he aroused
whenever human liberty was in question ; nor did he
hesitate to vindicate the great revolution in France, at
once in its principles and in its practical results; boldly
declaring that its evils were to be referred not so much
to the bad passions of men as to those timid counsels
which instituted compromise for principle.
His parliamentary career was interrupted by an episode
which belongs to the poetry of history, his visit to the
United States upon the invitation of the American Con
gress. The Boston poet at that time gave expression to
the universal feeling when he said,
" We bow not the neck, we bend not the knee.
But our hearts, La Fayette, we surrender to thee."
As there never was such a guest, so there never was such
a host ; and yet, throughout all his transcendent hospitality,
binding him by new ties, he kept the loyalty of his heart,
44 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [SUMMER
he did not forget the African slave. But his country
had further need of his services. Charles X. undertook
to subvert the charter under which he held his crown,
and Paris was again aroused, and France was heaving
again. Then did all eyes turn to the patriot farmer of
Lagrange to the hero already of two revolutions to in
spire confidence alike by his bravery and by his principles.
Now seventy-three years of age, with a few friends, among
whom was a personal friend of my own. whom some of
you also know, Dr. Howe, of Boston, he passed through
the streets where the conflict was hotly raging, and across
the barricades, to the City Hall, when he was again placed
at the head of the national guard of France.
" Liberty shall triumph," said he in his first proclama
tion, " or we will perish together." Charles X. fell before
the words of that old man. The destinies of France were
again in his hand. He might have made himself Dictator;
he might have established a republic of which he might
have been chief; but, mindful of that moderation which
was the rule of his life, unwilling to hazard again the
civil conflict which had drenched France with fraternal
blood, he proposed a popular throne surrounded by popular
institutions. The Duke of Orleans, as Louis Philippe,
became king of France. Unquestionably his own desire
was for a republic, upon the American model ; but he gave
up this darling desire of his heart, satisfied that, at least,
liberty was secured. If this was not so, it was because,
for a moment, he had put his trust in princes.
He again withdrew to his farm ; but his heart was
wherever liberty was in question, now with the Pole,
now with the Italian, now with the African slave. For
the rights of the latter he had unfailing sympathy, and
upon the principle, as he expressed it, "Every slave has
the right of immediate emancipation, by the concession
SUMNKR] ORATION ON LA FAYETTE. 45
of his master or by force, and this principle no man can
call in question." Tenderly he approached this great
question of our own country, but the constancy with
which he did it shows that it haunted and perplexed him
like a sphinx, with a perpetual riddle. He could not
understand how men who had fought for their own liberty
could deny liberty to others. But he did not despair;
although at one time in his old age his impatient philan
thropy broke forth in the declaration that he never
would have drawn the sword for America had he known
that it was to found a government that sanctioned human
slavery.
The time was now at hand when his great career was
to close. Being taken ill, at first with a cold, the Chamber
of Deputies inquired of his son after his health ; and upon
the next day, May 20, 1834, he died, at the age of seventy-
seven. The ruling passion was strong to the last. As
at the beginning, so at the end, he was all for freedom ;
and the last lines traced by his hand, which he rose
from his death-bed to write, attest his joy at that great
act of emancipation by which England, at an expense of
a hundred million dollars, had given freedom to eight hun
dred thousand slaves. "Nobly," he writes, and these
were the last words of your benefactor, "nobly has the
public treasure been employed." And these last words,
speaking from the tomb, still sound in our ears. Such
was La Fayette. At the tidings of his death there was
mourning in two hemispheres, and the saying of Pericles
was again fulfilled, for the whole earth was the sepulchre
of the illustrious man.
" Not to those chambers where the mighty rest,
Since their foundation came a nobler guest ;
Nor e'er was to the bowers of bliss convej'ed
A purer spirit, or a fairer shade."
46 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [SUMNEK
Judge him by what he did throughout a long life, and
you must confess his greatness. Judge him by the prin
ciples of his life, and you must bend with reverence before
him. In all history he stands alone. There is no one who
has done so much for human freedom. In youth showing
the firmness of age, and in age showing the ardor of
youth ; trampling upon the prejudices of birth, upon the
seductions of power, upon the blandishments of wealth,
setting aside the favor even of that people whom he loved
so well ; whether placed at the height of worldly ambition,
or plunged in the vaults of a dungeon, always true to the
game principle.
Great he was, indeed, not as an author, although he has
written what we are all glad to read ; not as an orator,
although he has spoken often and well ; not as a soldier,
although always brave, and often working miracles of
genius ; not as a statesman, although versed in govern
ment and intuitively perceiving the relations of men and
nations; not on these accounts is he great; but he is
great as one of the world's benefactors, who possessed the
largest measure of that greatest gift of God to man, the
genius of beneficence. And great he is as an example,
which, so long as history endures, shall teach all, the
author, the orator, the soldier, the statesman, all alike
to labor, and, if need be, to suffer, for human right. The
fame of such a character, brightening with the advance of
civilization, can find no limit except in earthly gratitude.
HALPINE! A HYMN TO THE TYPES. 47
A HYMN TO THE TYPES.
CHARLES G. HALPINE.
[Charles Graham Halpine, a poet and humorist of prolific powers,
who wrote under the assumed name of " Miles O'Reilly," was born in
Ireland in 1829, and died in 1869. His poems are very uneven in merit,
and their humor is generally of a character adapted to a fixed period and
situation and losing its point with the lapse of time. From his serious
poems we extract one of much imaginative merit.]
O SILENT myriad army, whose true metal
Ne'er flinched nor blenched before the despot Wrong !
Ye brethren, linked in an immortal battle
With time-grown Falsehoods, tyrannous and strong !
Fragments of strength and beauty lying idle,
Each in its place, until the appointed day ;
Then, swift as wheels the squadron to the bridle,
Ye spring into the long, compact array.
Obedient, self-contained, and self-contented,
Like veteran warriors in the mingled broil,
Each giving help where just his help is wanted,
Nor seeking more than his due share of toil ;
Striving not, vainly, each to be a leader,
Your capitals are captains of the file,
The crown you aim at, to inform the reader
And help old Truth on for another mile.
What wondrous dreams of beauty may be flying,
Unwinged, unuttered, through your silent mass,
Even as a prism in some deep grotto lying,
Until the informing soul of Genius pass,
Filling the cavern with a light as tender
As that which breaks from Love's half-downcast eyes ;
48 BEST AMERIfyiN AUTHORS. [H
Then the cold gem awakes to rainbow splendor,
Where, couched in moss, beside the fount it lies.
Oh, what a burst of glory when ye mingle
Your bloodless hands in the support of truth,
When to your banded spell the pulses tingle
Of tottering age and fiery-visioned youth !
What power and strength when ye stand up united
Beneath the master-spirits' guiding sway ;
A thousand lamps at one lone star-beam lighted,
Turning the night of error into day.
Ye are the messengers, all earth pervading,
Who speak of comfort and communion still,
Planks of a mighty ship, whose precious lading
Is man's just reason and his heart's fond will :
Launched on the stream of time, our thoughts are drifted
Far, far adown our children-peopled shore,
And the gay pennon of our hope is lifted
When him it cheered through life it cheers no more.
Unmarshalled army I earth is still a wonder,
A bright G-od's wonder, all too little known ;
Star-eyes above us, and the green sod under,
Oceans of beauty girdling every zone ;
And man himself, whose deep heart throbs forever
With passionate longings, and the fierce unrest
Of hopes that struggle in a vain endeavor
To hear themselves by other lips confessed.
Ye are the mightier tongues we have invented
To bear our utterances ever and allwhere ;
Our hearts into a thousand hearts transplanted,
A multiplied existence ye confer.
A HYMN TO THE TYPES. 49
Falsehood, with bloodshot eyes, awoke from slumber
And glared in baleful terror on your birth ;
Meek-fronted Truth enrolled you in her number,
And cried, " I am not without swords on earth !"
Ye are true types of men. When disunited,
The world has nothing feebler or more vain ,
But when one animated thought has lighted
The dim recesses of each heart and brain,
The mass rolls onward with a steady motion,
Warned by your beacon from the rock of Death,
The breath of Knowledge sweeps the stagnant ocean,
And men rise up like billows at its breath.
Ye are the swords of Truth, the only weapon
That Truth should wield in this protracted war;
Ye are the rocks of Knowledge that we step on,
In thought's bright firmament, from star to star!
I see an angel winged in every letter,
Even as man's soul is hid within his clay :
I see a prisoner with his broken fetter
Emerging out of darkness into day.
Unspeakable ye are ! We have created
A new existence, than our own more firm ;
Our life and hopes, into your life translated,
Enjoy a being that shall know no term.
The ploughman's frolic song still kindles gladness
Within the heart, though care has known its core,
And bright eyes weep at his recorded sadness
Who sleeps where pride and envy sting no more.
Even as the marble block contains all beauty,
Enshrined in darkness and the outward husk,
in. c d 5
50 BEST AMERICAN A UTHORS. [HALPINE
Which the warm sculptor, with love-prompted duty,
Shall make to shine, through darkness and through
dusk,
Into the day of loveliness, ye treasure
All forms of thought and song in your mute sphere j
Our pen the chisel, and our rhyme the measure,
By which we make the inborn god appear.
"Would that my heart were wider-tongued and deeper,
Nor moved involved in cares of meaner place,
Then would I mow down, like a sturdy reaper,
The crop of thought that rises from the " case."
Flowers of bright songs, and fruit of mellow reason,
And many a peeping bud of infant Truth,
My soul should garner in its summer season,
And steep in dews of a perpetual youth.
But, ah ! mute typos, are ye not all too often
Constrained to serve at some unsolaced toil,
To harden hearts that ye would love to soften,
And help to swell where ye would still the broil?
.Even so with me ! My dreams of song are hurried
Like moon-ray flashes through the drifting storm,
And all that God made noble in me buried
In wants I share in common with the worm.
CLINTON] POLITICAL PARTIES. 51
POLITICAL PARTIES.
DE WITT CLINTON.
[De Witt Clinton, an eminent American statesman, and for many
years in the early part of the century identified with the political con
ditions of New York City and State, was born at Little Britain, New
York, in 1769. He was United States Senator in 1802, was Mayor of
New York City for many years, and was elected Governor of New
York in 1824 by a very large majority. To his earnest and persistent
endeavors that State owed the Erie Canal. In 1812 he ran for Presi
dent, and received eighty-nine electoral votes. He was an orator of
unusual ability, and was intellectually of broad views and liberal
learning. He displayed great interest in scientific studies, and wrote
several natural history and historical treatises. He died in 1828. His
amusing letter on political parties is one that stands good for all time.]
MY DEAR SIR,
In every country or village inn, the bar-room is the
coffee-room, exchange, or place of intelligence, where all
the quidnuncs, and newsmongers, and politicians of the
district resort, and where strangers and travellers make
their first entry. Neither my taste, my habits, nor my
convenience will admit of gorgeous or showy equipments,
and when I therefore take my seat in the caravanseras
there is nothing in my appearance to attract particular
attention. Many a person with whom I have held con
versation has undoubtedly forgotten the subject, as well
as the company. In the desultory and rapid manner in
which such conferences are generally managed, a stranger
is liable to mistake names and titles of office. I have no
doubt but this had been my case frequently : I may have
styled a major a colonel, and a sheriff a judge, and, if
so, I assure you without the most distant idea of giving
offence.
52 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CLINTON
" Cursed be the verse, however sweet they flow,
Which tend to make one worthy man my foe,
Give virtue scandal, innocence a fear,
Or from the meek-eyed virgin draw a tear."
Volney told me in Paris that he travelled all over the
West on foot. My countrymen Dr. M'Nevin and Dr.
Goldsmith perambulated a great portion of Europe ; and
Wilson, the father of American Ornithology, was almost
always a pedestrian traveller. How cautious ought people
to be when in company with strangers ! I have heard folly
from the mouths of lawgivers, and ribaldry in the con
versations of the notables of the land. Unnoticed, un
observed, reclining on my chair in the bar-room, I have
seen human nature without disguise, the artificial great
man exhibiting his importance, the humble understrapper
listening like a blacksmith to a tailor's news, the oracle
of the place mounted on his tripod and pronouncing his
opinions with solemn gravity. Oh, if I had been recognized
as a traveller from the eastern world, a keen observer of
human nature, and a recorder of what I saw, I humbly
hope that much nonsense would have been spared, and
many improper exhibitions prevented ; but then I would
have seen man at a masquerade. I now derive light from
my obscurity, and observe this world as it is. My plain
dress, my moderate expenditures, my unobtrusive beha
vior, avert particular remark. It is only in the society
of such men as I meet with in this place that I am con
sidered as of the least importance. The prevalent con
versations all over this federal republic are on the subjects
of political excitement. After some sage remarks on the
weather, which compose the exordium of all conversations,
the man of America, like the man of Athens, asks, " What
news ?" It is needless to say that I have steered entirely
clear of political and theological strife. I hardly under-
CLINTON] POLITICAL PARTIES. 53
stand the nomenclature of parties. They are all repub
licans, and yet a portion of the people assume the title
of republican, as an exclusive right, or patent monopoly.
They are all federalists, that is, in favor of a general
government, and yet a party arrogate to themselves this
appellation to the disparagement of the others. It is easy
to see that the difference is nominal, that the whole con
troversy is about office, and that the country is constantly
assailed by ambitious demagogues for the purpose of grat
ifying their cupidity. It is a melancholy but true reflec
tion on human nature, that the smaller the difference the
greater the animosity. Mole-hills and rivulets become
mountains and rivers. The Greek empire was ruined by
two most inveterate factions, the Prasini and Yineti,
which originated in the color of livery in equestrian races.
The parties of Guelphs and Ghibelines, of Eoundheads
and Cavaliers, of Whigs and Tories, continued after all
causes of difference were merged. I have often asked
some of the leading politicians of this country what con
stituted the real points of discrimination between the
Eepublicans and Federalists, and I never could get a satis
factory answer.
An artful man will lay hold of words, if he cannot of
things, in order to promote his views. The Jansenists and
the Jesuits, the Nominalists and the Realists, the Sublap-
sarians and the Supralapsarians, were in polemics what
the party controversies of this people are in politics. If
you place an ass at an equal distance between two bundles
of hay, will he not remain there to all eternity ? was a
question solemnly propounded and gravely debated by the
Schoolmen. The motive to eat both, some contended,
being equal, it was impossible for the animal to come to
a conclusion. He would therefore remain in a state of
inaction forever and forever. This problem, so puzzling
in. 6*
54 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CLINTON
to scholastic philosophers, would at once be decided by the
ass, and the experimentum crucis would effectually silence
every doubt. It is impossible for a man quietly disposed,
to act the supposititious part of the scholastic ass, and re
main neutral between the parties, or bundles of hay. He
must, in truth, participate in one or in both, and, as it re
spects any radical difference of principle, it is very imma
terial which he selects. There are some pendulum poli
ticians who are continually oscillating between parties,
and these men, in endeavoring to expiate their former
oppugnation by fiery zeal, are mere firebrands in societj^.
In order to cover their turpitude, they assume high-sound
ing names, and are in verity political partisans, laying
claim to be high-minded, and, like Jupiter on Olympus,
elevated above the atmosphere of common beings. And
what adds infinitely to the force of these pretensions, is
to find most of these gentry to be heroes of petty strife,
and the leaders of village vexation, the fag-ends of the
learned professions, and the outcasts of reputable associa
tions. I often think of the observations of the honest
old traveller Tournefort, when I see the inordinate vio
lence of these high-minded gentlemen. "The Turks"
(says he), " take 'em one with another, are much honester
men than renegadoes ; and perhaps it is out of contempt
that they do not circumcise renegadoes ; for they have a
common saying that a bad Christian will never make a
good Turk."
\\INCHELL] OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 55
OBLITERATED CONTINENTS,
ALEXANDER WINCHELL.
[Of our recent geologists Winchell is one of the most active, and
probably the best known of all to the reading public, from his several
widely-read volumes of popular science. Of these we may name
" Sketches of Creation," " Preadamites," " World Life," and " Sparks
from a Geologist's Hammer," from which last our selection is made.
He is somewhat radical in theory, and advocates many views which
do not seem likely to be sustained, but as an intermediary between
science and common thought he performs a very useful and agreeable
service. Mr. Winchell was born in New York State in 1824. He
has occupied professorial positions in several universities, and since
1879 has filled the chair of geology and palaeontology in the Univer
sity of Michigan.]
THE mute and inanimate rocks, to one who questions
them, are rich in teaching and suggestions. They speak
not ; they bear no record in any human language ; yet in
reason's ear they are vocal with instruction ; to reason's
eye they are all luminous with the thought which beams
from the hieroglyphics inscribed upon their pages.
It is a further lesson of wastage which we propose now
to study. The rocks are not imperishable; and their very
disappearance is a text for reflection. I stand beneath a
beetling cliff, perchance the beetling sandstone cliffs of
Chautauqua County, in New York, or of the " Pictured
Hocks" at Lake Superior, or, perchance, those banded and
variegated courses of crumbling masonry which wall in
the valley of the Upper Mississippi, and there I perceive
not only that a portion of the rocky mass has been re
moved, but also that which remains is merely the debris,
the ruins, of some former rock or rocks which were ground
to fragments to build up the foundation which constitutes
56 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [
these massive walls and these overstretching shelters. If
I scrutinize any of these cliffs, I find them composed of
grains of sand. It is a quartz sand. In those words I
imply that a quartz rock has at some time been broken
into fine fragments. Some agency has assorted the frag
ments and brought the finer ones together here, in these
magnificent ranges of sandstone precipices, in these ex
tensive sandstone formations, which underlie whole coun
ties, which underlie, or have underlaid, States broad
enough for an empire.
How few of us have reflected in this direction ! The
very rocks which underlie Chicago or New York are a
pile of ruins. Everywhere, the rocks are almost univer
sally old material made over, who can say how many
times made over ? The geologist formerly discoursed of
fire-formed rocks, and regarded granite and its associates
as rocks that had assumed their present condition from a
state of fusion. Now, we are persuaded that granite, like
sandstones, has had a sedimentary origin. It was once a
mass of sand and mud upon a sea-bottom. Heat has sub
sequently baked the materials, and almost obliterated the
ancient lines of stratification. The rocks now admitted
to be of igneous origin are few. Only ancient and modern
lavas are fire-formed rocks.
How vast, then, has been the destruction of the land in
ancient times ! The entire mass of the solid crust of the
earth save only the lavas must be taken as the measure
of the wastage or denudation of the older lands. Eeflect
upon the thickness of these strata, reaching, perhaps, a
hundred thousand feet, and enwrapping the entire globe.
Only the oldest layers or formations are absolutely con
tinuous ; and the very newest occur in patches of limited
extent ; but the newer as well as the older underlie all the
seas, and the mean thickness is so vast as to convey a
WINCHELL] OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 57
vivid idea of the amount of work which has been done by
geological agencies in diminishing, or even obliterating,
continental masses whose sites are now lost, or known
only from surviving vestiges.
It is an interesting thought, an impressive thought,
that mountains which once reared their heads above the
clouds have been gnawed down by the tooth of time, and
that whole continents built on foundations of granite,
once clothed with sombre forests and swarming with the
humble populations of a primeval time, have been literally
eaten up by the sea. Lift up your eyes and behold the
proofs. Look around you and contemplate the fragments
of a meal which consisted of mountains and cubic miles
of solid land.
"We turn again to a survey of some of the facts. There
is a region on the American continent which we style the
Archaean. It lies north of the St. Lawrence and the great
lakes. It is composed of the oldest rocks known to geol
ogy. There they come to the surface ; but we know
that they continue underneath formations of more recent
date both on the north and the south. They spread under
us everywhere. These rocks are hard and crystalline.
They embrace gianites and syenites and diorites; but
they are all sedimentary. They are not a part of the primi
tive, fire-formed crust of the earth ; they are fragmental.
Some older formation some older land has been worn
down to supply the material for these vast beds of detritus.
But I said these are the oldest rocks known. The oldest
known rocks are composed of worked-over material. The
oldest known rocks are built of the ruins of some wasted
land, on which human eyes have never rested. Where lay
the lands whose slowly- crumbling Chores yielded the
quartz and the granite to build up the Laurentide hills ?
When these hills first rose, slime-covered, from the uni-
58 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WINCHELL
versal sea, only a waste of waters surrounded them. We
are certain, at least, that for many geologic periods the ocean
expanse, on all sides, was unbroken. Land there certainly
had been, dry land, arid land, formed of the first cooled
crust of the globe. This has disappeared by the en
croachment of heat from beneath. It is possible there
was a time when some portion of this primitive lava-crust
stood forth above the level of the ancient ocean. It is
possible that the old Archaean land is built of the ruins of
a fire-formed continent. But I deem it more probable
that the Archaean materials have been more than once
worked over. But, wherever the truth may lie in this re
spect, the very constitution of the oldest rocks which we
know proclaims the existence of an obliterated continent.
Turn next to this Archaean continent itself. On its
own part it reveals a wastage of enormous magnitude.
The great sheets of rocky material rest like lumber piled
on edge. On opposite slopes of the Laurentide region the
strata point up to a meeting-place some thousands of feet
above the highest levels as they now exist. Clearly, the
Laurentide range was at one time a mountain-chain which
uas been planed down to moderate levels by the action of
erosive agencies. Turn toward the eastward prolonga
tion of this low range of Canadian Kills north of the St.
Lawrence. This ancient land abuts against the coast of
Labrador. But now the navigator brings us new sugges
tions. The sounding-plummet has felt of the ocean's
bottom all the way from Newfoundland to Ireland. There
is the "telegraphic plateau." On this rests the great
Atlantic cable. Here, in this shallow water, along this
submerged ridge, do we not discover the stump of the
ancient prolongation of the Archaean land ? Are not
Newfoundland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, and the
smaller islands of that vicinity, remaining patches of a
WINCHELL] OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 59
continental prolongation which has been worn down by
the waves ? And are not Ireland and the smaller contig
uous islands on the European side the vestiges of the
remote extremity of the Archsean land of America? And
were not Great Britain and America once united in bonds
of granite ? And is not the telegraphic cable which re
unites them an instrument for the fulfilment of a destiny?
Who can declare whither the substance of the Archaean
continent has gone ? Where are the cubic miles of stuff
which have been taken from the higher altitudes of the
Laurentide range, and from that Atlantic prolongation
which is now reduced to a submerged stump ? I think
we may safely say the sandstones of Potsdam, in New
York, are formed from Archaean material. The cliffs at
Little Falls and Albany are formed of materials con
tributed by the older land. I think we may say that the
vast beds of Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous strata
account for some of the material missing from the Archaean
continent. There are the Alleghany Mountains, or,
better, the entire Appalachian chain, built out of coarse
materials brought from the northeast. We know they
came from the northeast because the materials grow
coarser in that direction. The lighter fragments the
sands and clays are transported farthest from the shore.
It was the sea which performed this work of transporta
tion. It was the sea which conspired with the storms of
heaven in tearing down the old land to convey it into the
territory of the United States. There, in a long stream,
stretching from New England to Alabama, the " dust of a
continent to be" was laid down in the bottom of the ocean.
Now, in this search for continental relics, turn south
ward. There are the West India Islands, composed also
of ancient rocks, perhaps mostly, certainly not altogether,
of rocks of the same age as those forming the Laurentide
60 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ WINCH ELL
hills. I think it probable another continent spread over
the Caribbean Sea at the time of the continental connec
tion of America and Europe. There, where that primitive
continent lay, are Cuba, now, and Jamaica, and the Lesser
Antilles, hundreds in number, the rags and tatters of
a land once continuous, perhaps beautiful, perhaps en
during until the middle ages of geological history, and
then populated by the grotesque forms of reptiles which
were, in that time, the highest and the dominant type of
beings upon the earth. That West Indian continent over
lapped a small portion of South America. Guiana was
annexed to that which has become the West Indies. All
other parts of South America were beneath the sea. The
Andes ah ! the Andes were building, receiving, proba
bly, the self-same material which was disappearing from
the West Indian continent. Stretching from Cuba north
ward was the ocean, whose northern shore was in Canada,
in later time in Central New York. Here, where rise
the cliffs which we ignorantly style " everlasting," was
then the empire of the ocean. There, where Neptune
now holds almost undisputed sway, rose ranges of granitic
mountains, which have melted into sediment. Tennyson
has happily rendered the thought :
" There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen I
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
" The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form , and nothing stands ;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."
In Memoriam, cxxi.
Turn next to the opposite side of the globe. Southeast
WINCHELL] OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 61
of Africa is a group of islands which Milne-Edwards first
designated as the remnant of a wasted continent. Mada
gascar, the Isle of France, the Isle of Bourbon, and their
associates, seem to be the vestiges of an obliterated land,
which the French zoologist proposed to call the Masca-
rene continent. Lemuria is a name now generally em
ployed to designate an obliterated land which embraced
the Mascarene continent and stretched eastward over a
portion of the site of the Indian Ocean, perhaps far
enough eastward to embrace the East India Islands.
There, at least, seem to be the remnants of an ancient
land which fulfilled its destiny before the broad plains
and stupendous mountain-chains of Asia had first re
ceived the sunlight. This lost continent is named Le
muria because there is evidence that it was the original,
the central home of the Lemurs, the lowest of the
monkeys, from which all higher types of four-handed
animals are descended. Lemuria was a central land for
animal and vegetable life. Here, it is fancied, the human
species began its existence, its diverging streams extend
ing themselves to all other lands, and developing upon
them the various races of men as we know them. In
Africa, human beings became Negroes and Hottentots ;
in Australia, Australians and Papuans ; in Hindustan,
Dravidians ; in Eastern Asia, Mongoloids ; in Central and
Western Asia, the Mediterranean race. The theory im
plies that the progenitor of the Mediterranean race made
his appearance long, very long, after the first human
being appeared in Lemuria. In consequence of these
speculations, the lost continent of Lemuria possesses a
high degree of interest. There organization first reached
its culmination. Thence, as a centre, the modern tribes
of plants and highest animals have diverged into other
parts of the world.
ITT 6
62 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WINCHELL
But let us return now to America. On our northwest
coast we reach a point within thirty-nine miles of Asia.
Behring's Strait, which separates the two continents, is
a channel geologically modern. There was a time when
an isthmus connected the lands now dissevered by a
strait. America was then, like Africa, the prolongation
of Asia. Over this isthmus travelled the Hairy Mammoth
from Siberia, and left his teeth and bones all the way from
Asia to the Grulf of Mexico. Over this isthmus came the
Mongoloid man who settled America and developed the
Mexican and Yucatese and Peruvian civilizations, and in
other regions became the red Indian, the Eskimo, and the
Aleut. Yet we have evidences of a wider communication
between Asia and America. The whole of Behring's Sea
is formed of shallow water. On its southern boundary
we find a precipitous descent into the bed of the great
Pacific. Here is another continental stump. Here is
another telegraphic plateau. May the time soon arrive
when human enterprise will take nature's hint and reunite
the mother land with our own ! But there are the Aleu
tian Islands: what means that wonderful chain arching
from the Alaskan point across the North Pacific to Japan ?
Are not these the vestiges of the mountain-barrier which
bounded the ancient continent of the north ? What are
these volcanic islands but the smoking chimney-tops of
another Andes, sunken in the watery depths ?
These are the relics of continents which have disap
peared. Their substance has entered into the upbuild
ing of other lands, as the pyramids have yielded mate
rial for the construction of modern cities. There rise the
Himalayas, whose very bricks bear the records of the Le-
murian age. There rise the Eocky Mountains, enriched
by the pillage of a land whose misfortune it was to perish
before human pens existed to celebrate its beauty. There
WINCH ELL] OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 63
tower the Alleghanies, only as a majestic dirt-heap result
ing from the destruction of the North Atlantic continent.
There rises the Andean rampart of South America, reared
for the benefit of the human age, but at the cost of a pre
human land of verdure and beauty whose very rags we
*tyle ^ the beautiful Antilles." . . .
We have no need to plunge beneath the sea and explore
for fossil continents to be convinced that continents have
their old age. The records of wasted areas are illuminated
by the daily sun. The Alleghanies have been lowered
nine thousand feet. When, at the close of the Coal Period,
the crust of the earth yielded to the long-increasing strain,
huge folds were uplifted from Vermont to Alabama ; and
some of them attained an altitude of fifteen thousand feet.
Since that fearful throe of nature, the elements have been
busy taking down what the forces of upheaval had reared.
Cubic miles of the Alleghanies have been reduced to sand.
The proud summits of the mountains lie strewed along
the humble shores of the Atlantic States.
There stand the Catskills, a pile of horizontal leaves
of red sandstone. Abruptly, on either slope, the rocky
strata terminate. There was a time when they continued
eastward across the valley of the Hudson. The wear of
chiliads of years has carted the formation away. There
was a time when they continued westward across the
entire southern border of the State. Those cliffs at
Panama, in Chautauqua County, are a remnant left as a
specimen of the formation, for the edification of tbo
student of nature. The huge blocks of the " Eock Cities"
of Alleghany and Cattaraugus counties in the same State
are samples left for the encouragement of geologists in
those regions. Other specimen rocks of the Catskills may
be seen in places from Delaware County westward. It is
fearful to contemplate the immensity of the mechanical
64 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WINCHELL
power which could carry away the surface of half a State
to the depth of a thousand feet. Here, at fifty cents a
cubic yard, would be a perennial job for the contractor of
the " New York ring."
Without leaving the same State, let me take the reader
to the ridge road which runs along the south shore of
Lake Ontario. Here the broad sheets of sandstone, lime-
. stone, and shale which underlie the State come to the sur
face and terminate in an abrupt cliff. Beyond is Lake
Ontario. What has become of the missing continuation
of these formations ?
Go to the Niagara gorge ; see how the faithful industry
of an agent " as weak as water" can accomplish results
which defy the capacity of human engineering. Here
was the Niagara, as busy in Mesozoic time as to-day, as
busy in Cenozoic time as if its work were just begun.
There is the living gorge, and there is the old gorge,
buried in its grave. Buried with materials obtained by
tearing to pieces some other land, buried by that agency
which piled up these hills of gravel and sand which every
where diversify the surface of our Northern States ; which
brought these acres of loose deposits from the worn and
wasted sides of Northern hills ; which dipped its flinty
ploughshare in the back of the surface-rocks of every
Northern State, and ripped up the rubbish which has filled
many an old river-channel and plastered over many an
unsightly scar which the wear of time had cut in the face
of the land ; the same agency which scooped out many of
the lake-basins, and scalped the hills for a booty to bestow
on a desolated and sorrow-stricken country. It was the
continental glacier which did this work ; and the desolated
country was a land that had been weathered and worn by
the erosions of unknown cycles of time, a land gashed
with the deep-cut gorges of long-wearing streams ; gullied
WINCHELL] OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 65
by the summer torrents of many geologic periods ; robbed
of its slender soil by the prolonged denudations of the
surface; a worn-out continental expanse, a land ex
hausted in the service of the beasts which had held do
minion here through Cenozoic time, but a land destined
to receive a higher being, and now renovated by such
thorough- working agencies for his reception.
He who has visited the flourishing city of Nashville
finds it situated in the bottom of a basin, a great natural
basin, scooped in the rocks of Central Tennessee, whose
sides are layers of Lower Silurian, Upper Silurian, Devo
nian, and Carboniferous rocks. It is a basin a hundred
miles in diameter and a thousand feet in depth. On the
east and the west, on the north and the south, the same
succession of rocks rises in the bounding wall. There can
be no error in my conclusion that these formations were
once continuous from side to side. Here, then, is another
example of the wastage of the land. The central mass
of Tennessee was needed to build up the Cretaceous and
Tertiary formations as a foundation for Alabama and
Mississippi.
Still, the most gigantic examples of denudation occur
in the far West. The canons of the Colorado, made
famous by the explorations of dewberry and Powell, are
river-gorges cut six thousand feet deep through the rocky
formations of the country. All the lateral affluents of the
Colorado have dug similar trenches. They intersect the
surface in every direction, and render it almost impassable.
Of these gorges Joaquin Miller writes,
" Down in a canon so cleft asunder
By sabre-stroke in the young world's prime,
It looks as if broken by bolts of thunder,
Riven and driven by turbulent time."
Songs of the Sierras
in. e 6*
66 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WINCHELL
The soils are washed away ; the naked rock bakes in the
summer sun, and no cooling shower mitigates the fervor
of the climate. This desert of the continent was once its
garden. The ruin has been wrought by the same agencies
which have desolated Palestine till the white bones of the
hills protrude where vineyards once blushed and olive-
trees cast their delicious shade. It was the same agency
which is preying to-day upon the farms of New York and
New England and is planning to skin the soils again from
the sterile rocks and leave the continent as lean as before
the "reign of ice."
In that western country, but farther north, in Wyoming,
Major Powell has discovered an enormous fault or break
through the rocks. On one side the ponderous crust of the
earth was uplifted twenty-five thousand feet, more than
four miles. The reader may picture a vertical wall four miles
in height. He may imagine himself standing at its base
and looking upward. Its summit is dimmed by the smoke
of distance. Its summit is half the time immersed in the
clouds. He need not imagine such a cliif ; it is not there ;
it has been planed down ; the levelling tendency of nature
would not tolerate such inequalities. Twenty-five thou
sand feet of solid rocks have been moved away.
These are examples of erosion on the existing conti
nents. I could point to many others, to the dissolution
of the hills of Texas and their distribution over the plains
nearer the Gulf border ; to the wearing away of the east
ern coast of the United States ; to the isolated hills rising
eight hundred feet along the valley of the Amazons, stand
ing as vestiges of an extensive formation which, in times
geologically recent, has covered the valley; to the enor
mous erosion of the continental mass in the neighborhood
of the mouths of the Amazons and Para ; to the evidence
that the North Sea has been dry land since Tertiary time,
WiNCHELLj OBLITERATED CONTINENTS. 67
and that the Thames was then a tributary of the Ehine ;
to the proof that the English Channel has been excavated
since the advent of man in Europe; to the Chinese record
of hydrographic changes in China which have shifted the
positions of great cities hundreds of miles in relation to
the sea.
But I must close the citation of these evidences of the
invasion of old age upon the beauty, the symmetry, and
the habitability of continents, by raising the question of
the rate of erosion of their surfaces. If we look about
us, we discover the evidences of great change in the con
figuration of the hill-sides within a few years. One sum
mer's rains plough unsightly gullies in our cultivated fields
and across our streets. These changes, resulting from
local transfers of earthy material, are filling lakes, and
draining marshes, and transforming the hills; but it is
only the transfer of the continental substance to the
ocean's bed which threatens the total obliteration of con
tinents. The sediment carried down by rivers is an ex
ponent of the efficient wastage and the rate of disappear
ance of the land. The sediments of the Mississippi have
been carefully measured by Humphreys and Abbott, gov
ernment engineers. The river discharges annually suffi
cient earthy material to form a mass one mile square and
two hundred and sixty-eight feet deep. In other words,
it is sufficient to extend the bar at the mouth of the river
three hundred and thirty-eight feet annually. They also
estimate that the material of the entire delta of the Mis
sissippi may have been deposited within five thousand
years. These quantities of sediment are vast, and impress
us with a conviction that the solid land is disappearing at
a rate which is almost alarming. But these volumes of
sediment are gathered up from so vast an area that the
lowering of any particular square mile is insignificant in
68 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WINCHELL
any limited time. New York contributes something to
this deposit through the Alleghany and Ohio Elvers. The
Eocky Mountains send their quota to mingle with the
mud floated from New York and Pennsylvania ; and all
the great tributaries of this great artery of the continent
reach out their myriad fingers over the farms and planta
tions, the hill-sides and the mountain-gulches, to filch, as
fast as they can, the fleeing soil from the possession of the
cultivator and owner.
" The Father of Waters
Seizes the hills in his hands, and drags them down to the ocean,
Deep in the sands to bury the scattered bones of the mammoth."
Evangeline.
Professor Croll estimates the lowering of the lands
through denudation to amount to one foot in six thousand
years. The basin of the Granges, however, has lowered
one foot in two thousand three hundred years. On the
contrary, Mr. Eeade, a civil engineer, estimates that Eng
land is lowered by denudation only one foot in thirteen
thousand years. He calculates that five hundred millions
of years must have elapsed since the first sedimentary
rocks were laid down in Europe, an estimate evidently
absurd, and throwing suspicion over his other estimates,
since Sir William Thompson has shown from physical
principles that one hundred millions of years are all the
time allowable since the beginning of incrustation on the
earth. Similarly, Colonel Forshey calculates that the
Mississippi Eiver would fill the Gulf of Mexico in one
million of years.
All calculations are merely approximate. I am per
suaded, however, that the conclusions of Croll and Eeade
respecting the rate of denudation are quite below the
truth ; while, on the other hand, I suspect that the esti-
TAYLOR] PEDESTRIANISM IN EUROPE. 69
mated age of the Mississippi delta by Humphreys and
Abbott is quite too small, as I would hold that the opinion
of De Lanoye, who assigns six thousand three hundred
and fifty years as the age of the Nile delta, is also too
moderate in its allowance of time.
From this outline of the facts we perceive that conti
nents are wearing out. Each continental area abides its
time, and gradually yields to the destructive agencies
which are always at work. Each period of the world's
history has had its continental surfaces for the accommo
dation of its appropriate populations. When the period
has reached its close, the continents have been exhausted,
and renovating agencies have been summoned to restore
their pristine condition. When impaired beyond recuper
ation, the powers of nature have been invoked for the
uplift and utilization of new continental masses, which
through ages had been building under water, out of the
stolen materials of older lands. So our own farms and
mountains will ultimately disappear, and the footing of
the human race will vanish beneath their feet. A wasted
continent and a wasted world must cease to retain its or
ganic populations. Thus we see a promise of release of
our race from the planet to which it is now confined.
PEDESTRIANISM IN EUROPE.
BAYARD TAYLOR.
To see Europe as a pedestrian requires little preparation,
if the traveller is willing to forego some of the refinements
of living to which he may have been accustomed, for the
sake of the new and interesting fields of observation
70 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TAYLOR
which will be opened to him. He must be content to
sleep on hard beds and partake of coarse fare; to undergo
rudeness at times from the officers of the police and the
porters of palaces and galleries; or to travel for hours in
rain and storm without finding a shelter. The knapsack
will at first be heavy upon the shoulders, the feet will be
sore and the limbs weary with the day's walk, and some
times the spirit will begin to flag under the general fatigue
of body. This, however, soon passes over. In a week's
time, if the pedestrian does not attempt too much on
setting out, his limbs are stronger, and his gait more firm
and vigorous ; he lies down at night with a feeling of re
freshing rest, sleeps with a soundness undisturbed by a
single dream, that seems almost like death, if he has been
accustomed to restless nights, and rises invigorated in
heart and frame for the next day's journey. The coarse
black bread of the peasant inns, with cheese no less coarse,
and a huge mug of milk or the nourishing beer of Ger
many, have a relish to his keen appetite which excites his
own astonishment. And if he is willing to regard all
incivility and attempts at imposition as valuable lessons
in the study of human nature, and to keep his temper and
cheerfulness in any situation which may try them, he is
prepared to walk through the whole of Europe, with more
real pleasure to -himself, and far more profit, than if he
journeyed in style and enjoyed (?) the constant services
of couriers and valets de place.
Should his means become unusually scant, he will find
it possible to travel on an amazingly small pittance, and
with more actual bodily comfort than would seem possible
to one who has not tried it. I was more than once obliged
to walk a number of days in succession on less than a
franc a day, and found that the only drawback to my
enjoyment was the fear that I might be without relief
TAYLOR] PEDESTRIANISM JN EUROPE. ^\
when this allowance should be exhausted. One observes,
admires, wonders, and learns quite as extensively, under
such circumstances, as if he had unlimited means.
The only expense that cannot be reduced at will, in
Europe, is that for sleeping. You may live on a crust of
bread a day, but lower than four cents for a bed you cannot
go. In Germany this is the regular price paid by trav
elling journeymen, and no one need wish for a more com
fortable resting-place than those massive boxes (when you
have become accustomed to their shortness), with their
coarse but clean linen sheets and healthy mattresses of
straw. In Italy the price varies from half a paul to a
paul (ten cents); but a person somewhat familiar with the
language would not often be asked more than the former
price, for which he has a bed stuffed with corn-husks, large
enough for at least three men. I was asked in France five
sous in all the village inns from Marseilles to Dieppe. The
pedestrian cares far more for a good rest than for the
quality of his fare, and a walk of thirty miles prepares
him to find it, on the hardest couch. I usually rose before
sunrise, and immediately began the day's journey, the cost
of lodging having been paid the night before, a universal
custom among the common inns, which are frequented by
the peasantry. At the next village I would buy a loaf of
the hard brown bread, with some cheese, or butter, or
whatever substantial addition could be made at trifling
cost, and breakfast on a bank by the road-side, lying at
full length on the dewy grass and using my knapsack as
a table. I might also mention that a leathern pouch,
fastened on one side of this table, contained a knife and
fork, and one or two solid tin boxes, for articles which
could not be carried in the pocket. A similar pouch at
the other side held pen and ink, and a small bottle which
was filled sometimes with the fresh water of the streams
72 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TAYLOR
and sometimes with the common country wine, which cost
from three to six sous the quart.
After walking more than half the distance to be accom.
plished, with half an hour's rest, dinner would be made in
the same manner, and, while we rested the full hour
allotted to the mid-day halt, guide-books would be ex
amined, journals written, or a sketch made of the land
scape. If it was during the cold, wet days of winter, wo
sought a rock, or sometimes the broad abutment of a
chance bridge, upon which to lie ; in summer it mattered
little whether we rested in sun or shade, under a bright
or rainy sky. The vital energy which this life in the
open air gives to the constitution is remarkable. The
very sensation of health and strength becomes a positive
luxury, and the heart overflows with its buoyant exuber
ance of cheerfulness. Every breath of the fresh morning
air was like a draught of some sparkling elixir, gifted with
all the potency of the undiscovered Fountain of Youth.
We felt pent and oppressed within the walls of a dwelling;
it was far more agreeable to march in the face of a driving
shower, under the beating of which the blood grew fresh
and warm, than to sit by a dull fireplace waiting for it to
cease. Although I had lived mainly upon a farm until
the age of seventeen, and was accustomed to out-door
exercise, I never before felt how much life one may draw
from air and sunshine alone.
Thus, what at first was borne as a hardship became at
last an enjoyment, and there seemed to me no situation
so extreme that it did not possess some charm to my
mind, which made me unwilling to shrink from the experi
ence. Still, as one depth of endurance after another was
reached, the words of Cicero would recur to me as en
couragement: "Perhaps even this may hereafter be re
membered with pleasure." Once only, while waiting six
TAYLOR] PEDESTRIANISM IN EUROPE. 73
days at Lyons in gloomy weather and among harsh people,
without a sous and with a strong doubt of receiving any
relief, I became indifferent to what might happen, and
would have passively met any change for the worse, as
men who have been exposed to shipwreck for days scarce
make an eifort to save themselves when the vessel strikes
at last.
A few words in relation to a pedestrian's equipment may
be of some practical value. It is best to take no more
clothing than is absolutely required, as the traveller will
not desire to carry more than fifteen pounds on his back,
knapsack included. A single suit of good dark cloth,
with a supply of linen, will be amply sufficient. The
strong linen blouse, confined by a leather belt, will protect
it from the dust, and when this is thrown aside on enter
ing a city the traveller makes a very respectable appear
ance. The slouched hat of finely-woven felt is a delightful
covering to the head, serving at the same time as umbrella
or night-cap, travelling-dress or visiting-costume. No one
should neglect a good cane, which, besides its feeling of
companionship, is equal to from three to five miles a day,
and may serve as a defence against banditti or savage
Bohemian dogs. In the Alps, the tall staves, pointed with
iron, and topped with a curved chamois-horn, can be
bought for a franc apiece, and are of great assistance in
crossing ice-fields, or sustaining the weight of the body in
descending steep and difficult passes.
An umbrella is inconvenient, unless it is short and may
be strapped on the knapsack; but even then an ample
cape of oiled silk or india-rubber cloth is far preferable.
The pedestrian need not be particular in this respect ; he
will soon grow accustomed to an occasional drenching,
and I am not sure that men, like plants, do not thrive
under it, when they have outgrown the hothouse nature
in. D 7
*74 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TAYLOR
of civilization, in a life under the open heaven. A port
folio capable of hard service, with a guide-book or two,
pocket-compass, and spy-glass, completes the contents of
the knapsack ; though if there is still a small corner to
spare I would recommend that it be filled with pocket
editions of one or two of the good old English classics.
It is ti rare delight to sit down in the gloomy fastnesses
of the Hartz, or in the breezy valleys of Styria, and read
the majestic measures of our glorious Saxon bards. Mil
ton is first fully appreciated when you look up from his
page to the snowy ramparts of the Alps, which shut out
all but the heaven of whose beauty he sang; and all times
and places are fitting for the universal Shakespeare.
Childe Harold bears such a glowing impress of the scenery
on which Byron's eye has dwelt that it spoke to me like
the answering voice of a friend from the crag of Drachen-
fels, in the rushing of the arrowy Rhone, and beside the
breathing marbles of the Vatican and the Capitol.
A little facility in sketching from nature is a most use
ful and delightful accomplishment for the pedestrian. He
may bring away the features of wild and unvisited land
scapes, the picturesque fronts of peasant cottages and
wayside shrines, or the simple beauty of some mountain-
child watching his herd of goats. Though having little
knowledge and no practice in the art, I persevered in my
awkward attempts, and was soon able to take a rough
and rapid but tolerably correct outline of almost any
scene. These memorials of two years of travel have now
a value to me which I would not exchange for the finest
engravings, however they might excel in faithful repre
sentation. Another article of equipment, which I had
almost forgotten to mention, is a small bottle of the best
Cognac, with which to bathe the feet, morning and even
ing, for the first week or two, or as long as they continue
TAYLOR] PEDESTRIANISM IN EUROPE. 75
tender with the exercise. It was also very strengthening
and refreshing, when the body was unusually weary with
a long day's walking or climbing, to use as an external
stimulant; for I never had occasion to apply it internally.
