The works of James Russell Lowell

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OP

CA PORNIA
SA. f A CRUZ

v. 1

£tantrarti Jtifirat attrition

THE WORKS OF
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

ILL USTRA TED WITH FOR TRAITS
ENGRAVED ON STEEL

IN TEN VOLUMES
VOLUME I.

9

LITERARY ESSAYS

AMONG MY BOOKS, MY STUDY

WINDOWS, FIRESIDE

TRAVELS

BY

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

IN FOUR VOLUMES
VOLUME I.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

(£1)1' liiticrsifci? IJrcss, Cambridge

Copyright, 1864, 1871, 1876, 1890,
BT JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

All rights reserved.

The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A
Electrotyped and Printed by IL 0. Houghton & Company.

CONTENTS

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 1

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 43

LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL IN ITALY AND ELSEWHERE.

I. AT SEA 100

II. IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 113

III. ITALY . • 120

IV. A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC . . . 189

KEATS 218

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 247

EMERSON THE LECTURER 349

THOREAU . . .361

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE ESSAYS

THE greater part of the literary and critical
essays here collected was originally written as
lectures for an audience consisting not only of my
own classes but also of such other members of the
University as might choose to attend them. This
will account for, if it do not excuse, a more rhe-
torical tone in them here and there than I should
have allowed myself had I been writing for the
eye and not for the ear. They were meant to be
suggestive of certain broader principles of criti-
cism based on the comparative study of literature
in its large meaning, rather than methodically ped-
agogic, to stimulate rather than to supply the place
of individual study. This was my deliberate in-
tention, but I am sensible that it may have been in
a manner forced upon me by my own limitations ;
for, though capable of whatever drudgery in ac-
quisition, I am by temperament impatient of de-
tail in communicating what I have acquired, and
too often put into a parenthesis or a note conclu-
sions arrived at by long study and reflection when
perhaps it had been wiser to expand them, not to

vi PREFATORY NOTE TO THE ESSAYS

mention that much of my illustration was extem-
poraneous and is now lost to me. I am apt also to
fancy that what has long been familiar to my own
mind must be equally so to the minds of others,
and this uncomfortable suspicion makes one shy of
insisting on what may be already only too little in
need of it. But Sir Kenelm. Digby, in the dedi-
cation of what Sir Thomas Browne calls his " ex-
cellent Treaty of Bodies," has said better than I
could what I wish to say. " For besides what
faylings may be in the matter, I cannot doubt but
that even in the expressions of it, there must often
be great obscurity and shortnesse ; which I, who
have my thoughts filled with the things themselves,
am not aware of. So that, what peradventure may
seeme very full to me, because every imperfect
touch bringeth into my mind the entire notion and
whole chain of circumstances belonging to that
thing I have so often beaten upon, may appeare
very crude and maymed to a stranger, that cannot
guesse what I would be at, otherwise than as my
direct words do lead him."

Let me add that in preparing these papers for
the press I omitted much illustrative and subsidi-
ary matter, and this I regret when it is too late.
Five or six lectures, for instance, were condensed
into the essay on Rousseau. The dates attached
were those of publication, but the bulk of the ma-
terial was written many years earlier, some of it so
long ago as 1854. I have refrained from modify-

PREFATORY NOTE TO THE ESSAYS vii

ing what was written by one — I know not whether
to say so much older or so much younger than I —
but at any rate different in some important re-
spects, and this partly from deference to him,

partly from distrust of myself.

J. K. L.

25th April, 1890.

LITERARY ESSAYS

A MOOSEHEAD JOUKNAL

1853

ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG AT THE BAGNI DI
LUCCA.

THURSDAY, ll^A August. — I knew as little yes-
terday of the interior of Maine as the least pene-
trating person knows of the inside of that great
social millstone which, driven by the river Time,
sets imperatively agoing the several wheels of our
individual activities. Born while Maine was still
a province of native Massachusetts, I was as much
a foreigner to it as yourself, my dear Storg. I had
seen many lakes, ranging from that of Virgil's
Cumaean to that of Scott's Caledonian Lady ; but
Moosehead, within two days of me, had never en-
joyed the profit of being mirrored in my retina.
At the sound of the name, no reminiscential atoms
(according to Kenelm Digby's Theory of Associ-
ation, — as good as any) stirred and marshalled
themselves in my brain. The truth is, we think
lightly of Nature's penny shows, and estimate what
we see by the cost of the ticket. Empedocles gave