Many of the German students wear a wicker flask, slung
over their shoulder, containing kirschwasser, which they
mix with the water of the mountain-streams ; but this is
not at all necessary to the traveller's health and comfort.
These students, with all their irregularities, are a noble,
warm-hearted class, and make the best companions in the
world. During the months of August and September,
hundreds of them ramble through Switzerland and the
Tyrol, extending their route sometimes to Yenice and
Eome. "With their ardent love for everything republican,
they will always receive an American heartily, consecrate
him as a bursch, and admit him to their fellowship. With
the most of them, an economy of expense is part of the
habit of their student-life, and they are only spendthrifts
on the articles of beer and tobacco. A month's residence
in Heidelberg, the most beautiful place in Germany, will
serve to make the young American acquainted with their
habits, and able to join them for an adventurous foot-
journey, with the greatest advantage to himself.
We always accepted a companion, of whatever kind,
while walking, from chimney-sweeps to barons. In a
strange country one can learn something from every
peasant, and we neglected no opportunity, not only to
obtain information, but to impart it. We found every
where great curiosity respecting America, and we were
always glad to tell them all they wished to know. In
Germany we were generally taken for Germans from
some part of the country where the dialect was a little
different, or, if they remarked our foreign peculiarities,
they supposed we were either Poles, Eussians, or Swiss.
76 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TATLOX
The greatest ignorance in relation to America prevails
among the common people. They imagine we are a
savage race, without intelligence and almost without law.
Persons of education, who had some slight knowledge
of our history, showed a curiosity to know something of
our political condition. They are taught by the German
newspapers (which are under a strict censorship in this
respect) to look only at the evil in our country, and they
almost invariably began by adverting to Slavery and
Repudiation. While we admitted, often with shame and
mortification, the existence of things so inconsistent with
true republicanism, we endeavored to make them compre
hend the advantages enjoyed by the free citizen, the
complete equality of birth, which places America, despite
her faults, far above any other nation on earth.
In large cities we always preferred to take the second
er third-rate hotels, which are generally visited by mer
chants and persons who travel on business ; for, with the
same comforts as those of the first rank, they are nearly
twice as cheap. A traveller, with a guide-book and a good
pair of eyes, can also dispense with the services of a
courier, whose duty it is to conduct strangers about the
city, from one lion to another. We chose rather to find
out and view the sights at our leisure. In small villages,
where we were often obliged to stop, we chose the best
hotels, which, particularly in Northern Germany and in
Italy, are none too good. But if it was a post that is, a
town where the post-chaise stops to change horses we
usually avoided the post hotel, where one must pay high
for having curtains before his windows and a more elegant,
cover on his bed. In the country taverns we always
found neat, comfortable lodgings, and a pleasant, friendly
reception from the people. They saluted us, on entering,
with " Be you welcome," and, on leaving, wished us a
TAYLOR] PEDESTRIANISM IN EUROPE. 77
pleasant journey and good fortune. The host, when he
brought us supper or breakfast, lifted his cap and wished
us a good appetite, and when he lighted us to our cham
bers left us with " May you sleep well !" We generally
found honest, friendly people ; they delighted in telling us
about the country around, what ruins there were in the
neighborhood, and what strange legends were connected
with them. The only part of Europe where it is unpleas
ant to travel in this manner is Bohemia. We could
scarcely find a comfortable inn ; the people all spoke an
unknown language, and were not particularly celebrated
for their honesty. Besides this, travellers rarely go on
foot in those regions ; we were frequently taken for
travelling handwerker, and subjected to imposition.
With regard to passports, although they were vexatious
and often expensive, we found little difficulty when we
had acquainted ourselves with the regulations concerning
them. In France and Germany they are comparatively
little trouble; in Italy they are the traveller's greatest
annoyance. Americans are treated with less strictness,
in this respect, than citizens of other nations, and, owing
to the absence of rank among us, they also enjoy greater
advantages of acquaintance and intercourse.
The expenses of travelling in England, although much
greater than in our own country, may, as we learned by
experience, be brought, through economy, within the same
compass. Indeed, it is my belief, from observation, that
with few exceptions, throughout Europe, where a traveller
enjoys the same comfort and abundance as in America, he
must pay the same prices. The principal difference is
that he only pays for what he gets, so that, if he be con
tent with the necessities of life, without its luxuries, the
expense is in proportion.
The best coin for the traveller's purpose is English gold,
in. 7*
78 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TAYLOR
which passes at a considerable premium on the Continent
and is readily accepted at all the principal hotels. Hav
ing to earn my means as I went along, I was obliged to
have money forwarded in small remittances, generally in
drafts on the house of Hottingeur & Co., in Paris, which
could be cashed in any large city of Europe. If only a
short tour is intended, and the pedestrian's means are
limited, he may easily carry the necessary amount with
him. There is little danger of robbery for those who
journey in such an humble style. I never lost a single
article in this manner, and rarely had any feeling but that
of perfect security. No part of our own country is safer
in this respect than Germany, Switzerland, or France.
Italy still bears an unfortunate reputation for honesty ;
the defiles of the Apennines and the hollows of the Roman
Campagna are haunted by banditti, and persons who travel
in their own carriages are often plundered. I saw the
caves and hiding-places of these outlaws among the ever
green shrubbery, in the pass of Monte Somma, near Spo-
leto. A Swedish gentleman in Rome told me that he had
walked from Ancona, through the mountains, to the Eter
nal City, partly by night, but that, although he met with
many suspicious faces, he was not disturbed in any way.
An English artist of my acquaintance walked from Leg
horn along the Tuscan and Tyrrhene coast to Civita Vec-
chia, through a barren and savage district, overgrown with
aloes and cork-trees, without experiencing any trouble,
except from the extreme curiosity of the ignorant inhabi
tants. The fastnesses of the Abruzzi have been explored
with like facility by daring pedestrians ; indeed, the sight
of a knapsack seems to serve as a free passport with all
highwaymen.
I have given, at times, through the foregoing chapters,
the cost of portions of my journey and residence in various
TAYLOR] PEDESTRIANISM IN EUROPE. 79
cities of Europe. The cheapest country for travelling, as
far as my experience extended, is Southern Germany,
where one can travel comfortably on twenty-five cents a
day. Italy and the south of France come next in order,
and are but little more expensive ; then follow Switzerland
and Northern Germany, and, lastly, Great Britain. The
cheapest city, and one of the pleasantest in the world, is
Florence, where we breakfasted on five cents, dined sump
tuously on twelve, and went to a good opera for ten. A
man would find no difficulty in spending a year there for
about two hundred and fifty dollars. This fact may be of '
some importance to those whose health requires such a
stay, yet are kept back from attempting the voyage
through fear of the expense. Counting the passage to
Leghorn at fifty or sixty dollars, it Will be seen how littlo
is necessary for a year's enjoyment of the sweet atmos
phere of Italy. In addition to these particulars, the fol
lowing connected statement of my expenses will better
show the minimum cost of a two years' pilgrimage :
Voyage to Liverpool, in the second cabin $24.00
Three weeks' travel in Ireland and Scotland 25.00
A week in London, at three shillings a day 4.50
From London to Heidelberg 15.00
A month at Heidelberg, and trip to Frankfort 20.00
Seven months in Frankfort, at ten dollars per month .... 70.00
Fuel, passports, excursions, and other expenses 30.00
Tour through Cassel, the Hartz, Saxony, Austria, Bavaria, etc. 10.00
A month in Frankfort 10.00
From Frankfort through Switzerland and over the Alps to
Milan 15.00
From Milan to Genoa -60
Expenses from Genoa to Florence 14.00
Four months in Florence 50.00
Eight days' journey from Florence to Kome, two weeks in
Kome, voyage to Marseilles, and journey to Paris . . . 40.00
80 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BAYLOR
Five weeks in Paris $15.00
From Paris to London , 8.00
Six weeks in London, at three shillings a day 31.00
Passage home 60.00
$472.10
The cost for places of amusement, guides' fees, and other
small expenses, not included in this list, increase the sum
total to five hundred dollars, for which I made the tour,
and for which others may make it. May the young
reader, whom this book has encouraged to attempt the
same pilgrimage, meet with equal kindness on his way,
and come home as well repaid for his labors !
A WESTERN RECEPTION.
FRANCES C. BAYLOR.
[" On Both Sides" is certainly a highly-amusing picture of American
and English eccentricities, and very neatly, though with some exag
geration, compares English conventionalism with American social
freedom. Miss Baylor claims that her pictures are from the life, and
this may well be, for the characters are not uncommon types, and if
taken simply as possible individuals, no claim of exaggeration can be
made. In our selection the party of English travellers, after some
amusing scenes at "Washington and on the cars, have reached the home
and are enjoying the hospitality of a wealthy Westerner and his Eng
lish wife. Furthermore we shall let them speak for themselves.]
THE dinner was a well-ordered one, as was everything
about the establishment ; for to American abundance and
variety, as shown in the ample provision for his household
made by Job, Mabel added English management and thrift,
and the result was a menage which even their guests,
BAYLOR] A WESTERN RECEPTION. 81
accustomed to the almost military punctuality and mellow,
stable comfort of the most perfect domestic system in the
world, found delightful. It may be a pardonable digres
sion to say here that Mabel had suffered almost as much
from overplentifulness in America as she had ever done
from undue scarcity in England. She had a conscientious
horror of waste that made it a great moral question what
she should do with the enormous quantities of food alone
provided by her liberal-minded spouse, who had no prac
tical experience of catering and a horror of being or
seeing others stinted. It drove her quite wild at first to
see the boxes, barrels, crates, coops, that he was always
sending out from Kalsing, and her distress vented itself in
an occasional mild exclamation, " What a dreadful country
for waste, mamma dear!" To consume in any one house
all that her husband provided was impossible. She could
not have done it with a double staff of London servants,
with their five meals a day and unlimited perquisites. To
throw anything away, according to her creed, was wicked,
and, according to Mrs. Yane, would certainly bring its
retribution in personal want. At last, happily for all
parties, a solution was found of the problem. A poor
man, with a numerous progeny, moved into a particularly
hopeless-looking cottage about a mile away on the Kal
sing road, and that happy conjunction between food and
mouths was effected which cynics declare does not often
occur, and which lightened more hearts than Mabel's.
Gastronomically considered, the dinner, to which we
must get back, presented no very striking features from
first to last, unless it be accounted one that Sir Eobert
pronounced " the ices" quite the most delicious stuff he
had ever tasted, and made acquaintance with pecans,
which he thought so well of that he may be s-aid to have
become intimate with them on the spot and never to have
in.-/
82 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BAYLOR
separated from them afterward, as the pockets of all his
coats testify to this day. Mrs. Sykes, whose appetite was
Immense, not only ate with great relish of such things as
she was accustomed to, but absolutely made the daring
experiment of trying one American dish, and reported on
it promptly. " It is not as nasty and messy as it looks,"
she said to Miss Noel. " You might try it, if you like,
but I should say it was perfectly indigestible. Still, one
always likes to be able to say that one has tasted the
native dishes, and after taking birds'-nest soup, as I did in
Hong-Kong, I can stand a little of anything."
" A little of some things goes a very long way," said
Mr. Ketchum ; and there was something in the way he
said it that made Miss Noel rush into an account of her
journey, which, containing as it did the episode of the
conductor, completely restored his good humor. He
laughed over it in a way that quite surprised his wife,
and called out to her, " Only hear, Mabel, what dreadful
liberties the great American citizen has been taking with
the British aristocracy !"
At which Miss Noel said, " Oh, pray don't fancy that I
was really annoyed ! Do you know, I think it must have
been a little way of his to give nicknames ? Parsons tells
me that he called two children that sat behind her ' Bub'
and ' Sis.' I am quite sure that he meant nothing, and it
didn't signify : it was only a little odd just at first."
This sent Mr. Ketchum off into a fresh explosion of
merriment, but he caught Mrs. Sykes's next speech. " The
impertinent man actually laid his hand on my arm, once,
to attract my attention, and was most unpleasantly ob
trusive," she was observing to Mabel.
"Good heavens! You don't mean it! I wonder that
it was not paralyzed up to the shoulder! Such auda
city " he began, but, catching Mabel's eye and seeing
BAYLOR] A WESTERN RECEPTION. 83
that she was* shaking her pretty head, he stopped abruptly
and offered Miss Noel a dish she had already declined.
He and Mr. Eamsay then got into a conversation about
hunting and shooting, in which they talked very much
at cross-purposes until they found out where the trouble
was and defined their terms, Mr. E-amsay's red deer turn
ing out to be Mr. Ketchum's elk ; the European elk, the
American moose ; English thrushes, American robins ;
English grouse, American partridges, and so on. The
other gentlemen were naturally attracted by topics so
congenial, and a brisk discussion of guns, powder, shot,
camp-life, Comanche-stalking, and the like, ensued that
made Mr. Eamsay's eyes sparkle with interest. " How I
should like a shy at one of those red devils!" he exclaimed.
"I am going out to the far West, you know. I have come
over to settle here, for a while at least."
" I am glad to hear that," said Job, who thought Mr.
Eamsay looked the sort of man that ought always to be
coming down the steps of the Guards' Club, and not a sub-
duer of nature, a miner, herdsman, ranchero, pioneer, but
did not feel called upon to express uncalled-for opinions.
"Yes, Eamsay is tired of the dry-rot of an idle life in
London, and is going to sit down out in the bush and wait
for civilization where there is only a fortnightly post and
he will be quite out of the reach of telegrams, six men
sleeping in the same tent, and that kind of thing. Just
BO. It is a fascinating sort of life for a young man. 1
have tried it myself, but I like my comfortable arm-chair
and my newspaper now. * Tempora mutantur, et nos
mutamur in illis* I envy the fellow tremendously, except
when I am pitying him with all my heart," said Sir Eobert,
running one hand through his side-whiskers and ga/.ing
benevolently, with his head a little on one side, at Mr.
Eamsay.
84 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BAYLOR
" I don't mind roughin' it. I like it," said Mr. Ramsay.
"And I think I have brought everything that I shall
need. I was afraid you'd think I was goin' to give you
the pleasure of my company for the rest of my life when
you saw what an awful lot of luggage I had brought; but
it is only that I am goin' out into the backwoods, where
I've heard fellows say there wasn't so much as a corkscrew
to be had for love or money. I hoped you'd excuse me
bringin' it."
" Certainly, certainly : the more you bring, and the
Conger you stay, the better I shall be pleased. But, if
you will let me, I'd like to see your outfit. I have lived
out there, and may be able to give you a hint or two,"
said Mr. Ketchum.
4C Have you, now ? I shall be delighted ! I'll get into
my Colorado rig after dinner and show you what I'm like.
Splendid get-up ! Not very nobby, you know, for the Park,
but quite the thing," replied Mr. Ramsay, beamingly. . . .
Mr. Ketchum was prowling up and down the drawing-
room, stopping occasionally to glance out at what remained
of a beautiful sunset, when a ring came at the bell, and
Sanford admitted a gentleman, who could be plainly seen
through the open door divesting himself of his overcoat
and hat. Mr. Ketchum recognized him and smiled. He
had expected him to call, but not quite so promptly. Else
where he would probably have greeted him with a care
less " How're you, Bates ? How was the queen when
you left Windsor Castle?" Or, "What did 'Wales' say
in his last letter?" But, punctilious in his ideas of hos
pitality, he now advanced, shook hands heartily, and
presented him to the others. Mr. Bates was a tall man,
whose figure was constructed on a few bold lines, as
though he had been a towel-horse. Mr. Ketchum once
said of him that when the workmen had finished building
BAYLOR] A WESTERN RECEPTION. 85
him they forgot to take down the scaffolding.. He was
dressed in the exaggeratedly British style, had an air of
feeble gentlemanliness, and for the rest was rather a
pronounced specimen of a not uncommon sort of snob.
Heaven had denied him the boon he most coveted, the
happiness of being an Englishman; but an Englishman
he had determined to be, in spite of the accident of birth.
He lacked a great many gifts that a lesser soul would
have thought indispensable to the role he proposed to
play. His physique was not up to the mark, his tastes
and habits and speech were formed, his voice was nasal,
he had really nothing except his money and himself to
depend upon, yet mark the result. In a few short years
he was more English than any Englishman in England,
such is the power of a resolute will. He was taken for
one over and over again by Americans, who keep a por
trait of John Bull hung up in their mental picture-galleries,
just as John Bull does of his neighbor Johnny Crapaud,
and Monsieur Crapaud in his turn of Hans Schneider,
remarkably good likenesses all of them, of course, per
fectly faithful, if not entirely flattering. Count D'Orsay
once painted the picture of a friend and submitted it
when finished to that friend's wife for criticism. " It is a
good picture," was her verdict, " but not a good likeness."
" Ah, madame," said the artist, " you see de beast" (mean
ing the best). We all see the beast in these national por
traits, and do not greatly care about the likeness being
preserved.
The English craze was only the last expression of a con
stitutional thirst for distinction that had long tormented
Mr. Bates and had led him in the earlier stages of his career
to talk only of the most fashionable people, and of these
as his most intimate friends, of their yachts, carriages,
jewels, opera-boxes, and enormous fortunes, of the best
in. 8
86 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BAYIOB
hotels, where he invariably stayed, of the best clubs,
at which every one hastened to put him up, of his tailor,
Poole, and his boot-maker, Biffins, the best in Europe,
though (with an uneasy laugh) " frightfully expensive,"
of his cigars, which Cubans thought superior to any they
had ever smoked, and his wines, which a well-known bon
vivant of New York had pronounced the best he had ever
found on this continent. There was so much sweetness
and light in Mr. Bates's account of himself at this period
that it was doubtless only from the most charitable motives
that society supplied the shadows in the brilliant picture
and mitigated his else intolerable radiance by whispering
that he was a simpleton and a bore and the son of a suc
cessful grocer in Tecumseh, Michigan.
The sight of so many English people was naturally
refreshing to an exile like Mr. Bates, and he bestowed
upon them the seven bendings, if not the nine knockings,
with which Chinese dignitaries are saluted. Mrs. Sykes
made him a present of a stare and took no further notice
of him. Sir Robert divined the ass in the lion's skin, but
made himself agreeable as usual. Mr. Ketchum played
with a paper-knife and contributed intermittently to the
conversation, as did Ethel and Mr. Ramsay. As for
Mabel, she had gone up to the nursery, and so missed
hearing Mr. Bates tell the company that he had been
"3 7 ahs and yahs abroad, and was perfectly devoted to
England," compare the climate, customs, and what not
of the two countries, always to the disadvantage of his
own, and round off every other sentence with a " Don't
you find it so ?" to Sir Robert.
" I think this a most delightful, exhilarating climate. 1
wonder at your liking ours better : it is so notoriously bad
that we spend half our time abusing it," Sir Robert said,
in reply to one appeal.
BAYLOR] A WESTERN RECEPTION. 87
But the visitor continued to set forth only the more
plainly the impossibility of America's ever proving a con
genial home to a Bates. Everything about it offended his
exquisite sensibilities. It was " raw," it was " cold," it was
" bare," it was " frightfully new." The grass, the skies,
the architecture, all distilled torture upon this delicately-
organized poet-soul. But the people, last, worst, most
unendurable and unescapable pang of all, the people !
Mr. Ketchum broke his paper-knife as he listened, and
as he threw the pieces aside he heard Mr. Bates saying,
" Give me solid old England, I say," and looked up, to see
" Que diable fait-il dans cette galere ?" written so legibly in
Sir Eobert's honest English face that his vexation was
replaced by amusement.
"Ah!" said Sir Eobert, and the exclamation expressed
something of the contempt he felt ; " I should have thought,
now, that you would have preferred your own country to
any other : most people do." Sir Robert would very proba
bly have been bored by the American who is always in
sisting blatantly upon the absolute superiority of every
thing American ; he would have understood the American
who in speaking of his country shows the loving pride
and enthusiasm that a son feels for his mother ; but he
utterly despised the creature who held in such light esteem
that for which most men are ready to lay down their lives-
The conversation languished rather, except so far as Mr.
Bates was concerned. Bent upon posing as a personage
and a social authority, he rambled on inconsequently,
chiefly about himself and his affairs, opinions, experiences,
what he considered "good form" and knew to be "bad
form," of something that was "not the correct thing"
and something else that was " no longer fashionable," and,
finally, of some people who had bought a house near his
whom he characterized as "low people," " tradespeople,"
88 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BAYLOR
he believed, whom he should have nothing to do with, of
course.
" Quite right, Bates," said Mr. Ketchum. " You can't
afford to know everybody : it would be a ' boah,' as you
say. But don't be too hard on them. We can't all be
upper crust, you know : somebody has got to be bed-rock.
We aristocrats should remember that." And, having dived
after Miss Noel's ball of wool, which had rolled toward
him, he added, "Pretty sunset that for a new country,
isn't it ? I like that view that we get of the valley through
the trees, there, better than any other in America. I say
America because it sounds as though I had been all over
the world and prevents my being identified with my own
country, which is my great object in life."
At this Sir Robert and Mr. Ramsay laughed and ex
changed glances, and Mrs. Ketchum, coming in, called for
an aide-de-camp, as she meant to "turn out the tea that
instant, but was not going to trot about with it," a
summons which both Mr. Bates and Mr. Ramsay obeyed
with alacrity.
" You go in tremendously for china, don't you ?" Mr.
Ramsay said, looking admiringly at the exquisite service
before him and removing the crimson cosey that smothered
the teapot. "Prettiest I ever saw, I think. Nice tone,
and all-overish design."
" It is rather nice, isn't it ?" said Mabel. " I often wish
that I could go to China and prowl about the shops a bit,
picking up things. You will take me some day, won't
you ?" (to her husband). " It would be quite delightful."
" It would be ; but the question that presents itself to
the intelligent and reflective mind is, 'Where the mis
chief is the money to come from?' The inclemency of the
times makes no impression on you, Mrs. Ketchum, what
ever. China, indeed ! haven't you enough of that sort of
BAYLOR] A WESTERN RECEPTION. 89
thing yet? I assure you, Mr. .Ramsay, that my wife's
extravagance in this matter is only equalled by her parsi
mony. She is always buying china ; but when we have
no company I am made to eat my dinner off a tin plate on
the back steps, to save wear and accidents. Ah, there is
Brown; come just in time to save me from joining tho
noble company of cashiers in the woods. Glad to see you,
Brown."
" Husband does jest so ! The idea of his saying "
Mabel began, but had to go forward to receive Mr. Brown,
his brother, Mr. Albert Brown, and their maiden sister,
Miss Susan Brown. The last was a great friend of Frau-
lein Schmidt's, and joined her very soon ; the brothers
proceeded to make their compliments to the English ladies;
Mr. Bates attached himself to Ethel ; and Job and the
baronet were left to their own devices for the moment.
"Is that the brother you dislike?" asked Sir Eobert,
nodding toward Mr. Albert Brown. "Not a pleasant
face, certainly : receding forehead, protruding eyes, thin
lips."
" Oh, it is not his personal pulchritude that I look at :
it is his pellet of a soul. A dozen such would rattle in a
mustard-seed," replied Mr. Ketch um, giving his chair an
energetic hitch. " He is so mean that if you were to bait
a trap with a postage-stamp you would catch Albert six
nights out of seven every week in the year. He was very
ill last winter, said to be dying, but the doctor held a
nickel under his nose, I suppose, at tho last moment, and
brought him back again. Strange to say, Brown is no
more like him than if he had never heard of him. His
heart is as big as all out-doors. Streaky family, like
breakfast bacon. I have known them all my life, but I
never could stand Albert ; and I have never asked him to
my house. He's no friend of mine, and I feel at liberty
in. 8*
90 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BAYLOR
to express myself pretty freely about him. I wonder
what brought him here to-night. Bug under that chip."
Just then the door opened, and Mr. Eamsay came in,
accoutred in the " rig" he had spoken of, and blushing
furiously at the sight of the additions made to the party
in his absence.
" The haughty Briton, as he appears in the famous role
of ' The Border Euffian,' " called out Mr. Ketchum, laugh
ingly. " Come here, Eamsay, and let us have a look."
Eedder still, but radiating satisfaction through the veil
of modesty, Mr. Eamsay joined his host on the hearth-rug
and bore with entire good humor the general inspection
that followed. He was dressed in a flannel shirt, a pair
of corduroy trousers, enormous jack-boots, and a cork
helmet, was belted and spurred, carried a haversack, wore
gauntlets that came nearly up to his elbow, had a kind of
wire coop with a gauze net stretched over it attached to
his helmet, and as to arms was a peripatetic arsenal.
" Green of the Fusiliers got me up this, he's been out in
Mexico a lot, all but this," touching the coop. " I got
that up to get ahead of those brutes of mosquitoes," he
said, and glanced at himself in fond approval.
The sight was too much for Mr. Ketchum. He looked
from the bristling, buccaneering Mr. Eamsay to the side-
whiskered and generally Britished Mr. Bates standing a
few paces off, and incontinently fled. Mabel followed him
into the dining-room, and found him convulsed with laugh
ter and fairly doubled up on the sofa. " What is the mat
ter, husband ? what is it ?" she asked, seeing nothing to
put anybody into such a state.
" Oh ! It's th-o ha ! ha I ha ! ha ! ha .'those two
ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! those two imitations!"
Mr. Ketchum got out, with great difficulty, and convulsed
BAYLOR] A WESTERN RECEPTION. 91
afresh, laughing until the tears rolled down his cheeks, to
the no small amazement of his wife, who looked on quite
anxiously at the demonstration. It was some moments
before he could compose himself sufficiently to go back ;
and even then his features worked ominously, and he had
the greatest difficulty in controlling his risibles.
Mr. Ramsay -was still contemplating himself delightedly
and talking of what he meant to do " out in Colorado and
*.hose parts."
Gradually sobering down, Mr. Ketchum joined in the
conversation, telling him that they would have a serious
talk about the Colorado plan next day, and saying what
he could for the " rig." " You have been handed around
on a rose-leaf all your life, my dear fellow. You'll find it
exchanged for a cactus out there, the roughest sort of
life, and human nature in its shirt-sleeves. If you were
not an Englishman, I should advise you either to go home
again or invest in a quarter's worth of arsenic. You can't
mine in hard-bake with a pewter spoon, you know. But
I reckon you are made of the right metal and will come
out ahead on that fight."
" I can't go home, you know. It is no good talking
of that. I haven't got the money to live there, unless I
turned mudlark," said Mr. Ramsay. " The governor won't
do anything for me, and I can't get tick, and I am obliged
to try the colonies or America."
" Well, anything is better than being an English gentle
man who can't keep up with the procession," said Mr.
Ketchum ; " and perhaps you may be the pigeon that is
to pick up a pea."
After this there was some music, and then Sanford
brought in the tray, with the materials on it for brewing
what Mr. Ketchum called " the muriate of susquate of
iodized potassium."
92 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
Miss Brown refused to stay long enough to either see
the deed done or partake of the contents of the flowing
bowl, and the party broke up, Mr. Bates kindly assuring
Sir Robert that he meant to see a great deal of him.
Good-nights were exchanged, and the front door closed.
DRIFTING.
T. B. READ.
[Thomas Buchanan Head, an American poet and artist, was born m
Chester County, Pennsylvania, in 1822. His paintings, o which the
best known are " Longfellow's Children" and " Sheridan's Hide," are
frequently devoted to highly-imaginative subjects, and manifest great
delicacy of conception. His poems show the same delicate fancy, and
several of them are masterpieces of their kind. Those best known are
" Sheridan's Ride" and " Drifting," the musical flow and the dream
like fancy of the latter of which has taken captive the public taste.
" The Closing Scene," though less popular, is a poem of high merit.
In addition to his volumes of poetry, he published a prose romance,
" The Pilgrims of the Great Saint Bernard." He died in 1872.]
MY soul to-day
Is far away,
Sailing the Yesuvian Bay ;
My winged boat,
A bird afloat,
Swims round the purple peaks remote.
Eound purple peaks
It sails, and seeks
Blue inlets and their crystal creeks,
Where high rocks throw,
Through deeps below,
A duplicated golden glow.
KEADJ DRIFTING. 93
Far, vague, and dim,
The mountains swim ;
While on Vesuvius' misty brim,
With outstretched hands,
The gray smoke stands
O'erlooking the volcanic lands.
Here Ischia smiles
O'er liquid miles ;
And yonder, bluest of the isles,
Calm Capri waits,
Her sapphire gates
Beguiling to her bright estates.
I heed not if
My rippling skiff
Float swift or slow from cliff to cliff:
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.
Under the walls
Where swells and falls
The bay's deep breast at intervals
At peace I lie.
Blown softly by,
A cloud upon this liquid sky.
The day, so mild,
Is Heaven's own child,
With Earth and Ocean reconciled ;
The airs I feel
Around me steal
Are murmuring to the murmuring keel.
94 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
Over the rail
My hand I trail
Within the shadow of the sail ;
A joy intense,
The cooling sense
Glides down my drowsy indolence.
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Where Summer sings and never dies ;
O'erveiled with vines,
She glows and shines
Among her future oil and wines.
Her children, hid
The cliffs amid,
Are gambolling with the gambolling kid,
Or down the walls,
With -tipsy calls,
Laugh on the rocks like water-falls.
The fisher's child,
With tresses wild,
Unto the smooth, bright sand beguiled,
With glowing lips
Sings as she skips,
Or gazes at the far-off ships.
Yon deep bark goes
Where Traffic blows,
From lands of sun to lands of snows ;
This happier one,
Its course is run
From lands of snow to lands of sun.
KUSH] THE INFLUENCE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 95
O happy ship,
To rise and dip,
With the blue crystal at your lip !
O happy crew,
My heart with you
Sails, and sails, and sings anew !
No more, no more
The worldly shore
Upbraids me with its loud uproar ;
With dreamful eyes
My spirit lies
Under the walls of Paradise.
THE INFLUENCE OF EDUCATED WOMEN.
BENJAMIN RUSH.
[Of distinguished Americans of the last century none occupied a
more prominent and useful position than Dr. Rush. He was a mem-
ter of the Continental Congress, and signed the Declaration of Inde
pendence. He was one of the most learned members of the medical
profession, and was a prominent professor in the Medical College of
Philadelphia, and in the "University, from 1769 till his death. He
was president of the society for the abolition of slavery, and was dis
tinguished for industry, piety, and benevolence. He was a popular
lecturer and a cultured writer. The extract from his writings which
wo give shows a pure and exalted mind, though it cannot be said that
its prevision of the results of female education has proved correct.
The declension which he foresees in the character of American women
has, happily, not yet begun. Dr. Kush was born near Philadelphia in
1745, and died in 1813.]
. IT is agreeable to observe how differently modern
writers and the inspired author of the Proverbs describe
96 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [Rusii
a fine woman. The former confine their praises chiefly
to person-al charms and ornamental accomplishments,
while the latter celebrates only the virtues of a valuable j
mistress of a family and a useful member of society. The j
one is perfectly acquainted with all the fashionable Ian- <
guages of Europe ; the other " opens her mouth with \
wisdom," and is perfectly acquainted with all the uses of j
the needle, the distaff, and the loom. The business of the!
one is pleasure ; the pleasure of the other is business. The
one is admired abroad ; the other is honored and beloved I
at home. "Her children arise up and call her blessed;:
her husband also, and he praiseth her." There is no fame]
in the world equal to this; nor is there a note in musicj
half so delightful as the respectful language with which!
a grateful son or daughter perpetuates the memory of a]
sensible and affectionate mother.
A philosopher once said, " Let me make all the ballads
of a country, and I care not who makes its laws." He
might with more propriety have said, Let the ladies of a
country be educated properly, and they will not only make
and administer its laws, but form its manners and character.!
It would require a lively imagination to describe, or even?
to comprehend, the happiness of a country where knowl-j
edge and virtue were generally diffused among the female
sex. Our young men would then be restrained from vied
by the terror of being banished from their company. The
loud laugh and the malignant smile at the expense of in-*
nocence or of personal infirmities, the feats of successful
mimicry, and the low-priced wit which is borrowed from
a misapplication of Scripture phrases, would no more bcj
considered as recommendations to the societ} r of th
l-adies. A double-entendre in their presence would theil
exclude a gentleman forever from the company of both|
sexes, and probably oblige him to seek an asylum from
Eusn] THE INFLUENCE OF EDUCATED WOMEN. 97
contempt in a foreign country. The influence of female
education would be still more extensive and useful in
domestic life. The obligations of gentlemen to qualify
themselves by knowledge and industry to discharge the
duties of benevolence would be increased by marriage;
and the patriot, the hero, and the legislator would find
the sweetest reward of their toils in the approbation and
applause of their wives. Children would discover the
marks of maternal prudence and wisdom in every station
of life ; for it has been remarked that there have been few
great or good men who have not been blessed with wise
and prudent mothers. Cyrus was taught to revere the
gods by his mother, Mandane ; Samuel was devoted to
his prophetic office, before he was born, by his mother,
Hannah ; Constantine was rescued from paganism by his
mother, Constantia ; and Edward the Sixth inherited
those great and excellent qualities which made him the
delight of the age in which he lived from his mother,
Lady Jane Seymour. Many other instances might be
mentioned, if necessary, from ancient and modern history,
to establish the truth of this proposition.
I am not enthusiastical upon the subject of education.
[n the ordinary course of human affairs, we shall probably
too soon folk sr the footsteps of the nations of Europe, in
manners and vices. The first marks we shall perceive of
our declension will appear among our women. Their
idleness, ignorance, and profligacy will be the harbingers
of our ruin. Then will the character and performance
of a buffoon in the theatre be the subject of more conver
sation and praise than the patriot or the minister of the
gospel ; then will our language and pronunciation be en
feebled and corrupted by a flood of French and Italian
words ; then will the history of romantic amours be pre
ferred to the immortal writings of Addison, Ha wkes worth,
in. E g 9
98 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [Kusn
and Johnson; then will our churches be neglected, and
the name of the Supreme Being never be called upon but
in profane exclamations ; then will our Sundays be appro
priated only to feasts and concerts ; and then will begin
all that train of domestic and political calamities. But
I forbear. The prospect is so painful that I cannot help
silently imploring the great Arbiter of human affairs to
interpose his almighty goodness, and to deliver us from
these evils, that at least one spot of the earth may be
reserved as a monument of the effects of good education,
in order to show in some degree what our species was
before the fall, and what it shall be after its restoration.
[Dr. Kush was an ardent advocate of the temperance reform, and
also published an essay against tobacco, from which we give a short
extract.]
Were it possible for a being who had resided upon our
globe to visit the inhabitants of a planet where reason
governed, and to tell them that a vile weed was in general
use among the inhabitants of the globe it had left, which
afforded no nourishment, that this weed was cultivated
with immense care, that it was an important article of
commerce, that the want of it produced real misery,
that its taste was extremely nauseous, that it was un
friendly to health and morals, and that its use was at
tended with a considerable loss of time and property, the
account would be thought incredible, and the author of it
would probably be excluded from society for relating a
story of so improbable a nature. In no one view is it
possible to contemplate the creature man in a more
absurd and ridiculous light than in his attachment to
TOBACCO.
The progress of habit in the use of Tobacco is exactly
the same as in the use of spirituous liquors. The slaves
RUSH] TOBACCO. 99
of it begin by using it only after dinner; then during the
whole afternoon and evening; afterwards before dinner,
then before breakfast, and finally during the whole night.
I knew a lady who had passed through all these stages,
who used to wake regularly two or three times every
night to compose her system with fresh doses of snuff.
The appetite for Tobacco is wholly artificial. No person
was ever born with a relish for it ; even in those persons
who are much attached to it, nature frequently recovers
her disrelish to it. It ceases to be agreeable in every
febrile indisposition. This is so invariably true, that a
disrelish to it is often a sign of an approaching, and a
return of the appetite for it a sign of a departing, fever.
I proceed now to mention some of the influences of the
habitual use of Tobacco upon morals.
1. One of the usual effects of smoking and chewing is
thirst. This thirst cannot be allayed by water; for no
sedative or even insipid liquor will be relished after the
mouth and throat have been exposed to the stimulus of
the smoke or juice of Tobacco. A desire, of course, is
excited for strong drinks, and these, when taken between
meals, soon lead to intemperance and drunkenness.
2. The use of Tobacco, more especially in smoking,
disposes to idleness, and idleness has been considered as
the root of all evil. "An idle man's brain," says the
celebrated and original Mr. Bunyan, " is the devil's work
shop."
3. The use of Tobacco is necessarily connected with the
neglect of cleanliness.
4. Tobacco, more especially when used in smoking, is
generally offensive to those people who do not use it. To
smoke in company, under such circumstances, is a breach
of good manners ; now, manners have an influence upon
morals. They may be considered as the outposts of virtue.
100 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TOURGEE
A habit of offending the senses of friends or strangers
by the use of Tobacco cannot, therefore, be indulged with
innocence. It produces a want of respect for our fellow-
creatures, and this always disposes to unkind and unjust
behavior towards them. Who ever knew a rude man
completely or uniformly moral ?
A TERRIBLE RIDE.
A. W. TOURGEE.
[The " Fool's Errand" of Judge Tourgee attracted almost as much
attention, as a vivid narrative of conditions in the South after the war,^
as did " Uncle Tom's Cabin" as a picture of conditions before the war.
He has written other novels, in several of which he deals with Southern .
incidents and characters, but none of them has attained the popularity,
of the one above named. Albion W. Tourgee was born in Ohio iiw
1838. He served in the Union army during the war, and afterwardaj
settled as lawyer, editor, and farmer at Greensborough, North Caro
lina, where he had personal experience of the condition of things in;
the "reconstructed South." The scene which we give from "A;i
Fool's Errand" follows a political meeting at which the hero had
spoken his views with incautious freedom.]
HE had not proceeded far, when, in descending a hill;
towards a little branch, he overtook two men, who weres
evidently sauntering along the road and waiting for some
one to come up with them. He recognized them as men
whom he had seen at the meeting. When he came up
with them, they greeted him pleasantly, but with some
thing like constraint in their manner. It was nearly
sundown ; and one of them, glancing at the west, re
marked,
TOURGEE] A TERRIBLE RIDE. 101
" Goin' back to Warrin'ton to-night, Colonel ?"
"Yes," was the reply. "It's just a pleasant hour's
ride."
" It'll he right dark afore ye git there," said his interro
gator, cautiously.
"A little moonlight will make it all the pleasanter," he
laughed.
"Ef ye'll take pore folks' fare," said the other man,
somewhat anxiously, " you're welcome to supper and a
bed at my house. It's right near by," he continued,
" not more'n a mile off your road at the farthest. You
might ride by and stay tu supper anyhow. 'Twouldn't
hinder long, an' we'd be right glad tu chat with ye a bit."
"No, thank you," he replied: "my wife will be looking
for me, and would be alarmed if I did not get home by
dark, or a little after. Good-evening."
He was about to spur on, when one of the men cried
after him, in their peculiar way,
" stranger ! wait a minit. Don't stop, but jest walk
along as if we was only passin' the time o' day. I don't
want tu 'larm ye, but it's my notion it would be jest as
well fer ye not to go home by the direct road, arter makin'
that speech ye did to-day."
" Why not ?"
" Wai, ye see, there was a crowd of rough fellers thar
that was powerful mad at what ye said about the nigger,
though I be cussed ef I don't believe it's gospel truth,
every word on't, myself. However, they're mad about it ;
an' thar's a parcel of towns-folks hez been eggin' 'em on tu
stop ye somewhar on the road home, an' they may make
ye trouble. I don't think they mean tu hurt ye ; but then
ther's no tellin' what such a crowd'll do."
" You say they intend to waylay me ?" asked Servosse.
" Wai, no ! we didn't say that : did we, Bill ?" appealing
IIT 9*
102 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TOURGEE
to his comrade. " But we thought they mout stop ye, and
treat ye rough, ye know."
" So you think they'll stop me. Where do you think
they'll do it ?" he asked.
" Oh, we don't know it ! Mind ye, we don't say so ; but
they mout, an', ef they did, 'twould ez likely ez not be
Romewhar about the ford."
" All right, my friends. When I'm stopped, it will be a
queer thing if some one's not hurt."
" Better stop with us now," said his new friends, anx
iously, " an' not git into trouble when ye can jest ez well
go round it."
" No, thank you," he answered : " I'm going home ; and
no one will stop me, either."
He spurred on, but had gone only a short distance,
when a pebble fell in the road in front of him, and then
another, evidently thrown from the bushes on his right.
He drew rein, and was about to take a pistol from his
belt, when he heard some one, evidently a colored man,
say,
"Oh, Mars' Kunnel ! don't shoot!" And at the same
time he saw a black face, surrounded by gray hair and
whiskers, peering out from behind a bush. " Jes' you git
down off 'n yer hoss, an' stan' h'yer one minit while I tells
ye sumfin'."
"What do you want?" he asked, impatiently. "It's
getting towards sundown, and I don't want to be late
home."
"Dar! jes' h'yer him, now!" said the colored man,
reproachfully. " Ez ef ole Jerry ebber wanted tu keep
him 'way from home !"
"Well, what is it, Jerry? Be in a hurry!" said Ser-
vosse, as he dismounted, and led his horse into the dense
undergrowth where the man was. It was without mis-
TOURGEE] A TERRIBLE RIDE. 103
giving that he did so. He did not know the man, and
had never seen him before, except, as he thought, at the
meeting that day. He had been warned of danger; but
such was his confidence in the good will of every colored
man that he left the highway, and came into the thicket
to meet him, without fear. The confidence which his ser
vice as a Federal soldier had inspired in the good faith,
trustworthiness, and caution of the colored man had not
yet departed.
"Dey's waitin' fer ye, Mars' Kunnel," said the man,
almost in a whisper, as soon as he came near. " I'd sot
down to rest my lame leg in de bushes jes' a little while
ago, an' dey come 'long, an' stopped nigh 'bout where I
was ; an' I heard 'em lay de whole plan, tu stop ye down
by de fo'd, an' tie ye out into de woods, an' give ye a
whippin' fur de speech ye made to-day."
The man came from behind his bush, and Servosse saw
that he was strangely deformed, or rather crippled from
disease. He walked almost bent double, supported by two
staves, but had yet a very bright, intelligent countenance.
He remembered then having seen him before. His name
was Jerry Hunt, and he lived on a plantation adjoining
Warrington.
" How did you come to be so far from home, Jerry ?" he
asked, in surprise.
" Went to h'yer de speakin', sah. Can't tell what fer.
Tought de Lor' hed sumfin' fer old Jerry tu du out h'yer;
so started 'arly, an' come. I knowed de Lor' sent me, but
didn't know what fer till I heerd 'em a-fixin' it up tu git
ye, Mars' Kunnel. Den I knowed, 'cause yu'se our fren' ;
/knows dat."
Then he told how, as he was lying in the bushes to rest,
six men came along, and he heard them arrange to waylay
Colonel Servosse, " an' war' him out wid hick'ries. Dey
104 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TOURQE
said dey wa'n't gwine to hurt him, but jes' tu let him know
dat he couldn't make sech infamous speeches as dat in dis
region widout gettin' his back striped, dat's all."
" And where are they to be, Uncle Jerry ?"
" Jes' on dis side de fo'd, sah, jes' as ye goes down de
hill in de deep cut."
" But how are they to know which road I take ? The
load forks three miles before I come to the creek, and I
can as well take one as the other."
u Yes, sah !" said Uncle Jerry. " Dey tought o' dat ; so
dey's gwine to leabe one man at de fawks wid a good hoss
to come down whichever road you don't take, an' gib 'em
warnin', leastwise ef you takes de upper road, which dey
don't 'spect, cos you come de lower one. Dey's gwine to
put a grape-vine 'cross de cut to catch yer hoss."
" And who stops at the forks ?"
" Mars' Savage, sah."
" What horse is he riding ?"
" He'll not hev any at de cawner, but will claim to be
waitin' fer Mars' Yaughn's carryall to come; but de gray
filly's hid in de bushes."
" All right, Jerry. I'm much obliged. If I don't take
care of myself now, it's my own fault. Good-night."
" God bless you, sah !"
Servosse rode on, revolving in his mind a plan by which
he should discomfit his enemies. To evade them after
such warning was a matter of no difficulty whatever ; but
he was too angry to wish to do this. The idea that he
should be waylaid upon the public highway, and mal
treated, because, after their own urgency, he had spoken
his opinion frankly and plainly about a public matter, was
more than he could endure. He determined to do some
thing more than escape the threatened attack, and give tho
parties to understand that he was not to be trifled with.
TOURGEE] A TERRIBLE RIDE. 105
On arriving at the forks of the road, he found Savage
in waiting, as he had been told, and, after some little chat
with him, started on the upper road. Savage called to
him, and assured him that the lower road was much
better, and a nearer way to Warrington.
" Well," was the reply, " my horse has chosen this, and
I always let him have his own way when we are going
toward home."
The horse of which he spoke was a bay Messenger,
which he had captured in battle, and afterwards ridden
for nearly two years in the service. In speed, endurance,
and sagacity the horse had few equals even among that
famous stock. Hoof, limb, and wind were sound ; and his
spirit did honor to his illustrious parentage. Upon his
steadiness and capacity his rider could count with the
utmost certainty. Horse and man were well mated, each
understanding with exactness the temper and habits of
the other.
" Now, Lollard," he said, as soon as he was well hidden
from the place where Savage was posted, " make the old
* Tabernacle Church' in the best time you can, and see if
we do not make these gentlemen repent the attempt to
circumvent us."
"The Tabernacle" was the name of a church which
stood on the upper road, about two miles from the lower
ford, from which there was a bridle-path through the
woods, coming out on the lower road about half a mile
above the ford. To reach the latter road by this path
before Savage should have time to pass the point of inter
section was now the immediate object.
Lollard covered the ground with mighty stretches, but
evenly and steadily, in a way that showed his staying
qualities. When they reached the church, his rider threw
the reins on his neck, and leaped to the ground. He was
106 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [TOURGEE
well acquainted with every bush around the church, having
frequently attended meeting there. After groping around
for a few seconds, he bent over a small hickory, and cut it
off with his knife. It made a goad about six feet long,
and perhaps an inch and a half in diameter in the heaviest
part. He trimmed off a few shoots, and then laid the top
on the ground and held it with his foot while he gave the
butt a few turns, deftly twisting the fibre so that it would
not snap from any sudden blow. This done, he had a
weapon which in the hands of an expert might well be
deemed formidable. He had a revolver in his belt; but
this he determined not to use.