2 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

his life for a pit-entrance to ^Etna, and no doubt
found his account in it. Accordingly, the clean
face of Cousin Bull is imaged patronizingly in
Lake George, and Loch Lomond glasses the hur-
ried countenance of Jonathan, diving deeper in the
streams of European association (and coming up
drier) than any other man. Or is the cause of our
not caring to see what is equally within the reach
of all our neighbors to be sought in that aristo-
cratic principle so deeply implanted in human
nature ? I knew a pauper graduate who always
borrowed a black coat, and came to eat the Com-
mencement dinner, — not that it was better than
the one which daily graced the board of the pub-
lic institution in which he hibernated (so to speak)
during the other three hundred and sixty-four
days of the year, save in this one particular, that
none of his eleemosynary fellow-commoners could
eat it. If there are unhappy men who wish that
they were as the Babe Unborn, there are more who
would aspire to the lonely distinction of being that
other figurative personage, the Oldest Inhabitant.
You remember the charming irresolution of our
dear Esthwaite, (like Macheath between his two
doxies,) divided between his theory that he is un-
der thirty, and his pride at being the only one of
us who witnessed the September gale and the re-
joicings at the Peace ? Nineteen years ago I was
walking through the Franconia Notch, and stopped
to chat with a hermit, who fed with gradual logs the
unwearied teeth of a saw-mill. As the strident steel
slit off the slabs of the log, so did the less willing

A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 3

machine of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and-down
motion, pare away that outward bark of conversa-
tion which protects the core, and which, like other
bark, has naturally most to do with the weather,
the season, and the heat of the day. At length I
asked him the best point of view for the Old Man
of the Mountain.

" Dunno, — never see it."

Too young and too happy either to feel or affect
the Horatian indifference, I was sincerely aston-
ished, and I expressed it.

The log-compelling man attempted no justifi-
cation, but after a little asked, " Come from
Baws'n?"

" Yes " (with peninsular pride).

" Goodie to see in the vycinity o' Baws'n."

" Oh, yes ! " I said ; and I thought, — see Bos-
ton and die ! see the State-Houses, old and new,
the caterpillar wooden bridges crawling with innu-
merable legs across the flats of Charles; see the
Common, — largest park, doubtless, in the world,
— with its files of trees planted as if by a drill-
sergeant, and then for your nunc dimittis !

" I should like, 'awl, I should like to stan' on
Bunker Hill. You 've ben there off en, likely ? "

" N-o-o," unwillingly, seeing the little end of
the horn in clear vision at the terminus of this
Socratic perspective.

"'Awl, my young frien', you've lamed neow
thet wut a man kin see any day for nawthin', chil-
dern half price, he never doos see. Nawthin' pay,
nawthin' vally."

4 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

With this modern instance of a wise saw, I de-
parted, deeply revolving these things with myself,
and convinced that, whatever the ratio of popula-
tion, the average amount of human nature to the
square mile differs little the world over. I thought
of it when I saw people upon the Pincian wonder-
ing at the alchemist sun, as if he never burned
the leaden clouds to gold in sight of Charles
Street. I thought of it when I found eyes first
discovering at Mont Blanc how beautiful snow was.
As I walked on, I said to myself, There is one
exception, wise hermit, — it is just these gratis
pictures which the poet puts in his show-box, and
which we all gladly pay Wordsworth and the rest
for a peep at. The divine faculty is to see what
everybody can look at.

While every well-informed man in Europe, from
the barber down to the diplomatist, has his view of
the Eastern Question, why should I not go person-
ally down East and see for myself? Why not,
like Tancred, attempt my own solution of the
Mystery of the Orient, — doubly mysterious when
you begin the two words with capitals? You know
my way of doing things, to let them simmer in my
mind gently for months, and at last do them im-
promptu in a kind of desperation, driven by the
Eumenides of unfulfilled purpose. So, after talk-
ing about Moosehead till nobody believed me capa-
ble of going thither, I found myself at the Eastern
Railway station. The only event of the journey
hither (I am now at Waterville) was a boy hawk-
ing exhilaratingly the last great railroad smash, —

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 5

thirteen lives lost, — and no doubt devoutly wish-
ing there had been fifty. This having a mercantile
interest, in horrors, holding stock, as it were, in
murder, misfortune, and pestilence, must have an
odd effect on the human mind. The birds of ill-
omen, at whose sombre flight the rest of the world
turn pale, are the ravens which bring food to this
little outcast in the wilderness. If this lad give
thanks for daily bread, it would be curious to
inquire what that phrase represents to his under-
standing. If there ever be a plum in it, it is Sin
or Death that puts it in. Other details of my
dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice it that I
arrived here in safety, — in complexion like an
Ethiopian serenader half got-up, and so broiled
and peppered that I was more like a devilled kid-
ney than anything else I can think of.