Mounting again, he dashed down the bridle-path until
he came to the lower road. A little clump of pines stood
in the angle made by this path and the road ; and on the
soft sward behind this he stopped, and, leaning forward,
stroked his horse's face to prevent him from neighing
upon the approach of the expected horseman. He had
waited but a few moments when he heard Savage coming
at a brisk gallop on his gray filly. The moon had now
risen ; and between the straggling pine-tops he caught
occasional glimpses of the rider as he came along the
stretch of white road, now distinctly seen in the moon
light, and now half hidden by the shadow. Holding his
horse hard until the other had passed the opening of the
path, he gave the gallant bay the spur, and in half a dozen
bounds was on the filly's quarter. The long, lithe hickory
hissed through the air, and again and again lashed across
the mare's haunches. Stung with pain, and mad with
fright, she bounded forward, and for a moment was beyond
reach ; while her rider, scarce less amazed than his horse
at the unexpected onset, lost his self-control, and added
unintentionally the prick of the spur to her incentives for
flight. It was but a moment's respite, however; for the
TOURGE] A TERRIBLE RIDE. 107
powerful horse was in an instant again at her side, and
again and again the strong arm of his rider sent the tough
hickory cutting through her hide or over the shoulders
of her rider. Half-way to the cut in the road this race
of pursuer and pursued kept up. Then Servosse with
sudden effort drew in the ba} r , and subdued his excitement;
and, taking the shady side of the road, he advanced at an
easy gait to observe the result of his artifice.
Meantime, the party at the cut, hearing the swift clatter
of horses' feet, concluded that the man for whom they
were waiting had been warned of the ambush, and was
pushing forward to avoid being stopped by them in the
woods.
"By heavens," said one, "it will kill him. Let's undo
the grape-vine." And he sprang forward, knife in hand,
+o cut it loose.
" No," said another : " if he chooses to break his neck,
it's none of our business."
" Yes," said a third : " let it alone, Sam. It's the easiest
way to get rid of him."
An opening in the wood allowed the rising full moon to
shine clear upon the upper part of the cut. Faster and
faster came the footstrokes of the maddened filly, nearer
and nearer to the ambuscade which the rider's friends had
laid for another. Her terrified rider, knowing the fate
that was before him, had tried in vain to stop her, had
broken his rein in so doing, and now clung in abject terror
to the saddle.
" Good God ! how he rides !" said one.
"Heavens ! men, it will be murder!" cried another; and
as by common impulse they sprang forward to cut the
rope. It was too late. Just as the hand of the foremost
touched the tough vine-rope, the gray filly bounded into
the spot of clear moonlight at the head of the cut ; and
108 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
the pale face of their comrade, distorted with terror,
flashed upon their sight.
"My God!" they all cried out together, "it's Tom
Savage !"
The mare's knees struck the taut vine. There was a
crash, a groan ; and Tom Savage and his beautiful young
mare were lying at the bottom of the rocky cut, crushed
and broken, while on the bank stood his comrades, pallid
and trembling with horror.
it needed not a moment's reflection to show even to
their half-drunken minds what had been the result of
their cowardly plan ; and, smitten with the sudden con
sciousness .of blood-guiltiness, they turned and fled with
out waiting to verify their apprehension by an investiga
tion of the quivering wreck of mangled flesh upon the
rocks below. Hastily mounting their horses, which were
picketed near, they dashed through the ford ; and he
against whom this evil had been devised heard the sharp
clatter of their horses' hoofs as they galloped up the rocky
hill beyond. Then he dismounted, and went cautiously
forward to the edge of the cut. A moment of listening
told him there was none there except the man whom he
had lashed on to his fate. His heart beat fast with sick
ening fear as he glanced at the mangled form below. A
low groan fell upon his ear. He clambered down the
steep side of the cut, and groped about in the shadow
until he found the body of the man. He struck a match,
and found that he was still living, though insensible.
At this moment he heard the sound of a rumbling
vehicle on the road above.
"Dis way, boys! dis way!" cried the voice of old
Jerry. " 'Twas right here dey was gwine to stop de
Kunnel."
There were hasty footsteps, and a rattling one-horse
TOURGEE] A TERRIBLE RIDE. 109
cart drove into the moonlight with the white-framed face
of old Jerry peering over the dash-board ; while a half-
dozen more colored men, each armed with a stout club,
rode with him, or ran beside it.
" Stop !" cried a voice from below.
"Bress de Lor'!" shouted Jerry. "Dat's de Runnel's
voice. Dey hain't killed him yit. Hurry on, boys!
hurry on !"
He scrambled from the cart, unmindful of his decrepi
tude, and in an instant willing hands were helping the
" Kunnel" bear something limp and bleeding towards the
light. Then one brought water in his hat, and another
gathered something to make a blaze for closer examination
of the body of Savage. Fortunately, he had slipped from
the saddle when his mare struck the rope, and before she
took her final plunge upon the rocks where she now lay
crushed and dying. He had been dashed against the
clayey bank, and was battered and bleeding, but still alive.
He was put carefully in the cart, and carried on to War-
rington.
" Jes' arter ye passed me, Kunnel, the cart corned on,
an' I tole 'em what was up, an' got 'em to drive on peart-
like, so that we might help ye ef ther was any need on't,
which, bress de Lor' ! dey wa'n't," was Uncle Jerry's ex
planation of their unexpected appearance.
in. 10
HO BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [AMES
NEWSPAPER CHARACTERISTICS.
FISHER AMES.
[It is somewhat interesting to find a writer of the last century, when
the Press was yet in its infancy, writing of it in words that are equally
applicable to-day, when the newspaper has swollen to such huge pro
portions and has become such a power in the land. It may be said,
however, that the evil which he so eloquently deplores arises more
from the demands of readers than from the desires of editors. While
an active market is open for such wares as he describes, they will be
produced. And until the public is prepared to support newspapei
literature of a higher moral tone, such literature will not be produced
in any abundance. Fisher Ames, the writer of the following selec
tions, was born in Massachusetts in 1758, and was one of the most
prominent of American orators and statesmen in the period succeeding
the Ke volution. He served for many years in Congress, where he was
the leader of the Federal party during Washington's administration.
Some of his speeches which have been preserved are of unusual elo
quence and power, while he was noted for soundness of judgment,
depth of learning, and purity of character. He died in 1808.]
IT seems as if newspaper wares were made to suit a
market, as much as any other. The starers, and wonder-
ers, and gapers engross a very large share of the attention
of all the sons of the type. Extraordinary events multi
ply upon us surprisingly. Gazettes, it is seriously to be
feared, will not long allow room to anything that is not
loathsome or shocking. A newspaper is pronounced to be
very lean and destitute of matter if it contains no account
of murders, suicides, prodigies, or monstrous births.
Some of these tales excite horror, and others disgust ,
yet the fashion reigns, like a tyrant, to relish wonders,
and almost to relish nothing else. Is this a reasonable
taste ? or is it monstrous and worthy of ridicule ? Is the
history of Newgate the only one worth reading? Are
oddities only to be hunted ? . . .
A.MES] NEWSPAPER CHARACTERISTICS. Ill
Surely extraordinary events have not the best title to
our studious attention. To study nature or man, we
ought to know things that are in the ordinary course, not
the unaccountable things that happen out of it.
This country is said to measure seven hundred mil
lions of acres, and is inhabited by almost six millions of
people. Who can doubt, then, that a great .many crimes
will be committed, and a great many strange things will
happen, every seven years ? There will be thunder-show
ers that will split tough white-oak trees ; and hail-storms
that will cost some farmers the full amount of twenty
shillings to mend their glass windows ; there will be
taverns, and boxing matches, and elections, and gouging,
and drinking, and love, and murder, and running in debt,
and running away, and suicide. Now, if a man supposes
eight, or ten, or twenty dozen of these amusing events
will happen in a single year, is he not just as wise as an
other man, who reads fifty columns of amazing particu
lars, and, of course, knows that they have happened ?
This State has almost one hundred thousand dwelling-
houses ; it would be strange if all of them should escape
fire for twelve months. Yet is it very profitable for a man
to become a deep student of all the accidents by which
they are consumed? He should take good care of his
chimney-corner, and put a fender before the back-log,
before he goes to bed. Having done this, he may let his
aunt or grandmother read by day or meditate by night the
terrible newspaper articles of fires ; how a maid dropped
asleep reading a romance, and the bedclothes took fire ;
how a boy, searching in a garret for a hoard of nuts, kin
dled some flax ; and how a mouse, warming his tail, caught
it on fire, and carried it into his hole in the floor.
Some of the shocking articles in the papers raise simple,
and very simple, wonder; some, terror; and some, horror
112 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [AMES
and disgust. Now, what instruction is there in these
endless wonders ? Who is the wiser or happier for read
ing the accounts of them? On the contrary, do they
riot shock tender minds, and addle shallow br-ains?
They make a thousand old maids, and eight or ten thou
sand booby boys, afraid to go to bed alone. Worse than
this happens; for some eccentric minds are turned to mis
chief by such accounts as they receive of troops of in
cendiaries burning our cities : the spirit of imitation is
contagious, and boys are found unaccountably bent to do
as men do. When the man flew from the steeple of the
North Church, fifty years ago, every unlucky boy thought
of nothing but flying from a sign-post. . . .
Every horrid story in a newspaper produces a shock ;
but, after some time, this shock lessens. At length, such
stories are so far from giving pain that they rather raise
curiosity, and we desire nothing so much as the particu
lars of terrible tragedies. To wonder is as easy as to
stare, and the most vacant mind is the most in need of
such resources as cost no trouble of scrutiny or reflection ;
it is a sort of food for idle curiosity, that is ready chewed
and digested. . . .
Now, Messrs. Printers, I pray the whole honorable craft
to banish as many murders, and horrid accidents, and
monstrous births, and prodigies, from their gazettes, as
their readers will permit them ; and, by degrees, to coax
them back to contemplate life and manners, to consider
common events with some common sense, and to study
nature where she can be known, rather than in those of
her ways where she really is, or is represented to be,
inexplicable.
[From his eloquently-written eulogy of Alexander Hamilton we
select the following passage, as a biographical sketch of interest and
value.]
AMES] ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 113
In all the different stations in which a life of active
usefulness has placed him, we find him not more remark
ably distinguished by the extent than by the variety and
versatility of his talents. In every place he made it
apparent that no other man could have filled it so well ;
and in times of critical importance, in which alone ho
desired employment, his services were justly deemed ab
solutely indispensable. As Secretary of the Treasury, his
was the powerful spirit that presided over the chaos.
" Confusion heard his voice, and wild Uproar
Stood ruled."
Indeed, in organizing the Federal Government in 1789,
every man of either sense or candor will allow, the diffi
culties seemed greater than the first-rate abilities could
surmount. The event has shown that his abilities were
greater than those difficulties. He surmounted them;
and Washington's administration was the most wise and
beneficent, the most prosperous, and ought to be the most
popular, that ever was intrusted with the affairs of a
nation. Great as was Washington's merit, much of it in
plan, much in execution, will of course devolve upon his
minister.
As a lawyer, his comprehensive genius reached the
principles of his profession ; he compassed its extent, he
fathomed its profound, perhaps, even more familiarly and
easily than the ordinary rules of its practice. With most
men law is a trade ; with him it was a science.
As a statesman, he was not more distinguished by the
great extent of his views than by the caution with which
he provided against impediments, and the watchfulness of
his care over the right and liberty of the subject. In
i none of the many revenue bills which he framed, though
in. A 10*
114 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [AMES
committees reported them, is there to be found a single
clause that savors of despotic power ; not one that the
sagest champions of law and liberty would, on that ground,
hesitate to approve and adopt.
It is rare that a man who owes so much to nature
descends to seek more from industry ; but he seemed to
depend on industry as if nature had done nothing for him, .
His habits of investigation were very remarkable ; his
mind seemed to cling to, his subject till he had exhausted
it. Hence the uncommon superiority of his reasoning
powers, a superiority that seemed to be augmented from
every source and to be fortified by every auxiliary,
learning, taste, wit, imagination, and eloquence. These
were embellished and enforced by his temper and manners,
by his fame and his virtues. It is difficult, in 'the midst
of such various excellence, to say in what particular the
effect of his greatness was most manifest. ISTo man more
promptly discerned truth ; no man more clearly displayed
it: it was not merely made visible, it seemed to come
bright with illumination from his lips. But, prompt and
clear as he was, fervid as Demosthenes, like Cicero full of
resource, he was not less remarkable for the copiousness
and completeness of his argument, that left little for cavil,
and nothing for doubt. Some men take their strongest
argument as a weapon, and use no other; but he left
nothing to be inquired for more, nothing to be answered.
He not only disarmed his adversaries of their pretexts
and objections, but he stripped them of all excuse for
having urged them ; he confounded and subdued as well
as convinced. He indemnified them, however, by making
his discussion a complete map of his subject ; so that his
opponents might, indeed, feel ashamed of their mistakes,
but they could not repeat them. In fact, it was no com
mon effort that could preserve a really able antagonist
AMES] ALEXANDER HAMILTON. 115
from becoming his convert; for the truth which his re
searches so distinctly presented to the understanding of
others was rendered almost irresistibly commanding and
impressive by the love and reverence which, it was ever
apparent, he profoundly cherished for it in his own.
While patriotism glowed in his heart, wisdom blended in
his speech her authority with her charms.
Such, also, is the character of his writings. Judiciously
collected, they will be a public treasure. . . .
The most substantial glory of a country is in its virtu
ous great men ; its prosperity will depend on its docility to
learn from their example. That nation is fated to igno
miny and servitude for which such men have lived in
vain. Power may be seized by a nation that is yet bar
barous ; and wealth may be enjoyed by one that it finds
or renders sordid : the one is the gift and the sport of
accident, and the other is the sport of power. Both are
mutable, and have passed away without leaving behind
them any other memorial than ruins that offend taste,
and traditions that baffle conjecture. But the glory of
Greece is imperishable, or will last as long as learning
itself, which is its monument; it strikes an everlasting root,
and bears perennial blossoms on its grave. The name of
Hamilton would have honored Greece in the age of Aris-
tides. May Heaven, the guardian of our liberty, grant
that our country may be fruitful of Hamiltons, and faith
ful to their glory I
116 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [GREELEY
ADVICE TO FARMERS.
HORACE GKEELEY.
["What I Know about Farming," by Horace Greeley, was the
subject of many satirical comments when published, probably mostly
by persons who did not take the trouble to read the work, which cer
tainly abounds with sensible advice to farmers, and seems to embody
the result of years of practical experience. We give the general sum
ming up of the work. Horace Greeley 's public life is too well known
to need comment. Born in New Hampshire in 1811, as a poor farmer's
son, he pushed himself by perseverance and intellect to the summit of
the journalistic profession, and was for many years one of the ruling
powers in the United States. He died in 1872.]
IN the foregoing essays I have sought to establish the
following propositions :
1. That good farming is and must ever be a paying busi
ness, subject, like all others, to mischances and pull-backs,
and to the general law that the struggle up from nothing
to something is ever an arduous and almost always a slow
process. In the few instances where wealth and distinc
tion have been swiftly won, they have rarely proved
abiding. There are pursuits wherein success is more en
vied and dazzling than in Agriculture ; but there is none
wherein efficiency and frugality are more certain to secure
comfort and competence.
2. Though the poor man must often go slowly, where
wealth may attain perfection at a bound, and though he
may sometimes seem compelled to till fields not half so
amply fertilized as they should be, it is nevertheless in
flexibly true that bounteous crops are grown at a profit,
while half and quarter crops are produced at a loss. A
rich man may afford to grow poor crops, because he can
afford to lose by his year's farming, while the poor man
GREELET] ADVICE TO FARMERS. 117
cannot. He ought, therefore, to till no more acres than
he can bring into good condition, to sow no seed, plough
no field, where he is not justified in expecting a good crop.
Better five acres amply fertilized and thoroughly tilled
than twenty acres which can at best make but a meagre
return, and which a dry or a wet season must doom to
partial if not absolute failure.
3. In choosing a location, the farmer should resolve to
choose once for all. Roaming from State to State, from
section to section, is a sad and far too common mistake.
Not merely is it true that " the rolling stone gathers no
moss," but the farmer who wanders from place to place
never acquires that intimate knowledge of the soil and
climate which is essential to excellence in his vocation.
He cannot read the clouds and learn when to expect rain,
when he may look for days of sunshine, as he could if he
had lived twenty years on the same place. Choose your
home in the East, the South, the Centre, the West, if you
will (and each section has its peculiar advantages) ; but
choose once for all, and, having chosen, regard that choice
as final.
4. Our young men are apt to plunge into responsibilities
too hastily. They buy farms while they lack at once ex
perience and means, incur losses and debts by consequent
miscalculations, and drag through life a weary load, which
sours them against their pursuit, when the fault is entirely
their own. No youth should undertake to manage a farm
until after several years of training for that task under
the eye of a capable master of the art of tilling the soil.
If he has enjoyed the requisite advantages on his father's
homestead, he may possibly be qualified to manage a farm
at twenty-one ; but there are few who might not profitably
wait and learn, in the pay of some successful cultivator,
for several years longer ; while I cannot recall an instance
118 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [GREELEY
of a youth rushing out of school or a city counting-house
to show old farmers how their work ought to be done,
that did not result in disaster. It is very well to know
what science teaches with regard to farming ; but no man
was ever a thoroughly good farmer who had not spent
some years in actual contact with the soil.
5. While every one says of his neighbor, " He farms too
much land," the greed of acquisition does not seem at all
chastened. Men stagger under loads of debt to-day, who
might relieve themselves by selling off so much of their
land as they cannot profitably use ; but every one seems
intent on holding all he can, as if in expectation of a great
advance in its market value. And yet you can buy farms
in every old State in the Union as cheaply per acre as
they could have been bought in like condition sixty years
ago ; and I doubt their selling higher sixty years hence
than they do now. No doubt there are lands, in the
vicinage of growing cities or villages, that have greatly
advanced in value ; but these are exceptions : and I
counsel every young farmer, every poor farmer, to buy
no more land than he can cultivate thoroughly, save such
as he needs for timber. Never fear that there will not be
more land for sale when you shall have the money where
with to buy it ; but shun debt as you would the plague, and
prefer forty acres all your own to a square mile heavily
mortgaged. I never lifted a millstone, but I have under
taken to carry debts, and they are fearfully heavy.
6. I know that most American farms east of the Roanoke
and the Wabash have too many fields and fences, and that
the too prevalent custom of allowing cattle to prowl over
meadow, tillage, and forest from September to May, pick
ing up a precarious and inadequate subsistence by brows
ing and foraging at large, is slovenly, unthrifty, and
hardly consistent with the requirements of good neigh-
GREELEY] ADVICE TO FARMERS. 119
borhood. It is at best a miseducation of your cattle into
lawless habits. I do not know just where and when all
pasturing becomes wasteful and improvident; but I do
know that pasturing fosters thistles, briers, and every
noxious weed, and so is inconsistent with cleanly and
thorough tillage. I know that the same acres will feed
far more stock, and keep them in better condition, if their
food be cut and fed to them, than if they are sent -out to
gather it for themselves. I know that the cost of cutting
their grass and other fodder with modern machinery need
aot greatly exceed that of driving them to remote pastures
in the morning and hunting them up at nightfall. I know
that penning them ten hours of each twenty-four in a
filthy yard, where they have neither food nor drink, is
unwise ; and I feel confident that it is already high time,
wherever good grass-land is worth one hundred dollars
per acre, to limit pasturage to one small field, as near the
centre of the farm as may be, wherein shade and good
water abound, into which green rye, clover, timothy, oats,
sowed corn, stalks, etc., etc., may successively be thrown
from every side, and where shelter from a cold, driving
storm is provided ; and that, if cows could be milked here
and left through night as well as day, it would be found
good economy.
7. I know that most of us are slashing down our trees
most improvidently, and thus compelling our children to
buy timber at thrice the cost at which we might and
should have grown it. I know that it is wasteful to let
white birch, hemlock, scrub oak, pitch pine, dog-wood,
etc., start up and grow on lands which might be cheaply
sown with the seeds of locust, white oak, hickory, sugar-
maple, chestnut, black walnut, and white pine. I know
that no farm in a settled region is so large that its owner
can really afford to surrender a considerable portion of it
120 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [GREELEY
to growing indifferent cord-wood when it would as freely
grow choice timber if seeded therefor; and I feel sure
that there are few farms so small that a portion of each
might not be profitably devoted to the growing of valuable
trees. I know that the common presumption that land
so devoted will yield no return for a lifetime is wrong,
know that, if thickly and properly seeded, it will begin
to yield bean-poles, hoop-poles, etc., the fifth or sixth year
from planting, and thenceforth will yield more and more
abundantly forever. I know that good timber, in any
well-peopled region, should not be cut off, but cut out,
thinned judiciously but moderately, and trimmed up, so
that it shall grow tall and run to trunk instead of branches ;
and I know that there are all about us millions of acres
of rocky crests and acclivities, steep ravines and sterile
sands, that ought to be seeded to timber forthwith, kept
clear of cattle, and devoted to tree-growing evermore.
8. I do not know that all lands may be profitably under-
drained. Wooded uplands, I know, could not be. Fields
which slope considerably, and so regularly that water
never stagnates upon or near their surface, do very well
without. Light, leachy sands, like those of Long Island,
Southern Jersey, Eastern Maryland, and the Carolinas,
seem to do fairly without. Yet my conviction is stronj
that nearly all land which is to be persistently cultivated wi
in time be underdrained. I would urge no farmer to plungo
up to his neck into debt in order to underdrain his farm.
But I would press every one who has no experience on
this head to select his wettest field, or the wettest part
of such field, and, having carefully read and digested
ring's, French's, or some other approved work on the sub-|
ject, procure tile and proceed next fall to drain that fiel<
or part of a field thoroughly, taking especial precautions
against back-water, and watch the effect until satisfied
GREELEY] ADVICE TO FARMERS. 121
that it will or will not pay 4o drain further. I think few
have drained one acre thoroughly, and at no unnecessary
cost, without being impelled by the result to drain more
and faster until they had tiled at least half their respective
farms.
9. As to irrigation, I doubt that there is a farm in the
United States where something might not be profitably
done forthwith to secure^ advantage from the artificial re
tention and application of water. Wherever a brook or
runnel crosses or skirts a farm, the question, " Can the
water here running uselessly by be retained, and in due
season equably diffused over some portion of this land ?"
at once presents itself. One who has never looked with
this view will be astonished at the facility with which
some acres of nearly every farm may be irrigated. Often,
a dam that need not cost twenty dollars will suffice to hold
back ten thousand barrels of water, so that it may be led
off along the upper edge of a slope or glade, falling off just
enough to maintain a gentle, steady current, and so pro
viding for the application of two or three inches of water
to several acres of tillage or grass just when the exigencies
of crop and season most urgently require such irrigation.
Any farmer east of the Hudson can tell where such an
application would have doubled the crop of 1870 and pre
cluded the hard necessity of selling or killing cattle not
easily replaced.
Of course, this is but a rude beginning. In time, we
shall dam very considerable streams mainly to this end,
and irrigate hundreds and thousands of acres from a single
pond or reservoir. Wells will be sunk on plains and gentle
swells now comparatively arid and sterile, and wind or
steam employed to raise water into reservoirs whence
wide areas of surrounding or subjacent land will be re
freshed at the critical moment and thus rendered boun-
III. 7 11
122 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [GREELEY
teously productive. On the vast, bleak, treeless plains of
the wild West even artesian wells will be sunk for this
purpose ; and the water thus obtained will prove a source
of fertility as well as refreshment, enriching the soil by
the minerals which it holds in solution, and insuring boun
teous crops from wide stretches of now barren and worth
less desert. Immigration will yet thickly dot the great
Sahara with oases of verdure and plenty ; but it will, long
ere that, have covered the valleys of our Great Basin and
those which skirt the affluents of the savage and desolate
Colorado with a beauty and thrift surpassing the dreams
of poets. And yet its easiest and readiest triumphs are to
be won right here, in the valleys of the Connecticut, the
Hudson, the Susquehanna, and the Potomac. . . .
11. Shallow culture is the most crying defect of our
average farming. Poverty may sometimes excuse it ; but
the excuse is stretched quite too far. If a farmer has
but a poor span of horses, or a light yoke of thin steers,
he cannot plough land as it should be ploughed ; but let
him double teams with his neighbor, and plough alternate
days on either farm ; or, if this may not be, let him buy
or borrow a sub-soil plough, and go once around with his
surface plough, then hitch on to the sub-soil, and run
another furrow in the bottom of the former. There are
a few intervales of rich, mellow soil, deposited by the
inundations of countless ages, where shallow culture will
answer, because the roots of the plants run freely through
fertile earth never yet disturbed by the plough ; but these
marked and meagre exceptions do not invalidate the truth
that nine-tenths of our tillage is neither so deep nor so
thorough as it should be. As a rule, the feeding roots of
plants do not run below the bottom of the furrows, though
in some instances they do ; and he who fancies that five
or six inches of soil will, under our fervid suns, with our
IRYANT] LIFE IN NATURE. 123
summers often rainless for weeks, produce as bounteous
and as sure a crop as twelve to eighteen inches, is imper
vious to fact or reason. He might as sensibly maintain
that you could draw as long and as heavily against a de
posit in bank of five hundred dollars as against one of
fifteen hundred dollars.
12. Finally, and as the sum of my convictions, we need
more thought, more study, more intellect infused into our
agriculture, with less blind devotion to a routine which,
if ever judicious, has long since ceased to be so. The
tillage which a pioneer, fighting single-handed and all but
empty-handed with a dense forest of giant trees, which
he can do no better than to cut down and burn, found in
dispensable among their stumps and roots, is not adapted
*o the altered circumstances of his grandchildren. If our
most energetic farmers would abstract ten hours each per
week from their incessant drudgery, and devote them to
reading and reflection with regard to their noble calling,
they would live longer, live to better purpose, and be
queath a better example, with more property, to their
children.
LIFE IN NATURE.
The denizens of field and forest, of air and water, of all the varied
domains of nature, have formed the theme of many poems, often oi
great beauty and merit. Some of the more attractive efforts of Amer
ican poets in this direction will form the subject of our present poetic
group. Bryant's rollicking poem to the Bobolink comes first in order.
ROBERT OF LINCOLN.
MERRILY swinging on brier and weed,
Near to the nest of his little dame.
124 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BRYANT
Over the mountain-side or mead,
Eobert of Lincoln is telling his name :
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink ;
Snug and safe is that nest of ours,
Hidden among the summer flowers.
Ghee, chee, chee.
Kobert of Lincoln is gayly dressed,
Wearing a bright black wedding-coat ;
White are his shoulders and white his crest ;
Hear him call, in his merry note,
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink ;
Look what a nice new coat is mine !
Sure there was never a bird so fine.
Chee, chee, chee.
Robert of Lincoln's Quaker wife,
Pretty and quiet, with plain brown wings,
Passing at home a patient life,
Broods in the grass while her husband sings,
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink ;
Brood, kind creature : you need not fear
Thieves and robbers while I am here.
Chee, chee, chee.
Modest and shy as a nun is she ;
One weak chirp is her only note.
Braggart and prince of braggarts is he,
Pouring boasts from his little throat :
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink ;
PIKE] LIFE IN NATURE. 125
Never was I afraid of man ;
Catch me. cowardly knaves, if you can 1
Chee, chee, chee.
Six white eggs on a bed of hay,
Flecked with purple, a pretty sight !
There, as the mother sits all day,
Eobert is singing with all his might,
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink ;
Nice good wife, that never goes out,
Keeping house while I frolic about ;
Chee, chee, chee.
******
Summer wanes ; the children are grown ;
Fun and frolic no more he knows ;
Eobert of Lincoln's a humdrum crone :
Off he flies, and we sing as he goes,
Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link,
Spink, spank, spink ;
When you can pipe that merry old strain,
Eobert of Lincoln, come back again.
Chee, chee, chee.
To the earliest and one of the best of our Western poets, Albert
Pike, we owe a spirited and beautiful address
TO THE MOCKING-BIRD.
Thou glorious mocker of the world ! I hear
Thy many voices ringing through the glooms
Of these green solitudes ; and all the clear,
Bright joyance of their song enthralls the ear,
And floods the heart. Over the sphered tombs
Of vanished nations rolls thy music-tide :
No light from History's starlit page illumes
in. 11*
126 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [PiKE
The memory of these nations : they have died :
None care for them but thou ; and thou mayst sing
O'er me, perhaps, as now thy clear notes ring
Over their bones by whom thou once wast deified.
Glad scorner of all cities ! Thou dost leave
The world's mad turmoil and incessant din,
Where none in others' honesty believe,
Where the old sigh, the young turn gray and grieve,
Where misery gnaws the maiden's heart within :
Thou fleest far into the dark green woods,
Where, with thy flood of music, thou canst win
Their heart to harmony, and where intrudes
No discord on thy melodies. Oh, where,
Among the sweet musicians of the air,
Is one so dear as thou to these old solitudes ?
Ha ! what a burst was that ! The jEolian strain
Goes floating through the tangled passages
Of the still woods, and now it comes again,
A multitudinous melody, like a rain
Of glassy music under echoing trees,
Close by a ringing lake. It wraps the soul
With a bright harmony of happiness,
Even as a gem is wrapped when round it roll
Thin waves of crimson flame : till we become,
With the excess of perfect pleasure, dumb,
And pant like a swift runner clinging to the goal.
I cannot love the man who doth not love,
As men love light, the song of happy birds ;
For the first visions that my boy-heart wove
To fill its sleep with, were that I did rove
Through the fresh woods, what time the snowy herds
STODDARD] LIFE IN NATURE. 127
Of morning clouds shrunk from the advancing sun,
Into the depths of Heaven's blue heart, as words
From the Poet's lips float gently, one by one,
And vanish in the human heart ; and then
I revelled in such songs, and sorrowed when,
With noon-heat overwrought, the music-gush was dono.
I would, sweet bird, that I might live with thee,
Amid the eloquent grandeur of these shades,
Alone with Nature, but it may not be ;
I have to struggle with the stormy sea
Of human life until existence fades
Into death's darkness. Thou wilt sing and soar
Through the thick woods and shadow-checkered glades.
While pain and sorrow cast no dimness o'er
The brilliance of thy heart ; but I must wear,
As now, my garments of regret and care,
As penitents of old their galling sackcloth wore.
Yet why complain ? What though fond hopes deferred
Have overshadowed Life's green paths with gloom ?
Content's soft music is not all unheard :
There is a voice sweeter than thine, sweet bird,
To welcome me within my humble home ;
There is an eye, with love's devotion bright,
The darkness of existence to illume.
Then why complain ? When Death shall cast his blight
Over the spirit, my cold bones shall rest
Beneath these trees ; and, from thy swelling breast,
Over them pour thy song, like a rich flood of light.
Still more beautiful is Eichard Henry Stoddard's simile of birds to
thoughts :
Birds are singing, round my window,
Tunes the sweetest ever heard,
128 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [EGBERTS
And I hang my cage there daily,
But I never catch a bird.
So with thoughts my brain is peopled,
And they sing there all day long;
But they will not fold their pinions
In the little cage of Song !
From the life of the birds we may descend to the humbler life of
the green leaves and herbage within which they make their covert.
Even the humble grass speaks to us, though its voice is audible to our
understanding only, not to our ears. What it says we are told in the
following poem :
THE VOICE OF THE GRASS.
Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere :
By the dusty road-side,
On the sunny hill-side,
Close by the noisy brook,
In every shady nook,
I come creeping, creeping everywhere.
Here I come creeping, smiling everywhere :
All round the open door,
Where sit the aged poor ;
Here where the children play,
In the bright and merry May,
I come creeping, creeping everywhere.
Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere :
You cannot see me coming,
Nor hear my low, sweet humming ;
For in the starry night,
And the glad morning light,
I come quietly creeping everywhere.
PERCIVAL] LIFE IN NATURE. 129
Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere ;
More welcome than the flowers
In summer's pleasant hours :
The gentle cow is glad,
And the merry bird not sad,
To see me creeping, creeping everywhere.
Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere :
"When you're numbered with the dead
In your still and narrow bed,
In the happy spring I'll come
And deck your silent home,
Creeping, silently creeping everywhere.
Here I come creeping, creeping everywhere :
My humble song of praise
Most joyfully I raise
To Him at whose command
I beautify the land,
Creeping, silently creeping everywhere.
SARAH EGBERTS.
One of our older poets presents us with a poem which has always
remained a favorite with the reading public of America :
THE CORAL GROVE.
Deep in the wave is a coral grove,
Where the purple mullet and gold-fish rove ;
Where the sea-flower spreads its leaves of blue,
That never are wet with falling dew,
But in bright and changeful beauty shine
Far down in the green and glassy brine.
The floor is of sand, like the mountain drift,
And the pearl-shells spangle the flinty snow ;
in. i
130 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HOLMES
From coral rocks the sea-plants lift
Their boughs, where the tides and billows flow ;
The water is calm and still below,
For the winds and waves are absent there,
And the sands are bright as the stars that glow
In the motionless fields of upper air.
There, with its waving blade of green,
The sea-flag streams through the silent water,
And the crimson leaf of the dulse is seen
To blush, like a banner bathed in slaughter.
There with a light and easy motion
The fan-coral sweeps through the clear, deep sea,
And the yellow and scarlet tufts of ocean
Are bending like corn on the upland lea ;
And life, in rare and beautiful forms,
Is sporting amid those bowers of stone,
And is safe, when the wrathful spirit of storms
Has made the top of the wave his own.
And when the ship from his fury flies,
Where the myriad voices of ocean roar,
When the wind-god frowns in the murky skies.
And demons are waiting the wreck on shore,
Then, far below, in the peaceful sea,'
The purple mullet and gold-fish rove
Where the waters murmur tranquilly,
Through the bending twigs of the coral grove.
JAMES GATES PERCIVAL.
The life of the ocean depths speaks to us in a yet nobler strain in
one of the most beautiful of Oliver Wendell Holmes 's many beautiful
poems :
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,
The venturous bark that flings
HOLMES] LIFE IN NATURE. 131
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings,
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl ;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl !
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed !
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil ;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no
more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn !
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn !
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that
sings .
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll !
Leave thy low-vaulted past !
132 B&ST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [EMERSON
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea !
Of the many poets who have sung the humbler life of nature, none
has entered more fully into its spirit, or gained fuller inspiration from
his subject, than Emerson in his charming address to
THE HUMBLE-BEE.
Burly, dozing humble-bee,
Where thou art is clime for me.
Let them sail for Porto Blque,
Far-off heats through seas to seek :
I will follow thee alone,
Thou animated torrid zone !
Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,
Let me chase thy waving lines :
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.
Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion !
Sailor of the atmosphere,
Swimmer through the waves of air,
"Voyager of light and noon,
Epicurean of June,
Wait, I prithee, till I come
;. Within earshot of thy hum,
All without is martyrdom.
When the south wind, in May days,
With a net of shining haze
Silvers the horizon wall,
And, with softness touching all,
EMERSON] LIFE IN NATURE. 132
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,
And infusing subtle heats
Turns the sod to violets,
Thou, in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow, breezy bass.
Hot midsummer's petted crone,
Sweet to me thy drowsy tone
Tells of countless sunny hours,
Long days, and solid banks of flowers ;
Of gulfs of sweetness without bound
In Indian wildernesses found ;
Of Syrian peace, immortal leisure,
Firmest cheer, and bird-like pleasure.
Aught unsavory or unclean
Hath my insect never seen ;
But violets and bilberry bells,
Maple-sap and daffodels,
Grass with green flag half-mast high,
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey,
Scented fern, and agrimony,
Clover, catchfly, adder's-tongue,
And brier roses, dwelt among :
All beside was unknown waste,
All was picture as he passed.
Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher !
m. 12
134 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HUNT
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care,
Leave the chaff and take the wheat.
When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep ;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep ;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous.
In a similar vein, and quite as charming in manner and handling, is
Helen Hunt's "Strawberry Festival."
MY STRAWBERRY.
marvel, fruit of fruits, I pause
To reckon thee. I ask what cause
Set free so much of red from heats
At core of earth, and mixed such sweets
With sour and spice ; what was that strength
Which out of darkness, length by length,
Spun all thy shining thread of vine,
Netting the fields in bond as thine.
1 see thy tendrils drink by sips
From grass and clover's smiling lips ;
I hear thy roots dig down for wells,
Tapping the meadow's hidden cells ;
Whole generations of green things,
Descended from long lines of springs,
I see make room for thee to bide
A quiet comrade by their side :
I see the creeping peoples go
Mysterious journeys to and fro,
Treading to right and left of thee,
Doing thee homage wonderingly.
BOLLES] LIFE IN NATURE. 135
I see the wild bees, as they fare,
Thy cups of honey drink, but spare.
I mark thee bathe and bathe again
In sweet uncalendared spring rain.
I watch how all May has of sun
Makes haste to have thy ripeness done,
While all her nights let dews escape
To set and cool thy perfect shape.
Ah, fruit of fruits, no more I pause
To dream and seek thy hidden laws !
I stretch my hand and dare to taste,
In instant of delicious waste
On single feast, all things that went
To make the empire thou hast spent.
In conclusion we give a very pretty poetical address to the life of
long ago, that geological life of which all that remains to us is its un
dying record upon the rocks.
THE PETRIFIED FERN.
In a valley, centuries ago,
Grew a little fern-leaf, green and slender,
Veining delicate and fibres tender,
Waving, when the wind crept down so low ;
Rushes tall, and moss, and grass grew round it,
Playful sunbeams darted in and found it,
Drops of dew stole in, by night, and crowned it,
But no foot of man e'er trod that way:
Earth was young and keeping holiday.
Monster fishes swam the silent main,
Stately forests waved their giant branches,
Mountains hurled their snowy avalanches,
Mammoth creatures stalked across the plain ;
136 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BOLLHS
Nature revelled in grand mysteries,
But the little fern \vas not of these,
Did not number with the hills and trees,
Only grew and waved its sweet, wild way :
No one came to note it, day by day.
Earth, one time, put on a frolic mood.
Heaved the rocks, and changed the mighty motion
Of the deep, strong currents of the ocean,
Moved the plain, and shook the haughty wood,
Crushed the little fern, in soft, moist clay,
Covered it, and hid it safe away :
Oh, the long, long centuries since that day !
Oh, the agony ! Oh, life's bitter cost,
Since that useless little fern was lost !
Useless? Lost? There came a thoughtful man,
Searching Nature's secrets, far and deep :
From a fissure in a rocky steep
He withdrew a stone, o'er which there ran
Fairy pencillings, a quaint design,
Yeinings, leafage, fibres clear and fine,
And the fern's life lay in every line !
So, I think, God hides some souls away,
Sweetly to surprise us the last day.
MARY L. BOLLES.
KAMSAY] WASHINGTON RESIGNS HIS COMMISSION. 137
WASHINGTON RESIGNS HIS COMMISSION.
DAVID RAMSAY.
[David Kamsay was born in Pennsylvania in 1749. He studied
medicine under Dr. Rush, and practised for many years in Charleston,
South Carolina. He served in the Continental Congress in 1782 and
1785. He wrote several historical works, the chief of which was his
" History of the American Revolution," which became at once highly
popular. His " Life of Washington," published in 1801, still main
tains a high reputation. He died in Charleston in 1815, being shot
by a lunatic. At that period he was making preparations for publish
ing a more general work on American history. From his " Life of
Washington" we make a short but interesting extract.]
THE hour now approached in which it became necessary
for the American chief to take leave of his officers, who
had been endeared to him by a long series of common
sufferings and dangers. This was done in a solemn man
ner. The officers having previously assembled for the
purpose, General Washington joined them, and, calling
for a glass of wine, thus addressed them : " With a heart
full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I
most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as pros
perous and happy as your former ones have been glorious
and honorable." Having drank, he added, "I cannot
come to each of you to take my leave, but shall be obliged
to you if each of you will come and take me by the hand."
General Knox, being next, turned to him. Incapable of
utterance, Washington grasped his hand and embraced him.
The officers came up successively, and he took an affection
ate leave of each of them. Not a word was articulated
on either side. A majestic silence prevailed. The tear
of sensibility glistened in every eye. The tenderness of
the scene exceeded all description. When the last of tho
in. 12*
138 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [KAMSAT
officers had taken his leave, Washington left the room,
and passed through the corps of light infantry to the
place of embarkation. The officers followed in a solemn,
mute procession, with dejected countenances. On his en
tering the barge to cross the North River, he turned
towards the companions of his glory, and, by waving his
hat, bid them a silent adieu. Some of them answered
this last signal of respect and affection with tears; and
all of them hung upon the barge which conveyed him
from their sight till they could no longer distinguish in it
the person of their beloved commander-in-chief.
The army being disbanded, Washington proceeded to
Annapolis, then the seat of Congress, to resign his com
mission. On his way thither, he, of his own accord, de
livered to the comptroller of accounts in Philadelphia an
account of the expenditure of all the public money he had
ever received. This was in his own handwriting, and
every entry was made in a very particular manner.
Touchers were produced for every item, except for secret
intelligence and service, which amounted to no more than
1982?. 10s. sterling. The whole which, in the course
of eight years of war, had passed through his hands,
amounted only to 14,479?. 18s. M. sterling. Nothing was
charged or retained for personal services ; and actual dis
bursements had been managed with such economy and
fidelity that they were all covered by the above moderate
sum.
After accounting for all his expenditures of public
money (secret-service money, for obvious reasons, ex-
cepted) with all the exactness which established forms
required from the inferior officers of his army, he hastened
to resign into the hands of the fathers of his country the
powers with which they had invested him. This was
done in a public audience. Congress received him as tho
RAMSAY] WASHINGTON RESIGNS HIS COMMISSION. 139
founder and guardian of the republic. While he appeared
before them, they silently retraced the scenes of danger
and distress through which they had passed together.
They recalled to mind the blessings of freedom and peace
purchased by his arm. They gazed with wonder on their
fellow-citizen, who appeared more great and worthy of
esteem in resigning his power than he had done in glo
riously using it. Every heart was big with emotion.
Tears of admiration and gratitude burst from every eye.
The general sympathy was felt by the resigning hero, and
wet his cheek with a manly tear. . . .
The sensations of Washington on retiring from public
business are thus expressed : " I am just beginning to ex-
perience the ease and freedom from public cares, which,
however desirable, it takes some time to realize; for,
strange as it may seem, it is nevertheless true, that it was
not until lately I could get the better of my usual custom
of ruminating, as soon as I awoke in the morning, on the
business of the ensuing day ; and of my surprise on find
ing, after revolving many things in my mind, that I was
no longer a public man, or had anything to do with pub
lic transactions. I feel as I conceive a wearied traveller
must do, who, after treading many a painful step with a
heavy burden on his shoulders, is eased of the latter,
having reached the haven to which all the former were
directed, and, from his house-top, is looking back, and
tracing with an eager eye the meanders by which ho
escaped the quicksands and mires which lay in his way,
and into which none but the all-powerful Guide and Dis
penser of human events could have prevented his falling."
140 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HOPKINSON
SPECIMEN OF A COLLEGIATE EXAMINATION.
FRANCIS HOPKINSON.
[Of the members of the Continental Congress, and signers of the
Declaration, Judge Hopkinson alone gained a high position in general
literature, and shares with Franklin the honor of being a prominent
American humorist of the last century. In humor and satire, indeed,
he has been ranked with Swift, Lucian, and Rabelais. This is some
what undue praise. Yet if his wit does not fully reach the level of
those masters of the art, it escapes their coarseness and vulgarity, and
displays a very fine sense of humor. The "Collegiate Examination"
paper has lost somewhat of its point, since the absurdities which it
satirizes have been largely reformed. It is also too long drawn out
for the taste of modern readers, the examination being conducted not
only through the Metaphysics and Logic of a salt-box, but also through
its Natural Philosophy, Mathematics, Anatomy, Chemistry, and Sur
gery and Practice of Physic. We give it under only the first two of
these headings. More applicable to existing conditions is his essay on
"Whitewashing," which we also give. The title should properly
be changed to " House-Cleaning," but the custom continues in vogue,
and the husband of the present century is as much a victim to the
semi-annual invasion of bucket and broom as was his eighteenth-cen
tury counterpart to the terrors of the whitewash-brush. Judge Hop
kinson was born in Philadelphia in 1737, and died in 1791. He wrote,
in addition to those named, many humorous essays, but is best known
in literature by his satirical ballad, " The Battle of the Kegs."]
METAPHYSICS.
PROFESSOR. What is a SALT-BOX ?
STUDENT. It is a box made to contain salt.
PROF. How is it divided ?
STU. Into a salt-box and a box of salt.
PROF. Very well! show the distinction.
STU. A salt-box may be where there is no salt; but
salt is absolutely necessary to the existence of a box of
salt.
HOPKINSON] A COLLEGIATE EXAMINATION. UJ
PROP. Are not salt-boxes otherwise divided ?
STU. Yes ; by a partition.
PROF. What is the use of this partition ?
STU. To separate the coarse salt from the fine.
PROF. How ? think a little.
STU. To separate the fine salt from the coarse.
PROF. To be sure; it is to separate the fine from tno
coarse ; but are not salt-boxes yet otherwise distinguished?
STU. Yes ; into possible, probable, and positive.
PROF. Define these several kinds of salt-boxes.
STU. A possible salt-box is a salt-box yet unsold in the
hands of the joiner.
PROF. Why so ?
STU. Because it hath never yet become a salt-box in fact,
having never had any salt in it ; and it may possibly be
applied to some other use.
PROF. Very true ; for a salt-box which never had, hath
not now, and perhaps never may have, any salt in it, can
only be termed a possible salt-box. What is a probable
salt-box ?
STU. It is a salt-box in the hand of one going to a shop
to buy salt, and who hath sixpence in his pocket to pay
the grocer ; and a positive salt-box is one which hath actu
ally and bona fide got salt in it.
PROF. Very good : but is there no instance of a positive
salt-box which hath no salt in it ?
STU. I know of none.
PROF. Yes: there is one mentioned by some authors: it
is where a box hath by long use been so impregnated with
salt, that, although all the salt hath been long since emp
tied out, it may yet be called a salt-box, with the same
propriety that we say a salt herring, salt beef, etc. And,
in this sense, any box that may have accidentally, or
otherwise, been long steeped in brine, may be termed
142 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HOPKINSON
positively a salt-box, although never designed for the pur
pose of keeping salt. But tell me, what other division of
salt-boxes do you recollect ?
STU. They are further divided into substantive and pen
dent : a substantive salt-box is that which stands by itself
on the table or dresser; and a pendent is that which hangs
upon a nail against the wall.
PROP. What is the idea of a salt-box?
STU. It is that image which the mind conceives of a
salt-box when no salt-box is present.
PROF. What is the abstract idea of a salt box ?
STU. It is the idea of a salt-box abstracted from the idea
of a box, or of salt, or of a salt-box, or of a box of salt.
PROF. Yery right; and by these means you acquire a
most perfect knowledge of a salt-box. But tell me, is the
idea of a salt-box a salt idea?
STU. Not unless the ideal box hath ideal salt in it.
PROF. True; and therefore an abstract idea cannot be
either salt or fresh, round or square, long or short ; for a
true abstract idea must be entirely free of all adjuncts.
And this shows the difference between a salt idea and an
idea of salt. Is an aptitude to hold salt an essential or an
accidental property of a salt-box ?
STU. It is essential; but if there should be a crack in the
bottom of the box the aptitude to spill salt would be termed
an accidental property of that salt-box.
PROF. Yery well ! very well indeed ! What is the salt
called with respect to the box ?
STU. It is called its contents.
PROF. And why so ?
STU. Because the cook is content quoad hoc to find plenty
Df salt in the box.
PROF. You are very right, I see you have not misspent
your time : but let us now proceed to
' HOPKINSON] A COLLEGIATE EXAMINATION. 143
LOGIC.
PROF. How many parts are there in a salt-box ?
STU. Three. Bottom, top, and sides.
PROF. How many modes are there in salt-boxes ?
STU. Four. The formal, the substantial, the accidental,
and the topsy-turvy.
PROF. Define these several modes.
STU. The formal respects the figure or shape of the box,
such as round, square, oblong, and so forth ; the substantial
respects the work of the joiner; and the accidental depends
upon the string by which the box is hung against the
wall.
PROF. Yery well ; and what are the consequences of the
accidental mode ?
STU. If the string should break the box would fall, the
salt be spilt, the salt-box broken, and the cook in a bitter
passion ; and this is the accidental mode with its conse
quences,
PROF. How do you distinguish between the top and
bottom of a salt-box ?
STU. The top of a box is that part which is uppermost,
and the bottom that part which is lowest in all positions.
PROF. You should rather say the lowest part is the
bottom and the uppermost part is the top. How is it,
then, if the bottom should be the uppermost ?
STU. The top would then be the lowermost ; and so the
bottom would become the top, and the top would become
the bottom ; and this is called the topsy-turvy mode, which
is nearly allied to the accidental, and frequently arises
from it.
PROF. Yery good; but are not salt-boxes sometimes
single, and sometimes double ?
STU. Yes.
144 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HOPKTNSON
PROF. Well, then, mention the several combinations of
salt-boxes with respect to their having salt or not.
STU. They are divided into single salt-boxes having salt;
single salt-boxes having no salt ; double salt-boxes having
salt ; double salt-boxes having no salt ; and single double
salt-boxes having salt and no salt.
PROF. Hold ! hold ! you are going too far.
ON WHITEWASHING.*
DEAR SIR, The peculiar customs of every country
appear to strangers awkward and absurd ; but the inhabi
tants consider them as very proper and even necessary.
Long habit imposes on the understanding, and reconciles
it to anything that is not manifestly pernicious or imme
diately destructive.
I have read somewhere of a nation (in Africa, I think)
which is governed by twelve counsellors. "When these
counsellors are to meet on public business, twelve large
earthen jars are set in two rows, and filled with water.
The counsellors enter the apartment one after another,
stark naked, and each leaps into a jar, where he sits up to
the chin in water. When the jars are all filled with coun
sellors, they proceed to deliberate on the great concerns
of the nation. This, to be sure, forms a very grotesque
scene ; but the object is to transact the public business :
they have been accustomed to do it in this way, and there
fore it appears to them the most rational and convenient
way. Indeed, if we consider it impartially, there seems
to be no reason why a counsellor may not be as wise in an
earthen jar as in an elbow-chair; or why the good of the
people may not be as maturely considered in the one as in
the other.
* A letter from a gentleman in America to his friend in Europe.
ON WHITEWASHING. i45
The established manners of every country are the
standards of propriety with the people who have adopted
them ; and every nation assumes the right of considering
all deviations therefrom as barbarisms and absurdities.
I have discovered but few national singularities amongst
the people of these new States. Their customs and man
ners are nearly the same with those of England, which
they have long been used to copy. I have, however, ob
served one custom which, for aught I know, is peculiar to
this country. An account of it will serve to fill up the
remainder of this sheet, and may afford you some amuse
ment.
When a young couple are about to enter on the matri
monial state, a never-failing article in the marriage treaty
is, that the lady shall have and enjoy the free and unmo
lested exercise of the rights of WHITEWASHING, with all
its ceremonials, privileges, and appurtenances. You will
wonder what this privilege of whitewashing is. I will
endeavor to give you an idea of the ceremony as I have
seen it performed.
There is no season of the year in which the lady may
not, if she pleases, claim her privilege ; but the latter end
of May is generally fixed upon for the purpose. The at
tentive husband may judge, by certain prognostics, when
the storm is nigh at hand. If the lady grows uncom
monly fretful, finds fault with the servants, is discontented
with the children, and complains much of the nastiness
of everything about her, these are symptoms which ought
not to be neglected ; yet they sometimes go off without
any further effect. But if, when the husband rises in the
morning, he should observe in the yard a wheelbarrow
with a quantity of lime in it, or should see certain buckets
filled with a solution of lime in water, there is no time for
hesitation. He immediately locks up the apartment or
in. a k 13
146 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HOPKINSON
closet where his papers and private property are kept,
and, putting the key in his pocket, betakes himself to
flight. A husband, however beloved, becomes a perfect
nuisance during this season of female rage. His authority
is superseded, his commission suspended, and the very
scullion who cleans the brasses in the kitchen becomes of
more importance than he. He has nothing for it but to
abdicate for a time, and run from an evil which he can
neither prevent nor mollify.
The husband gone, the ceremony begins. The walls are
stripped of their furniture ; paintings, prints, and looking-
glasses lie in huddled heaps about the floors ; the curtains
are torn from their testers, the beds crammed into win
dows ; chairs and tables, bedsteads and cradles, crowd the
yard; and the garden fence bends beneath the weight of
carpets, blankets, cloth cloaks, old coats, under-petticoats,
and, ragged breeches. Here may be seen the lumber of
the kitchen, forming a dark and confused mass for the
foreground of the picture ; gridirons and frying-pans,
rusty shovels and broken tongs, joint-stools, and the frac
tured remains of rush-bottomed chairs. There, a closet
has disgorged its bowels, riveted plates and dishes, halves
of china bowls, cracked tumblers, broken wineglasses,
phials of forgotten physic, papers of unknown powders,
Seeds and dried herbs, tops of teapots, and stoppers of
departed decanters; from the rag-hole in the garret to
the rat-hole in the cellar, no place escapes unrummaged.
It would seem as if the day of general doom was come,
and the utensils of the house were dragged forth to judg
ment.
This ceremony completed, and the house thoroughly
evacuated, the next operation is to smear the walls and
ceilings with brushes, dipped in a solution of lime, called
WHITEWASH : to pour buckets of water over every floor.
HOPKINSON] ON WHITEWASHING. 147
and scratch all the partitions and wainscots with hard
brushes, charged with soft soap and stone-cutter's sand.
The windows by no means escape the general deluge.
A servant scrambles out upon the pent-house, at the risk
of her neck, and, with a mug in her hand and a bucket
within reach, dashes innumerable gallons of water against
the glass panes, to the great annoyance of passengers in
the street.
I have been told that an action at law was once brought
against one of these water-nymphs by a person who had
a new suit of clothes spoiled by this operation ; but, after
long argument, it was determined that no damages could
be awarded, inasmuch as the defendant was in the exercise
of a legal right, and not answerable for the consequences.
And so the poor gentleman was doubly nonsuited ; for he
lost both his suit of clothes and his suit at law.
I know a gentleman here who is fond of accounting for
everything in a philosophical way. He considers this,
which I call a custom, as a real, periodical disease, peculiar
to the climate. His train of reasoning is whimsical and
ingenious ; but I am not at leisure to give you the detail.
The result was, that he found the distemper to be in
curable; but, after much study, he thought he had dis
covered a method to divert the evil he could not subdue.
For this purpose, he caused a small building, about twelve
feet square, to be erected in his garden, and furnished
with some ordinary chairs and tables and a few prints of
the cheapest sort. His hope was that, when the white
washing frenzy seized the females of his family, they
might repair to this apartment, and scrub, and scour, and
smear to their hearts' content, and so spend the violence
of the disease in this outpost, whilst he enjoyed himself
in quiet at head-quarters. But the experiment did not
answer his expectation. It was impossible it should,
148 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
since a principal part of the gratification consists in the
lady's having an uncontrolled right to torment her hus
band, at least once in every year, to turn him out of
doors, and take the reins of government into her own
hands.
CHARACTERISTICS OF ARABIAN POETRY.
HENRY COPPEE.
[Henry Coppee was born at Savannah, Georgia, in 1821, and gradu
ated at West Point in 1845. He served in the army during the Mexi
can war, resigned in 1855, was professor of English literature in the
University of Pennsylvania from 1855 to 1866, president of Lehigh
University from 1866 to 1875, and since then has been professor of his
tory in that institution. His works include "Elements of Logic,"
" Elements of Rhetoric," " The Conquest of Spain by the Arab-Moors,"
etc. The latter work is a valuable contribution to historical literature,
and fills a gap which had previously been but imperfectly occupied.
Professor Coppee is a careful and judicious writer, and his work adds
another to the list of important histories by American authors.]
As the Arabian nature was of quick perception, fertile
fancy, and remarkable command of language, there were
many more poets than among the colder and more prosaic
nations of the North ; and those who were not ready
writers were ardent and appreciative hearers. The poet
became thus the universal teacher, from the singer or.
the highway to the bard who chanted before kings. An
honored guest among the great, his versatile art at the
same time touched the sensibilities and conveyed instruc
tion to the mind. By it he taught grammar, rhetoric,
biography, history, theology, medicine, chemistry, all
the training of the schools.
This was in part due, as I have said, to the peculiar
COPPEE] CHARACTERISTICS OF ARABIAN POETRY. 149
conditions of the language, it is eminently poetic, and,
although every scholar knows in a general way the great
inadequacy of translations, I am inclined to think that no
poetry suffers more in the transcription than the Arabic.
The following will serve as an illustration of the impossi
bility of judging of their rhythmic effects. Ibnu-1-monk-
hol and his little son in an afternoon walk came up to a
pool in their road, and began to cap verses thus : " Go
on," said the father :
" The frogs are croaking "in that pool,"
" Yes, and with no sweet melody, troth."
" Their language was boisterous
When they called the Beni Al-Mallah."
As they approached, the frogs became silent, and the
father said,
a Thou hast become mute like these frogs,"
" When they collected for scandal."
" There is no help for the oppressed,"
" And no rain for those who want it."
Of this singular verse-making, doubtless not without
rhetorical harmony in the original, the historian says,
" Certainly no one can doubt that this finishing of hemi-
stichs is highly deserving of praise : had it been executed
by a learned man advanced in life, it would have com
manded the greatest attention ; but being, as it was, the
work of a mere boy, it was a wonderful performance and
well worthy of remark."
Thoroughly satisfied as I am of the superior general
culture of the Arabians, I am inclined to think that the
excellence of their poetry, as tried either by classical
canons or modern taste, has been greatly overrated. It
is sweet, but turgid : from its almost universal application
in. 13*
150 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CoppfiE
its afflatus is lost ; it gilds commonplaces. It reacts upon
and injures prose, and is itself injured in the contact. It
labors to find conceits, and thus is forced in sentiment
and superlative in expression. And yet doubtless there
is a great charm in the variety of its cadenced sounds, a
rhetorical harmony which is totally lost in translation ;
a melange of the hum of bees, the twitter of swallows,
and the note of the whippoorwill ; a charm of nature's
chorus in changing melodies, constantly returning to the
key-note, for the Arabian poetry was always in recitative -
they chanted their verses in rhythmic divisions.
The most favorite forms of poetry were the Ghazele,
the Kassidah, and the Divan.
The Ghazele was a love-song or short ode, something
like what we call a canzonet or sonnet, containing from
fourteen to twenty-six lines, alternately rhyming. The
Kassidah is a longer and more pretentious piece, at once
descriptive and epic ; sometimes a scrap of history poet
ically treated, sometimes a tale in verse. It generally
contains from forty to two hundred lines. The Divan
is a collection of the smaller poems, generally Gha-
zeles, compiled and connected according to arbitrary
rules. Among these rules, or rather poetical customs,
was the use of assonances or imperfect rhymes, a feature
adopted and permanently embodied in Spanish poetry.
In much of the Arabian verse the second line of each
couplet ends with the same word. It was considered a
great feat to have all the letters of the alphabet system
atically recognized in a poem, somewhat like our writing
of acrostics.
But the poetic tendencies of the Arabians are not best
displayed in these more important forms : some of the
sweetest and most effective lines are found in impromptu
verses, a couplet or two, and in happy repartees, often,
COPPEE] CHARACTERISTICS OF ARABIAN POETRY. 151
we may suppose, carefully prepared, but having an ex
temporaneous appearance, which won from the rich and
great large rewards to the happy poet. The Arabian
Nights are full of such detached jewels of poetry, which
add greatly to their charms. Sultan and slave, priest and
merchant, traveller and soldier, vie with each other in
poetic conceits which bear largely upon the fortunes of
all.
Extended specimens of Arabian poetry in English trans
lation would be out of place in such a digest as this. A
few examples from the works of the Spanish Arabians will
illustrate the genre.
Thus, in praise of friendship, Ibn Zeydun, in the eleventh
century, sings, " We passed the night alone with no other
companion but friendship and union ; and, while happiness
and slumber fled from the eyelids of our detractors, the
shadows of night retained us in the secret bonds of pleas
ure, until the tongue of morning began to herald our
names."
" Name to me," says an Andalusian, speaking of the
Sherif At-talik, " one of your poets who has described the
color which a draught of pure wine imparts to the cheek
of the drinker in verses equal to these :
" The wine has colored his cheeks like a rising sun shining upon his
face : the west is his mouth, and the east is the lively cup
bearer's hand.
"When the sun has set behind his mouth, it leaves upon his cheeks a
rosy twilight."
in praise of love, the flowers are pressed into the
service :
'* The gardens shine with anemones, and the light fresh gales are per-
fumed with their scent.
152 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [COPPEE
"When I visited them, the clouds had just been beating the flowers,
and making them as deeply tinged as the best wine.
What is their crime ? said I ; and I was told, in answer, they stole
from the cheeks of the fair their beauty."
Ibnu-1-Faraj writes to a friend for a gift of some old
wine, and his letter is in verse :
" Send me some of that wine, sweet as thy love and more transparent
than the tears which fall down thy cheeks. Send me, O my
son ! some of that liquor, the soul's own sister, that I may com
fort my" debilitated stomach."
An amusing anti-climax.
The love of local homes is constantly set forth in poetic
hyperbole. Cordova, Seville, Granada, Toledo, Cadiz, is
each in turn the fairest and dearest spot on earth : each a
miracle of nature and art. I select in illustration a few
lines of Abu-1-hasan Ibn Nasr, a poet of Granada in the
twelfth century, in praise of Guadix and its river :
" O Wadin-1-eshit ! my soul falls into ecstasies whenever I think of
the favors the Almighty has lavished upon thee.
" By Allah, thy shade at noon, when the rays of the sun are the hot
test, is so fresh that those who walk on thy banks cannot stop to
converse together.
" The sun itself, seeking a remedy for its own ardor, directs its course
through thy shadowy bed.
" Thy current smiles through the prismatic bubbles of the waters like
the skin of a variegated snake. The trees that hang over thy
soft inclined banks are so many steps to descend to thy bed, while
their boughs covered with blossoms, and devoured by burning
thirst, are perpetually drinking of thy waters."
The story is told of an African poet, Bekr Ibn Hamad
El Taharti, that when the Sultan Ibrahim had shut him
self up in his seraglio, in luxurious ease, with his female
slaves, and forbidden any one to approach him, the poet,
COPPEK] CHARACTERISTICS OF ARABIAN POETRY. 153
having a petition to present, wrote, on the flowers which
were to be taken in, the following verses :
" The fair, the enchanting fair !
Who, even though slaves,
Do rule their Lord, and render him their slave ;
They work the bane of man ; seek we for roses
When neither fields nor gardens furnish them ?
The lovely flower ! on their bright cheeks we find them,
Sweeter and thornless too. This, then, my plaint,
Being on roses written, I do look
To have received with favor, since 'tis formed
Of that which is the image of their cheeks,
The fair, the enchanting fair!"
The poet's supplication was granted, and he received an
additional bounty of one hundred dinars.
It would exhaust the reader's patience, without, as
these specimens will suffice to show, affording a compen
sating instruction, were I to offer numerous extracts,
which, after all, can give no fair notion of Arabian poetry.
Whatever estimate we may now form of its taste and
power, its influence upon the people who heard the verses
chanted can hardly be exaggerated. When a popular poet
appeared, and intoned his love-songs to the multitude, it
was a common saying that " all men's ears grew to his
tunes, as if they had eaten ballads."
As 'might be expected, in the long period of the Arabia n
dominion in Spain there were great changes in the spirjt
and language of their poetry, which in a more extended
inquiry would claim some detail of illustration; but what
they called poetic progress was not improvement. At
first their utterances were simple and natural: they at
tempted in their new and beautiful seats to photograph
what they saw, and just as they saw it; afterwards their
descriptions became turgid and cloying, and created a
154 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
false taste among the hearers ; they resorted to strata
gems to excite a satiated fancy ; and the attempts of
women in verse still further lowered the poetic standard.
Many of these women became famous : they were repre
sentatives of all social classes, nobles, freed slaves, wives
and concubines, Christians and Jewesses.
I must not leave this subject without calling attention
to the singular and potent influence which Arabian poetry
exercised over the literature of Southern and Western
Europe. It can be traced in the reproduction of many
of the stories as well as in the structure of the French
fabliaux and chansons de geste of the jongleurs and trouveres
of the North, and is more particularly to be observed in
le gai saber of the Provengal troubadours. It extended
into Italy, and is found in the charming stanzas of Ariosto,
both as to matter and manner, and in the " twice-told
tales" of Boccaccio's Decameron. In a word, the entire
southern literature of Europe, up to the Renaissance,
owes as much to the Spanish Arabians for matter and
form as it does to the Latin for language. And, more
than this, when we remember that our English Chaucer
borrowed the scheme of his Canterbury Tales, and several
of the stories, from Boccaccio, we may well claim that
the Arabian idea has penetrated into the North, and left
its profound impression in the plastic English literature
of the fourteenth century.
Closely connected with their taste in poetry and their
use of it was their fondness for story-telling, which marks
the social life of the Oriental people. With them it took
the place of theatrical representation's, from the munshid,
or poet who recited his compositions at the courts of
princes, to the humble improvisatore, who gathered his little
crowd around him and satisfied their wonder with his
grotesque legends of genii and the supernatural.
COPPEE] CHARACTERISTICS OF ARABIAN POETRY. 155
The men frequented the bazaars to hear such tales ; the
women gathered at the baths to exchange or repeat them,
and there were improvisatrices of the seraglio. " Physi
cians often ordered story-telling as a prescription for their
patients, to mitigate their sufferings, to calm their agita
tion, to give sleep after protracted insomnia, and these
raconteurs, accustomed to deal with sickness, knew how
to modulate their voices, to soften the tone, and to give
way by still gentler utterances to the approach of sleep."
This kind of eloquence with them was classed as " lawful
magic," and was not considered beneath the cultivation
of men who prided themselves upon their literary emi
nence. They boasted of the number of entertaining
tales they had learned or invented, and the ready lan
guage and dramatic skill they displayed in telling them.
Such men were eagerly sought out by the Khalifs and
the grandees to beguile their ennui, or to recreate them
after their fatigues. Such is the simple philosophy of
the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments," stories about
stories, told by all sorts of people to Haroun Al Easchid
and his vizier, who wandered in disguise to find them.
The traveller in the East to-day may find the original
type little changed, except in the necessary accompani
ments of coffee and tobacco, which seem so very Orien
tal that we can scarcely believe that the former was not
used till the sixteenth, nor the latter till the seventeenth
century.
Naturally gifted with memory, of which Al Makkari
says, "Memory is among the gifts which the Almighty
poured most profusely upon the Andalusians," these story
tellers did not rely implicitly upon it; they not only
heightened the interest of their stories by mimetic and
histrionic effects, but they often improvised, while in the
very fervor of narration, charming plots of episodical
156 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HAWTHORNE
adventure, like those in the " Thousand and One Nights."
Once improvised, they became part of the chanter's future
stores, a broader foundation for new successes. These
were sometimes collected into volumes ; and one of these
Andalusian collections would, if we may accept the eu-
logium of bibliographers, were it translated, divide our
interest with the "Arabian Nights." Its author was a
very facetious man, who knew by heart a prodigious
number of stories, and gave them to the Spanish Arabs
as " The Book of Routes and Stations in the Adventures
of Abu-1-halyi." They had one great advantage, to which
I have already referred ; they were not limited to the
truth, but would have been tame had they not been full
of hyperbole in their descriptions.
Their musical powers are vaunted by the historian, but
little is known of their attainments in this art. They
sang to the lute (el-'ood), as the modern Spaniards do
to the guitar, with the same gesticulation, using the in
strument as a fan, and as if it were alive, and joining the
ballad with personal movements, se cantan bailando ;
sometimes executing a pas seul to the rhythm they were
producing, and subsiding again into a state of quiescence.
THE SECRET CHAMBER.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
[The extract we give below is the concluding chapter in the last
published work of the most original of American novelists, presuma
bly the last chapter written by Hawthorne's wonder-working hand.
* The Scarlet Letter," " The Marble Faun," and the other beautifully-
told stories of Hawthorne, exhibit a grace of manner and purity of
diction not surpassed by any other American writer. Yet these are
HAWTHORNE] THE SECRET CHAMBER. 157
the least of their merits. They are instinct with a marked originality
of thought and a subtile mysticism which stamp them as perhaps the
most remarkable and valuable of existing novels. Hawthorne seemed
to have no vision for the commonplace, but to revel in abstruse con
ceptions and dreams of strange conditions of destiny, which only one
with his minute power of analysis and broad grasp of exceptional
situations could have safely handled. It is not surprising that his
works very slowly gained an audience. A new generation had to be
born, and to grow up to his manner of thought, before the high merit
of his deeply-imaginative pictures could be recognized.
" Dr. Grimshawe's Secret" is one of several unfinished works left at
his death. It has been recently published, and is practically complete,
po far as the plot is concerned, though the suggestive notes of the
author show that the work was yet " in the rough," and was far from
having attained its. final finished and polished form. We are first in
troduced to grim old Dr. Grimshawe, dwelling as a recluse in a spider-
haunted den, yet associated with two attractive children, whose origin
is shrouded in mystery. It gradually appears that the boy is in some
way related to an ancient English family a member of whom, accord
ing to legend, had been the executioner of Charles I. He had stepped
in the blood of the slaughtered king, and wherever he trod thereafter
a bloody imprint appeared. After long imprisonment in a secret
chamber in his ancestral mansion, he escaped, leaving on the doorstep
the ineffaceable mark of a blood-stained foot. In the grave of this
fugitive, who fled to America, the boy finds a silver key, which plays
its final part in our chapter. At a later date Dr. Grimshawe dies, the
boy, Eedclyffe, and the girl, Elsie, make their way to England, and
the mystery of the secret chamber, which is felt throughout the work,
begins to loom up in prominent proportions. A series of events draw
Eedclyffe, as by the hand of destiny, to the old mansion. Here he
incautiously reveals his belief in his paternity, and his intention to
claim his birthright, to Lord Braithwaite, its present possessor. As a
result of his imprudence, he is induced to drink of a drugged wine by
his villanous host, and mysteriously vanishes. At this point in the
story the chapter which we give opens. In it the plot is sufficiently
unfolded to give some idea of the author's general conception, though
several mysteries are left unexplained, and an artistic finish is yet
lacking. The golden hair which rises in overflowing folds from the
casket is a conception of striking beauty and originality, and one can-
in. 14
158 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HAWTHORNE
not but regret the absence of the author's explanation of the startling
mystery revealed by the silver key.]
REDCLYFFE, apparently, had not communicated to his
agent in London his change of address, when he left the
Warden's residence to avail himself of the hospitality of
Braithwaite Hall; for letters arrived for him, from his
own country, both private and with the seal of state upon
them, one among the rest that bore on the envelope the
name of the President of the United States. The good
Warden was impressed with great respect for so distin
guished a signature, and, not knowing but that the welfare
of the Republic (for which he had an Englishman's con
temptuous interest) might be involved in its early delivery
at its destination, he determined to ride over to Braith
waite Hall, call on his friend, and deliver it with his own
hand. With this purpose, he mounted his horse, at the
hour of his usual morning ride, and set forth, and, before
reaching the village, saw a figure before him which he
recognized as that of the pensioner.
" Soho ! whither go you, old friend ?" said the Warden,
drawing his bridle as he came up with the old man.
" To Braithwaite Hall, sir," said the pensioner, who con
tinued to walk diligently on ; " and I am glad to see your
honor (if it be so) on the same errand."
"Why so?" asked the Warden. "You seem much in
earnest. Why should my visit to Braithwaite Hall be a
special cause of rejoicing?"
"Nay," said the pensioner, "your honor is specially in
terested in this young American, who has gone thither to
abide ; and when one is in a strange country he needs some
guidance. My mind is not easy about the young man."
" Well," said the Warden, smiling to himself at the old
gentleman's idle and senile fears, " I commend your dili
gence on behalf of your friend."
HAWTHORNE] THE SECRET CHAMBER. 159
He rode on as he spoke, and deep in one of the wood
land paths he saw the flutter of a woman's garment, and,
greatly to his surprise, overtook Elsie, who seemed to be
walking along with great rapidity, and, startled by the
approach of hoofs behind her, looked up at him, with a
pale cheek.
" Good-morning, Miss Elsie," said the Warden. " You
are taking a long walk this morning. I regret to see that
I have frightened you."
"Pray, whither are you going?" said she.
"To the Hall," said the Warden, wondering at the ab
rupt question.
"Ah, sir," exclaimed Elsie, "for heaven's sake, pray
insist on seeing Mr. Eedclyife ; take no excuse. There
are reasons for it."
" Certainly, fair lady," responded the Warden, wonder
ing more and more at this injunction from such a source.
"And when I see this fascinating gentleman, pray what
message am I to give him from Miss Elsie, who, more
over, seems to be on the eve of visiting him in person ?"
"See him! see him! Only see him!" said Elsie, with
passionate earnestness, " and in haste ! See him now !"
She waved him onward as she spoke ; and the Warden,
greatly commoted for the nonce, complied with the
maiden's fantasy so far as to ride on at a quicker pace,
uneasily marvelling at what could have aroused this
usually shy and reserved girl's nervousness to such a
pitch. The incident served at all events to titillate his
English sluggishness ; so that he approached the avenue
of the old Hall with a vague expectation of something
that had happened there, though he knew not of what
nature it could possibly be. However, he rode round to
the side entrance, by which horsemen generally entered
the house, and, a groom approaching to take his bridle, he
160 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HAWTHORNE
alighted and approached the door. I know not whether
it were anything more than the glistening moisture com
mon in an English autumnal morning, but so it was, that
the trace of the Bloody Footstep seemed fresh, as if it had
been that very night imprinted anew, and the crime made
all over again, with fresh guilt upon somebody's soul.
When the footman came to the door, responsive to his
ring, the Warden inquired for Mr. Kedclyffe, the American
gentleman.
"The American gentleman left for London early this
morning," replied the footman, in a matter-of-fact way.
"Gone!" exclaimed the Warden. "This is sudden,
and strange that he should go without saying good-by.
Gone !" And then he remembered the old pensioner's
eagerness that the Warden should come here, and Elsie's
strange injunction that he should insist on seeing Red-
clyife. " Pray, is Lord Braithwaite at home ?"
" I think, sir, he is in the library," said the servant,
" but will see. Pray, sir, walk in."
He returned in a moment, and ushered the Warden,
through passages with which he was familiar of old, to the
library, where he found Lord Braithwaite sitting with the
London newspaper in his hand. He rose and welcomed
his guest with great equanimity.
To the Warden's inquiries after Redclyffe, Lord Braith
waite replied that his guest had that morning left the
house, being called to London by letters from America,
but of what nature Lord Braithwaite was unable to say,
except that they seemed to be of urgency and importance.
The Warden's further inquiries, which he pushed as far as
was decorous, elicited nothing more than this ; and he was
preparing to take his leave, not seeing any reason for in
sisting (according to Elsie's desire) on the impossibility of
seeing a man who was not there, nor, indeed, any reason
HAWTHORNE] THE SECRET CHAMBER. 161
for so doing. And yet it seemed very strange that Eed-
clyffe should have gone so unceremoniously ; nor was he
half satisfied, though he knew not why he should be
otherwise.
"Do you happen to know Mr. Eedclyffe's address in
London ?" asked the Warden.
"Not at all," said Braithwaite. " But I presume there
is courtesy enough in the American character to impel him
to write to me, or both of us, within a day or two, telling
us of his whereabouts and whatabouts. Should you know,
I beg you will let me know ; for I have really been pleased
with this gentleman, and should have been glad could he
have favored me with a somewhat longer visit."
There was nothing more to be said ; and the Warden
took his leave, and was about mounting his horse, when
he beheld the pensioner approaching the house, and he
remained standing until he should come up.
" You are too late," said he, as the old man drew near.
" Our friend has taken French leave."
" Mr. Warden," said the old man, solemnly, " let me pray
you not to give him up so easily. Come with me into the
presence of Lord Braithwaite."
The Warden made some objections ; but the pensioner's
manner was so earnest that he soon consented, knowing
that the strangeness of his sudden return might well
enough be put upon the eccentricities of the pensioner,
especially as he was so well known to Lord Braithwaite.
He accordingly 1 again ra?ig at the door, which being
opened by the same stolid footman, the Warden desired
him to announce to Lord Braithwaite that the Warden
and a pensioner desired to see him. He soon returned,
with a request that they would walk in, and ushered them
again to the library, where they found the master of the
house in conversation with Omskirk at one end of the
in. I 14*
162 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HAWTHORNE
apartment, a whispered conversation, which detained
him a moment after their arrival. The Warden fancied
that he saw in old Omskirk's countenance a shade more
of that mysterious horror which made him such a bugbear
to children ; but when Braithwaite turned from him and
approached his visitor there was no trace of any disturb
ance, beyond a natural surprise to see his good friend the
Warden so soon after his taking leave.
" I see you are surprised," said the latter. " But you
must lay the blame, if any, on our good old friend here,
who, for some reason, best known to himself, insisted on
having my company here."
Braithwaite looked to the old pensioner with a ques
tioning look, as if good-humoredly (yet not as if he cared
much about it) asking for an explanation. As Omskirk
was about leaving the room, having remained till this
time, with that nervous look which distinguished him,
gazing towards the party, the pensioner made him a sign,
which he obeyed as if compelled to do so.
"Well, my friend," said the Warden, somewhat impa
tient of the aspect in which he himself appeared, " I beg
of you, explain at once to Lord Braithwaite why you have
brought me back in this strange way."
" It is," said the pensioner, quietly, " that in your pres
ence I request him to allow me to see Mr. Redclyffe."
"Why, my friend," said Braithwaite, "how can I show
you a man who has left my house, and whom, in the
chances of this life, I am not very likely to see again,
though hospitably desirous of so doing ?"
Here ensued a laughing sort of colloquy between the
Warden and Braithwaite, in which the former jocosely
excused himself for having yielded to the whim of the
pensioner and returned with him on an errand which he
well knew to be futile.
HAWTHORNE] THE SECRET CHAMBER. 168
" I have long been aware," he said, apart, in a confiden
tial way, " of something a little awry in our old friend's
mental system. You will excuse him, and me for humor
ing him."
" Of course, of course," said Braithwaite, in the same
tone. " I shall not be moved by anything the old fellow
can say."
The old pensioner, meanwhile, had been as it were heat
ing up, and gathering himself into a mood of energy
which those who saw him had never before witnessed in
his usually quiet person. He seemed somehow to "grow
taller and larger, more impressive. At length, fixing his
eyes on Lord Braithwaite, he spoke again.
"Dark, murderous man," exclaimed he. "Your course
has not been unwatched; the secrets of this mansion are
not unknown. For two centuries back, they have been
better known to them who dwell afar off than to those
resident within the mansion. The foot that made the
Bloody Footstep has returned from its long wanderings,
and it passes on, straight as destiny, sure as an avenging
Providence, to the punishment and destruction of those
who incur retribution."
" Here is an odd kind of tragedy," said Lord Braithwaite,
with a scornful smile. " Come, my old friend, lay aside
this vein and talk sense."
" Not thus do you escape your penalty, hardened and
crafty one!" exclaimed the pensioner. "I demand of you,
before this worthy Warden, access to the secret ways of
this mansion, of which thou dost unjustly retain possession.
I shall disclose what for centuries has remained hidden,
the ghastly secrets that this house hides."
" Humor him," whispered the Warden, " and hereafter
I will take care that the exuberance of our old friend shall
be duly restrained. He shall not trouble you again."
164 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HAWTHORNE
Lord Braithwaite, to say the truth, appeared a little
flabbergasted and disturbed by these latter expressions
of the old gentleman. He hesitated, turned pale; but at
last, recovering his momentary confusion and irresolution,
he replied, with apparent carelessness,
" Go wherever you will, old gentleman. The house is
open to you for this time. If ever you have another op
portunity to disturb it, the fault will be mine."
" Follow, sir," said the pensioner, turning to the Warden ;
" follow, maiden. JSTow shall a great mystery begin to bft
revealed."
So saying, he led the way before them, passing out of
the hall, not by the door- way, but through one of the oaken
panels of the wall, which admitted the party into a passage
which seemed to pass through the thickness of the wall,
and was lighted by interstices through which shone gleams
of light. This led them into what looked like a little
vestibule, or circular room, which the Warden, though
deeming himself many years familiar with the old house,
had never seen before, any more than the passage which
led to it. To his surprise, this room was not vacant, for
in it sat, in a large old chair, Omskirk, like a toad in its
hole, like some wild, fearful creature in its den, and it was
now partly understood how this man had the possibility
of suddenly disappearing, so inscrutably, and so in a
moment, and, when all quest for him was given up, of as
suddenly appearing again.
"Ha!" said old Omskirk, slowly rising, as at the ap
proach of some event that he had long expected. " Is he
coming at last ?"
" Poor victim of another's iniquity," said the pensioner,
11 thy release approaches. Hejoice !"
The old man arose with a sort of trepidation and solemn
joy intermixed in his manner, and bowed reverently, as if
HAWTHORNE] THE SECRET CHAMBER. 165
there were in what he heard more than other ears could
understand in it.
" Yes ; I have waited long," replied he. " Welcome, if
my release is come."
u Well," said Lord Braithwaite, scornfully, " this secret
retreat of my house is known to many. It was the
priest's secret chamber when it was dangerous to be of
the old and true religion, here in England. There is no
longer any use in concealing this place ; and the Warden,
or any man, might have seen it, or any of the curiosities
of the old hereditary house, if desirous so to do."
" Aha ! son of Belial !" quoth the pensioner. " And
this, too !"
He took three pieces from a certain point of the wall,
which he seemed to know, and stooped to press upon the
floor. The Warden looked at Lord Braithwaite, and saw
that he had grown deadly pale. What his change of
cheer might bode, he could not guess ; but, at the pressure
of the old pensioner's finger, the floor, or a segment of it,
rose like the lid of a box, and discovered a small dark
some pair of stairs; within which burned a lamp, lighting
it downward, like the steps that descend into a sepulchre.
" Follow," said he to those who looked on wondering.
And he began to descend. Lord Braithwaite saw him
disappear, then frantically followed, the Warden next,
and old Omskirk took his place in the rear, like a man
following his inevitable destiny. At the bottom of a
winding descent, that seemed deep and remote, and far
within, they came to a door, which the pensioner pressed
with a spring ; and, passing through the space that dis
closed itself, the whole party followed, and found them
selves in a small, gloomy room. On one side of it was a
couch, on which sat Eedclyffe ; face to face with him was
a white-haired figure in a chair.
166 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [HAWTHORNE
" You are come !" said Redclyffe, solemnly. " But too
late."
" And yonder is the coffer," said the pensioner. " Open
but that, and our quest is ended !"
" That, if I mistake not, I can do," said Redclyffe.
He drew forth what he had kept all this time, as some
thing that might yet reveal to him the mystery of his
birth the silver key that had been found by the grave in
far New England ; and, applying it to the lock, he slowly
turned it on the hinges, that had not been turned for two
hundred years. All even Lord Braithwaite, guilty and
shame-stricken as he felt pressed forward to look upon
what was about to be disclosed. What were the wondrous
contents ? The entire, mysterious coffer was full of golden
ringlets, abundant, clustering through the whole coffer,
and living with elasticity, so as immediately, as it were,
to flow over the sides of the coffer, and rise in large abun
dance from the long compression. Into this by a miracle
of natural production which was known likewise in other
cases into this had been resolved the whole bodily sub
stance of that fair and unfortunate being, known so long
in the legends of the family as the Beauty of the Golden
Locks. As the pensioner looked at this strange sight,
the lustre of the precious and miraculous hair gleaming
and glistening, and seeming to add light to the gloomy
room, he took from his breast-pocket another lock of
hair, in a locket, and compared it, before their faces, with
that which brimmed over from the coffer.
" It is the same !" said he.
"And who are you that know it?" asked Redclyffe,
surprised.
" He whose ancestors taught him the secret, who has
had it handed down to him these two centuries, and now
only with regret yields to the necessity of making it known
SPRAGUE] SHAKESPEARE ODE. 167
"You are the heir!" said Kedclyffe.
In that gloomy room, beside the dead old man, they
looked at him, and saw a dignity beaming on him, cover
ing his whole figure, that broke out like a lustre at the
close of day.
SHAKESPEARE ODE.
CHARLES SPRAGUE.
[Among the several beautiful poems which have made the name of
Charles Sprague familiar to American lovers of poetry the Shake
speare Ode stands first, as, in the words of Griswold, "one of the
most vigorous and beautiful lyrics in the English language." He is
best known, however, by his shorter and simpler efforts, " The Winged
Worshippers" and "The Family Meeting," which rank among the
favorite specimens of American verse, and display much poetical skill
and beauty of thought. He was born in Boston in 1791, and died in
the same city in 1875.]
GOD of the glorious Lyre !
Whose notes of old on lofty Pindus rang,
While Jove's exulting choir
Caught the glad echoes and responsive sang,
Come ! bless the service and the shrine
We consecrate to thee and thine.
Fierce from the frozen north,
When Havoc led his legions forth,
O'er Learning's sunny groves the dark destroyers spread :
In dust the sacred statue slept,
Fair Science round her altars wept,
And Wisdom cowled his head.
168 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
At length, Olympian lord of morn,
The raven veil of night was torn,
When, through golden clouds descending,
Thou didst hold thy radiant flight,
O'er Nature's lovely pageant bending,
Till Avon rolled, all sparkling, to thy sight !
There, on its bank, beneath the mulberry's shade,
Wrapped in young dreams, a wild-eyed minstrel strayed.
Lighting there, and lingering long,
Thou didst teach the bard his song ;
Thy fingers strung his sleeping shell,
And round his brows a garland curled ;
On his lips thy spirit fell,
And bade him wake and warm the world.
Then Shakespeare rose !
Across the trembling strings
His daring hand he flings,
And lo ! a new creation glows !
There, clustering round, submissive to his will,
Fate's vassal train his high commands fulfil.
Madness, with his frightful scream,
Yengeance, leaning on his lance,
Avarice, with his blade and beam,
Hatred, blasting with a glance,
Remorse that weeps, and Rage that roars,
And Jealousy that dotes, but dooms, and murders, yet
adores,
Mirth, his face with sunbeams lit,
Waking laughter's merry swell,
Arm in arm with fresh-eyed Wit,
That waves his tingling lash, while Folly shakes his bell.
SPRAQUE] SHAKESPEARE ODE. 169
Despair, that haunts the gurgling stream.
Kissed by the virgin moon's cold beam,
Where some lost maid wild chaplets wreathes,
And, swan-like, there her own dirge breathes,
Then, broken-hearted, sinks to rest,
Beneath the bubbling wave that shrouds her maniac breast.
Young Love, with eye of tender gloom,
Now drooping o'er the hallowed tomb
"Where his plighted victims lie,
Where they met, but met to die ;
And now, when crimson buds are sleeping,
Through the dewy arbor peeping,
Where- Beauty's child, the frowning world forgot,
To Youth's devoted tale is listening,
Eapture on her dark lash glistening,
While fairies leave their cowslip cells and guard the happy
spot.
Thus rise the phantom throng,
Obedient to their Master's song,
And lead in willing chains the wondering soul along.
For other worlds war's Great One sighed in vain,
O'er other worlds see Shakespeare rove and reign I
The rapt magician of his own wild lay,
Earth and her tribes his mystic wand obey.
Old Ocean trembles, Thunder cracks the skies,
Air teems with shapes, and tell-tale spectres rise ;
Night's paltering hags their fearful orgies keep,
And faithless Guilt unseals the lip of sleep ;
Time yields his trophies up, and Death restores
The mouldered victims of his voiceless shores.
The fireside legend and the faded page,
The crime that cursed, the deed that blessed an age,
in. H 15
170 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [SPRAGUE
All, all come forth, the good to charm and cheer,
To scourge bold Vice, and start the generous tear ;
With pictured Folly gazing fools to shame,
And guide young Glory's foot along the path of fame.
Lo ! hand in hand,
Hell's juggling sisters stand,
To greet their victim from the fight ;
Grouped on the blasted heath,
They tempt him to the work of death,
Then melt in air, and mock his wondering sight.
In midnight's hallowed hour
He seeks the fatal tower,
"Where the lone raven, perched on high,
Pours to the sullen gale
Her hoarse, prophetic wail,
And croaks the dreadful moment nigh.
See, by the phantom dagger led,
Pale, guilty thing !
Slowly he steals, with silent tread,
And grasps his coward steel to smite his sleeping king !
Hark ! 'tis the signal bell,
Struck by that bold and unsexed one
Whose milk is gall, whose heart is stone ;
His ear hath caught the knell,
'Tis done ! 'tis done !
Behold him from the chamber rushing
Where his dead monarch's blood is gushing!
Look where he trembling stands,
Sad gazing there,
Life's smoking crimson on his hands,
And in his felon heart the worm of wild despair !
SPKAGUE] SHAKESPEARE ODE. 171
Mark the sceptred traitor slumbering !
There flit the slaves of conscience round,
With boding tongue foul murders numbering ;
Sleep's leaden portals catch the sound.
In his dream of blood for mercy quaking,
At his own dull scream behold him waking !
Soon that dream to fate shall turn :
For him the living furies burn ;
For him the vulture sits on yonder misty peak,
And chides the lagging night, and whets her hungry beak.
Hark ! the trumpet's warning breath
Echoes round the vale of death.
Unhorsed, unhelmed, disdaining shield,
The panting tyrant scours the field.
Yengeance! he meets thy dooming blade !
The scourge of earth, the scorn of Heaven,
He falls ! unwept and unforgiven,
And all his guilty glories fade.
Like a crushed reptile in the dust he lies,
And Hate's last lightning quivers from his eyes !
Behold yon crownless king,
Yon white-locked, weeping sire,
Where heaven's unpillared chambers ring,
And burst their streams of flood and fire !
He gave them all, the daughters of his love ;
That recreant pair ! they drive him forth to rove
In such a night of woe,
The cubless regent of the wood
Forgets to bathe her fangs in blood,
And caverns with her foe !
Yet one was ever kind ;
Why lingers she behind ?
172 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [SPRAQUB
O pity! view him by her dead form kneeling
Even in wild frenzy holy nature feeling.
His aching eyeballs strain
To see those curtained orbs unfold,
That beauteous bosom heave again ;
But ail is dark and cold.
In agony the father shakes ;
Grief's choking note
O
Swells in his throat,
Each withered heart-string tugs and breaks.
Round her pale neck his dying arms he wreathes,
And on her marble lips his last, his death-kiss breathes.
Down, trembling wing ! shall insect weakness keep
The sun-defying eagle's sweep ?
A mortal strike celestial strings,
And feebly echo what a seraph sings ?
"Who now shall grace the glowing throne
Where, all unrivalled, all alone,
Bold Shakespeare sat, and looked creation through,
The minstrel monarch of the worlds he drew?
That throne is cold that lyre in death unstrung
On whose proud note delighted Wonder hung.
Yet old Oblivion, as in wrath he sweeps,
One spot shall spare, the grave where Shakespeare sleep*
.Rulers and ruled in common gloom may lie,
But Nature's laureate bards shall never die.
Art's chiselled boast and Glory's trophied shore
Must live in numbers, or can live no more.
While sculptured Jove some nameless waste may claim,
Still rolls the Olympic car in Pindar's fame ;
Troy's doubtful walls in ashes passed away,
Yet frown on Greece in Homer's deathless lay ;
MACKENZIE] NOVEL-WRITING BEFORE WAVERLEY. 173
Rome, slowly sinking in her crumbling fanes,
Stands all immortal in her Maro's strains ;
So, too, yon giant empress of the isles,
On whose broad sway the sun forever smiles,
To Time's unsparing rage one day must bend,
And all her triumphs in her Shakespeare end !
O thou ! to whose creative power
We dedicate the festal hour,
While Grace and Goodness round the altar stand,
Learning's anointed train, and Beauty's rose-lipped band
Realms yet unborn, in accents now unknown,
Thy song shall learn, and bless it for their own.
Deep in the West as Independence roves,
His banners planting round the land he loves,
Where Nature sleeps in Eden's infant grace,
In Time's full hour shall spring a glorious race.
Thy name, thy verse, thy language, shall they bear,
And deck for thee the vaulted temple there.
Our Roman-hearted fathers broke
Thy parent empire's galling yoke ;
But thou, harmonious master of the mind,
Around their sons a gentler chain shalt bind;
Once more in thee shall Albion's sceptre wave,
And what her Monarch lost her Monarch-Bard shall savo.
NOVEL-WRITING BEFORE WAVERLEY.
K. S. MACKENZIE.
[Kobert Shelton Mackenzie was born in Ireland in 1809. He set
tled in America in 1852, where he became literary and foreign editor
of the Philadelphia Press, which post he held till his death in 1881.
III. 15*
174 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MACKENZIE
He was a lively and entertaining writer, and published many works,
of a miscellaneous character, of which we may here mention " Lays of
Palestine," " Tressilian ; or, the Story-Tellers," lives of Dickens, Scott,
Curran, etc., and "Titian, an Art-Novel." The selection we give is
from the " Life of Scott." It contains much interesting and not gen
erally known information.]
BEFORE Scott had given over writing long poems, ho
diverged into another branch of literature, in which ho
obtained higher and more permanent fame' than that
which he had won as a minstrel. Many persons have
scarcely read his poetical romances ; but who is not
familiar with the Waverley novels ?
As great a novel-reader as Lord Brougham, Lord Lynd-
hurst, and Daniel O'Connell (the last of whom once de
clared to me that the advantages of steam, as applied
to travelling on sea and land, were counterbalanced by
the abridgment of the time he used to devote to the
perusal of works of fiction), Walter Scott saw, before he
began to write, that the novels and romances of the pres
ent century, and particularly at its commencement, were
unsuited to the changed condition of society in his own
time. The dramatists of the Elizabethan age produced
stories, historical or comic, which two centuries later
would probably have appeared in prose as historical
romances, or novels of society. In an age when readers
were few, the tales acted on the stage were the principal
popular sources of intellectual enjoyment. For a long
time after the death of Shakespeare, the drama may be
said to have fallen into abeyance. Thirty or forty years
of civil strife, during which imaginative literature was at
a discount, followed the death of Shakespeare ; and, though
there was a revival of the drama between the Restoration
in 1660 and the Eevolution in 1688, little effective in that
line was presented until Dryden bade the dry bones live.
MACKENZIE] NOVEL-WRITING BEFORE WAVERLEY. 175
Bunyan's immortal "Pilgrim's Progress," in this time, was
the favorite reading of the people ; and the " Decameron"
of Boccaccio, Rabelais' comic and satiric adventures of
" Gargantua and Pantagruel," and Cervantes' wonderful
" Don Quixote," became well known in England through
translations. So, at a later period, were the Abbe Prevost's
" Manon PEscaut" (like the younger Dumas's " La Dame
aux Camelias," the apotheosis of a professional impure),
Rousseau's "Nouvelle Heloise," Lfe Sage's " Gil Bias" and
" Le Diable Boiteux," Yoltaire's " Candide" and " Zadig,"
St. Pierre's " Paul and Yirginia," Goethe's " Sorrows of
Werther," and a few other foreign works.
When the seventeenth century opened, the gross novels
of Mrs. Aphra Behn, which had delighted the gay and
careless courtiers of the closing years of the Stuart dynasty,
fell into disrepute. The age of Queen Anne, which has
been entitled the Augustan, exhibited comparative decency,
at least in its prose fiction ; and under the new dynasty,
though not quite so scrupulous (for the first two Guelphio
sovereigns were themselves unmistakably immoral in their
domestic and social relations), public taste became im
proved. De Foe's " Robinson Crusoe," which does not
contain a single impure incident or expression, speedily
obtained a popularity which it still enjoys. Swift's " Gul
liver," a political fiction, which is a satire on human nature
also, had (and has) a multitude of readers, who, opening
it merely to be entertained by the wonderful adventures
it contains, narrated in a most artistic vraisemblance,
scarcely notice its too prevailing coarseness. Richardson
and Fielding, however, may rank as the inventors of the
English novel, though not of its higher class, the histor
ical. There runs an undercurrent of indelicacy, not very
decided, but adapted to the sensuous taste of the time,
through Richardson's sentimentality ; and yet the author
176 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MACKENZIE
of " Pamela" and " Clarissa Harlowe" affected to be a
purist in morals. Next to him is Fielding, who had
begun as a satirical parodist, and ended by establishing a
new school of story-tellers, who rejoiced in what Scott
has called "warmth of description." Fielding, with all
his faults, possessed genius, and was followed by Smollett,
who photographed the manners and exhibited the vices
of many grades of society. Sterne, decidedly a man of
genius, was not restrained from gross indelicacy by a sen so
of what was due to his office as a clergyman. Oliver
Goldsmith, whose " Yicar of Wakefield," much as all read
ers admire it, has serious defects in construction and senti
ment, might have produced a real novel of English society,
but "died too soon," when Scott was only three years old.
Horace Walpole's "Castle of Otranto," written in 1763,
was its author's solitary work of fiction, and owed as much
at least to his rank as to novelty of design or execution.
Clara Eeeve's Gothic romance, " The Old English Baron,"
alone remembered out of her many works, was an almost
avowed imitation of Walpole's romantic story, and a
decided improvement upon it.
When Scott wrote the first chapters of " Waverley,"
in 1805, the principal living novelist was Mrs. Eadcliffe,
whose very sensational romances outdid all contemporary
productions. With her began high payments for such
works. She received five hundred pounds for the " Mys
teries of Udolpho," and eight hundred pounds for " The
Italians," its successor. To-day, these stories, crowded
with crime and with apparently supernatural effects (all
of which are elaborately explained away at the close),
would scarcely engage the attention of a novel-reader for
half an hour. Henry Mackenzie's stories, popular in their
day, were didactic and sentimental, and had got out of
fashion. Cumberland, the dramatist, preserved in " the
MACKENZIE] NOVEL-WRITING BEFORE WAVERLEY. 177
crystal amberization" of Sheridan's " Critic" as Sir Fretful
Plagiary, had finally lapsed into writing novels which
possessed the coarseness of Fielding, without his wit ; yet
his play, " The West Indian**' which presents the truest
character of an Irish gentleman ever put upon the stage,
was surpassed in its day only by Sheridan's " School for
Scandal," in which even the livery-servants and soubrettes
converse in epigram. Madame D'Arblaj r , whose novel of
" Evelina" had created a greater sensation among the
literati of her time than probably had ever before been
caused by any similar production, was reposing on her
laurels, but failed to please a later generation of readers.
For the copyright of "Evelina" she received twenty
pounds in 1778, while for " Camilla" she was paid three
thousand guineas in 1796 ; making fame by the first, and
losing it by the latter work. Mrs. Charlotte Smith suc
ceeded, commencing with a translation of " Manon 1'Es
caut," the heroine of which is a beautiful wanton, and
settling down into prose fictions, occasionally indecorous,
and usually dull.
Perhaps, strictly speaking, Miss Sophia Lee should be
credited with the authorship of the first English historical
novel. In 1783-86 appeared " The Eecess," in six volumes.
Mary, Queen of Scots, is its heroine ; but, unlike Scott,
who carefully adhered to facts when he introduced his
torical characters, Miss Lee boldly married Mary Stuart
to the Earl of Leicester, and introduced two daughters
as the fruit of this union.
Mrs. Inchbald, whose " Simple Story" won the sympa
thies of a large circle of readers; Eegina Maria Eoche,
whose " Children of the Abbey" still finds a considerable
Bale in this country, though it is almost wholly forgotten
in England; Mrs. Opie, whose "Father and Daughter"
had the tears of the public in their day, and was success-
TTI. m
178 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MACKENZIE
ful when adopted, for the stage ; William Godwin, with
his realistic " Caleb Williams" and his romantic " St.
Leon ;" Dr. Moore, whose " Zeluco" suggested to Byron
the character of " Childe Harold ;" Sidney Owenson (after
wards Lady Morgan), whose " Wild Irish Girl" and " Ida
of Athens" scarcely indicated the promise which subse
quently was realized in " O'Donnell" and " Florence Ma-
carthy ;" and, above all, rational, truthful, and' vigorous
Maria Edgeworth, these belonged to Scott's own time,
and their works might be safely read with pleasure and
advantage. This is not a long catalogue of novelists ; but
it will be observed that even then, sixty years ago, most
of the story-tellers were of the gentler sex. I have not
included Jane Austen, because " Sense and Sensibility."
the first of her novels, was not published until 1811, six
years after " Waverley" had been planned and partly
written ; and have not forgotten Anna Maria Porter, who
appeared in print before Sir Walter Scott, nor her sister
Jane, because neither of them had any influence upon his
taste. It is stated by an authority whose general correct
ness I have pleasure in acknowledging, that Sir Walter
Scott admitted (conversation with George IV. in the
library of Garlton Palace) that this work Jane Porter's
" Scottish Chiefs" suggested his Waverley Novels ; but,
considering that " Waverley" was begun in 1805, and that
" The Scottish Chiefs" first appeared in 1810, I am unable
to believe that he derived any suggestion from a work
then unwritten.
Also prior to the commencement of " Waverley" was the
debut of Charles Robert Maturin, an Irish clergyman of
striking genius, with a minimum of discretion. His " Fatal
Revenge ; or, the Family of Montario," which, with its
appalling horrors, out-Radcliifed Mrs. Radcliffe, appeared
in 1804. In a subsequent romance, entitled " Melmoth the
MACKENZIE] NOVEL-WRITING BEFORE WAVERLEY. J7<J
Wanderer," he abated some of these horrors, seasoning
them with the naked indecency of Lewis's " Monk ;" and
in his tragedy of " Bertram," produced at Drury Lane
Theatre through Lord Byron's influence, he had originally
introduced the Enemy of Man as one of the dramatis per
sona? I
There is another phalanx of novelists who lived, but
can scarcely be said to have flourished, early in the present
century. Their works, from the source of their publication
in Leadenhall Street, London, were known as "Minerva-
press Novels." At the head of these was " Anne of Swan
sea," Mrs. Hatton, sister of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble,
who dealt largely in commonplace, was very deficient in
constructive skill, usually extended each of her romances
to four and even five volumes, and was fond of resonant
titles, such as " The Eock of Glotzden ; or, the Secret
Avenger," Mr. Thomas Surr, whose " Splendid Misery,"
treating of fashionable life, with which he had not the
slightest acquaintance, was in eager request at all the cir
culating libraries in town and country, and a Captain
Thomas Ashe, who carried on for some years the profit
able but disreputable trade of writing novels of society
upon the current scandals of the day, and never published
them if he could induce the persons whom he libelled to
buy his manuscript. He lived by literary blackmail. The
Minerva-press novels, bad as they were, had immense popu
larity for some years.
No wonder, then, that Walter Scott, who, having shown
the world in " The Minstrelsy" and " The La}-" that he
was editor and poet, and being himself a novel-reader,
should be utterly dissatisfied with the quality of the exist
ing supply. The French Eevolution, distinguished by its
levelling principle and action, had ended in substituting
a feudal empire for an effete monarchy ; and, even when
180 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MACKENZIE
Napoleon was redividing Europe into kingdoms and prin
cipalities for his family and his followers, there had sprung
up, or rather revived, a deep devotion to the chivalry
which had done so much in the past, and whose traditions
had engrafted grace into history and breathed reality into
song. To this feeling, this principle, Scott had ministered
in his poems ; and now, acknowledged head of the ro
mantic school, he resolved to extend its limits beyond the*
ballad or the narrative poem, and use prose as the more
suitable medium. He strove to delineate the past as it
seemed in the eyes of men who were dubious of the
present and afraid of the future, noble, stately, glitter
ing, and gay, with the pulse of life ever beating to heroic
measures. His view of feudalism in " The Talisman,"
" Ivanhoe," and " The Fair Maid of Perth" was not the
caricature a few preceding authors had drawn, but a por
trait, faithful, if idealized.
" Waverley," as we have seen, had been condemned by
Erskine, thrown by, mislaid, recovered, and depreciated
by Ballantyne. Scott, having nearly completed his " Life
and Works of Jonathan Swift" (published by Constable,
in nineteen octavo volumes, on the 1st of July, 1814), a
work which really was supplementary to his history of a
particular period of English literary history, brought out
his " Waverley" manuscript for the third time, carefully
read it, thought something could be made of it, and per
mitted the announcement in " The Scots' Magazine" of
February, 1814, that '"Waverley; or, 'Tis Sixty Years
Since,' a novel in three volumes 12mo, would be published
in March." Already he had made some progress in con
tinuing the story ; for in January he had shown the
greater part of the first volume to Mr. Erskine, who at
once predicted that it would prove the most popular of
all his friend's works. It was determined to publish it
MACKENZIE] NOVEL-WRITING BEFORE WAVERLEY. 181
anonymously, and unusual pains were taken to prevent
the discovery of the authors name. John Ballantyne
copied out all the manuscript. Double proof-sheets were
regularly printed off. One was forwarded to Scott; and
the alterations which it received were, by Ballantyne's
own hand, copied upon the other proof-sheet for the use
of the printers ; so that even the corrected proof-sheets of
the author were never seen in the printing-office. Whfle
" Waverley" was passing through the press, Mr. Erskine
read some of the proof-sheets to a few friends after supper ;
and from the enthusiastic praise they obtained, as well as
from the way in which their host spoke, the party inferred
that they were listening to the first effort of some unknown
but very able aspirant.
When the first volume was printed, Ballantyne placed it
in the hands of Constable, who, not doubting who was the
author, considered the matter, and offered seven hundred
pounds for the copyright. This price was so high (Miss
Edgeworth up to that time not having realized a tenth
of that sum by even her most successful work) that a
novice would* gladly have accepted it. Scott's reply,
through Ballantyne, was, that it was too much if the novel
should not succeed, too little if it did. He would have
taken a thousand pounds ; bat Constable would not offer
so much, and published the work on the terms of equal
division of profits between himself and the author.
The first volume was printed before the second wa
begun. Constable, who had become proprietor of the " En
cyclopaedia Britannica," was bringing out a supplement to
that extensive work. At his request Scott agreed to write
three essays for it, on Chivalry, the Drama, and Romance,
and completed two in April and May, writing that on
Romance some time later. Constable, a liberal man, paid
a hundred pounds for each. This episode ended, Scott set
in. 10
182 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MACKENZIE
seriously to work on " Waverley," and informed his friend
Morritt that " the last two volumes were written in three
weeks." In corroboration of this, Lockhart has related a
personal anecdote, how, happening to pass through Edin
burgh in June, 1814, he dined with Mr. William Menzies
(afterwards a judgo at the Cape of Good Hope), whose
residence was then in G-eorge Street, situated very near
to, and at right angles with, North Castle Street. " There
was," he says, " a party of very young persons, most of
them, like Menzies and myself, destined for the bar of
Scotland, all gay and thoughtless, enjoying the first flush
of manhood, with little remembrance of the yesterday or
care of the morrow. When my companion's worthy father
and uncle, after seeing two or three bottles go round, left
the juveniles to themselves, the weather being hot, we
adjourned to a library, which had one large window look
ing northwards. After carousing here for an hour or more,
I observed that a shade had come over the aspect of my
friend, who happened to be placed immediately opposite
myself, and said something that intimated a fear of his
being unwell. * No,' said he, ' I shall be well enough pres
ently, if you will only let me sit where you are, and take
my chair; for there is a confounded hand in sight of me
here, which has often bothered me before, and now it
won't let me fill my glass with a good will.' I arose to
change places with him accordingly ; and he pointed out
to me this hand, which, like the writing on Belshazzar's
wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity. 'Since we sat down/
he said, 'I have been watching it: it fascinates my eye; it
never stops. Page after page is finished, and thrown on
that heap of manuscript : and still it goes on unwearied ;
and so it will be till candles are brought in, and God knows
how long after that. It is the same every night. I can't
stand the sight of it when I am not at my books.' ' Some
STEDMAN] POETRY IN AMERICA. 183
stupid, dogged engrossing clerk, probably!' exclaimed my
self, or some other giddy youth in our society. ' ISTo, boys,'
said our host. ' I well know what hand it is : 'tis Walter
Scott's.' " This was the hand that, in the evenings of three
summer weeks, wrote the last two volumes of " Waverley."
RESTRICTED DEVELOPMENT OF POETRY IN AMERICA.
E. C. STEDMAN.
[Edmund Clarence Stedman, author of "Victorian Poets," " Poets
of America," and several other works, both in prose and in poetry,
was born at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1833. He has written many
poems of a high order of merit, among which may be specially men
tioned "Pan in Wall Street" and "The Lord's Day Gale." His
critical works are valuable additions to American literature, and dis
play excellent powers of judgment and a fine literary skill. From
his " Poets of America" we select a short passage, illustrative of the
difficulties which have tended to check the development of American
poetry.
FOR two centuries, in truth, the situation here was so
adverse to art, and especially to song, as to nullify even
our complement to Taine's theory ; to stifle, or to divert
to other than ideal uses, any exceptional genius that ex
isted, and that would have made its way against restric
tions not of themselves quite as exceptional. The modi
fied results of this situation may still be observed. As a
rider to all I have said of the essential superiority of art
to its materials, we must not fail, also, to consider the re
pugnance of the general mind to disassociate things and
ideas, to separate the spirit of a work from what is used
for its construction. There is a natural expectation that
the art of a country will convey to us something of the
184 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [STEDMAN
national history, aspect, social law. On the whole, it has
been the instinct of masters to avail themselves, so far
as might be, in their plots, manners, and scenery, of the
region nearest them : a wise instinct, through which they
reach closely to nature, and are more sure to make their
work of interest elsewhere and afterward. Shakespeare's
men are apt to be Englishmen, though they may figure in
Illyria or Eome. Nor is it entirely through unfairness
and caprice that the free range allowed to English poets
has. been denied our own. The Old World has drawn its
countries together, like elderly people in a tacit alliance
against the strength of youth which cannot return to
them, the fresh, rude beauty and love which they may
not share. There is, also, something worth an estimate
in the division of an ocean gulf, that makes us like the
people of a new planet ; and when those on the other
side hear us sounding the changes upon familiar themes,
with voices not unlike their own, they well may feel as if
the highest qualities of our song were not full compensa
tion for its lack of " something rich and strange." A re
sponse may fairly be expected to the search for novelty,
to the curious yearning of those who look to us from
across the seas.
Here begin the special restrictions of an American poet.
He represents, it is true, the music and ardor of a new
country, of a land his race has peopled for two hundred
and fifty years, a nation that has completed its first cen
tury. A new land, a new nation, yet not forced, like
those which have progressed from barbarism to a sense
of art, to create a language and literature of their own ;
a new land with an old language, a new nation with all
the literature and traditions behind it of the country from
whose colonies it has sprung. While the thought and
learning of this people began in America just where it
STEDMAN] POETRY IN AMERICA. 185
had arrived in the mother-land at the dates of the James
town and Plymouth settlements, the physical state and
environment of Americans were those of men who find
themselves encountering the primitive nature of a savage
world ; with this difference, that they were equipped for
the struggle, not as an aboriginal race, but with the logic,
courage, experience, of the civilization behind them. All
the drags, the anchorage, the limitations, involved in the
word " colonial" retarded a new ideality. The colonial
restriction has been well determined. It made the west
ern lyre, until the period covered by this survey, a mech
anism to echo, without fresh and true feeling, notes that
came from over sea. It so occupied this people with a
stern, steadfast, ingenious, finally triumphant contest with
Nature that their epic passion was absorbed in the clear
ing of forests, the bridging of rivers, the conquest of
savage and beast, the creation of a free government ; and
this labor is not yet ended ; it goes on with larger cohorts
and immensely widening power. But the imagination
never dies, and when our first leisure came for its exercise
it was awakened by contact with the nature thus tamed,
by communion with the broadest panorama of woods
and hills and waters, under the most radiant skies, that
civilized man has ever found himself confronting. Pio
neers in art and poetry here caught their inspiration, and
naturally the field of painting was the first to give token
of novel results. The very ease with which books con
taining the world's best literature were obtainable in the
backwoods made our early writers copyists. The painters,
meanwhile, had to lament the absence of galleries in this
country, and their own inability to go abroad and study.
Thrown upon themselves, and deficient in technical knowl
edge, they sought for models in the nature about them ;
and thus began our landscape-school of painting, the work
HI 16*
186 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [STEDMAN
of which, however rude and defective, was more original
than the verse wherewith it was contemporary.
A poet of the first rank is not given to every country,
nor to every age. But poets of gifts approaching those
of our living favorites doubtless have been born in
America, according to Nature's average, at diiferent times
of our history. Until recently, the stimulants of their
genius must have been wanting. It may be that the
people had no real need of them, and song and art, like
invention, come not without necessity. What poetry was
latent here and there does not concern us. The stone on
which our colonial life was founded was frigid as an arctic
boulder; there was no molecular motion to give out life
and heat. Who were the mute, inglorious Miltons ? Of
what kind is the verse that was produced ? Does it move
us ? Is it poetry ? However fine the cast of individuals,
the eifect of a perpetual contest with the elemental, often
sinister, always gigantic forces of a new continent would
be so adverse to art, so directly in the line of necessity
and temporal gain, as to stifle their poetic fire, to develop
a heroism that was stolid and unimaginative, to mark
persons and communities with sternness and angularity,
leading them to a homely gauge of values, not wont to
esteem the ideal at its true worth. The aspiration of a
refined nature would seem to the multitude foolishness
and a stumbling-block. For a prolonged season the art
of writing verse was almost solely a luxury of the pro
fessional classes in America, and its relics bear witness to
their pedantry and dulness. It is not to the wigged and
gowned that we instinctively listen for the music and
freedom of creative song. And if poetry even in Eng
land, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the
close of the eighteenth, stupidly fashioned itself upon the
models of worn-out schools, how should it do more in
STEDMAN] POETRY IN AMERICA. 187
England's colonies, that brought hither certain shoots
of taste and learning from the Old World, and found it
hard to protect them at all in the sterile wild-woods of
the New ?
Such was the nature of the barriers which, in the early
and later colonial periods, absolutely defied the over
leaping of a single notable poet. We find little of more
significance in the transition-era of the Revolution, al
though a nation took on life. No poetry was begotten in
the rage of that heroic strife ; its humor, hatred, hope,
suffering, prophecy, were feebly uttered, as far as verse
was concerned, in the mode and language inherited years
before from the coarsest English satirists. There came at
last a time when the nation felt itself in vigorous youth,
and began to have a song. Some few original notes were
heard among our pipings. The positive barriers were
broken, and in their stead came the restrictions that are
felt in some degree down to the present time.
^^^^^C^^CJJC^
Up to a recent date, absence of theme for a national
masterpiece, for a work belonging to our own atmosphere
and history, has been a result of the condition under
which we started. Original art is long deferred among a
people cultured at the outset. A writer has well said that
"the cause of the absence of the legendary and poetic in
our early history may be attributed to the mental develop
ment of the colonists, who had already passed through
that historic stage." They started at once with both
church and school-house. The imagination was controlled
by precedent, and "Art was cheated of its birthright."
They made little history in a dramatic sense. What there
was of the poetic or wondrous in their arduous compelling
life had a local range, such as the trials for witchcraft,
finely utilized by New England's great romancer, and too
188 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [STEDMAN
inadequately, it must be owned, by her most famous poet.
In Parkman's elegant survey of certain picturesque epochs
in colonial history, the feminine element, essential to com
plete dramatic quality, is usually wanting ; in other annals,
like those of Spanish- American adventure, it scarcely ap
pears at all. American antiquity is a rude settler's an
tiquity ; a homely fashion, that palls because not long out
of date ; a story everywhere the same, furnishing at
times the basis of some exquisite idyl, like " Evangeline,"
but for none too many of the class. " Evangeline" still
remains the most notable of the longer American poems ;
and how much of that is otherwise than scenic and idyllic,
and how much of it does not fit the story to the landscape,
rather than the landscape to the story ? No material, no
stirring theme, with all your freedom, your conquest, your
noble woods and waters, your westward spread of men !
These are motives, accessories, atmosphere, often grander
in magnitude than elsewhere to be found, but not perforce
more new. The poetic instinct does not always hold the
macrocosm superior to the microcosm, the prairie to the
plain of Marathon, the Hudson to the Cephisus or the
Tweed. As for latter-day history, this is not far enough
removed. From the Bevolution to the Civil War, the
incidents of our life and passion are so recent and so
plainly recorded as to gather no luminous halo from the
too slight distance at which we observe them. The true
poet will profit by them to the uttermost ; the limits are
to be overcome, but still are limits and in his way. He is
thrown upon the necessity of inventing dramatic themes
for the broader range of poetic venture. This the great
poets always have avoided, for the product of such inven
tion usually has seemed artificial and remote from human
concern.
Bear in mind, also, that our wide-awake people are re-
STEDMAN] POETRY IN AMERICA. 189
moved, not only from the superstitions that were a religion
to our forefathers, but from the wondercraft and simple
faith prevailing among the common folk of other lands
than our own. The beautifying lens of fancy has dropped
from our eyes. Where are our forest and river legends,
our Lorelei, our Yenusberg, our elves and kobolds? We
have old-time customs and traditions, and they are quaint
and dear to us, but their atmosphere is not one in which
we freely move. Just so with our heroism. No national
changes and struggles have been of more worth than our
own, but critics are not far wrong who point out that,
however lofty the action and spirit of our latest crisis,
heroism is not with us so much the chief business that
one must be always " enthusiastic and on guard." One
of our poets aims to be especially national. He sings,
upon theory, as the American bard must sing when the
years have died away. The result is a striking assump
tion of what can only come of itself, and after long time
be past ; a disjointed series of kaleidoscopic pieces, not
constituting a master-work, but, with all their strength
and weakness, as unsatisfactory as the ill-assorted elements
which he strives to represent. Yet, even in this effort, he
is representative and a personage of mark, if not precisely
in the direction of his own choice and assurance.
More clearly to understand how far, and in what way,
our poets have felt the lack of background, of social
contrasts, and of legendary and specific incident, we may
observe the literature of some region where different
conditions exist. In an isolated country of established
growth and quality, a native genius soon discovers his
tendency and proper field.
Look at Scotland. Her national melodies were ready
and waiting for Burns ; her legends, history, traditions,
for Walter Scott. The popular tongue, costumes, manners,
190 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
all distinctively and picturesquely her own, affect the en
tire outcome of her song and art. Embraced in English
literature, her literature is so un-English that it affords
the paradigm we need. Enter the cathedral in Glasgow.
Within the last thirty years that edifice has been refitted
throughout with stained glass, contributed by the ancient
families and clans. What associations are called up by
the devices upon the windows in the chancel and nave,
and in the impressive crypt below ! Among all the shields
and names, those of Sterling, Hay, Douglas, Montrose,
Campbell, Montgomerie, Lawrie, Buccleuch, Hamilton,
not one that is not utterly, purely Scottish. Even in our
oldest and most characteristic sections in Virginia or New
England, influences like these are discovered to no such
extent. In a certain sense, they are not only influences,
but aids ; they move, they stimulate, they belong to the
life and memory of the native poet, and he avails himself
of them without effort or consciousness. Not that they
are the essential, the imperative aids. But to be without
them is a restriction, and one which our first genuine
school of poets has had more or less to endure.
* ********
It is, moreover, in America that the popular instinct,
which resists whatever is asserted to be a tax upon knowl
edge, has worked with peculiar force against the develop
ment of a home-school. So long as our purveyors could
avail themselves without cost or hindrance of foreign
master-works, they scarcely could be expected to risk
their means in behalf of native authorship. Pure ideal
ists, men like Poe and Hawthorne, are little able to push
their own fortunes. Until a state of law shall exist that
will induce American publishers, driven from their distant
foraging-grounds, to seek for genius at home and make it
available, the support of our authors will not be so assured
STEDMAN] POETRY IN AMERICA. 191
as to tend "in the end to the advancement of literature."
International copyright at least would have made it feasi
ble for the poet to earn his living by general literary work,
and to reserve some heart and thought for his nobler call
ing. Now, when an organized movement at last seems
underway toward copyright reform, it still is so hampered
with reservations and class-interests that many ask whether
it were not better to have no change at all than to have one
that is partial, and that may postpone indefinitely the one
thing needful, to wit, honest recognition of an author's
right of property in his own creations, without any more
limits of space and time than those appertaining to other
kinds of estate.
Literature verily has been almost the sole product of
human labor that has not been rated as the lasting prop
erty of the producer and his heirs or assigns. This want
of permanent copyright has borne severely upon au
thors in all countries, but most severely upon those of
America, who have had to await the formation of public
taste, to create their audiences, and who, while willing to
suffer in their own persons, are less ready to devote life
times to the production of what will be valueless to those
whom they hold most dear. The want of international
copyright has been a wrong to our brother-writers in
Europe. Their complaints are just ; their cry has gone up
for years. Great as the spoliations have been which they
have endured, the effect upon our native literature and
authorship has been far more disastrous. Our authors
themselves do not comprehend it. A few of the great
publishing houses, grown rich upon the system of free
reprints, of late have felt this wrong, and the men of heart
and culture who control them are generously atoning for it.
We see them leaders in artistic and literary movements,
the friends of authors and artists, receiving for their pub-
192 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MAURY
He and private humanities our warmest tributes of honor
and affection. It is said that every wrong in this world
is surely, if slowly, righted ; and the wrongs of authors
doubtless will be set right. But who shall pick up water
spilled to the ground ? The writers of a new generation
will never realize how bitter was the bread eaten by those
who went before them and made their paths straight.
THE GULF STREAM.
M. F. MAURY.
[Matthew Fontaine Maury was one of the earliest and best students
of hydrography in the United States, and his various works on this
and related subjects are of much value. Chief among them is " The
Physical Geography of the Sea," a work which is full of interesting
and important information, and sufficiently popular in treatment to
give it a marked success. We extract from it some of its more striking
statements concerning the Gulf Stream, the conditions and character
istics of which are treated exhaustively in the work. Lieutenant
Maury was born in Virginia in 1806, and died in 1873.]
THERE is a river in the ocean : in the severest droughts
it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never over
flows ; its banks and its bottom are of cold water, while
its current is of warm ; the Gulf of Mexico is its fountain,
and its mouth is in the Arctic Seas. It is the Gulf Stream.
There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters.
Its current is more rapid than the Mississippi or the Ama
zon, and its volume more than a thousand times greater.
Its waters, as far out from the Gulf as the Carolina coasts,
are of an indigo blue. They are so distinctly marked that
their line of junction with the common sea-water may be
traced by the eye. Often one half of the vessel ma^ bo
MAURY] THE GULF STREAM. 193
perceived floating in Gulf Stream water, while the other
half is in common water of the sea, so sharp is the line,
and such the want of affinity, between those waters, and
such, too, the reluctance, so to speak, on the part of those
of the Gulf Stream to mingle with the littoral waters of
the sea.
At the salt-works in France, and along the shores of the
Adriatic, where the " salines" are carried on by the process
of solar evaporation, there is a series of vats or pools
through which the water is passed as it comes from the
sea, and is reduced to the briny state. The longer it is
exposed to evaporation, the salter it grows, and the
deeper is the hue of its blue, until crystallization is about
to commence, when the now deep-blue water puts on a
reddish tint. Now, the waters of the Gulf Stream are
salter than the littoral waters of the sea through which
they flow, and hence we can account for the deep indigo-
blue which all navigators observe off the Carolina coasts.
The salt-makers are in the habit of judging of the richness
of the sea-water in salt by its color : the greener the hue,
the fresher the water. We have in this, perhaps, an ex
planation of the contrasts which the waters of the Gulf
Stream present with those of the Atlantic, as well as of
the light green of the North Sea and other Polar waters ;
also of the dark blue of the trade-wind regions, and es
pecially of the Indian Ocean, which poets have described
as the " black waters."
What is the cause of the Gulf Stream has always puz
zled philosophers. Many are the theories and numerous
the speculations that have been advanced with regard to
it. Modern investigations and examinations are beginning
to throw some light upon the subject, though all is not yet
entirely clear.
*# # ## # * * ##
IIT. i n 17
194 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MAURY
No feature of the Gulf Stream excites remark among
seamen more frequently than the sharpness of its edges,
particularly along its inner borders. There, it is a streak
on the water. As high up as the Carolinas this streak
may be seen, like a greenish edging to a blue border, the
bright indigo of the tropical contrasting finely with the
dirty green of the littoral waters. It is this apparent re
luctance of the warm waters of the stream to mix with
the cool of the ocean that excites wonder and calls forth
remark. But have we not, so to speak, a similar reluctance
manifested by all fluids, only upon a smaller scale, or under
circumstances less calculated to attract attention or excite
remark ?
The water, hot and cold, as it is let into the tub for a
warm bath, generally arranges itself in layers or sections,
according to temperature : it requires violent stirring to
break them up, mix, and bring the whole to an even tem
perature. The jet of air from the blow-pipe, or of gas
from the burner, presents the phenomenon still more
familiarly: here we have, as with the Gulf Stream, the
dividing line between fluids in motion and fluids at rest
finely presented. There is a like reluctance for mixing
between streams of clear and muddy water. This is very
marked between the red waters of the Missouri and the
inky waters of the Upper Mississippi : here the waters of
each may be distinguished for the distance of several miles
after these two rivers come together. It requires force to
inject, as it were, the particles of one of these waters
among those of the other, for mere vis inertice tends to
maintain in their statu quo fluids that have already ar
ranged themselves in layers, streaks, or aggregations.
In the ocean we have the continual heaving of the sea
and agitation of the waves to overcome this vis inertice,
and the marvel is, that they in their violence do not,' by
MAURY] THE GULF STREAM. 103
mingling the Gulf and littoral waters together, sooner
break up and obliterate all marks of a division between
them. But the waters of the Gulf Stream differ from the
in-shore waters not only in color, transparency, and tem
perature, but in specific gravity, in saltness, and in other
properties, I conjecture, also. Therefore they may have
a peculiar viscosity, or molecular arrangement, of their
own, which further tends to prevent mixture, and so pre
serve their line of demarcation.
Observations made for the purpose in the navy show
that ships cruising in the West Indies suffer in their copper
sheathing more than they do in any other seas. This
would indicate that the waters of the Caribbean Sea and
Gulf of Mexico, from which the Gulf Stream is fed, have
some peculiar property or other which makes them so
destructive upon the copper of cruisers.
The story told by the copper and the blue color [see
ante, p. 193] indicates a higher point of saturation with
salts than sea-water generally has ; and the salometer
confirms it. Dr. Thomassy, a French savant, who has
been extensively engaged in the manufacture of salt by
solar evaporation, informs me that on his passage to the
United States he tried the saltness of the water with a
most delicate instrument : he found it in the Bay of Bis
cay to contain three and one-half per cent, of salt ; in the
trade-wind region, four and four-tenths per cent. ; and in
the Gulf Stream, off Charleston, four per cent., notwith
standing the Amazon and the Mississippi, with all the in
termediate rivers, and the clouds of the West Indies, had
lent their fresh water to dilute the saltness of this basin.
Now, the question may be asked, What should make
the waters of the Mexican Gulf and Caribbean Sea salter
than the waters in those parts of the ocean through
which the Gulf Stream flows ? There are physical agents
196 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MAUEY
that are known to be at work in different parts of the
ocean, the tendency of which is to make the waters in one
part of the ocean salter and heavier, and in another part
lighter and less salt, than the average of sea-water.
These agents are those employed by sea-shells in secreting
solid matter for their structures ; they are also heat and
radiation, evaporation and precipitation. In the trade
wind regions at sea, evaporation is generally in excess of
precipitation, while in the extra-tropical regions the re
verse is the case ; that is, the clouds let down more water
there than the winds take up again ; and these are the
regions in which the Gulf Stream enters the Atlantic.
Along the shores of India, where observations have been
carefully made, the evaporation from the sea is said to
amount to three-fourths of an inch daily. Suppose it in
the trade-wind region of the Atlantic to amount to only
half an inch, that would give an annual evaporation of
fifteen feet. In the process of evaporation from the sea,
fresh water only is taken up; the salts are left behind.
Now, a layer of sea-water fifteen feet deep, and as broad
as the trade-wind belts of the Atlantic, and reaching
across the ocean, contains an immense amount of salts.
The great equatorial current which often sweeps from the
shores of Africa across the Atlantic into the Caribbean
Sea is a surface- current ; and may it not bear into that
sea a large portion of those waters that have satisfied the
thirsty trade-winds with saltless vapor? If so, and it
probably does, have we not detected here the footprints
of an agent that does tend to make the waters of the
Caribbean Sea salter, and therefore heavier, than the
average of sea- water at a given temperature ?
It is immaterial, so far as the correctness of the principle
upon which this reasoning depends is concerned, whether
the annual evaporation from the trade- wind regions of
MAURY] THE GULF STREAM. 197
the Atlantic be fifteen, ten, or five feet. The layer of
water, whatever be its thickness, that is evaporated from
this part of the ocean is not all poured back by the clouds
upon the same spot whence it came. But they take it
and pour it down in showers upon the extra-tropical re
gions of the earth, on the land as well as in the sea,
and on the land more water is let down than is taken up
into the clouds again. The rest sinks down through the
soil to feed the springs and return through the rivers to
the sea. Suppose the excess of precipitation in these
extra-tropical regions of the sea to amount to but twelve
inches, or even to but two, it is twelve inches or two
inches, as the case may be, of fresh water added to the
sea in those parts, and which therefore tends to lessen the
specific gravity of sea- water there to that extent, and to
produce a double dynamical effect, for the simple reason
that what is taken from one scale, by being put into the
other, doubles the difference.
ISTow, that we may form some idea as to the influence
which the salt left by the vapor that the trade- winds,
northeast and southeast, take up from sea-water, is calcu
lated to exert in creating currents, let us make a partial
calculation to show how much salt this vapor held in solu
tion before it was taken up, and, of course, while it was
yet in the state of sea-water. The northeast trade-wind
regions of the Atlantic embrace an area of at least three
million square miles ; and the yearly evaporation from it
is, we will suppose, fifteen feet. The salt that is contained
in a mass of sea-water covering to the depth of fifteen
eet an area of three million square miles in superficial
extent would be sufficient to cover the British islands to
the depth of fourteen feet. As this water supplies the
trade- winds with vapor, it therefore becomes salter, and
as it become salter the forces of aggregation among its
in. 17*
198 BEST AMERICAN A UTHORS. [
particles are increased, as we may infer from the fact that
the waters of the Gulf Stream are reluctant to mix with
those of the ocean.
Whatever be the cause that enables these trade-wind
waters to remain on the surface, whether it be from the
fact just stated, and in consequence of which the waters
of the Gulf Stream are held together in their channel ; or
whether it be from the fact that the expansion from the
heat 'of the torrid zone is sufficient to compensate for this
increased saltness ; or whether it be from the low temper
ature and high saturation of the submarine waters of the
intertropical ocean ; or whether it be owing to all of these
influences together, that these waters are kept on the
surface, suffice it to say, we do know that they go into
the Caribbean Sea as a surface-current. On their passage
to and through it, they intermingle with the fresh waters
that are emptied into the sea from the Amazon, the Ori
noco, and the Mississippi, and from the clouds, and the
rivers of the coasts round about. An immense volume
of fresh water is supplied from these sources. It tends
to make the sea-water, that the trade-winds have been
playing upon and driving along, less briny, warmer, and
lighter; for the waters of these large intertropical streams
are warmer than sea-water. This admixture of fresh
water still leaves the Gulf Stream a brine stronger than
that of the extra-tropical sea generally, but not quite so
strong as that of the trade-wind regions.
*********
As to the temperature of the Gulf Stream, there is. in
a winter's day, off Hatteras, and even as high up as the
Grand Banks of Newfoundland in mid-ocean, a difference
between its waters and those of the ocean near by of 20,
and even 30. Water, we know, expands by heat; and
here the difference of temperature may more than com-
MAURT] THE GULF STREAM. 199
pensate for the difference in saltness, and leave, therefore,
the waters of the Gulf Stream, though salter, yet lighter
by reason of their warmth.
If they be lighter, they should therefore occupy a higher
level than those through which they flow. Assuming
the depth off Hatteras to be one hundred and fourteen
fathoms, and allowing the usual rates of expansion for
sea-water, figures show that the middle or axis of the
Gulf Stream there should be nearly two feet higher than
the contiguous waters of the Atlantic. Hence the surface
of the stream should present a double inclined plane, from
which the water would be running down on either side
as from the roof of a house. As this runs off at the top,
the same weight of colder water runs in at the bottom,
and so raises up the cold-water bed of the Gulf Stream,
and causes it to become shallower and shallower as it
goes north. That the Gulf Stream is therefore roof-
shaped, causing the waters on its surface to flow off to
either side from the middle, we have not only circum
stantial evidence to show, but observations to prove.
Navigators, while drifting along with the Gulf Stream,
have lowered a boat to try the surface-current. In such
cases the boat would drift either to the east or to the
west, as it happened to be on one side or the other of the
axis of the stream, while the vessel herself would drift
along with the stream in the direction of its course ; thus
showing the existence of a shallow roof-current from the
middle toward either edge, which would carry the boat
along, but which, being superficial, does not extend deep
enough to affect the drift of the vessel.
That such is the case is also indicated by the circum
stance that the sea-weed and drift-wood which are found
in such large quantities along the outer edge of the Gulf
Stream are rarely, even with the prevalence of easterly
200 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MAURY
winds, found along its inner edge, and for the simple
reason that to cross the Gulf Stream, and to pass over
from that side to this, they would have to drift up an
inclined plane, as it were ; that is, they would have to
stem this roof-current until they reached the middle of
the stream. We rarely hear of planks, or wrecks, or of
any floating substance which is cast into the sea on the
other side of the Gulf Stream, being found along the coast
of the United States. Drift-wood, trees, and seeds from
the West India islands are often cast up on the shores of
Europe, but rarely on the Atlantic shores of this country
*********
But there are other forces operating upon the Gulf
Stream. They are derived from the effect of changes in
the waters of the whole ocean, as produced by changes in
their temperature from time to time. As the Gulf Stream
leaves the coasts of the United States, it begins to vary its
position according to the seasons, the limit of its northern
edge, as it passes the meridian of Cape Race, being in winter
about latitude 40-41, and in September, when the sea is
hottest, about latitude 45-46. The trough of the Gulf
Stream, therefore, may be supposed to waver about in the
ocean not unlike a pennon in the breeze. Its head is con
fined between the shoals of the Bahamas and the Caro-
linas; but that part of it which stretches over toward the
Grand Banks of Newfoundland is, as the temperature of
the waters of the ocean changes, first pressed down toward
the south, and then again up toward the north, according
to the season of the year.
To appreciate the extent of the force by which it is so
pressed, let us imagine the waters of the Gulf Stream to
extend all the way to the bottom of the sea, so as com
pletely to separate, by an impenetrable liquid wall, if you
please, the waters of the ocean on the rio-ht from the
MAURY] THE GULF STREAM. 201
waters in the ocean on the left of the stream. It is the
height of summer: the waters of the sea on either hand
are for the most part in a liquid state, and the Gulf Stream,
let it be supposed, has assumed a normal condition between
the two divisions, adjusting itself to the pressure on either
side so as to balance them exactly and be in equilibrium.
Now, again, it is the dead of winter, and the temperature
of the waters over an area of millions of square miles in
the North Atlantic has been changed many degrees, and
this change of temperature has been followed likewise by
a change in volume of those waters, amounting, no doubt,
in the aggregate, to many hundred millions of tons, over
the whole ocean ; for sea-water, unlike fresh, contracts to
freezing, and below. Now, is it probable that in passing
from their summer to their winter temperature the sea-
waters to the right of the Gulf Stream should change
their specific gravity exactly as much in the aggregate as
do the waters in the whole ocean to the left of it ? If
not, the difference must be compensated by some means.
Sparks are not more prone to fly upward, nor water to
seek its level, than Nature is sure with her efforts to
restore equilibrium in both sea and air whenever, wherever,
and by whatever it be disturbed. Therefore, though the
waters of the Gulf Stream do not extend to the bottom,
and though they be not impenetrable to the waters on
either hand, yet, seeing that they have a waste of waters
on the right and a waste of waters on the left, to which
they offer a sort of resisting permeability, we are enabled
to comprehend how the waters on either hand, as their
specific gravity is increased or diminished, will impart to
the trough of this stream a vibratory motion, pressing it
now to the right, now to the left, according to the seasons
and the consequent changes of temperature in the sea.
202 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MATJRT
As a rule, the hottest water of the Gulf Stream is at or
near the surface ; and as the deep-sea thermometer is sent
down, it shows that these waters, though still far warmer
than the water on either side at corresponding depths,
gradually become less and less warm until the bottom of
the current is reached. There is reason to believe that
the warm waters of the Gulf Stream are nowhere per
mitted, in the oceanic economy, to touch the bottom of
the sea. There is everywhere a cushion of cool water be
tween them and the solid parts of the earth's crust. This
arrangement is suggestive, and strikingly beautiful. One
of the benign offices of the Gulf Stream is to convey heat
from the Gulf of Mexico, where otherwise it would be
come excessive, and to dispense it in regions beyond the
Atlantic for the amelioration of the climates of the British
Islands and of all Western Europe. Now, cold water is
one of the best non-conductors of heat ; and if the warm
water of the Gulf Stream was sent across the Atlantic in
contact with the solid crust of the earth, comparatively
a good conductor of heat, instead of being sent across, as
it is, in contact with a cold, non-conducting cushion of
cool water to fend it from the bottom, much of its heat
would be lost in the first part of the way, and the soft
climates of both France and England would be, as that of
Labrador, severe in the extreme, ice-bound, and bitterly
cold.
Modern ingenuity has suggested a beautiful mode of
warming houses in winter. It is done by means of hot
water. The furnace and the caldron are sometimes placed
at a distance from the apartments to be warmed. It is so
at the Observatory. In this case, pipes are used to con
duct the heated water from the caldron under the super
intendent's dwelling over into one of the basement-rooms
of the Observatory, a distance of one hundred feet. These
MACTRT] THE GULF STREAM. 203
pipes are then flared out so as to present a large cooling
surface ; after which they are united into one again,
through which the water, being now cooled, returns of its
own accord to the caldron. Thus cool water is returning
all the time and flowing in at the bottom of the caldron,
w r hile hot water is continually flowing out at the top. The
ventilation of the Observatory is so arranged that the
circulation of the atmosphere through it is led from this
basement-room, where the pipes are, to all other parts of
the building; and in the process of this circulation the
warmth conveyed by the water to the basement is taken
thence by the air and distributed over all the rooms.
Now, to compare small things with great, we have, in the
warm waters which are confined in the Gulf of Mexico,
just such a heating apparatus for Great Britain, the North
Atlantic, and Western Europe.
The furnace is the torrid zone ; the Mexican Gulf and
Caribbean Sea are the caldrons; the Gulf Stream is the
conducting pipe. From the Grand Banks of Newfound
land to the shores of Europe is the basement the hot-air
chamber in which this pipe is flared out so as to present
a large cooling surface. Here the circulation of the atmos
phere is arranged by nature ; it is from west to east; con
sequently it is such that the warmth thus conveyed into
this warm-air chamber of mid-ocean is taken up by the
genial west winds and dispensed in the most benign man
ner throughout Great Britain and the west of Europe.
The mean temperature of the water-heated air-chamber of
the Observatory is about 90. The maximum temperature
of the Gulf Stream is 86, or about 9 above the ocean tem
perature due the latitude. Increasing its latitude 10, it
loses but 2 of temperature ; and, after having run three
thousand miles toward the north, it still preserves, even
in winter, the heat of summer. With this temperature, it
204 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MAURY
crosses the 46th degree of north latitude, and there, over
flowing its liquid banks, it spreads itself out for thousands
of square leagues over the cold waters around, covering
the ocean with a mantle of warmth that serves so much
to mitigate in Europe the rigors of winter. Moving now
more slowly, but dispensing its genial influences more
freely, it finally meets the British Islands. By these it is
divided, one part going into the polar basin of Spitsbergen,
the other entering the Bay of Biscay, but each with a
warmth considerably above the ocean temperature. Such
an immense volume of heated water cannot fail to carry
with it beyond the seas a mild and moist atmosphere.
And this it is which so much softens climate there.
We know not, except approximately in a few places,
what the depth or the under temperature of the Gulf
Stream may be ; but assuming the temperature and velocity
at the depth of two hundred fathoms to be those of the
surface, and taking the well-known difference between the
capacity of air and of water for specific heat as the argu
ment, a simple calculation will show that the quantity of
heat discharged over the Atlantic from the waters of the
Gulf Stream in a winter's day would be sufficient to raise
the whole column of atmosphere that rests upon France
and the British Islands from the freezing-point to summer
heat.
Every west wind that blows crosses the stream on its
way to Europe, and carries with it a portion of this heat
to temper there the northern winds of winter. It is the
influence of this stream upon climate that makes Erin the
"Emerald Isle of the Sea," and that clothes the shores of
Albion in evergreen robes, while in the same latitude, on
this side, the coasts of Labrador are fast bound in fetters
of ice. In a valuable paper on currents, Mr. Eedfield states
that in 1831 the harbor of St. John's, Newfoundland, was
MATJRY] THE GULF STREAM. 205
closed with ice as late as the month of June ; yet who ever
heard of the port of Liverpool, on the other side, though
two degrees farther north, being closed with ice, even in
the dead of winter ?
The Thermal Chart shows this. The isothermal lines
of 60, 50, etc., starting off from the parallel of 40 near
the coasts of the United States, run off in a northeast
wardly direction, showing the same oceanic temperature
on the European side of the Atlantic in latitude 55 or
60 that we have on the western side in latitude 40.
Scott, in one of his beautiful novels, tells us that the
ponds in the Orkneys (latitude near 60) are not frozen
in winter. The people there owe their soft climate to
this grand heating apparatus, for drift-wood from the
West Indies is occasionally cast ashore there by the Gulf
Stream.
Nor do the beneficial influences of this stream upon
climate end here. The West Indian Archipelago is encom
passed on one side by its chain of islands, and on the other
by the Cordilleras of the Andes, contracting with the
Isthmus of Darien, and stretching themselves out over the
plains of Central America and Mexico. Beginning on the
summit of this range, we leave the regions of perpetual
snow, and descend first into the tierra templada, and then
into the tierra caliente, or burning land. Descending still
lower, we reach both the level and the surface of the
Mexican seas, where, were it not for this beautiful and
benign system of aqueous circulation, the peculiar feat
ures of the surrounding country assure us we should
have the hottest, if not the most pestilential, climate in
the world. As the waters in these two caldrons become
heated, they are borne off by the Gulf Stream, and are
replaced by cooler currents through the Caribbean Sea,
the surface-water, as it enters here, being three degrees or
ITT. 18
206 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
four degrees, and that in depth even forty degrees, cooler
than when it escapes from the Gulf. Taking only this
difference in surface-temperature as an index of the heat
accumulated there, a simple calculation will show that the
quantity of heat daily carried off by the Gulf Stream
from those regions and discharged over the Atlantic is
sufficient to raise mountains of iron from zero to the
melting-point, and to keep in flow from them a molten
stream of metal greater in volume than the waters daily
discharged from the Mississippi River.
Who, therefore, can calculate the benign influence of
this wonderful current upon the climate of the South?
In the pursuit of this subject, the mind is led from nature
up to the great Architect of nature ; and what mind will
the study of this subject not fill with profitable emotions?
Unchanged and unchanging alone, of all created things,
the ocean is the great emblem of its everlasting Creator.
" He treadeth upon the waves of the sea," and is seen in
the wonders of the deep. Yea, "He calleth for its waters,
and poureth them out upon the face of the earth."
THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE.
JOHN S. C. ABBOTT.
[The Abbott brothers, John and Jacob, form perhaps the only in
stance in American history of two brothers attaining a wide popularity
in literature. Their fields of work were markedly diverse. The Eev.
Jacob Abbott was exceedingly prolific in juvenile writings, and his
"Rollo Books," "Harper's Story-Books," and " Franconia Stories"
were the delight of young readers of a generation ago. The reputa
tion of John S. C. Abbott was gained in the field of history. His
writings included " History of Napoleon Bonaparte," " History of tho
ABBOTT] THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE. 207
French Kevolution," " History of the Civil War in America," and sev
eral smaller historical works. His style is highly animated and very
pleasing, but his partisanship and undiscriminating eulogy of his
principal characters have greatly impaired the value of his works as
histories. We offer a strongly-written extract from his " French Eev-
olution." He was born in Maine in 1805, and died in 1877.]
THE electors now ordered thirty thousand pikes to be
manufactured. Every smith was immediately employed,
every forge was glowing, and for thirty-six hours, day and
night, without intermission, the anvils rang till the pikes
were finished. All this day of Monday the people thought
only of defending themselves ; but night again came, an
other night of terror, tumult, and sleeplessness.
The Bastille was the great terror of Paris. While that
remained in the hands of their enemies, with its impreg
nable walls and heavy guns commanding the city, there
was no safety. As by an instinct, during the night of
tbe 13th, the Parisians decided that the Bastille must be
taken. With that fortress in their hands they could de
fend themselves and repel their foes. But how could the
Bastille be taken ? It was apparently as unassailable as
Gibraltar's rock. Nothing could be more preposterous
than the thought of storming the Bastille. " The idea,"
says Micbelet, " was by no means reasonable. It was an
act of faith."
The Bastille stood in the very beart of tbe Faubourg
St. Antoine, enormous, massive, and blackened with age,
tbe gloomy emblem of royal prerogative, exciting by its
mysterious power and menace tbe terror and tbe execra
tion of every one wbo passed beneatb tbe shadow of its
towers. Even tbe sports of childhood dare not approach
the empoisoned atmosphere with wbicb it seemed to bo
enveloped.
M. de Launey was governor of tbe fortress. He was no
208 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
soldier, but a mean, mercenary man, despised by the
Parisians. He contrived to draw from the establishment,
by every species of cruelty and extortion, an income of
twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He reduced the
amount of fire-wood to which the shivering inmates were
entitled, made a gi-eat profit on the wretched wine which
he furnished to those who were able to buy, and even lot
out the little garden within the enclosure, thus depriving
those prisoners who were not in dungeon confinement of
the privilege of a walk there, which they had a right to
claim. De Launey was not merely detested as governor
of the Bastille, but he was personally execrated as a
greedy, sordid, merciless man. Linguet's Memoirs of the
Bastille had rendered De Launey's name infamous through
out Europe. Such men are usually cowards. De Launey
was both spiritless and imbecile. Had he not been both,
the Bastille could not have been taken.
Still the people had no guns. It was ascertained that
there was a large supply at the Hotel des Invalides ; but
how could they be taken without any weapons of attack ?
Sombreuil, the governor, was a firm and fearless man, and,
in addition to his ordinary force, amply sufficient for de
fence, he had recently obtained a strong detachment of ar
tillery and several additional cannon, showing that he was
ready to do battle. Within fifteen minutes' march of the
Invalides, Besenval was encamped with several thousand
Swiss and German troops in the highest state of discipline
and provided with all the most formidable implements of
war. Every moment rumors passed through the streets
that the troops from Versailles were on the march, headed
by officers who were breathing threatenings and slaughter.
With electric speed the rumor passed through the streets
that there was a large quantity of arms stored in the
magazine of the Hotel of the Invalids. Before nine o'clock
ABBOTT] THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE. 209
ill the morning of the 14th, thirty thousand men were
before the Invalides ; some with pikes, pistols, or muskets,
but most of them unarmed. The curate of St. Etienne
led his parishioners in this conflict for freedom. As this
intrepid man marched at the head of his flock he said to
them, "My children, let us not forget that all men are
brothers." The bells of alarm ringing from the steeples
seemed to invest the movement with a religious character.
Those sublime voices, accustomed to summon the multi
tude to prayer, now with their loudest utterance called
them to the defence of their civil and religious rights.
Sombreuil perceived at once that the populace could
only be repelled by enormous massacre, and that probably
even that, in the frenzied state of the public mind, would
be ineffectual. He dared not assume the responsibility of
firing without an order from the king, and he could get
no answer to the messages he sent to Versailles. Though
his cannon charged with grape-shot could have swept
down thousands, he did not venture to give the fatal
command to fire. The citizens, with a simultaneous rush
in all directions, leaped the trenches, clambered over the
low wall, for the hotel was not a fortress, and, like a
resistless inundation, filled the vast building. They found
in the armory thirty thousand muskets. Seizing these
and six pieces of cannon, they rushed, as by a common
instinct, toward the Bastille, to assail with these feeble
means one of the strongest fortresses in the world, a
fortress which an army under the great Cond'e had in
vain besieged for three-and-twenty days. De Launey,
from the summit of his towers, had for many hours heard
the roar of the insurgent city. As he now saw the black
mass of countless thousands approaching, he turned pale
and trembled. All the cannon, loaded with grape-shot,
were thrust out of the port-holes, and several cart-loads
in. o 18*
210 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
of paving- stones, cannon-balls, and old iron had been con
veyed to the tops of the towers to be thrown down to
crush the assailants. Twelve large rampart-guns, charged
heavily with grape, guarded the only entrance. These
were manned by thirty-two Swiss soldiers, who would
have no scruples in firing upon Frenchmen. The eighty-
two French soldiers who composed the remainder of the
garrison were placed upon the towers, and at distant posts,
where they could act efficiently without being brought so
immediately into conflict with the attacking party.
A man of very fearless and determined character, M.
Thuriot, was sent by the electors of the Hotel de Ville to
summon the Bastille to surrender. The drawbridge was
lowered, and he was admitted. The governor received
him at the head of his staff.
"I summon you," said Thuriot, "in the name of the
people, in the name of honor, and of our native land."
The governor, who was every moment expecting the
arrival of troops to disperse the crowd, refused to surren
der the fortress, but replied that he w r as ready to give his
oath that he would not fire upon the people if they did
not fire upon him. After a long and exciting interview,
Thuriot came forth to those at the Hotel de Ville who had
sent him.
He had hardly emerged from the massive portals, and
crossed the drawbridge of the moat, which was imme
diately raised behind him, ere the people commenced tho
attack. A scene of confusion and uproar ensued which
cannot be described. A hundred thousand men, filling all
the streets and alleys which opened upon the Bastille,
cro'wding all the windows and house-tops of the adjacent
buildings, kept up an incessant firing, harmlessly flatten
ing their bullets against walls of stone forty feet thick and
one hundred feet high.
ABBOTT] THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE. 211
The French soldiers within the garrison were reluctant
to fire upon their relatives and friends. But the Swiss,
obedient to authority, opened a deadly fire of bullets and
grape-shot upon the crowd. While the battle was raging,
an intercepted letter was brought to the Hotel de Ville,
in which Besenval, commandant of the troops in the Field
of Mars, exhorted De Launey to remain firm, assuring him
that he would soon come with succor. But, fortunately
for the people, even these foreign troops refused to march
for the protection of the Bastille.
The French guards now broke from their barracks, and,
led by their subaltern officers, came with two pieces of
artillery in formidable array to join the people. They
were received with thunders of applause which drowned
even the roar of the battle. Energetically they opened
their batteries upon the fortress, but their balls rebounded
harmless from the impregnable rock.
Apparently the whole of Paris, with one united will,
was combined against the great bulwark of tyranny.
Men, women, and boys were mingled in the fight. Priests,
nobles, wealthy citizens, and the ragged and emaciate
victims of famine were pressing in the frenzied assault
side by side. The French soldiers were now anxious to
surrender, but the Swiss, sheltered from all chance of
harm, shot down with deliberate and unerring aim whom
soever they would. Four hours of the battle had now
passed, and, though but one man had been hurt within
the fortress, a hundred and seventy-one of the citizens
had been either killed or wounded. The French soldiers
now raised a flag of truce upon the towers, while the
Swiss continued firing below. This movement plunged
De Launey into despair. One hundred thousand men
were beleaguering his fortress. The king sent no troops
to his aid j and three-fourths of his garrison had abandoned
212 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ABBOTT
him and were already opening communications with his
assailants. He knew that the people could never pardon
him for the blood of their fathers and brothers with which
he had crimsoned their streets, that death was his in
evitable doom. In a state almost of delirium he seized a
match from a cannon and rushed toward the magazine,
determined to blow up the citadel. There were a hundred
and thirty-five barrels of gunpowder in the vaults. The
explosion would have thrown the Bastille into the air,
buried one hundred thousand people beneath its ruins,
and have demolished one-third of Paris. Two subaltern
officers crossed their bayonets before him and prevented
the accomplishment of this horrible design.
Some wretches seized upon a young lady whom they
believed to be the governor's daughter, and wished by
the threat of burning her within view of her father upon
the towers to compel him to surrender. But the citizens
promptly rescued her from their hands and conveyed her
to a place of safety. It was now five o'clock, and the
assault had commenced at twelve o'clock at noon. The
French soldiers within made white flags of napkins, at
tached them to bayonets, and waved them from the walls.
Gradually the flags of truce were seen through the smoke ;
the firing ceased, and the cry resounded through the
crowd and was echoed along the streets of Paris, " The
Bastille surrenders!" This fortress, which Louis XIY.
and Turenne had pronounced impregnable, surrendered
not to the arms of its assailants,, for they had produced
no impression upon it. It was conquered by that public
opinion which pervaded Paris and which vanquished its
garrison.
The massive portals were thrown open, and the vast
multitude, a living deluge, plunging headlong, rushed in.
They clambered the towers, penetrated the cells, an<]
ABBOTT] THE STORMING OF THE BASTILLE. 213
descended into the dungeons and oubliettes. Appalled
they gazed upon the instruments of torture with which
former victims of oppression had been torn and broken.
Excited as they were by the strife, and exasperated by
the shedding of blood, but one man in the fortress, a Swiss
soldier, fell a victim to their rage.
The victorious people now set out in a tumultuous pro
cession to convey their prisoners, the governor and the
soldiers, to the Hotel de Yille. Those of the populace
whose relatives had perished in the strife were roused to
fury, and called loudly for the blood of De Launey. Two
very powerful men placed themselves on each side of him
for his protection. But the clamor increased, the pressure
became more resistless, and just as they were entering the
Place de Grove the protectors of the governor were over
powered : he was struck down, his head severed by a
sabre-stroke, and raised, a bloody and ghastly trophy, into
the air upon a pike.
In the midst of the great commotion two of the Swiss
soldiers of the Bastille, whom the populace supposed to
have been active in the cannonade, were seized, notwith
standing the most strenuous efforts to save them, and hung
to a lamp-post. A rumor passed through the crowd that
a letter had been found from the mayor, Flesselles, who
was already strongly suspected of treachery, directed to
De Launey, in which he said,
"I am amusing the Parisians with cockades and
promises. Hold out till the evening, and you shall be
relieved."
Loud murmurs rose from the crowd which filled and
surrounded the hall. Some one proposed that Flesselles
should be taken to the Palais Koyal to be tried by the
people. The clamor was increasing, and his peril immi
nent. Pallid with fear, he descended from the platform,
214 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MURFREE
and, accompanied by a vast throng, set out for the Palais
Boyal. At the turning of the first street an unknown
man approached, and with a pistol shot him dead. In
furiated wretches immediately cut off his head, and it was
borne upon a pike in savage triumph through the streets.
The French Guards, with the great body of the people,
did what they could to repress these bloody acts. The
French and Swiss soldiers took the oath of fidelity to the
nation, and under the protection of the French Guard
were marched to places of safety, where they were sup
plied with lodgings and food. Thus terminated this event
ful day. The fall of the Bastille broke the right arm of
the monarchy, paralyzed its nerves of action, and struck it
a death-blow. The monarch of France, from his palace at
Versailles, heard the distant thunders of the cannonade,
and yet inscribed upon his puerile journal "Nothing I"
AN ASTONISHED GAMBLER.
MARY N. MURFREE.
[It is but a few years since " Charles Egbert Craddock" came first
into notice as one of the best of our rising novelists, and still less time
since the reading world was surprised by the discovery that the author
of these spirited and brilliantly-written novels was a woman, Mary
Noailles Murfree. " In the Tennessee Mountains," " Where the Battle
was Fought," "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains," etc.,
introduce us not only to a new author, but to a new locality, and char
acters, habits, and scenery fresh to the novel-reader. To this and to the
fine descriptive talent of the authoress must be ascribed their great
popularity. The selection given below is taken from " "Where the Battle
was Fought."]
A BAND of itinerant musicians suddenly struck up a
popular waltz, and the rotunda was filled with surging
MURFREE] AN ASTONISHED GAMBLER. 215
waves of sound. " This is insufferable," said Meredith.
" Suppose we go up to my room, where we can have a
quiet smoke and talk."
As they passed the fountain, West approached them.
" Going up-stairs ?" he asked of his cousin.
Meredith nodded. " Will you come with us ?"
" And I'll bring Casey," West declared, agreeably, very
slightly lowering his voice; "that is, if you have no objec
tion. I'm under great obligations to him, and, as he knows
nobody in town but us, I feel bound to see him through
and make his stay as pleasant as possible."
Meredith frowned, and hesitated. But Casey was stand
ing at no great distance, and had evidently overheard the
conversation. Estwicke experienced a twinge of uneasi
ness. Despite his ill-defined antipathy toward Casey, and
although the suggestion that he should join them had
destroyed every prospect of pleasure, it seemed to Estwicke
almost a cruelty to refuse publicly so slight and apparently
BO reasonable a request. He watched Meredith with ex
pectant eyes.
" Certainly, if you like," the young lawyer assented, not
too graciously, and turned away.
" That's a boon," he muttered to Estwicke, who made
no reply, for at that moment they stepped into the elevator,
and stood silent and with their cigars held low and re
versed, like the muskets of privates at a military funeral,
in deference to a group of ladies within.
"I roost high," said Meredith, when they had gotten
out on an upper story. " It comes cheaper up here, and
there's better ventilation. ' Beggars all, but, marry, good
air.' "
After they were seated before the blazing fire in Mere
dith's room, West seemed altogether unaware of the reluc
tant toleration with which his entertainer regarded the
216 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MUKFREE
amendment to the quiet smoke and talk. With his gay,
youthful self-sufficiency, he absorbed the conversation as
far as he might. He was facetious, and flippantly frater
nized with Casey.
" Captain," he said to Estwicke, with an explanatory
wave of his hand toward his solemn red-faced friend,
" there is the great original David ! And I am Jonathan !
Wasn't it David who saved Jonathan's life ?" He pulled
at his mustache, and laughed, and smoked his big cigar
with manly gusto.
" Oh, it was nothing, -nothing whatever," declared
Casey. His manner suggested that from good nature he
was content to lightly waive recognition of a feat.
The sharp young lawyer apprehended the intimation.
"Nothing?" he repeated, satirically. "Nothing to save
Tom West's life? Why, it- was a public benefaction!"
Estwicke, with his quick interest in exploits, his love
of danger, his enthusiastic admiration of bravery, turned
to Casey with a sudden sense of respect.
" May I ask how that came about ?"
Casey hesitated, and Estwicke presently recognized in
this a tact which was hardly consonant with such a slow-
seeming man, for West, after waiting expectantly for a
moment, plunged into an account of a recent railroad
accident, that might have been very disastrous, but had
resulted in nothing worse than cooping him up in the
debris, whence by some exercise of thews and sinews of
which Mr. Casey was amply capable he was extricated.
His rescue had evidently involved no risk, but it had
served as an introduction of Casey, who was adroitly
abetting West in magnifying its importance. Estwicke
listened with contemptuous amusement, and Meredith's
efforts to conceal his impatience had grown so lame that
his relief was very evident when a knock at the door
MURFREE] AN ASTONISHED GAMBLER. 217
interrupted the conversation, and a card was brought in.
He glanced at it in surprise.
" Show the gentleman up," he said, and the brisk and
grinning bell-boy disappeared.
* * * * ^^ * # *
" I insist that you don't go," said Meredith, addressing
himself specially to Bstwicke. " This won't keep me long ;
meantime, suppose you have a game of cards. I am not
going to my office : we can talk the matter over here."
He flung a pack of cards on the table ; then he and
Brennett turned away to a desk which was on the oppo
site side of the room. The trio at the table chatted for a
few moments in a desultory strain, but presently West,
glancing at lawyer and client now fairly immersed in
business, shrugged his shoulders, gathered up the cards,
and, with a juvenile leer at the others, proposed to deal
for " draw."
" I haven't played for so long, I scarcely remember the
game," protested Casey.
West laughed jeeringly; he joyed so in his amiable
wickedness.
" Oh, Casey's afraid of getting turned out of church.
We'll take you in out of the wet, won't we, captain?
We belong to the ' big church,' we do."
Estwicke made no reply: he hardly relished even a
" big church" membership with Casey.
" I suppose we play with a limit?" he asked, impatiently,
showing some eagerness to begin.
West's was an amiable wickedness. In fact, it was only
a weak-kneed semblance, that would, yet might not, be.
He quaked at the bare suggestion of the alternative.
" Captain, you shock me," he declared. " Of course we
play with a limit. fifty cents, say."
They talked very little when once fairly at it. For a
III. K 19
218 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MURFREE
time Meredith, who sat with his back toward them, only
knew vaguely that somebody was " passing," or " strad
dling the blind," or " seeing and going better." Once or
twice West laughed out loud and long in triumph. And
again his voice rose in excited remonstrance, to which his
companions seemed to pay no attention. Then the room
was quiet for a time, and the lawyer lost cognizance of
everything except the complications of Brennett's liens
and his debtor's duplicity.
"How many bales do you suppose he has there?"
Meredith asked, after a meditative pause.
There was no answer.
He glanced up impatiently. Brennett's face was in
stinct with an alert interest. His eyes, lighted by some
inward sardonic laughter, were fixed upon the group by
the fire.
Meredith turned quickly, and at this moment Estwicke
his coat thrown off upon the floor, his hat thrust on the
back of his head, the hot blood crimsoning his sunburned
cheek, the perspiration standing thick in his close-clipped
red hair, his eyes blazing with that most unholy fire, the
gambler's passion cocked his cigar between his set teeth
and raised the blind one hundred dollars.
West had passed out of the game, had drawn away
from the table, and was gazing with dismayed surprise at
the swollen proportions of the pool and at the impassive,
stony countenance of Casey. Not a feather was ruffled
as he looked coolly into Estwicke's burning eyes ; he was
as decorously florid, his waistcoat as commercially rotund,
as ever, but his demeanor was the demeanor of the pro
fessional expert.
He stolidly made good; and then he drew one card,
Estwicke standing pat. After this, for a few moments,
each seemed cautious, making very small bets. But pres-
MURFREE] AN ASTONISHED GAMBLER. 219
ently, when Estwicke raised him fifty dollars, Casey " saw
it" and went a hundred better.
Then the slow, cumbrous fellow, according to his habit,
laid his cards, face downward, on the table in front of him,
with a single chip upon them to hold them in place, and,
clasping his hands lightly upon his substantial stomach,
cakaly awaited Estwicke's "say."
And all at once Estwicke looked hard at the man, with
a change on his expressive face. There was an eager sur
prise in his eyes ; the flush of sheer excitement deepened
to an angry glow ; he seemed lost for an instant in a sort
of doubting confusion. Suddenly he made good, and
" called."
Meredith was thunder-struck as he realized the full sig
nificance of the scene. He rose hastily. "Gentlemen,"
he said, sternly, " this is going entirely too far."
They took no heed. With one hand Casey laid his
cards, a straight flush, ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of
diamonds, upon the table beside Estwicke's jack full,
while with the other hand he gathered the pool toward
him, giving no sign of elation.
"I protest," began Meredith. He stopped suddenly
short.
Brennett sprang to his feet with a sharp exclamation.
It happened in an instant. There was a swift move
ment of Estwicke's intent figure ; he thrust his hand be
hind him, and seemed to draw from his pistol-pocket a
glancing, steely flash of light ; there was a sharp, metallic
click, of a peculiarly nerve-thrilling quality ; he lunged
across the table, and held the weapon at full cock at the
man's head.
Warned by Estwicke's motion, Casey had made an
effort to draw his pistol. His hand grasped it in his
pocket.
220 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MURFREE
"Move your right arm and you're a dead man," said
Estwicke between his se't teeth. They were strong and
white, and unconsciously he showed them. The veins
that crossed his forehead were black and swollen. His
breath came hot and fast and with a sibilant sound. He
seemed to think as Brennett sprang up that there would
be an effort to disarm him.
" If you interfere," he said, in a low voice, " if you
touch me, I will kill you ! I will kill you !"
It was a moment of terrible suspense, but as Brennett
moved hastily back he laughed aloud, a short, ungenial
laugh, nervous perhaps ; or was the fancy so absurd that
he should interfere ?
Meredith's motion toward Estwicke was arrested by
his next words. "Drop that card out of your sleeve,
the card I dealt you."
Casey gazed abjectly at him, turning even paler than
before, and made a weak, spasmodic effort to speak, to
deny.
" _N"o use talking," said Estwicke, cutting him short.
"Drop the card." His finger, by accident or design,
quivered slightly on the trigger.
The sharper shook his sleeve, and the three of diamonds
fell upon the table.
" The exchange was quick as lightning, but I saw it !"
Estwicke declared.
Without lowering his eyes or moving the weapon, he
placed with his left hand the three of diamonds on the
table beside the straight flush to illustrate the self-evident
fact that, no matter which of the cards Casey had substi
tuted for it, the hand after the draw was merely a flush,
" And a full outranks a flush !" he proclaimed, with a
fierce, dictatorial air.
Casey sat before him. silent, cowed, helpless, the re-
MURFREE] ^4^ ASTONISHED GAMBLER. 221
volver that he still grasped in his pocket as useless as if
his right hand was palsied.
"My 'full' raked the pool!" thundered Estwicke. "I
won it all ! I'll have it all ! Fork ! With your left hand,
mind."
As Casey hastily pushed the money across the table, a
modest nickel, that had served in the half-dollar limit
game with which they began, fell to the floor and rolled
away among the shadows.
He had surrendered utterly : it was all over. A breath
of relief was beginning to inflate his lungs, which in the
surprise and fright had seemed to forget and bungle their
familiar functions. The other men moved slightly as they
stood, an involuntary expression of the relaxation of
the tension : the creak of Tom West's boots was to him
like the voice of a friend. Then they realized, with the
shock of an infinite surprise, that Estwicke sat as motion
less as if he were carved in stone, his pistol still held at
the cheat's head. The room was so silent that they
might hear the rumble of the elevator on its missions up
and down, the throb of the engine in the cellar, the faint
rattle of the dishes in the dining-room far, far below the
high story where the young man's room was perched.
They understood at last, and it came upon them with the
amazing effect of a flash of lightning from a clear sky.
Estwicke was waiting for the nickel !
The card-sharper was panting, failing, almost losing con
sciousness. He did not dare to stoop and search for the
coin; he could not summon his voice for speech. The
tears sprang into his eyes when he saw that the situation
was at length comprehended by the others.
West hastily knelt on the floor, passed his tremulous
fingers over the dark carpet, clutched the coin, and placed
it on the table.
m. 19*
222 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MURFKEE
To the two men who knew Estwicke best the episode
was a frightful illustration of a certain imperious exact-
ingness which they had discovered even in their short
acquaintance was a notable characteristic of his nature.
For one instant longer he looked hard at the sharper
Then he brought his heavy hand down upon the table
in the midst of the pile of greenbacks, with a vehemence
that sent a shiver through every glass in the room.
" Damn you !" he cried out, fiercely. " Keep it !"
He thrust his pistol into his pocket. Without another
word he strode heavily out of the room, leaving Casey
staring blankly at the money so strangely relinquished,
and the others standing petrified under the yellow gas-jets,
gazing after the receding figure that marched through
the shadowy vagueness of the dimly-lighted hall without.
When he was fairly gone, Meredith turned to Casey.
The sharper had before hardly seemed able to breathe.
He was on his feet now and ready to walk. His god was
good to him. The touch of it had made him whole.
"I have never before had occasion," said Meredith,
sternly, "to show a man the door." He waved his hand
toward it.
The hardened creature insolently lifted his cold, fishy
eye and grinned. His plethoric pocket-book was over
flowing in his hands; he tucked the other bills into the
pockets of his respectable, commercial-looking waistcoat.
" Sorry to have any disagreement, I'm sure. Your
friend is a little too choleric; apt to be the fault of mili-
tary men. I have to thank you for a most delightful
evening. I'll come again soon. By-by, West."
He bowed and grinned and grimaced at the door.
Meredith was scarlet with indignation. Tom West
thrust his hands into his pockets and turned sheepishly
away. Brennett flung himself against the mantel-piece
MURFREE] AN ASTONISHED GAMBLER. 223
and laughed with an intense enjoyment so chilling, so
derisive, so repellent in its quality that Casey paused in
the hall and glanced back through the open door in sur
prise and a vague distrust. Meredith saw among the
shadows his white, heavy-jawed face, from which the
pmile had faded in an expression of inexplicable wonder,
f fear. Then he turned once more and disappeared.
Meredith hastily handed Brennett his memoranda, and,
with a promise to return in a few moments, started toward
the door.
""Where are you going?" West demanded, inquisitively.
" To look up m Captain Estwicke," Meredith replied,
curtly.
The ;; elevator-boy" knew the number of Estwicke's
room on the transient floor by reason of having had the
key left with him during the evening. Estwicke had
hardly entered and closed the door when Meredith
knocked. He looked around with a flushed face as the
young lawyer came in.
"I hope you will remember how that blackguard was
forced upon me," Meredith began, hotly. " I don't usu
ally consort with cheats. I am not responsible for your
meeting such company in my room."
Estwicke gave a bitter laugh.
" What does it matter to me where I met him ?"
" It matters to me," said Meredith, tersely.
Estwicke was tramping back and forth the length of the
room.
"I thought I had given that thing up!" he cried, in a
tumult of despair. " I haven't touched a card for years.
I can't play in moderation. I can't, you see. I go wild,
wild ! It's an hereditary passion."
Meredith was a lawyer, and an acute one. He changed
his base with a celerity that did infinite credit to his
224 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MURFREE
acumen. Estwicke was taking himself to task, not his
entertainer. He briskly joined the onslaught.
" Oh, hereditary 1" he sneered. " I have often noticed
that a man credits his father with his own pet vices.
What was the reason you let the rascal have the money ?"
"I had no reason, no positive idea; it. was only an
impulse," said Estwicke. "Somehow when I got it I
couldn't touch it. That I should brawl with a fellow
like that for money ! But why not ?" he added, after a
sullen pause. "He is as good as I am; that is, I am as
bad as he is."
" Bless me!" exclaimed Meredith, satiriqally, " I wouldn't
say that."
" I know better. He doesn't."
" But some of it was yours on the strictest moral con
struction."
Estwicke stood in the middle of the floor staring at his
visitor.
" I mean the money you originally bet," Meredith
explained.
This was a distinction that Estwicke could not grasp.
" It was all mine !" he bawled. " My full raked the
pool !" He came hastily and sat down in the green-rep
arm-chair, expounding how the game stood, checking off
his cards and Casey's on the fingers of his right and left
hands, respectively. His excited words in their confused
haste stumbled and tripped up over each other in his
throat; his eyes were eager and earnest; he trembled
with the intensity of his interest. Even the wordy
lawyer could not interrupt.
"Well," he said, when Estwicke had concluded, "I knew
all that before; and it's a nice business. You told me once
that you have nothing but your pay. I should think," ho
continued, exasperatingly, " this night's work would make
MURFREE] AN ASTONISHED GAMBLER. 225
a considerable hole in it. I hope you feel that you have
invested your time and money to the best advantage."
" Oh, I got disgusted with the money. I couldn't endure
to keep step, morally, you know, with that contemptible,
poor devil. I tell you he looked at the money with tears
in his eyes."
Meredith stared.
" This is rather a belated sympathy with the l poor devil,' "
he said, sarcastically. " Captain Estwicke," he continued,
"I don't pretend to understand you, but I feel it almost a
duty to tell you how heartily I disapprove of your conduct
to-night. Pistoling a man at a card-table for cheating is a
practically unprovoked, cruel, and abhorrent crime."
" Didn't do it," said Estwicke, grimly, on the defensive.
"You would have done it, if he had not instantly
yielded."
" Ha-a-rdly," drawled Estwicke. The tone was signifi
cant. Meredith looked at him expectantly. Estwicke
glanced uneasily up at the ceiling, then down at his boots.
As he turned doubtfully toward Meredith, their eyes met,
and he broke into an uproarious peal of laughter.
""Why, man," he cried, hilariously, "the pistol wasn't
loaded !"
He drew the weapon from his pocket and held it at
arm's length, revolving its empty chambers, and setting
the walls to echoing its sharp click.
Meredith laughed too, partly in sympathy with the
other's boisterous enjoyment of what he considered so
exquisitely flavored a joke and partly in relief. "I'm glad
you let me know this," he declared. " Forget what I said
when I didn't know it." Presently he added, with a view
of contingencies of which Estwicke seemed utterly incapa
ble, "But suppose that that fellow had persisted in heaving
up the thing he had in his pocket ?"
in.
226 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [MURFREE
" Oh, but I was sure he wouldn't. Moral suasion, you
know. There's a wonderful deal of moral suasion in giving
a man a peep down an iron tube. It puts the best of us
out of countenance." After a pause, he said, gravely,
" Nothing would have induced me to hurt the man ; be
sides, I couldn't. All I wanted was my own money."
" And you didn't want that little long."
" I feel like the devil," said Estwicke, impatiently. "I'm
so much like the devil to-night that I don't know us
apart." . . .
The young lawyer had risen to take leave. With an
almost affectionate impulse he paused at the door. " Est
wicke," he said, " I want to tell you you're a good fellow."
" That I am," said Estwicke, mockingly. " I'm mighty
good."
He looked about him wearily, with a haggard, hunted
face, after the door had closed. Then suddenly he rang
the bell, called for his bill, packed his traps dexterously,
methodically, and in surprisingly small compass, one of
his military accomplishments, and the full moon was
hardly swinging past the meridian before he was bowling
swiftly along the turnpike among the hills that encom
passed the city. Through the carriage windows he saw it
lying behind him in many an undulation, its domes and
its mansard roofs idealized in the glamour and the distance
to a castellated splendor. It had faded away in the dusky
shadows long before he caught sight of the white-framed
barrack-buildings. His heart warmed at the thought of
his friends so close at hand, of the familiar surroundings,
and the old routine. He saw the sentry's bayonet glisten
in the moonlight and catch on its point a star of fire. And
the evening and the scene he had left slipped into the
dark corners of his recollection.
BOKER] THE BLACK REGIMENT. 227
THE BLACK REGIMENT.
GEOKGE H. BOKER.
[George Henry Boker is a native of Philadelphia, where he was
born in 1823. He has been an active writer of plays and poems, and
has served in a public capacity, having been appointed United States
Minister to Constantinople in 1871 and to St. Petersburg in 1874.
Of his plays the only one well adapted to the stage is " Francesca da
Rimini," a work whose poetic and dramatic merit and elevated senti
ment have brought it into deserved popularity as an acting drama.
Many of his poems display a high grade of poetic ability, while the
one we quote is among the most vigorous and striking of American
war Ivrics.]
DARK as the clouds of even,
Banked in the western heaven,
Waiting the breath that lifts
All the dead mass, and drifts
Tempest and falling brand
Over a ruined land,
So still and orderly,
Arm to arm, knee to knee,
Waiting the great event,
Stands the black regiment.
Down the long dusky line
Teeth gleam and eyeballs shine ;
And the bright bayonet,
Bristling and firmly set,
Flashed with a purpose grand,
Long ere the sharp command
Of the fierce rolling drum
Told them their time had come,
Told them what work was sent
For the black regiment.
228 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
" Now," the flag-sergeant cried,
"Though death and hell betide,-
Let the whole nation see
If we are fit to be
Free in this land ; or bound
Down, like the whining hound,
Bound with red stripes of pain
In our cold chains again !"
Oh ! what a shout there went
From the black regiment !
" Charge !" Trump and drum awoke ,
Onward the bondmen broke ;
Bayonet and sabre-stroke
Yainly opposed their rush.
Through the wild battle's crush,
With but one thought aflush.
Driving their lords like chaff,
In the guns' mouths they laugh ;
Or at the slippery brands
Leaping with open hands,
Down they tear man and horse,
Down in their awful course ;
Trampling with bloody heel
Over the crashing steel ;
All their eyes forward bent,
Eushed the black regiment.
" Freedom !" their battle-cry,
" Freedom I or leave to die 1"
Ah ! and they meant the word,
Not as with us 'tis heard,
Not a mere party shout ;
They gave their spirits out,
BROOKS] FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN. 229
Trusted the end to God,
And on the gory sod
Eolled in triumphant blood,
Glad to strike one free blow,
Whether for weal or woe ;
Glad to breathe one free breath,
Though on the lips of death ;
Praying alas ! in vain I
That they might fall again,
So they could once more see
That burst of liberty !
This was what " freedom" lent
To the black regiment.
Hundreds on hundreds fell;
But they are resting well ;
Scourges and shackles strong
Never shall do them wrong.
Oh, to the living few,
Soldiers, be just and true !
Hail them as comrades tried ;
Fight with them side by side ;
Never, in field or tent,
Scorn the black regiment I
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN.
JAMES BROOKS.
L" A Seven Months' Run," by James Brooks, consists of very rapid
notes of a very hasty journey round the world, contributed in the form
of letters to the New York Evening Express. But these letters are
written in an amusing strain, and with a clearness of detail within
in. 20
230 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BROOKS
their "brevity of outline that makes them at once entertaining and in
structive reading. As illustration of the author's racy style and fresh
ness of comment on the strange scenes of the Oriental world, we give
the chapter describing his first sight of life in Japan.]
SOMETHING new! Everything new, at last! Under
your world now, how everything in this world seems up
side down, and down-side up ! I feel very like, nay, just
like, the Boston Yankee, who first saw Boston, and felt his
rural ideas revolving within his head, and I act more like
Ben Franklin, the printer, when he first turned up in
Philadelphia, with both eyes as open as saucers, munch
ing his roll, staring at and astounded by everything. Long
and long ago, after travelling over many lands, I was sure
I had reached the Horatian nil admirari ; but I am mis
taken, for I am wondering over everything to-day.
At daybreak on the Sabbath morning our good ship bade
good-by to the pretty-well-behaved Pacific, and turned a
cape and the light-houses that opened on us the bay of
Yedo. Up early, to see and to study, the first living
things to refresh our long-ocean-wearied eyes were the
fishermen of the island of Niphon. Report says (I have
not tried its truth) that Japan is about the best fishing-
ground of the universe. You know (or, if you don't, you
ought) that in the Boston State-House, over the Speaker's
chair, is a codfish, the emblem of Massachusetts' rise,
progress, and prosperity before the days of East India
ships and the spinning-jenny. The fish, in like manner,
is reverenced here in Japan. It is a basis of Japan life
and prosperity. Hence I levelled eyes and glasses, as
naturally man will, on the first life seen, that is, on the
fishermen. What queer boats! What queer oars, or
sculls I What queer-looking sails, of mats ! Boreas can
hardly blow over such broad-cast boats. Nobody rows ;
everybody sculls ; and they scull with one oar, two, three,
BROOKS] FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN. 231
four, five, six, as many as need be for the boat or junk,
and they scull as fast as they could row in such heavy
and clumsy boats. History says wharf-history: I never
read it in books, but it may be true that when the Ty
coons and Daimios found the Japanese sculling off, or
sailing off, from Japan, they ordered the better class, of
Chinese junks, that the Japanese had been imitating, to
be so constructed that they could never well get over to
China, ay, to be so heavy, so clumsy, that Neptune, in
his roaring moods, would tip them over, or roll them
under, if ever they ventured out of sight of land. Hence
the ugliness of these junks, and ocean-uselessness. The
June California steamer, out from here, picked up the
crew of one, three-fourths of them starved to death, be
cause they could not find their way from Hiogo to Yoko
hama, having been blown out of sight of land. The fisher
men we met, such of them as had seines, were scaring
the fish into them by pounding furiously on the bottom
of the boats ! Can this be done ? I charge nothing to
the Cape-Codders for letting them into the Japanese
secret of catching fish. But what most astonished us
new-comers was the G-eorgia costume, minus the spurs,
of these interesting fishermen. The fishermen were as
naked as the fish, that is, the most of the fishermen.
Some of them had something on, but nothing to speak
of. Anatomy could be studied practically, as well as
phrenology, and plr^siognomy, and physiology, that is,
muscular and venous anatomy. Some of our passengers,
at first, were a little confused and confounded over this
new development of life, and dropped their lorgnettes ,
but I see the same passengers now in Yokohama streets,
and they are done blushing already.
The first day an American spends in Europe, say in
England (I speak now for myself), is a great day, if not
232 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BROOKS
the greatest, of his life. The beautifully green fields, the
hedges, the cottages, etc., bewitch him. But this first day
in this Eastern Asia does not exactly bewitch so much as
it bedevils a traveller. The livery of a trading company's
boatman, sent out to escort home a passenger by the
steamer, what was it, think you? A little turban on
the head, with nakedness to the hips, and then a yellow
sash girdle, over blue nankin trousers, running into straw
shoes ! Was not this a novel livery ? Can any of the
grandees of Hyde Park, or of th^e Central Park, come quite
up to this great swell ? Then numerous police or custom
house boats crowded around us, the most of the boatmen
with respectable clothes on (not all), some with one sword,
others with two. Some of them had on baskets for bon
nets, or hats, made of straw or bamboo ; others, with
heads wrapped up in handkerchiefs ; others, with nothing
on their heads but their cues, not pig-tails of Chinese mag
nificence, but short pipe-stem cues, on the top of the crown.
A hundred boats, as usual, were clamorous and greedy for
one passenger, and hundreds of hands were ready to grab
every trunk and carpet-bag, New York as well as Yoko
hama life, you will add. The arrival of a Pacific mail
steamer from California is a great event in Yokohama,
and soon the ship was full of Europeans, to see and to
study what was going on.
The Japan custom-house officers are not very particular
as to baggage, not even looking into it, though very pecu
liar. They have ears, but our lingo is not theirs, and
hence they profit in nothing therefrom ; and they have
eyes, but they see nothing custom-house-ward thereby.
Hence we slip and slide in without the least trouble : but
their five per cent, ad valorem is not the forty, and fifty,
and one hundred per cent, in our American civilization;
and therefore there is not so much need of our American
BROOKS] FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN. 233
spying or searching. Soldiers with not very alarming-
looking muskets, save in their sword-bayonets, watch
over " the Bund," as they call it here, a sort of pier or
wharf. In custom-house tongue it might be called a gate
or portcullis. We pass them, and then begin a series of
cryings or yellings that scare fresh-come European or
American horses half to death, and even frighten our pas
senger dogs, and would frighten us, if we were not ex
pecting anything and everything new. " Yeow," " yeow,"
or " yow," " yow," or " yew," " yew," or something like it
in the cat-mewing line, are screaming whole battalions of
porters and carriers ; and men -horses are dragging, on
miserable round plank wheels, granite, and timber, or
lumber. "Yeow," "yeow," goes up to heaven, and rolls
over all the earth. It is "yeow," "yeow," at daybreak in
the morning, and " yeow," " yeow," all night, among the
coolie Japs, loading and unloading the ships in the harbor.
There is no need of horses (I have already come to that
conclusion), or elephants, where men can carry such loads.
When, years ago, off Constantinople, I first saw men
turned into horses, I thought that was something wonder
ful ; but these one-horse Japs, with their enormous loads,
shame the Turks, the Grand Turks, even. What glorious
muscular legs they have, so admirably developed ! I wish
I had a pair of them to trot over the world with. What
brawny arms, pointed off, though, with little hands!
Gymnast or boxer would have to stand back in "a
primary" where a fellow had such props, or such pointers
There comes a travelling restaurant ! That's the way to
live, where your dinner comes on a fellow's shoulders to
you, a whole score of you, and where you do not have to
go to the dinner, where rice and chop-sticks, and fish,
raw fish, too, are all ready for you, where you can squat
down on a mat, and have a Delmonico treat for only a few
in. 20*
234 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BROOKS
" cash," that is, two, or three, or four " Tempos," not five
cents, even, none of your five-dollar " Delmonico's."
There's life, there's happiness, there's economy. True, it
rains ; but has not the fellow a basket-hat on, that sheds
all rain as well as all sun ? not a mere parapluie, a rain
shedder, as the French call it, but an umbrella, or ombrella,
too, in Latina lingua. And has he not brought out, too,
to shed the rain, a great straw cloak, or mantilla, that
covers all but his legs, and his one-story mounted shoes,
or pattens, tied on by a rope of braided straw? If it
were not for the looks of the thing among the Yankee
and English aristocracy of Yokohama, I would squat
down and try the rice (not the raw fish) of that dinner.
If one could only learn to squat like a Jap, one never
would again use a chair, or a sofa. The fact is, in many
things " civilization," as it is called, is a humbug. Squat
ting on a clean mat, if you have only been brought up to
it, I am sure, from what I see here, is easier and preferable
to sitting in a chair. The muscles of the legs have only
to be trained from babyhood up, and a chair becomes as
much of a nuisance as now is to us this mat. See how
nicely our children squat, or young ladies, even, who will
sew or write in bed, or on the floor, and by hours, too,
without a groan. Hence, I reason, some of our civiliza
tion may be a humbug, if not much of it. There are a
lot of tumble-boys, funny fellows, with caps on their
heads, stuck with red and black feathers, looking like
roosters' combs, who roll up, and roll over, like balls of
dirt, and then roll all together . . . They want only "a
cash," a tenth part of a cent, thus to tumble, over and
over. "All-Eight," in the American-Japanese jugglers'
corps, was thus trained in a Japan street, and graduated
in that school. There is a mother with a baby on her
back, slung a la American Indian pappoose, and the poor
BROOKS] FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF JAPAN. 235
baby is fast asleep, with its head toppling all about. The
mother, perhaps, would not have much, if any, clothes on,
if it had not been necessary for her to throw over her the
sack for the baby to sleep or live in. There is a carpenter,
pulling his foreplane toward him, not pushing it from
him, beautifully clad, exquisitely, I may add. No French
modiste even could have clothed him richer, with a livery
on that no French high chamberlain could devise better ;
but the poor devil's only clothes, save a cotton roll about
his loins, and his straw shoes, were his skin, tattooed with
all sorts of tortoises, storks, and other Jap divinities. It
cost only three and a half dollars, that livery, they tell
me, and it is the pride and glory of a true Jap to have it.
You could not buy a hat in New York for that, you know.
But to earn the three dollars and a half to get the livery,
that's the difficulty. That surplus is a year's saving ; and
if it were not so, all Japanese of the working classes
would have on the livery. There is a wrestler, a big,
burly fellow, the picked man of his clan, who was big
enough to pass for a European. Wrestling here is a quasi
noble profession .... It entitles a man to have two
swords on, and to look down on common fellows. An
actor in Japan is nothing, nobody, ranking only with
beggars ; while the wrestler is a grand cockalorum. An
actor has no rank, no honors, and everybody looks down
upon his (with us) great profession, and the only social dif
ference between him and the beggar is, that he may rise, the
beggar never. The beggar, by the way, bequeaths the pro
fession from sire to son. The boy must follow the trade of
the father. There is no hope, no future, for him. Not
even the coolie will work in the same gang with him.
Put a beggar to work in a coolie gang, and every coolie
" strikes" at once, refusing thus to associate with a beg
gar. When the beggar sees you coming, he prostrates
236 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [BROOKS
himself on his knees, then falls upon the ground, and
holds up his hand only " for cash." He utters a most woe
begone cry to touch your heart and to win your sympa
thies. There comes something with two swords on, pony-
mounted, and his betto. The betto is a boy who follows
his lordship's pony, and the pony races, and the betto
races. Which will beat, ask you ? The pony never.
The betto has on his tattoo livery-straw shoes, it may be,
no shoes, perhaps. The betto will keep up with that
pony day after day, thirty miles a day, and no pony can
overdo that on a journey. This betto takes care of the
pony, watches over and feeds him, ard helps to take care
of his master, too. There is hair- dressing going on,
public hair-dressing, on the front steps of the shop or
house, one man dressing another man's hair and doing
up his cue. The women dress their hair in our old moth
ers' fashion of gone-by times (none of your long tails of
false hair, said I, dangling behind, with a skewer to hold
it up on top of the head), beautiful, glossy, black hair.
" Thank the Lord," said I to a Yokohama American lady,
"we have reached a country at last where the women
wear only their own hair!" "You are much mistaken,"
said she : " all that hair on top of Madame Jap's head is
false hair." Madame shaves off, or cuts off, the original
crown, and piles on the false hair. Once a week, only, is
the hair done up, skewered, and glued, Spanish (Cadiz)
style, thus defying the winds and the fogs for a whole
week, and kept in place, nights, while sleeping on the
mat-bed, with a wooden pillow under the nape of the
neck. Woman, thus, you see, is woman everywhere.
There is nothing true outside of their heads, though all
so true and sweet inside. These black teeth, too, of these
Japanese Madames, are they not terrible ? How can
husbands ever kiss such black-teethed wives? When a
WEEMS] KEIMER'S NEW RELIGION. 237
woman is married here, she blackens her teeth, while our
wives and daughters, when married, put on not only a
marriage-ring, but all the other rings they can get. Such
is fashion. But what more sense in the rings,, and ear
rings, and bracelets, these emblems of vassalage, I dare
not write handcuffs, than in these black teeth ? Never
theless, the black teeth are beautiful black teeth, molars
and eye-teeth of the first chop. They put on some white
preparation that turns them black, and they renew the
operation about every week. These Jap women only
miss, many of them, being very, very pretty. When
their copper color is whitened up, they would pass for
brunettes, even in America. But if they are married
these abominable black teeth! this boca negra! But
fashion is everything.
KEIMER'S ATTEMPT TO FOUND A NEW RELIGION.
MASON L. WEEMS.
[This lively bit of literary chat, which can scarcely be called bi
ography, is an extract from the "Life of Franklin," by Mason L.
Weems, the most amusingly entertaining, but the least trustworthy,
of American biographers. Born in Virginia in 1759, he wrote " A
History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits, of General
George Washington," and biographies of Marion, Franklin, and
Penn. These works have a basis of biography and a large super
structure of Weems, the plain facts of history being embellished in
an extraordinary manner, and conversations being invented as freely
as ancient historians invented orations for their characters. Weems
died in 1825.]
BEN was naturally comic in a high degree, and this
pleasant vein, greatly improved by his present golden
238 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WBTSMS
prospects, betrayed him into many a frolic with Keimer,
to whom he had prudently attached himself as a journey
man until the Annis should sail. The reader will excuse
Ben for these frolics when he comes to learn what were
their aims ; as also what an insufferable old creature this
Keimer was. Silly as a BOOBY, yet vain as a JAY, and
garrulous as a PIE, he could never rest but when in a stiff
argument, and acting the orator, at which he looked on
Cicero himself as but a boy to him. He was a fine target
for Ben's SOCRATIC ARTILLERY, which he frequently played
off on the old pomposo with great effect. By questions
artfully put, he would obtain of him certain points, which
Keimer readily granted, as seeing in them no sort of con
nection with the matter in debate. But yet these points,
when granted, like distant nets slyly hauling round a
porpoise or sturgeon, would, by degrees, so completely
circumvent the silly fish, that with all his flouncing and
fury he could never extricate himself, but rather got more
deeply entangled. Often caught in this way, he became
at last so afraid of Ben's questions, that he would turn as
mad when one of them was "poked at him" as a bull at
sight of a scarlet cloak, and would not answer the simplest
question without first asking, " Well, and what would you
make of that ?" He came at length to form so exalted an
opinion of Ben's talents for refutation, that he seriously
proposed to him one day that they should turn out to
gether and preach up a NEW EELIGION ! Keimer was to
preach and make the converts, and Ben to answer and
put to silence the gainsayers. He said a world of money
might be made by it.
On hearing the outlines of this new religion, Ben found
great fault with it. This he did only that he might have
another frolic with Keimer; but his frolics were praise
worthy, for they all " leaned to virtue's side." The truth
WEEMS] KEIMER'S NEW RELIGION. 239
is, he saw that Keimer was prodigiously a hypocrite. At
every whipstitch he could play the knave, and then for a
pretence would read his Bible. But it was not the moral
part of the Bible, the sweet precepts and parables of the
Gospel, that he read. No. verily. Food so angelic was
not at all to the tooth of his childish fancy, which de
lighted in nothing but the novel and curious. Like too
many of the saints nowadays, he would rather read about
the WITCH OF ENDOR than the GOOD SAMARITAN, and hear a
sermon on the brazen candlesticks than on the LOVE OF GOD.
And then, O dear! who was Melchizedek? Or where
was the land of Nod ? Or, was it in the shape of a serpent
or a monkey that the devil tempted Eve ? As he was one
day poring over the Pentateuch as busy after some nice
game of this sort as a terrier on the track of a weasel, he
came to that famous text where Moses says, " Thou shalt
not mar the corners of thy beard" Ay ! this was the di
vinity for Keimer. It struck him like a new light from
the clouds : then, rolling his eyes as from an apparition,
he exclaimed, "Miserable man that I am! and was I in
deed forbidden to mar even the corners of my beard, and
have I been all this time shaving myself as smooth as an
eunuch ! Fire and brimstone, how have you been boiling
up for me, and I knew it not ! Hell, deepest hell, is my
portion, that's a clear case, unless I reform. And reform
I will, if I live. Yes, my poor naked chin, if ever I but
get another crop upon thee and I suffer it to be touched
by the ungodly steel, then let my right hand forget hei
cunning."
From that day he became as shy of a razor as ever
Samson was. His long black whiskers whistled in the
wind. And then to see how he would stand up before his
glass and stroke them down, it would have reminded you
of some ancient Druid adjusting the sacred Mistletoe.
240 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WEKMS
Ben could not bear that sight ! Such shameless neglect
of angel morality, and yet such fidgeting about a goatish
beard ! " Heavens, sir," said he to Keimer, one day, in
the midst of a hot argument,
" Who can think, with common sense,
A smooth-shaved face gives God offence ?
Or that a whisker hath a charm,
Eternal justice to disarm?"
He even proposed to him to get shaved. Keimer swore
outright that he would never lose his beard. A stiff
altercation ensued. But Keimer getting angry, Ben
agreed at last to give up the beard. He said that, " as
the beard at best was but an external, a mere excrescence,
he would not insist on that as so very essential. But
certainly, sir," continued he, " there is one thing that is."
Keimer wanted to know what that was.
" Why, sir, 1 ' added Ben, " this turning out and preach
ing up a NEW EELIGION is, without doubt, a very serious
affair, and ought not to be undertaken too hastily. Much
time, sir, in my opinion at least, should be spent in making
preparation, in which fasting should certainly have a large
share."
Keimer, who was a great glutton, said he could never
fast.
Ben then insisted that if they were not to fast alto
gether, they ought, at any rate, to abstain from animal
food, and live as the saints of old did, on vegetables and
water.
Keimer shook his head, and said that if he were to live
on vegetables and water he should soon die..
Ben assured him that it was entirely a mistake. He
had tried it often, he said, and could testify from his own
experience that he was never more healthy and cheerful
WBEMS] KEIMER S NEW RELIGION 241
than when he lived on vegetables alone. "Die from feed
ing on vegetables, indeed ! "Why, sir, it contradicts reason,
and contradicts all history, ancient and profane. There
was Daniel, and his three young friends, Shadrach, Me-
shach, and Abednego,. who fed on a vegetable diet, of
choice ; did they languish and die of it ? Or rather did
they not display a rouge of health and fire of genius far
beyond those silly youths who crammed on all the luxu
ries of the royal table? And that amiable Italian noble
man, Lewis Cornaro, who says of bread, that it was such
a dainty to his palate that he was almost afraid, at times,
it was too good for him to eat ; did he languish and die
of this simple fare ? On the contrary, did he not outlive
three generations of gratified epicures, and, after all, go
off in his second century, like a bird of Paradise, singing
the praises of Temperance and Virtue ? And pray, sir,"
continued Ben, " where's the wonder of all this ? Must not
the blood that is formed of vegetables be the purest in
nature? And then, as the spirits depend on the blood,
must not the spirits secreted from such blood be the
purest too ? And when this is the case with the blood
and spirits, which are the very life of the man, must not
that man enjoy the best chance for such healthy secretions
and circulations as are most conducive to long and happy
life?"
While Ben argued at this rate, Keimer regarded hint
with a look which seemed to say, "Very true, sir; all
this is very true ; but still I cannot go it."
Ben, still unwilling to give up his point, thought he
would make one more push at him. " What a pity it is,"
said he, with a sigh, "that the blessings of so sublime a
religion should be all lost to the world, merely for lack of
a little fortitude on the part of its propagators !"
This was touching him on the right string; for Keimer
in L q 21
242 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WEEMS
was a man of such vanity, that a little flattery would put
him up to anything. So, after a few hems and hcCs, he
said he believed he would, at any rate, make a trial of
this new regimen.
Having thus carried his point, Ben immediately engaged
a poor old woman of the neighborhood to become their
^ook, and gave her, oif-hand, written receipts for three-
and-forty dishes, not one of which contained a single
atom of fish, flesh, or fowl. For their first day's break
fast on the new regimen, the old woman treated them with
a tureen of oat-meal gruel. Keimer was particularly
fond of his breakfast, at which a nice beef-steak with
onion sauce was a standing dish. It was as good as a
farce to Ben to see with what an eye Keimer regarded
the tureen, when, entering the room, in place of his steak,
hot, smoking, and savory, he beheld this pale, meagre-
looking slop.
"What have you got there?" said he, with a visage
grum. and scowling eye.
" A dish of hasty pudding," replied Ben, with the smile
of an innocent youth who had a keen appetite, with
something good to satisfy it, " a dish of nice hasty pud
ding, sir, made of oats."
" Of OATS !" retorted Keimer, with a voice raised to a
scream.
" Yes, sir, oafs," rejoined Ben ; " oats, that precious grain
which gives such elegance and fire to our noblest of quad
rupeds, the horse."
Keimer growled out that he was no horse, to eat oats.
'' No matter for that," replied Ben ; " 'tis equally good
for men."
Keimer denied that any human being ever eat oats.
"Ay!" said Ben, "and pray what's become of the
Scotch ? Don't they live on oats ? And yet where will
WEEMS] KEIMER'S NEW RELIGION. 243
you find a people so ' bonny, blithe, and gay,* a nation of
such wits and warriors ?"
As there was no answering this, Keimer sat down to
the tureen, and swallowed a few spoonfuls, but not with
out making as many wry faces as if it had been so much
jalap; while Ben, all smile and chat, breakfasted most
deliciously.
At dinner, by Ben's order, the old woman paraded a
trencher piled up with potatoes. Keimer's grumbling-fit
came on him again. "He saw clear enough," he said,
" that he was to be poisoned."
" Poh ! cheer up, man," replied Ben ; " this is your right
preacher's bread."
" Bread the d 1 !" replied Keimer, snarling.
"Yes, bread, sir," continued Ben, pleasantly, "the
bread of life, sir ; for where do you find such health and
spirits, such bloom and beauty, as among the honest-
hearted IRISH? and yet for their breakfast, dinner, and
supper the potato is their teetotum ; the first, second, and
third course."
In this way, Ben and his old woman went on with
Keimer, daily ringing the changes on oat-meal gruel,
roasted potatoes, boiled rice, and so on, through the whole
family of roots and grains in all their various genders,
moods, and tenses.
Sometimes, like a restive mule, Keimer would kick up
and show strong symptoms of flying the way. But then
Ben would prick him up again with a touch of his ruling
passion, vanity. " Only think, Mr. Keimer," he would
say, " only think what has been done by the founders of
new religions: how they have enlightened the ignorant,
polished the rude, civilized the savage, and made heroes
of those who were little better than brutes. Think, sir,
what Moses did among the stiff-necked Jews; what Ma-
244 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WEEM8
hornet did among the wild Arahs; and what you may do
among these gentle drab-coated Pennsylvanians." This,
like a spur in the flank of a jaded horse, gave Keimer a
new start, and pushed him on afresh to his gruel break
fasts and potato dinners. Ben strove hard to keep him
up to this gait. Often at table, and especially when he
saw that Keimer was in good humor and fed kindly, he
would give a loose to fancy, and paint the advantages of
their new regimen in the most glowing colors. "Ay, sir,"
he would say, letting drop at the same time his spoon, as
in an ecstasy of his subject, while his pudding on the plat
ter cooled, " ay, sir, now we are beginning to live like men
going a-preaching indeed. Let your epicures gormandize
their fowl, fish, and flesh, with draughts of intoxicating
liquors. Such gross, inflammatory food may suit the bru
tal votaries of Mars and Yenus. But our views, sir, are
different altogether; we are going to teach wisdom and
benevolence to mankind. This is a heavenly work, sir,
and our minds ought to be heavenly. Now, as the mind
depends greatly on the body, and the body on the food, we
should certainly select that which is of the most pure and
refining quality. And this, sir, is exactly the food to our
purpose. This mild potato, or this gentle pudding, is the
thing to insure the light stomach, the cool liver, the clear
head, and, above all, those celestial passions which become
a preacher that would moralize the world. And these
celestial passions, sir, let me add, though I don't pretend
to be a prophet, these celestial passions, sir, were you but
to stick to this diet, would soon shine out in your counte
nance with such apostolic majesty and grace as would
strike all beholders with reverence, and enable you to
carry the world before you."
Such was the style of Ben's rhetoric with old Keimer.
But it could not all do. For though these harangues
WEEMS] KEIMER S NEW RELIGION. 245
would sometimes make him fancy himself as big as Zoro
aster or Confucius, and talk as if he should soon have
the whole country running after him, and worshipping
him for the GREAT LAMA of the West, yet this divinity
fit was too much against the grain to last long. Unfortu
nately for poor Keimer, the kitchen lay between him and
his bishopric : and both nature and habit had so wedded
him to that swinish idol, that nothing could divorce him.
So, after having been led by Ben a " very d I of a life,"
as he called it, "/or three months" his flesh-pot appetites
prevailed, and he swore, " by his whiskers, he would suffer it
no longer" Accordingly, he ordered a nice roast pig for
dinner, and desired Ben to invite a young friend to dine
with them. Ben did so ; but neither himself nor his
young friend were anything the better for the pig. For,
before they could arrive, the pig being done, and his ap
petite beyond all restraint, Keimer had fallen on it and
devoured the whole. And there he sat panting and tor
pid as an ANACONDA who had just swallowed a young
buffalo. But still his looks gave sign that the " Ministers
of Grace" had not entirely deserted him, for at sight of
Ben and his young friend he blushed up to the eyelids,
and in a glow of scarlet, which showed that he paid dear
for his whistle (gluttony), he apologized for disappointing
them of their dinner. " Indeed, the smell of the pig," he
said, " was so sweet, and the nicely-browned skin so invit
ing, especially to him who had been long starved, that for
the soul of him he could not resist the temptation to taste
it; and then, O! if Lucifer himself had been at the door,
he must have gone on, let what would have been the
consequences." He said, too, " that for his part he was
glad it was a pig and not a hog, for that he verily believed
he should have bursted himself/' Then, leaning back in
his chair and pressing his swollen abdomen with his
in. 21*
246 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WEEMS
paws, he exclaimed, with an awkward laugh, " Well, I
don't believe I was ever cut out for a bishop 1" Here
ended the farce ; for Keimer never after this uttered
another word about his NEW RELIGION.
Ben used, laughing, to say that he drew Keimer into
this scrape that he might enjoy the satisfaction of starving
him out of his gluttony. And he did it also that he might
save the more for books and candles : their vegetable regi
men costing him, in all, rather less than three cents a
day ! To those who can spend twenty times this sum on
tobacco and whiskey alone, three cents per day must ap
pear a scurvy allowance, and of course poor Ben must be
sadly pitied. But such philosophers should remember
that all depends on our loves, whose property it is to
make bitter things sweet, and heavy things light.
For example : to lie out in the darksome swamp with
no other canopy but the sky, and no bed but the cold
ground, and his only music the midnight owl or scream
ing alligator, seems terrible to servile minds ; but it was
joy to Marion, whose " whole soul" as General Lee well
observes, " was devoted to liberty and country."
So, to shut himself up in a dirty printing-office, with
no dinner but a bit of bread, no supper but an apple, must,
appear to every epicure, as it did to Keimer, " a mere d I
of a life ;" but it was joy to Ben, whose whole soul waa
on his books, as the sacred lamps that were to guide him
to usefulness and glory.
Happy he who early strikes into the path of wisdom,
and bravely walks therein till habit sprinkles it with
roses. He shall be led as a lamb among the green pas
tures along the watercourses of pleasure, nor shall he
ever experience the pang of those
" Who see the right, and approve it too ;
Condemn the wrong and yet the wrong pursue."
DENNIE] JACK AND GILL. 247
JACK AND GILL: A CRITICISM.
JOSEPH DENNIE.
[Joseph Dennie, the author of the " Lay Preacher," and editor of
"The Portfolio," a periodical not surpassed in literary merit by any
similar contemporaneous publication, exercised, in his period, a most
beneficial influence on American literature. His own writings are
full of gayety and show excellent powers. The serio-comic specimen
of criticism we give is a good example. Mr. Dennie was born in
Boston in 1768, was educated at Harvard, read law after his gradua
tion, and began practice at "Walpole, New Hampshire. In 1799 he
removed to Philadelphia, and there began in 1800 the publication of
"The Portfolio." For five years it was a quarto weekly, and then
became an octavo monthly, which it remained until it ceased to be
issued in 1827. Mr. Dennie died in Philadelphia in 1812.]
AMONG critical writers, it is a common remark that the
fashion of the times has often given a temporary reputa
tion to performances of very little merit, and neglected
those much more deserving of applause. I therefore
rejoice that it has fallen to my lot to rescue from neglect
this inimitable poem ; for, whatever may be my diffidence,
as I shall pursue the manner of the most eminent critics,
it is scarcely possible to err. The fastidious reader will
doubtless smile when he is informed that the work, thus
highly praised, is a poem consisting only of four lines ;
but as there is no reason why a poet should be restricted
in his number of verses, as it would be a very sad misfor
tune if every rhymer were obliged to write a long as
well as a bad poem, and more particularly as these verses
contain more beauties than we often find in a poem of four
thousand, all objections to its brevity should cease. I
must at the same time acknowledge that at first I doubted
in what class of poetry it should be arranged. Its ex
treme shortness and its uncommon metre seemed to de-
248 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
grade it into a ballad; but its interesting subject, its unity
of plan, and, above all, its having a beginning, a middle,
and an end, decide its claim to the epic rank. I shall
now proceed, with the candor, though not with the acute-
ness, of a good critic, to analyze and display its various
excellencies.
The opening of the poem is Singularly beautiful :
Jack and Gill.
The first duty of the poet is to introduce his subject ; and
there is no part of poetry more difficult. We are told by
the great critic of antiquity that we should avoid begin
ning "ab ovo" but go into the business at once. Here our
author is very happy; for, instead of telling us, as an
ordinary writer would have done, who were the ancestors
of Jack and Gill, that the grandfather of Jack was a re
spectable farmer, that his mother kept a tavern at the
sign of the Blue Bear, and that Gill's father was a justice
of the peace (once of the quorum*), together with a cata
logue of uncles and aunts, he introduces them to us at
once in their proper persons.
The choice, too, of names is not unworthy of considera
tion. It would doubtless have contributed to the splendor
of the poem to have endowed the heroes with long and
sounding titles, which, by dazzling the eyes of the reader,
might prevent an examination of the work itself. These
adventitious ornaments are justly disregarded by our
author, who, by giving us plain Jack and Gill, has dis
dained to rely on extrinsic support. In the very choice
of appellations he is, however, judicious. Had he, for in
stance, called the first character John, he might have given
him more dignity ; but he would not so well harmonize
with his -neighbor, to whom, in the course of the work, it
will appear he must necessarily bo joined.
DENNIE] JACK AND GILL. 249
The personages being now seen, their situation is next
to be discovered. Of this we are immediately informed
in the subsequent line, when we are told
Jack and Gill
Went up a hill.
Here the imagery is distinct, yet the description concise.
We instantly figure to ourselves the two persons travelling
up an ascent, which we may accommodate to our own
ideas of declivity, barrenness, rockiness, sandiness, etc.,
all which, as they exercise the imagination, are beauties
of a high order. The reader will pardon my presumption,
if I here attempt to broach a new principle, which no
critic with whom I am acquainted has ever mentioned.
It is this, that poetic beauties may be divided into negative
and positive, the former consisting of mere absence of fault,
the latter in the presence of excellence ; the first of an
inferior order, but requiring considerable critical acumen
to discover them, the latter of a higher rank, but obvious
to the meanest capacity. To apply the principle in this
case, the poet meant to inform us that two persons were
going up a hill. ]STow, the act of going up a hill although
Locke would pronounce it a very complex idea, compre
hending person, rising ground, trees, etc., etc. is an opera
tion so simple as to need no description. Had the poet,
therefore, told us how the two heroes went up, whether
in a cart or a wagon, and entered into the thousand par
ticulars which the subject involves, they would have been
tedious, because superfluous. The omission of these little
incidents, and telling us simply that they went up the hill,
no matter how, is a very high negative beauty.
Having ascertained the names and conditions of the
parties, the reader becomes naturally inquisitive into th*ir
employment, and wishes to know whether their occupation
250 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS,
is worthy of them. This laudable curiosity is abundantly
gratified in the succeeding lines ; for
Jack and Gill
"Went up a hill,
To fetch a bucket of water.
Here we behold the plan gradually unfolding, a new scene
opens to our view, and the description is exceedingly
beautiful. We now discover their object, which we were
before left to conjecture. We see the two friends, like
Pylades and Orestes, assisting and cheering each other
in their labors, gayly ascending the hill, eager to arrive at
the summit, and to fill their bucket. Here, too, is a new
elegance. Our acute author could not but observe the
necessity of machinery, which has been so much com
mended by critics, and admired by readers. Instead, how
ever, of introducing a host of gods and goddesses, who
might have only impeded the journey of his heroes, by
the intervention of the bucket, which is, as it ought to
be, simple and conducive to the progress of the poem,
he has considerably improved on the ancient plan. In
the management of it, also, he has shown much judgment,
by making the influence of the machinery and the subject
reciprocal ; for while the utensil carries on the heroes, it
is itself carried on by them.
It has been objected (for every Homer has his Zoilus)
that their employment is not sufficiently dignified for epic
poetry; but, in answer to this, it must be remarked that
it was the opinion of Socrates, and many other philoso
phers, that beauty should be estimated by utility; and
surely the purpose of the heroes must have been beneficial.
They ascended the rugged mountain to draw water ; and
drawing water is certainly more conducive to human hap
piness than drawing blood, as do the boasted heroes of the
DENNIE] JACK AND GILL. 251
Iliad, or roving on the ocean and invading other men's
property, as did the pious ^Eneas. Yes! they went to
draw water. Interesting scene ! It might have been
drawn for the purpose of culinary consumption ; it might
have been to quench the thirst of the harmless animals
who relied on them for support; it might have been to
feed a sterile soil, and to revive the drooping plants which
they raised by their labors. Is not our author more judi
cious than Apollonius, who chooses for the heroes of his
Argonautics a set of rascals undertaking to steal a sheep
skin ? And, if dignity is to be considered, is not drawing
water a circumstance highly characteristic of antiquity ?
Do we not find the amiable Eebecca busy at the well?
Does not one of the maidens in the Odyssey delight us by
her diligence in the same situation ? and has not a learned
Dean proved that it was quite fashionable in Peloponnesus?
Let there be an end to such frivolous remarks.
But the descriptive part is now finished, and the author
hastens to the catastrophe. At what part of the mountain
the well was situated, what was the reason of the sad mis
fortune, or how the prudence of Jack forsook him, we are
not informed ; but so, alas ! it happened,
Jack fell down
Unfortunate John ! At the moment when he was nimbly,
for aught we know, going up the hill, perhaps at the
moment when his toils were to cease, and he had filled the
bucket, he made an unfortunate step, his centre of gravity,
as the philosophers would say, fell beyond his base, and he
tumbled. The extent of his fall does not, however, appear
until the next line, as the author feared to overwhelm us
by too immediate a disclosure of his whole misfortune.
Buoyed by hope, we suppose his affliction not quite reme
diless, that his fall is an accident to which the wayfarers
252 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
of this life are daily liable, and we anticipate his immedi
ate rise to resume his labors. But how are we undeceived
by the heart-rending tale that
Jack fell down
And broke his crown
Nothing now remains but to deplore the premature fate
of the unhappy John. The mention of the crown has much
perplexed the commentators. But my learned reader will
doubtless agree with me in conjecturing that, as the crown
is often used metaphorically for the head, and as that part
is, or, without any disparagement to the unfortunate suf
ferer, might have been, the heaviest, it was really his peri
cranium which sustained the damage. Having seen the
fate of Jack, we are anxious to know the lot of his com
panion. Alas !
And Gill came tumbling after.
Here the distress thickens on us. Unable to support the
loss of his friend, he followed him. determined to share his
disaster, and resolved that, as they had gone up together,
they should not be separated as they came down.
Of the bucket we are told nothing ; but, as it is prob
able that it fell with its supporters, we have a scene of
misery unequalled in the whole compass of tragic descrip
tion. Imagine to ourselves Jack rapidly descending, per
haps rolling over and over down the mountain, the bucket,
as the lighter, moving along, and pouring forth (if it had
been filled) its liquid stream, Gill following in confusion,
with a quick and circular and headlong motion ; add to
this the dust, which they might have collected and dis
persed, with the blood which must have flowed from
John's head, and we will witness a catastrophe highly
shocking, and feel an irresistible impulse to run for a doc
tor. The sound, too, charmingly " echoes to the sense,"
PERRY] AFTER THE BALL. 253
Jack fell down
And broke his crown,
And Gill came tumbling after.
The quick succession of movements is indicated by an
equally rapid motion of the short syllables ; and in the
last line Gill rolls with a greater sprightliness and vivacity
than even the stone of Sisyphus.
Having expatiated so largely on its particular merits,
let us conclude by a brief review of its most prominent
beauties. The subject is the fall of men, a subject high,
interesting, worthy of a poet ; the heroes, men who do not
commit a single fault, and whose misfortunes are to be
imputed, not to indiscretion, but to destiny. To the illus
tration of the subject every part of the poem conduces.
Attention is neither wearied by multiplicity of trivial
incidents, nor distracted by frequency of digression. The
poet prudently clipped the wings of imagination, and
repressed the extravagance of metaphorical decoration.
All is simple, plain, consistent. The moral, too, that
part without which poetry is useless sound, has not
escaped the view of the poet. When we behold two
young men, who but a short moment before stood up
in all the pride of health, suddenly falling down a hill,
how must we lament the instability of all things !
AFTER THE BALL.
NORA PERRY.
[Most of our poets of any eminence have produced some one poem
that has become specially popular, often alone representing the poet to
the great majority of readers. This is the case with Nora Perry's
' After the Ball," which has been quoted and requoted, yet whose
ITT. 22
254 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [PERRY
interest has never grown stale to the lovers of genuine poetry. The
author is a graceful and musical writer, and deservedly popular. Her
works are " After the Ball, and Other Poems," " Her Lover's Friend,
and Other Poems," "The Tragedy of the Unexpected, and Other
Stories," etc.]
THEY sat and combed their beautiful hair,
Their long, bright tresses, one by one,
As they laughed and talked in the chamber there,
After the revel was done.
Idly they talked of waltz and quadrille,
Idly they laughed, like other girls,
Who over the fire, when all is still,
Comb out their braids and curls.
Robes of satin and Brussels lace,
Knots of flowers and ribbons, too,
Scattered about in every place,
For the revel is through.
And Maud and Madge in robes of white,
The prettiest night-gowns under the sun,
Stockingless, slipperless, sit in the night,
For the revel is done,
Sit and comb their beautiful hair,
Those wonderful waves of brown and gold,
Till the fire is out in the chamber there,
And the little bare feet are cold.
Then out of the gathering winter chill,
All out of the bitter Saint Agnes weather,
While the fire is out and the house is still,
Maud and Madge together,
PERKY] AFTER THE BALL. 255
Maud and Madge in robes of white,
The prettiest night-gowns under the sun,
Curtained away from the chilly night,
After the revel is done,
Float along in a splendid dream,
To a golden gittern's tinkling tune,
While a thousand lustres shimmering stream,
In a palace's grand saloon.
Flashing of jewels, and flutter of laces,
Tropical odors sweeter than musk,
Men and women with beautiful faces
And eyes of tropical dusk,
And one face shining out like a star,
One face haunting the dreams of each,
And one voice, sweeter than others are,
Breaking into silvery speech,
Telling, through lips of bearded bloom,
An old, old story over again,
As down the royal bannered room,
To the golden gittern's strain,
Two and two, they dreamily walk,
While an unseen spirit walks beside,
And, all unheard in the lovers' talk,
He claimeth one for a bride.
Oh, Maud and Madge, dream on together,
With never a pang of jealous fear !
For, ere the bitter Saint Agnes weather
Shall whiten another year,
256 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
Eobed for the bridal, and robed for the tomb,
Braided brown hair, and golden tress,
There'll be only one of you left for the bloom
Of the bearded lips to press,
Only one for the bridal pearls,
The robe of satin and Brussels lace,
Only one to blush through her curls
At the sight of a lover's face.
Oh, beautiful Madge, in your bridal white,
For you the revel has just begun ;
But for her who sleeps in your arms to-night
The revel of life is done !
But robed and crowned with your saintly bliss,
Queen of heaven and bride of the sun,
Oh, beautiful Maud, you'll never miss
The kisses another hath won !
ORATION ON THE DEATH OF WASHINGTON.
HENRY LEE.
[We give a portion of this celebrated oration, one sentence of which
will live in the memory of the American people while the name of
Washington is remembered, namely, that George Washington was
" first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his country
men." The name of Lee is one which occupies a prominent position
in the political genealogy of America. Henry Lee, the " Light-Horse
Harry" of the Eevolutionary war, was a prominent cavalry officer on
LEE] ORATION ON THE DEATH OF WASHINGTON. 257
the side of the republic, born in Virginia in 1756. He was selected by
Congress in 1799 to pronounce a eulogy on Washington. He died in
Georgia in 1818. One of his sons was General Kobert E. Lee, the
Confederate leader in the civil war.]
How, my fellow-citizens, shall I single to your grateful
hearts his pre-eminent worth? Where shall I begin in
opening to your view a 'character throughout sublime?
Shall I speak of his warlike achievements, all springing
from obedience to his country's will, all directed to his
country's good ?
Will you go with me to the banks of the Monongahela,
to see our youthful Washington supporting in the dismal
hour of Indian victory the ill-fated Braddock, and saving,
by his judgment and his valor, the remains of a defeated
army, pressed by the conquering savage foe? Or when,
oppressed America nobly resolving to risk her all in de
fence of her violated right, he was elevated by the unani
mous vote of Congress to the command of her armies?
Will you follow him to the high grounds of Boston, where
to an undisciplined, courageous, and virtuous yeomanry
his presence gave the stability of system and infused the
invincibility of love of country? Or shall I carry you to
the painful scenes of Long Island, York Island, and 'New
Jersey, when, combating superior and gallant armies, aided
by powerful fleets and led by chiefs high in the roll of fame,
he stood the bulwark of our safety, undismayed by disas-
1ers, unchanged by change of fortune? Or will you view
him in the precarious fields of Trenton, where deep gloom,
unnerving every arm, reigned triumphant through our
thinned, worn-down, unaided ranks, himself unknown?
Dreadful was the night. It was about this time of win
ter; the storm raged; the Delaware, rolling furiously
with floating ice, forbade the approach of man. Wash
ington, self-collected, viewed the tremendous scene. His
in. r 22*
258 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [LEE
country called ; unappalled by surrounding dangers, he
passed to the hostile shore ; he fought, he conquered.
The morning sun cheered the American world. Our
country rose on the event, and her dauntless chief, pur
suing his blow, completed in the lawns of Princeton
what his vast soul had conceived on the shores of .the
Delaware.
Thence to the strong grounds of Morristown he led his
small but gallant band ; and through an eventful winter,
by the high effort of his genius, whose matchless force
was measurable only by the growth of difficulties, he held
in check formidable hostile legions, conducted by a chief
experienced in the arts of war, and famed for his valor on
the ever-memorable Heights of Abraham, where fell Wolfe,
Montcalm, and since our much-lamented Montgomery, all
covered with glory. In this fortunate interval, produced
by his masterly conduct, our fathers, ourselves, animated by
his resistless example, rallied around our country's stand
ard, and continued to follow her beloved chief through the
various and trying scenes to which the destinies of our
union led.
Who is there that has forgotten the vales of Brandy-
wine, the fields of Germantown, or the plains of Mon-
mouth ? Everywhere present, wants of every kind ob
structing, numerous and valiant armies encountering,
himself a host, he assuaged our sufferings, limited our
privations, and upheld our tottering Eepublic. Shall I
display to you the spread of the fire of his soul, by re
hearsing the praises of the hero of Saratoga and his
much-loved compeer of the Carolinas? No; our Wash
ington wears not borrowed glory. To Gates, to Greene,
he gave without reserve the applause due to their eminent
merit ; and long may the chiefs of Saratoga and of Eutaw
receive the grateful respect of a grateful people.
LEE] ORATION ON THE DEATH OF WASHINGTON. 2", 9
Moving in his own orbit, he imparted heat and light to
his most distant satellites; and, combining the physical
and moral force of all within his sphere, with irresistible
weight, he took his course, commiserating folly, disdaining
vice, dismaying treason, and invigorating despondency;
until the auspicious hour arrived when, united with the
intrepid forces of a potent and magnanimous ally, he
brought to submission the since conqueror of India ; thus
finishing his long career of military glory with a lustre
corresponding to his great name, and in this, his last act
of war, affixing the seal of fate to our nation's birth.
*********
First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of hib
countrymen, he was second to none in the humble and
endearing scenes of private life. Pious, just, humane,
temperate, and sincere, uniform, dignified, and command
ing, his example was edifying to all around him, as were
the effects of that example lasting.
To his equals he was condescending; to his inferiors,
kind ; and to the dear object of his affections, exempla-
rily tender. Correct throughout, vice shuddered in his
presence, and virtue always felt his fostering hand ; the
purity of his private character gave effulgence to his
public virtues.
His last scene comported with the whole tenor of his
life. Although in extreme pain, not a sigh, not a groan,
escaped him ; and with undisturbed serenity he closed his
well-spent life. Such was the man America has lost!
Such was the man for whom our nation mourns !
260 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [CHANGING
RELIGION IN ITS RELATIONS TO LITERATURE.
W. E. CHANNING.
[William Ellery Charming, the author of our present selection, was
born in Ehode Island in 1780, and died in Massachusetts in October,
1842. Devoted from an early age to religious studies, he quickly
assumed the position of the most eloquent of Unitarian ministers, and
one of the most elegant and forcible writers of that early period of
American literature. Channing, while one of the first, was one of the
most ardent, of our reformers, and his eloquent appeals against slavery,
war, intemperance, and other evils of society rank with the finest and
most influential contributions to the literature of human progress. His
paper on the " Life and Character of Napoleon Bonaparte" spread his
reputation throughout the civilized world. Others of his works were
" Self-Culture," "Elevation of the Laboring Classes," and "Evi
dences of Christianity." The latter is a work of the very highest
merit, and perhaps the most admirable contribution to the subject in
the English language. Channing's life was as pure in tone, and as
admirable in its high standard of morality, as his writings. We give
a short extract from his essay on Fenelon, in which are beautifully
shown the true relations of literature to religion.]
THE truth is, that religion, justly viewed, surpasses all
other principles in giving a free and manifold action to
the mind. It recognizes in every faculty and sentiment
the workmanship of God, and assigns a sphere of agency
to each. It takes our whole nature under its guardian
ship, and with a parental love ministers to its inferior as
well as higher gratifications. False religion mutilates tho
soul, sees evil in our innocent sensibilities, and rules with a
tyrant's frown and rod. True religion is a mild and law
ful sovereign, governing to protect, to give strength, to un
fold all our inward resources. We believe that, under its
influence, literature is to pass its present limits, and to
put itself forth in original forms of composition. Eeligion
CHANNING] RELIGION AND LITERATURE. 261
is of all principles most fruitful, multiform, and unconfined.
It is sympathy with -that Being who seems to delight in
diversifying the modes of his agency and the products of
his wisdom and power. It does not chain us to a few
essential duties, or express itself in a few unchanging
modes of writing. It has the liberality and munificence
of nature, which not only produces the necessary root
and grain, hut pours forth fruits and flowers. It has the
variety and bold contrasts of nature, which at the foot of
the awful mountain scoops out the freshest, sweetest val
leys, and embosoms, in the wild, troubled ocean, islands
whose vernal airs and loveliness and teeming fruitfulness
almost breathe the joys of Paradise. Religion will ac
complish for literature what it most needs ; that is, will
give it depth, at the same time that it heightens its grace
and beauty. The union of these attributes is most to be
desired. Our literature is lamentably superficial, and to
some the beautiful and the superficial even seem to be
naturally conjoined. Let not beauty be so wronged. It
resides chiefly in profound thoughts and feelings. It
overflows chiefly in the writings of poets, gifted with a
sublime and piercing vision. A beautiful literature springs
from the depth and fulness of intellectual and moral life,
from an energy of thought and feeling, to which nothing,
as we believe, ministers so largely as enlightened religion.
So far frpm a monotonous solemnity overspreading lit
erature in consequence of the all-pervading influence of
religion, we believe that the sportive and comic forms of
composition, instead of being abandoned, will only be re
fined and improved. We know that these are supposed to
be frowned upon by piety; but they have their root in the
constitution which God has given us, and ought not there
fore to be indiscriminately condemned. The propensity
to wit and laughter does indeed, through excessive indul-
262 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
gence, often issue in a character of heartless levity, low
mimicry, or unfeeling ridicule. It often seeks gratification
in regions of impurity, throws a gayety round vice, and
sometimes even pours contempt on virtue. But, though
often and mournfully perverted, it is still a gift of God,
and may and ought to minister, not only to innocent
pleasure, but to the intellect and the heart. Man was
made for relaxation as truly as for labor ; and, by a law
of his nature which has not received the attention it de
serves, he finds perhaps no relaxation so restorative as
that in which he reverts to his childhood, seems to forget
his wisdom, leaves the imagination to exhilarate itself by
sportive inventions, talks of amusing incongruities in con
duct and events, smiles at the innocent eccentricities and
odd mistakes of those whom he most esteems, allows him
self to indulge in arch allusions or kind-hearted satire, and
transports himself into a world of ludicrous combinations.
We have said that on these occasions the mind seems to
put off its wisdom ; but the truth is that, in a pure mind,
wisdom retreats, if we may so say, to its centre, and there,
unseen, keeps guard over this transient folly, draws deli
cate lines which are never to be passed in the freest
moments, and, like a judicious parent watching the sports
of childhood, preserves a stainless innocence of soul in the
very exuberance of gayety. This combination of moral
power with wit and humor, with comic conceptions and
irrepressible laughter, this union of mirth and virtue, be
longs to an advanced stage of the character; and we believe
that in proportion to the diffusion of an enlightened re
ligion this action of the mind will increase, and will over
flow in compositions which, joining innocence to sportive-
ness, will communicate unmixed delight. Eeligion is not
at variance with occasional mirth. In the same charac
ter, the solemn thoughts and the sublime emotions of the
CHAINING] RELIGION AND LITERATURE. 263
improved Christian may be joined with the unanxious
freedom, buoyancy, and gayety of early years.
We will add but one more illustration of our views. We
believe that the union of religion with genius will favor
that species of composition to which it may seem at first
to be least propitious. We refer to that department of
literature which has for its object the delineation of the
stronger and more terrible and guilty passions. Strange
as it may appear, these gloomy and appalling features
of our nature may be best comprehended and portrayed
by the purest and noblest minds. The common idea is
that overwhelming emotions, the more they are experi
enced, can the more effectually be described. We have
one strong presumption against this doctrine. Tradition
leads us to believe that Shakespeare, though he painted
so faithfully and fearfully the storms of passion, was a
calm and cheerful man. The passions are too much en
grossed by their objects to meditate on themselves; and
none are more ignorant of their growth and subtle work
ings than their own victims. Nothing reveals to us the
secrets of our own souls like religion, and in disclosing to
us, in ourselves, the tendency of passion to afford every
energy and to spread its hues over every thought, it gives
us a key to all souls ; for, in all, human nature is essen
tially one, having the same spiritual elements and the
same grand features. No man, it is believed, understands
the wild and irregular emotions of the mind like him in
whom a principle of divine order has begun to establish
peace. No man knows the horror of thick darkness which
gathers over the slaves of vehement passion like him who
is rising into the light and liberty of virtue. There is
indeed a selfish shrewdness, which is thought to give a
peculiar and deep insight into human nature. But the
knowledge of which it boasts is partial, distorted, and vul-
264 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
gar, and wholly unfit for the purposes of literature. We
value it little. We believe that no qualification avails so
much to a knowledge of human nature in all its forms, in
its good and evil manifestations, as that enlightened, celes
tial charity which religion alone inspires; for this estab
lishes sympathies between us and all men, and thus makes
them intelligible to us. A man imbued with this spirit
alone contemplates vice as it really exists and as it ought
always to be described. In the most depraved fellow-
beings he sees partakers of his own nature. Amidst the
terrible ravages of the passions he sees conscience, though
prostrate, not destroyed, nor wholly powerless. He sees
the proofs of an unextinguished moral life, in inward
struggles, in occasional relen tings, in sigh ings for lost
innocence, in reviving throbs of early affections, in the
sophistry by which the guilty mind would become recon
ciled to itself, in remorse, in anxious forebodings, in de
spair, perhaps in studied recklessness and cherished self-
forgetfulness. These conflicts between the passions and
the moral nature are the most interesting subjects in the
branch of literature to which we refer, and we believe that
to portray t.hem with truth and power the man of genius
can find in nothing such effectual aid as in the develop
ment of the moral and religious principles in his own
breast.
SUNDAY MORNING IN WALLENCAMP.
SALLIE PRATT McLEAN.
[The selection given below is from "Cape Cod Folks," a worK
marked by a fine power of humorous characterization. Grandpa and
Grandma Keeler, in particular, are richly drawn, and we have chosen
a scene in which these veterans are strongly brought out. The work
MCLEAN] SUNDAY MORNING IN WALLENCAMP. 265
created considerable sensation when first published, it being declared
that not only were actual Cape Cod characters introduced, but that
real names were in some cases employed. There was even talk of
prosecution of the author for libel. This author was Sallie Pratt
McLean, a native of Connecticut, where she was born in 1855.]
SUNDAY morning nothing arose in Wallencamp save the
sun.
At least, that celestial orb had long forgotten all the
roseate flaming of his youth, in an honest, straightfor
ward march through the heavens, ere the first signs of
smoke came curling lazily up from the Wallencamp
chimneys.
I had retired at night, very weary, with the delicious
consciousness that it wouldn't make any difference when
I woke up the next morning, or whether, indeed, I woke
at all. So I opened my eyes leisurely and lay half dream
ing, half meditating on a variety of things.
I deciphered a few of the texts on the scriptural patch
work quilt which covered my couch. There were " Let
not your heart be troubled," " Remember Lot's wife," and
"Philander Keeler," traced in inky hieroglyphics, all in
close conjunction.
Finally, I reached out for my watch, and, having ascer
tained the time of day, I got up and proceeded to dress
hastily enough, wondering to hear no signs of life in the
house.
I went noiselessly down the stairs. All was silent
below, except for the peaceful snoring of Mrs. Philander
and the little Keelers, which was responded to from some
remote western corner of the Ark by the triumphant
snores of Grandma and Grandpa Keeler.
I attempted to kindle a fire in the stove, but it sizzled
a little while, spitefully, as much as to say, ''What! Sun
day morning? Not I !" and went out. So I concluded
in. M 23
266 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
to put on some wraps and go out and warm myself in the
sun.
I climbed the long hill back of the Ark, descended, and
walked along the bank of the river. It was a beautiful
morning. The air was everything that could be desired
in the way of air, but I felt a desperate need of something
more substantial.
Standing alone with nature, on the bank of the lovely
river, I thought, with tears in my eyes, of the delicious
breakfast already recuperating the exhausted energies of
my far-away home friends.
When I got back to the house, Mrs. Philander, in simple
and unaffected attire, was bustling busily about the stove.
The snores from Grandma and Grandpa's quarter had
ceased, signifying that they, also, had advanced a stage in
the grand processes of Sunday morning.
The children came teasing me to dress them, so I fast
ened for them a variety of small articles which I flattered
myself on having combined in a very ingenious and artis
tic manner, though I believe those infant Keelers went
weeping to Grandma afterwards, and were remodelled by
her all-comforting hand with much skill and patience.
In the midst of her preparations for breakfast, Madeline
abruptly assumed her hat and shawl, and was seen from
the window walking leisurely across the fields in the di
rection of the woods. She returned in due time, bearing
an armful of fresh evergreens, which she twisted around
the family register.
When the ancient couple made their appearance, I
remarked silently, in regard to Grandma Keeler's hair,
what proved afterward to be its usual holiday-morning
arrangement. It was confined in six infinitesimal braids
which appeared to be sprouting out, perpendicularly, in
all directions from her head. The effect of redundancy
MCLEAN] SUNDAY MORNING IN WALLENCAMP. 267
and expansiveness thus heightened and increased on
Grandma's features was striking in the extreme.
While we were eating breakfast, that good soul observed
to Grandpa Keeler, " Wall, pa, I suppose you'll be all
ready when the time comes to take teacher and me over
to West Wallen to Sunday-school, won't ye ?"
Grandpa coughed, and coughed again, and raised his
eyes helplessly to the window.
"Looks some like showers," said he. " A-hem ! a-hem!
Looks mightily to me like showers, over yonder."
u Thar, r'aly, husband ! I must say I feel mortified
for ye," said Grandma. " Seein' as you're a perfessor, too,
and thar ain't been a single Sunday mornin' since I've lived
with ye, pa, summer or winter, but what you've seen
showers, and it r'aly seems to me it's dreadful inconsist
ent, when thar ain't no cloud in the sky, and don't look
no more like rain than I do." And Grandma's face, in
spite of her reproachful tones, was, above all, blandly
sunlike and expressive of anything rather than deluge
and watery disaster.
Grandpa was silent a little while, then coughed again.
I had never seen Grandpa in worse straits.
" A-hem ! a-hem ! l Fanny' seems to be a little lame
this mornin'," said he. " I shouldn't wonder. She's been
goin' pretty stiddy this week."
"It does beat all, pa," continued Grandma Keeler,
"how't all the horses you've ever had since I've known
ye have always been took lame Sunday mornin'. Thar
was 'Happy Jack,' he could go anywhers through the
week, and never limp a step, as nobody could see, and
Sunday mornin' he was always took lame ! And thar
was ' Tantrum'- "
" Tantrum" was the horse that had run away with
Grandma when she was thrown from the wagon and gen-
268 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [McLEAN
erally smashed to pieces. And now Grandma branched
off into the thrilling reminiscences connected with this
incident of her life, which was the third time during the
week that the horrible tale had been repeated for my
delectation.
When she had finished, Grandpa shook his head with
painful earnestness, reverting to the former subject of
discussion.
" It's a long jaunt !" said he ; "a long jaunt I"
"Thar's a long hill to climb before we reach Zion's
mount," said Grandma Keeler, impressively.
"Wall, there's a darned sight harder one on the road to
West Wallen !" burst out the old sea-captain, desperately;
" say nothin' about the devilish stones !"
" Thar, now," said Grandma, with calm though awful
reproof, " I think we've gone fur enough for one day ;
we've broke the Sabbath, and took the name of the Lord
in vain, and that ought to be enough for perfessors."
Grandpa replied at length, in a greatly-subdued tone,
" Wall, if-you and the teacher want to go over to Sunday-
school to-day, I suppose we can go if we get ready," a
long, submissive sigh, " I suppose we can."
" They have preachin' service in the mornin', I suppose,"
said Grandma. "But we don't generally git along to that.
It makes such an early start. We generally try to git
around, when we go, in time for Sunday-school. They
have singin' and all. It's just about as interesting I think,
as preachin'. The old man r'aly likes it," she observed
aside to me, "when he once gits started, but he kind o'
dreads the gittin' started."
When I beheld the ordeal through which Grandpa Keeler
was called to pass, at. the hands of his faithful consort,
before he was considered in a fit condition of mind and
body to embark for the sanctuary, I marvelled not at the
MCLEAN] SUNDAY MORNING IN WALLENCAMP. 260
old man's reluctance, nor that he had indeed seen clouds
and tempest fringing the horizon.
Immediately after breakfast, he set out for the barn,
ostensibly to "see to the chores;" really, I believe, to
obtain a few moments' respite before worse evil should
^ome upon him.
Pretty soon Grandma was at the back door, calling, in
firm though persuasive tones,
"Husband! husband! Come in, now, and get ready!"
No answer. Then it was in another key, weighty, yet
expressive of no weak irritation, that Grandma called,
" Come, pa ! pa-a ! pa-a-a !" Still no answer.
Then that voice of Grandma's sung out like a trumpet,
terrible with meaning, " Bijonah Keeler!"
But Grandpa appeared not. Next, I saw Grandma
slowly but surely gravitating in the direction of. the barn,
and soon she returned, bringing with her that ancient
delinquent, who looked like a lost sheep indeed and a truly
unreconciled one.
" Now the first thing," said Grandma, looking her for
lorn captive over, " is boots. Go and get on yer meetin'
gaiters, pa."
The old gentleman, having invested himself with those
sacred relics, came pathetically limping into the room.
" I declare, ma," said he, " somehow these things
phew ! Somehow they pinch my feet dreadfully. . I don't
know what it is, phew ! They're dreadful oncomf 'table
things, somehow."
" Since I've known ye, pa," solemnly ejaculated Grandma
Keeler, "you've never had a pair o' meetin' boots that set
easy on yer feet. You'd ought to get boots big enough
for ye, pa," she continued, looking down disapprovingly
on the old gentleman's pedal extremities, which resembled
two small scows at anchor in black cloth encasements,
in. 23*
270 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [McLEAN
"and not be so proud as to go to pinchin' yer feet into
gaiters a number o' sizes too small for ye."
" They're number tens, I tell ye !" roared Grandpa,
nettled outrageously by this cutting taunt.
"Wall, thar, now, pa," said Grandma, soothingly: "if
I had sech feet as that. I wouldn't go to spreadin' it all
over town, if I was you but it's time we stopped bick-
erin' now, husband, and got ready for meetin' : so set
down and let me wash yer head."
" I've washed once this mornin'. It's clean enough,"
Grandpa protested, but in vain. He was planted in a
chair, and Grandma Keeler, with rag and soap and a basin
of water, attacked the old gentleman vigorously, much as
I have seen cruel mothers wash the faces of their earth-
begrimed infants. He only gave expression to such
groans as,
" Thar, ma ! don't tear my ears to pieces ! Come, ma !
you've got my eyes so full o' soap now, ma, that I can't
see nothin'. Phew ! Lordy ! ain't ye most through with
this, ma?"
Then came the dyeing process, which Grandma Keeler
assured me, aside, made Grandpa " look like a man o'
thirty;" but, to me, after it he looked neither old nor
young, human nor inhuman, nor like anything that I had
ever seen before under the sun.
"There's the lotion, the potion, the dye-er, and the
setter," said Grandma, pointing to four bottles on the
table. " Now whar's the directions, Madeline ?"
These having been produced from between the leaves
of the family Bible, Madeline read, while Grandma made
a vigorous practical application of the various mixtures.
" This admirable lotion," in soft ecstatic tones Made-
line rehearsed the flowery language of the recipe,
'* though not so instantaneously startling in its eifects as
MCLEAN] SUNDAY MORNING IN WALLENCAMP. 271
our inestimable dyer and setter, yet forms a most essential
part of the whole process, opening, as it does, the dry and
lifeless pores of the scalp, imparting to them new life and
beauty, and rendering them more easily susceptible to the
applications which follow. But we must go deeper than
this : a tone must be given to the whole system by means
of the cleansing and rejuvenating of the very centre of
our beings, and, for this purpose, we have prepared our
wonderful potion." Here Grandpa, with a wry face, was
made to swallow a spoonful of the mixture. " Our un
paralleled dyer," Madeline continued, " restores black hair
to a more than original gloss and brilliancy, and gives
to the faded golden tress the sunny flashes of youth."
Grandpa was dyed. " Our world-renowned setter com
pletes and perfects the whole process, by adding tone and
permanency to the efficacious qualities of the lotion, potion,
and dyer, etc.," while on Grandpa's head the unutterable
dye was set.
" Now read teacher some of the testimonials, daughter,"
said Grandma Keeler, whose face was one broad, generous
illustration of that rare and peculiar virtue called faith.
So Madeline continued : " Mrs. Hiram Briggs, of North
Dedham, writes : ' I was terribly afflicted with baldness,
so that, for months, I was little more than an outcast from
society, and an object of pity to my most familiar friends.
I tried every remedy in vain. At length I heard of your
wonderful restorative. After a week's application, my
hair had already begun to grow in what seemed the most
miraculous manner. At the end of ten months it had
assumed such length and proportions as to be a most lux
urious burden,' and where I had before been regarded with
pity and aversion, I became the envied and admired of
all beholders.' "
"Just think," "said Grandma Keeler, with rapturous
272 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
sympathy and gratitude, " how that poor creetur must 'a'
felt!"
" ' Orion Spaulding, of Weedsville, Yermont,' " Madeline
went on but here I had to beg to be excused, and went
to my room to get ready for the Sunday-school.
When I came down again, Grandpa Keeler was seated,
completely arrayed in his best clothes, opposite Grandma,
who held the big family Bible in her lap, and a Sunday-
school question-book in one hand.
" Now, pa," said she, " what tribe was it in sacred writ
that wore bunnits ?"
I was compelled to infer from the tone of Grandpa
Keeler's answer that his temper had not undergone a
mollifying process during my absence.
" Come, ma," said he, " how much longer ye goin' to
pester me in this way ?"
" Why, pa," Grandma rejoined, calmly, " until you git a
proper understandin' of it. What tribe was it in sacred
writ that wore bunnits ?"
" Lordy !" exclaimed the old man. " How d'ye suppose
I know ! They must 'a' been a tarnal old-womanish-
lookin' set, anyway."
"The tribe o' Judah, pa," said Grandma, gravely.
"Now, how good it is, husband, to have your under
standin' all freshened up on the scripters I"
" Come, come, ma !" said Grandpa, rising nervously, " it's
time we was startin'. When I make up my mind to go
anywhere I always want to git there in time. If I was
goin' to the old Harry, I should want to git there in
time."
" It's my consarn that we shall git thar before tirr^
some on us," said Grandma, with sad meaning, " unless we
larn to use more respec'ful language."
PRESTON] THE LADY RIBERTA'S HARVEST. 273
THE LADY RIBERTA'S HARVEST.
MARGARET J. PRESTON.
[Mrs. Preston born in Virginia in 1838 is a poetess of much
ability, and a graceful and attractive prose-writer, with fine powers of
expression. Her published works are, in prose and poetry, "Silver-
wood," "Beechenbrook," "Old Songs and New," and "Cartoons."
The poem we give is from the last-named work.]
I.
IN the days of eld there was wont to be,
On the jagged coast of the Zuyder Zee,
A city from whence broad galleons went
To distant island and continent,
To lands that under the tropics lay,
Ind and the fabled far Cathay,
To gather from earth, and sea, and air,
All that was beautiful, rich, and rare;
And back they voyaged so laden full
With fairy fabrics from old Stamboul,
With pungent woods that breathed out balms,
With broidered stuffs from the realm of palms,
With shawls from the marts of Ispahan,
With marvellous lacquers from strange Japan,
That through this traffic on many a sea
So grand did its merchants grow to be
That even Venetian lords became
Half covetous of the city's fame.
n.
The Lady Biberta's fleet was great,
And year by year it had brought such store
Of treasures, until in her queenly state
There scarcely sufficed her room for more,
in. s
274 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [PRESTON
Her feasts no prince in the realms around
Had service so rich or food so fine
As daily her carven tables crowned ;
And proud she was of her luscious cates,
And her rare conserves, and her priceless wine,
And her golden salvers and golden plates ;
For all that the sea or the shore could bring
Was hers for the fairest furnishing.
in.
It fell one day that a stranger came
In garb of an Eastern sage arrayed,
Commended by one of noble name :
He had traversed many a clime, he said,
And, whithersoever he went, had heard
Of the Lady Kiberta's state, that so
In his heart a secret yearning stirred
To find if the tale were true or no.
At once the Lady Roberta's pride
Upsprang, and into her lordly hall
She led the stranger, and at her side
She bade him be seated in sight of all.
IV.
Silver and gold around him gleamed,
The daintiest dishes before him steamed ;
The rarest of fish, and flesh, and bird,
Fruits all flushed with the tropic sun,
Nuts whose names he had never heard,
Were offered : the stranger would have none ;
Nor spake he in praise a single word.
" Doth anything lack," with chafe, at last,
The hostess queried, "from the repast?"
PRESTON] THE LADY RIBERTA'S HARVEST. 275
Gravely the guest then gave reply :
" Lady, since them dost question, I,
Daring to speak the truth alway,
Even in such a presence, say
Something is wanting : I have sate
Oft at the tables of rich and great,
N"or seen such viands as these ; but yet
I marvel me much thou shouldst forget
The world's one best thing ; for 'tis clear,
Whatever beside, it is not here."
v.
" Name it," the Lady flashed, " and nought
Will I grudge of search till the best is brought."
But never another word the guest
Uttered, as smoothly he waved aside
Her question, that in the heat of pride,
Mindless of courtesy, still she pressed.
And when from her grand refection hall
They fared from their feasting, one and all,
Again with a heightened tone and air
To the guest she turned, but no guest was there.
" I'll have it," she stamped, " whatever it be ;
" I'll scour the land, and I'll sweep the sea,
Nor ever the tireless quest resign
Till I know the world's one best thing mine !"
VI.
Once more were the white-sailed galleons sent
To far-off island and continent,
In search of the most delicious things
That ever had whetted the greed of kings:
But none of the luxuries that they brought
Seemed quite the marvel the Lady sought.
276 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [PRESTON
VII.
At length from his latest voyage back
Sailed one of her captains : he told her how
Wild weather had driven him from his track,
And his vessel had sprung aleak, till bow
And stern were merged, and a rime of mould
Had mossed the flour within the hold,
And nothing was left but wine and meat,
Through weary weeks, for the crew to eat.
" Then the words of the stranger rose," he said,
" And I felt that the one best thing was bread :
And so, for a cargo, I was fain
Thereafter to load my ships with -grain."
Viii.
The Lady Biberta's wrath out-sprang
Like a sword from its sheath, and her keen voice rang
Sharp as a lance-thrust : " Get thee back
To the vessel, and have forth every sack,
And spill in the sea thy cursed store,
Nor ever sail with my galleons more 1"
IX.
The people who hungered for daily bread
Prayed that to them in their need, instead,
The grain might be dealt; but she heeded none,
Nor rested until the deed was done.
The months passed on, and the harvest sown
In the furrows of deep sea-fields had grown
To a forest of slender stalks, a wide
Strong net to trap whatever the tide
GOODRICH] DOMESTIC LIFE IN 1800 277
Drew on in its wake, the drift and wreck
Of many a shattered mast and deck,
And all the tangle of weeds there be
Afloat in the trough of the plunging sea,
Until, as the years went by, a shoal
Of sand had tided a sunken mole
Across the mouth of the port, that so
The galleys were foundered, and to and fro
No longer went forth, and merchants sought
Harbors elsewhere for the stores they brought.
The Lady Eiberta's ships went down
In the offing ; the city's old renown
Faded and fled with its commerce dead,
And the Lady Eiberta begged for bread.
XI.
The hungry billows with rage and roar
Have broken the ancient barriers o'er,
And bitten their way into the shore,
And where such traffic was wont to be,
The voyager now can only see
The spume and fret of the Zuyder Zee.
DOMESTIC LIFE IN 1800.
SAMUEL G. GOODRICH.
[The vast quantity of juvenile literature, of all sizes and shapes and
adapted to all tastes, with which Young America is now blessed (or
burdened), was preceded a generation or two ago by the writings of a
few authors only, much less varied in subject and ambitious in style
and finish, yet in their day the youthful delight of the elderly men and
women of the present era. Among these caterers to juvenile taste the
in. 24
278 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [GOODRICH
name of Peter Parley stands eminent, with his nearly two hundred
separate volumes, including history, geography, travels, and other edu
cational works, which fifty years ago were highly popular, yet which
have as completely vanished from sight as if they had never existed.
Samuel Griswold Goodrich, the author concealed under the title of
Peter Parley, was born at Ridgefield, Connecticut, in 1793, and died
in 1860. In addition to his juvenile works, he wrote several for mature
readers, among which we may name "Recollections of a Lifetime."
Tn the following selection we give an interesting extract from these
recollections, of value as showing the marked difference between Amer
ican manners and customs at the beginning and towards the end of the
nineteenth century.]
MY DEAR C , You will gather from my preceding
letter some ideas of the household industry and occupations
of country-people in Connecticut at the beginning of the
present century. Their manners, in other respects, had a
corresponding stamp of homeliness and simplicity.
In most families, the first exercise of the morning was
reading the Bible, followed by a prayer, at which all were
assembled, including the servants and helpers of the kitchen
and the farm. Then came the breakfast, which was a
substantial meal, always including hot viands, with vege
tables, apple-sauce, pickles, mustard, horseradish, and vari
ous other condiments. Cider was the common drink for
laboring people ; even children drank it at will. Tea was
common, but not so general as now. Coffee was almost
unknown. Dinner was a still more hearty and varied
repast, characterized by abundance of garden vegetables ;
tea was a light supper.
The day began early : breakfast was had at six in sum
mer and seven in winter; dinner at noon, the work-people
in the fields being called to their meals by a conch-shell,
usually winded by some kitchen Triton. The echoing of
this noontide horn from farm to farm, and over hill and
dale, was a species of music which even rivalled the pop-
GOODRICH] DOMESTIC LIFE IN 1800. 279
ular melody of drum and fife. Tea the evening meal
usually took place about sundown. In families where all
were laborers, all sat at table, servants as well as masters.
the food being served before sitting down. In families
where the masters and mistresses did not share the labors
of the household or the farm, the meals of the domestics
were had separate. There was, however, in those days a
perfectly good understanding and good feeling between
the masters and servants. The latter were not Irish ;
they had not as yet imbibed the plebeian envy of those
above them which has since so generally embittered and
embarrassed American domestic life. The terms democrat
and aristocrat had not got into use : these distinctions,
and the feelings now implied by them, had, indeed, no ex
istence in the hearts of the people. Our servants, during
all my early life, were of the neighborhood, generally the
daughters of respectable farmers and mechanics, and, re
specting others, were themselves respected arid cherished.
They were devoted to the interests of the family, and
were always relied upon and treated as friends. In health
they had the same food, in sickness the same care, as the
masters and mistresses or their children. This servitude
implied no degradation, because it did not degrade the
heart or manners of those subjected to it. It was never
thought of as a reproach to a man or woman, in the sta
tions they afterwards filled, that he or she had been out
to service. If servitude has since become associated with
debasement, it is only because servants themselves, under
the bad guidance of demagogues, have lowered their call
ing by low feelings and low manners.
At the period of my earliest recollections, men of all
classes were dressed in long, broad-tailed coats, with huge
pockets, long waistcoats, and breeches. Hats had low
crowns, with broad brims, some so wide as to be sup-
280 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [GOODRICH
ported at the sides with cords. The stockings of the par
son, and a few others, were of silk in summer and worsted
in winter; those of the people were generally of wool, and
blue and gray mixed. Women dressed in wide bonnets,
sometimes of straw and sometimes of silk : the gowns
were of silk, muslin, gingham, etc., generally close and
short-waisted, the breast and shoulders being covered by a
full muslin kerchief. Girls ornamented themselves with a
large white Yandyke. On the whole, the dress of both
men and women has greatly changed. As to the former,
short, snug, close-fitting garments have succeeded to the
loose latitudinarian coats of former times ; stove-pipe hats
have followed broad brims, and pantaloons have taken the
place of breeches. With the other sex, little French bon
nets, set round with glowing flowers, flourish in the place
of the plain, yawning hats of yore ; then it was as much
an effort to make the waists short as it is now to make
them long. As to the hips, which now make so formida
ble a display, it seems to me that, in the days I allude to,
ladies had none to speak of.
The amusements were then much the same as at present ;
though some striking differences may be noted. Books
and newspapers which are now diffused even among the
country towns, so as to be in the hands of all, young and
old were then scarce, and were read respectfully, and as
if they were grave matters, demanding thought and atten
tion. They were not toys and pastimes, taken up every
day. and by everybody, in the short intervals of labor,
and then hastily dismissed, like waste paper. The aged
sat down when they read, and drew forth their spectacles
and put them deliberately and reverently upon the nose.
These instruments were not, as now, little tortoise-shell
hooks, attached to a ribbon, and put off and on with a
jerk ; but they were of silver or steel, substantially made,
GOODRICH] DOMESTIC LIFE IN 1800. 281
and calculated to hold on with a firm and steady grasp,
showing the gravity of the uses to which they were de
voted. Even the young approached a book with rever
ence, and a newspaper with awe. How the world has
changed !
The two great festivals were Thanksgiving and " train
ing-day," the latter deriving from the still lingering spirit
of the Eevolutionary War a decidedly martial charac
ter. The marching of the troops, and the discharge of
gunpowder, which invariably closed the exercises, were
glorious and inspiring mementos of heroic achievements
upon many a bloody field. The music of the drum and
fife resounded on every side. A match between two rival
drummers always drew an admiring crowd, and was in
fact one of the chief excitements of the great day.
Tavern-haunting especially in winter, when there was
little to do, for manufactures had not then sprung up to
give profitable occupation during this inclement season-
was common, even with respectable farmers. Marriages
were celebrated in the evening, at the house of the bride,
with a general gathering of the neighborhood, and usually
wound off by dancing. Everybody went, as to a public
exhibition, without invitation. Funerals generally drew
large processions, which proceeded to the grave. Here
the minister always made an address suited to the occa
sion. If there was anything remarkable in the history of
the deceased, it was turned to religious account in the
next Sunday's sermon. Singing-meetings, to practise
church music, were a great resource for the young in
winter. Dances at private houses were common, and
drew no reproaches from the sober people present. Balls
at the tavern were frequented by the young ; the children
of deacons and ministers attended, though the parents did
not. The winter brought sleighing, skating, and the usual
in. 24*
282 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [GOODRICH
round of in-door sports. In general, the intercourse of all
classes was kindly and considerate, no one arrogating
superiority, and yet no one refusing to acknowledge it
where it existed. You would hardly have noticed that
there was a higher and a lower class. Such there were,
certainly, for there must always and everywhere be the
strong and the weak, the wise and the foolish, those of
superior and those of inferior intellect, taste, manners,
appearance, and character. But in our society these
existed without being felt as a privilege to one which
must give offence to another. The feuds between Up and
Down, which have since disturbed the whole fabric of
society, had not then begun.
It may serve, in some degree, to throw light upon the
manners and customs of this period, if I give you a sketch
of my two grandmothers. Both were widows, and were
well stricken in years, when they came to visit us at
Ridgefield, about the year 1803 or '4. My grancfmother
Ely was of the old regime, a lady of the old school, and
sustaining the character in her upright carriage, her long,
tapering waist, and her high-heeled shoes. The costumes
of Louis XY.'s time had prevailed in New York and Bos
ton, and even at this period they still lingered there in
isolated cases, though the Revolution had generally exer
cised a transforming influence upon the toilet of both men
and women. It is curious enough that at this moment
1855 the female attire of a century ago is revived ; and
in every black-eyed, stately old lady, dressed in black silk
and showing her steel-gray hair beneath her cap, I can
now see semblances of this my maternal grandmother.
My other grandmother was in all things the opposite :
short, fat, blue-eyed, practical, utilitarian. She was a
good example of the country dame, hearty, homespun,
familiar, full of strong sense and practical energy. I
WILSON] A VISIT TO SUNNYSWE. 283
scarcely know which of the two I liked the best. The first
sang me plaintive songs ; told me stories of the Kevolu-
tion, her husband, Colonel Ely, having had: a large and
painful share in its vicissitudes; she described General
Washington, whom she had seen, and the French officers,
Lafayette, Rochambeau, and others, who had been in
mates of her house. She told me tales of even moro
ancient date, and recited poetry, generally consisting of
ballads, which were suited to my taste. And all this lore
was commended to me by a voice of inimitable tenderness
and a manner at once lofty and condescending. My other
grandmother was not less kind, but she promoted my
happiness and prosperity in another way. Instead, oi
stories, she gave me bread and butter ; in place of poetry,
she fed me with apple-sauce and pie. Never was there
a more hearty old lady. She had a firm conviction that
children must be fed, and what she believed she practised.
A VISIT TO SUNNYSIDE.
J. G. WILSON.
[From the latest work of James Grant Wilson, the charmingly-
written series of literary memoirs entitled " Bryant and his Friends,"
we select an interesting description of a visit to Washington Irving
in his days of ripe old age. Other works of the author are " Memoirs
of Illustrious Soldiers," " Poets and Poetry of Scotland," and biogra
phies of General Grant and Fitz-Greene Halleck. General Wilson
was bom at Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1835. He served with dis
tinction as a cavalry colonel in the civil war, attaining before its close
the rank of brigadier-general.]
IT was a sunny September morning that the writer set
out from New York in an early train, on a visit to Sunny-
28 i BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ WILSON
side and its late honored proprietor, almost the last of
the great literary lights that witnessed the dawn of the
nineteenth century. Of his eminent contemporaries who
ushered in the reign of the last of the Georges, but four
survived him, Dana, De Quincey, Landor, and Paulding,
and they, full of years and then trembling on the hori
zon's verge, have since been gathered to their fathers.
Arrived at Irvington, we procured the only attainable
vehicle the place could boast of, an old, shaky, two-
seated box wagon, drawn by a steed bearing a striking
resemblance to Geoffrey Crayon's descriptions of the
charger bestrode by the enraptured pedagogue on the
occasion of the famous gathering at Mynheer Yan Tassel's,
and were in due time set down at the porch of Sunny-
side, pleasantly situated on the banks of the river where
its owner thanked God he was born. The quaint-looking
mansion is a graceful combination of the English cottage
and Dutch farm-house, covered with ivy brought from
Melrose Abbey, and embowered amid trees and shrubbery.
A venerable weathercock of portly dimensions, which
once covered the Stadt-House of New Amsterdam, in the
time of worthy Peter Stuyvesant, erects its crest on the
gable end of the edifice, and a gilded horse in full gallop,
whilom the weathercock of a valiant burgomaster of
Albany, glitters in the sunshine on a peaked turret over
the portal.
From the tranquil and secluded abode are visible the
" Tappaan Zee" and the picturesque Palisades, and various
paths lead through shadowy walks or to points com
manding fine views of river-scenery. Near by murmurs a
musical stream. A more charming retreat for a poet's old
age it would be difficult to find, independent of the thou
sand delightful associations that enhanced its beauties to
the mind of Washington Irving.
WILSON] A VISIT TO SUJVNFSWE. 285
The simplicity of the interior arrangement struck me
as characteristic of the simple and unperverted tastes of
its owner, and its cottage ornaments were suggestive of
his delightful pictures of English country life. Entering
by a rustic door- way covered with climbing roses, and
passing through a tiled hall, you enter the drawing-room,
a low-roofed apartment, on the Avails of which hung the
Jarvis portrait, painted when Mr. Irving was twenty-
seven years of age, an engraving of Faed's picture of
Scott and his friends at Abbotsford, presented to him by
a son of Sir "Walter Scott's eminent publisher, Archibald
Constable, together with several other paintings and en
gravings, and well filled with parlor-furniture, a piano,
and tables covered with books and magazines of the day.
The family at that time consisted of the bachelor author,
who had " no termagant wife to dispute the sovereignty
of the Roost" with him ; his eldest brother, Ebenezer, ten
years his senior ; a nephew, Pierre M. Irving, and his wife ;
and two nieces, daughters of the brother above mentioned,
who were ever ministering to the slightest wish of their
honored uncle. Children could not have been more kind
and considerate to a parent, nor a father to his daughters,
than was the warm-hearted old man to his nieces, who alone
of that happy circle now survive, and are the present pos
sessors of Sunnyside.
As I sat at his board in the dining-room, from which is
seen the majestic Hudson with its myriad of sailing-vessels
and steamers, and heard him dilate upon the bygone days
and the giants that were on the earth then, of his friends
Scott and Byron, of Moore and Lockhart, of Prof. Wilson
and the Ettrick Shepherd, and as the old man pledged
the health of his kinsfolk and guest, it seemed as if a veri
table realm of romance were suddenly opened. He told
us of his first meeting with Sir Walter Scott, so graphi-
286 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [ WILSON
cally described in his charming essay on Abbotsford ; and
his last, in London, when the great Scotchman was on his
way to the Continent with the vain hope of restoring his
health, broken down by his gigantic efforts to leave an
untarnished name and a fantastic mansion and the broad
acres that surrounded it to a long line of Scotts of Abbots-
ford ; with various anecdotes of those above mentioned,
and other notables of bygone days.
Mr. Irving related with great glee an anecdote of James
Hogg, the " Ettrick Shepherd," who in one of his early
visits to Edinburgh was invited by Sir Walter Scott to
dine with him at his mansion in Castle Street. Quite a
number of the literati had been asked to meet the rustic
poet at dinner. When Hogg entered the drawing-room,
Lady Scott, being in delicate health, was reclining on a
sofa. After being presented, he took possession of another
sofa opposite to her, and stretched himself thereupon at
full length, for, as he afterwards said, " I thought I could
do no wrong to copy the lady of the house." The dress
of the " Ettrick Shepherd" at that time was precisely that
in which any ordinary herdsman attends cattle to the
market, and as his hands, moreover, bore most legible marks
of a recent sheep-shearing, the lady of the house did not
observe with perfect equanimity the novel usage to which
her chintz was exposed. Hogg, however, remarked noth
ing of all this, dined heartily and drank freely, and by
jest, anecdote, and song afforded great merriment to all
the company. As the wine operated, his familiarity in
creased and strengthened ; from " Mr. Scott" he advanced
to " Shirra" (Sheriff), and thence to " Scott," " Walter,"
and " Wattie," until at length he fairly convulsed the
whole party by addressing Lady Scott as " Charlotte."
In reply to our inquiry as to his opinion of the poets
of the present day, Irving said, u I ignore them all. I
WILSON] A VISIT TO SUNNYSIDE. 287
read no poetry written since Byron's, Moore's, and Scott's."
" What !" I exclaimed, " not Paulding's ' Backwoodsman' ?"
Whereupon he laughed most heartily, and answered,
l Well, if I did, I should take it in homoeopathic doses."
This was followed by some friendly praise of Paulding's
prose writings, including " The Dutchman's Fireside."
This led me to allude to Mrs. Grant's " Memoirs of an
American Lady." " Oh, yes," he answered, " I knew your
gifted godmother, Mrs. Grant of Laggan, but only slightly.
Our friends Cogswell and Ticknor were much more inti
mate with her than it was my good fortune to be. Her
account of Mrs. Schuyler is a very pleasant one, and I be-
lieve^ as you say, that it suggested ' The Dutchman's Fire
side' to Paulding." After some pleasant words about his
former literary partner and some of the younger members
of the literary guild, the elderly author said, " He and I
were very fortunate in being born so early. We should
have no chance now against the battalions of better
writers." He alluded in terms of the highest admiration
to Motley's " History of the Dutch Eepublic," and in the
same connection complained, " There are a great deal too
many books written nowadays about countries, and places,
and people, that when I was young no one knew, or
wanted to have any knowledge of whatever; and it is
morally impossible for any mortal to read or digest one-
half of them."
***####*#
Eeturning to the drawing-room, Mr. Irving sat down
in his favorite seat, a large, well-cushioned, and capacious
arm-chair, and as we called his attention to Faed's picture
of many of his old friends, and asked his opinion of it and
its correctness, he leaned his head on one hand, as repre
sented in the admirable portrait by Martin prefixed to
the illustrated edition of the " Sketch-Book," and with the
288 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [WILSON
same dreamy look, surveying it lovingly, replied that
" they were mostly c old familiar faces,' and some of them
very good, Scott's, Wilson's, and Campbell's being the
best," and spoke of Prof. Wilson as being a " noble-look-
ino- man, with a considerable resemblance to our Audu-
&
bon."
His sanctum sanctorum was a small room, well filled
with books, neatly arranged on the shelves, that extended
completely -around the room. In the centre stood a table,
with a neat writing-desk, on which, seated in the well-
lined easy elbow-chair, Geoffrey Crayon had written many
of his modern works, including his " Life of Washington."
His hours for literary labor were in the morning, " but,"
said he, " unlike Scott, I can do no work until I got break
fast, and it is between breakfast and dinner that I do all
my writing." He appeared gratified at our allusion to
the fact that Niagara and Irving were the two topics
connected with this country in which we found intelligent
Englishmen, or rather Britons, most interested during
our sojourn there the previous season, and also at my
reference to a letter written by Scott to his friend John
.Richardson, of London, dated Sept. 22, 1817, a few days
after Irving's visit to Abbotsford, in which Scott says,
"When you see Tom Campbell, tell him, with rny best
love, that I have to thank him for making me known to
Mr. Washington Irving, who is one of the best and pleas-
antest acquaintances I have made this many a day."
In strolling over his charming grounds, we came upon
those of his opulent neighbor, Mr. Moses H. G-rinnell, who
married a niece of Mr. Irving, which were kept in the
most perfect order, when he remarked, " My place in ita
rough and uncultivated condition sets off finely my neigh
bor Grinnell's ;" and on my replying that I thought it
was precisely the reverse, he indulged in a quiet laugh,
LELAND] ' THE ART OF THE FUTURE. 289
and looked very much as if he quite agreed with me. He
alluded to Scott's passion for the possession of land, and
mentioned that it was a prevalent disease among authors
generally, and confessed to being himself a victim ; and
further remarked that he quite agreed with Pope, in
thinking " no man was so happy as he who lived retired
from the world on his own soil.
On our return we found a party of five ladies and gen
tlemen, under the escort of a relative, who had come up
from New York to see " Diedrich Knickerbocker" and his
loved domain. Upon returning from a ramble over the
grounds and those of Mr. Grinnell with the Southern
party and the Misses Irving, we found the amiable author
upon the front porch gazing over the river and the distant
hills at the setting sun, the tout ensemble presenting a fine
scene for a painter. I shall never forget it, the mild,
dreamy, and happy expression of that old man's counte
nance as he sat with his shawl around him looking over
the broad Tappaan Zee at the sun's departing rays. I
never saw him again.
THE ART OF THE FUTURE.
CHARLES G. LELAND.
[Charles Godfrey Leland is best known to readers in general by his
ridiculously humorous " Hans Breitmann's Ballads." Another favor
ably-known work is " The Sketch-Book of Meister Karl." He is,
in addition, the author of several works on the gypsies, and of other
works in prose and poetry. Of his poems " The Music- Lesson of
Confucius" is ranked the highest. He takes much interest in art, and
has written some acceptable works on this subject. From his " Sun
shine in Thought" we select the following well-drawn and truthful
m. N t 25
2*K) BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS.
representation of much of the art of the present period of transition.
Mr. Leland was born in Philadelphia in 1824.]
WHAT is to be the Art of the Future ?
To answer this question, we must ascertain what was
the leading condition or principle under which that which
we now call ART was formed, and ascertain whether it is
still living though dormant, or whether an entirely new
principle is not forming.
It is a matter worth remark, that at present those
scholars who are thoroughly penetrated by the spirit of
history, and who appreciate that each strongly-marked
epoch, and that alone, has given the world a distinctive
art and literature, are now all anxiously looking forward
to a future which shall be brilliant in product. In all by
gone ages, men lived in their present. The Egyptians
knew nothing which was not Egyptian; the Dutch painter
of the sixteenth century remained firmly Dutch: in all
these schools and styles there was no looking outside of
nationality, of that which they literally were.
Now we see in architecture, in painting, in poetry, in
every product of the kind, simply a gathering up and
combining what others have done. Ask what is new in
pictures, we are shown the pre-Raphaelite imitations of
Millais and Hunt. Look for novelties in architecture, and
we find Norman, or Gothic, or "Composite," or "Roman"
edifices. The great merit of Tennyson, according to Kings-
ley, is to have most nearly reproduced the real old English
ballad ; and so it goes, through the whole circle of art.
No wonder that earnest thinkers begin to inquire for the
Art of the Future, and wonder what it is to be.
Yet this our age has produced one stupendous original
thought, with many of its results ; though these are as
yet only in the very beginning. I mean Science with its
practical applications ; its technology, in the form of steam-
LELAND] THE ART OF THE FUTURE. 291
engines, looms, clothes and food for everybody, and scores
of thousands of other novelties. And dilettanti keep won
dering what the Art of the Future is to be, when this
stupendous power of Science is advancing at colossal
strides, inevitably destined in a few years to swallow up
every old-time idea, every trace of old romance and art,
poetry, and romantic or sentimental feeling; yes, to con
quer even literature, and then reproduce society completely
changed, modified, and made beautiful, in & spirit which
will be neither classic nor Gothic, but differing from both,
and infinitely more glorious than either, the spirit of the
most literal of facts, of pure Nature.
Science is every day taking Man away from the ideal,
the morbid, the sickly and visionary, from the fond fancies
of early ages, and leading him to facts and to nature.
She is, though we see it not, taking us from conventional
ideas of beauty, such as all art hitherto has labored under,
and leading us to direct appreciation of beauty as it is.
When Science and all organization is science shall
have progressed so far as to secure rights and comforts
to all, we will find that practical usefulness, or the mon
ster Utility, so much decried by the poets of the day and
by philosophers, has led us to the highest forms of beauty,
and to a blending of the beautiful with the useful wherever
the latter occurs.
Nature never creates anything without beauty. " On
old decay the greenest mosses spring," and the dullest,
dryest old experimenter with a microscope finds himself
compelled to give names expressive of beauty to invisible
marvels abounding in what Man's short-sightedness calls
ugly. "When Science shall have advanced to investing
the humblest articles with beauty, at cheap rates, when
the photograph or other inventions shall give the flower,
or the as yet unseen marvels of the sea, or of space, in any
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colors and of any size, will there not be an approach to
Nature, and inexhaustible treasures of beauty showered
in upon us, such as Art never dreamt of? Raphael never
painted such an exquisite loveliness as there is alive in
flesh and blood when expressing true emotion by its
glances ; but what I assert needs no proof, no comparison,
to those who have seen with awe the mighty levers now
slowly preparing, which will move the world.
A writer, fh commenting on this progress of Science,
very properly remarks that some persons have appre
hended that in this deluge of the material the ideal may
be entirely lost.
" There have been not a few who, in the strong physical
and mechanical proclivities of the age, have fancied they
discerned an imminent danger, the danger of the spiritual
nature being submerged and put in abeyance, and all
thought of and interest in a future and immortal life
being swallowed up in the splendors and enjoyments
wherewith physical science promises to endow the pres
ent material existence. As evidence of this state of
things, it has been urged that Eeligion has lost much of
its hold on the faith and feelings of men."
Against this, plain, undoubting Faith is very properly
held up. But if more earthly reasoning be needed, may
we not find it in the argument that, if science and
practical usefulness are really leading us back to nature,
artificial as the means may seem to be, such commu
nity with nature will do more to dispose us to the truth
than aught besides? Truth is the ultimate basis of all
things, and he who walks in Truth and Nature walks
with GOD.
Let me, at the risk of being accused of repetition, and
he is a poor thinker, and one most unworthy a reader,
who will not risk more than that to set forth what he
LELAND] THE ART OF THE FUTURE. 293
truly believes, speak more in detail of this possible future
and formation of Art.
The reader who has ever studied the peculiarities of that
sober little insect, the common household ant, has doubt
less observed the mechanical regularity with which, when
some Pays da Cocagne of a dead blue-bottle fly or deceased
beetle has been discovered, two regular routes are at once
established, one toward the prey, another frgm it. Every
ant takes the down-train, helps himself to dead fly, moves
off, and in a few minutes may be discovered several yards
distant, travelling in regular procession with his fellows.
All goes well so long as the continuity is kept up. But
break up the procession, brush away a yard of up and
down trains, and then note the bewilderment of the un
fortunate little Arabs ! They know not for a long time
whether to go to the right or the left: all is tohu bohu, all
void and confusion. Those who have just returned from
their banquet are as unable as were the children in the
Piper of Hamelin to say how they went away. They
know that they came from Blue-Bottle Land,
" But how, or why, they don't understand."
And they move to the right and the left, and up and down,
and go wiring in and wiring out, leaving observers still in
doubt whether the ants upon the track are clearing out
or going back. All that they know is, nothing can be
known !
The present condition of the intellectual energies of the
civilized world is precisely like that of the ants whose
trains of travel have been broken up. For the first time
since man came into the world, there is a general, a uni
versal period of doubt and of hesitation. Outside of the
circles of the men of science of the second and third
classes, who are satisfied with their batteries and cruci-
294 BEST AMERICAN AUTHORS. [LELAND
bles, and the "industrial progressives," there is not a
really thinking mind in existence which does not recognize
that the old paths of thoughts are broken up, and that
the new are not as yet formed. The Germans are anx
iously worrying themselves about the Zukunftsmusik the
Music of the Future and the Art of the Future; for
there is no longer satisfaction in the great, highly-trained,
critical minds of the age with what the age produces.
Produces ! alas ! it produces nothing. Are pre-Eaphaelite
pictures anything but a Reproduction ? Is Yerdi's music,
after all, anything but a spasmodic straining and wrench
ing against the spirit of the age, to create something
original, while the age vetoes the effort? Statuary !
Of Poetry, be it of type or of daily life, I have already
spoken.
The earlier ages of the world were full of physical con
fusion, but of mental confusion they had but little. The
Egyptian painter knew exactly what to paint ; the age
had taught a lesson which all artists repeated like chil
dren, some more readily perhaps than others, but it was
all the same lesson. There was no demand for something
radically new. The most elaborate, the most stupendous
works of the carvers and architects of the Middle Ages
were trifling, so far as mental wear and tear were con
cerned, compared to what artists of the present day suffer,
who are always racked for novelties. Take that miracle
of miracles, the Shrine of Saint Lawrence, by Adam
Kraft. From boyhood to age, Adam Kraft's head had
contained little else save trefoils, ogives, persil, thistle,
and feuille-d'Olivier mouldings, mascarons, and garlands.
He could not by any possibility be called on to do any
work out of the Gothic "style," and of only a certain
subdivision of Gothic at that. Centuries of tradition,
tens of thousands of models and suggestions around him
LELAND] THE ART OF THE FUTURE. 295
all the time, made the task easier. He was inspired with
a single spirit, and, having genius, did great things,
much greater than he could have done had he been set to
make a Norman fount to-day, a " Greek" pulpit to-morrow,
an Egyptian organ the third, and perhaps at a Choctaw
staircase on the fourth.
What has been said holds good for all that men sung,
painted, graved, or thought in those early days. Nine-
tenths of their work was done for them by habit, tradi
tion, and association. They were ages in which nations
were consolidated and formed according to blood and
climate and habits and circumst