10 P. M. — The civil landlord and neat chamber
at the " Elm wood House " were very grateful, and
after tea I set forth to explore the town. It has
a good chance of being pretty : but, like most
American towns, it is in a hobbledehoy age, grow-
ing yet, and one cannot tell what may happen. A
child with great promise of beauty is often spoiled
by its second teeth. There is something agreeable
in the sense of completeness which a walled town
gives one. It is entire, like a crystal, — a work
which man has succeeded in finishing. I think
the human mind pines more or less where every-
thing is new, and is better for a diet of stale bread.
The number of Americans who visit the Old World,
and the deep inspirations with which they breathe

6 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

the air of antiquity, as if their mental lungs had
been starved with too thin an atmosphere, is be-
ginning to afford matter of speculation to obser-
vant Europeans. For my own part, I never saw a
house which I thought old enough to be torn down.
It is too like that Scythian fashion of knocking old
people on the head. I cannot help thinking that
the indefinable something which we call character
is cumulative, — that the influence of the same
climate, scenery, and associations for several gen-
erations is necessary to its gathering head, and that
the process is disturbed by continual change of
place. The American is nomadic in religion, in
ideas, in morals, and leaves his faith and opinions
with as much indifference as the house in which he
was born. However, we need not bother : Nature
takes care not to leave out of the great heart of
society either of its two ventricles of hold-back and
go-ahead.

It seems as if every considerable American town
must have its one specimen of everything, and so
there is a college in Waterville, the buildings of
which are three in number, of brick, and quite up
to the average ugliness which seems essential in
edifices of this description. Unhappily, they do
not reach that extreme of ugliness where it and
beauty come together in the clasp of fascination.
We erect handsomer factories for cottons, woollens,
and steam-engines, than for doctors, lawyers, and
parsons. The truth is, that, till our struggle with
nature is over, till this shaggy hemisphere is tamed
and subjugated, the workshop wiU be the college

A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 1

whose degrees will be most valued. Moreover,
steam has made travel so easy that the great uni-
versity of the world is open to all comers, and the
old cloister system is falling astern. Perhaps it is
only the more needed, and, were I rich, I should
like to found a few lazyships in my Alma Mater as
a kind of counterpoise. The Anglo-Saxon race
has accepted the primal curse as a blessing, has
deified work, and would not have thanked Adam
for abstaining from the apple.. They would have
dammed the four rivers of Paradise, substituted
cotton for fig-leaves among the antediluvian popu-
lations, and commended man's first disobedience as
a wise measure of political economy. But to re-
turn to our college. We cannot have fine buildings
till we are less in a hurry. We snatch an educa-
tion like a meal at a railroad-station. Just in time
to make us dyspeptic, the whistle shrieks, and we
must rush, or lose our places in the great train of
life. Yet noble architecture is one element of
patriotism, and an eminent one of culture, the finer
portions of which are taken in by unconscious ab-
sorption through the pores of the mind from the
surrounding atmosphere. I suppose we must wait,
for we are a great bivouac as yet, rather than a na-
tion on the march from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
and pitch tents instead of building houses. Our
very villages seem to be in motion, following west-
ward the bewitching music of some Pied Piper of
Hamelin. We still feel the great push toward
sundown given to the peoples somewhere in the
gray dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone of
all animated nature emigrates eastward.

8 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

Friday, 12£A. — The coach leaves Waterville at
five o'clock in the morning, and one must break-
fast in the dark at a quarter past four, because a
train starts at twenty minutes before five, — the
passengers by both conveyances being pastured
gregariously. So one must be up at half past
three. The primary geological formations contain
no trace of man, and it seems to me that these
eocene periods of the day are not fitted for sustain-
ing the human forms of life. One of the Fathers
held that the sun was created to be worshipped at
his rising by the Gentiles. The more reason that
Christians (except, perhaps, early Christians) should
abstain from these heathenish ceremonials. As one
arriving by an early train is welcomed by a drowsy
maid with the sleep scarce brushed out of her hair,
and finds empty grates and polished mahogany, on
whose arid plains the pioneers of breakfast have
not yet encamped, so a person waked thus unsea-
sonably is sent into the world before his faculties
are up and dressed to serve him. It might have
been for this reason that my stomach resented for
several hours a piece of fried beefsteak which I
forced upon it, or, more properly speaking, a piece
of that leathern conveniency which in these regions
assumes the name. You will find it as hard to
believe, my dear Storg, as that quarrel of the
Sorbonists, whether one should say ego amat or
no, that the use of the gridiron is unknown here-
about, and so near a river named after St. Law-
rence, too !

To-day has been the hottest day of the season,

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 9

yet our drive has not been unpleasant. For a con-
siderable distance we followed the course of the
Sebasticook River, a pretty stream with alterna-
tions of dark brown pools and wine-colored rapids.
On each side of the road the land had been cleared,
and little one-story farm-houses were scattered at
intervals. But the stumps still held out in most of
the fields, and the tangled wilderness closed in be-
hind, striped here and there with the slim white
trunks of the elm. As yet only the edges of the
great forest have been nibbled away. Sometimes
a root-fence stretched up its bleaching antlers, like
the trophies of a giant hunter. Now and then the
houses thickened into an unsocial-looking village,
and we drove up to the grocery to leave and take a
mail-bag, stopping again presently to water the
horses at some pallid little tavern, whose one red-
curtained eye (the bar-room) had been put out by
the inexorable thrust of Maine Law. Had Shen-
stone travelled this road, he would never have writ-
ten that famous stanza of his ; had Johnson, he
would never have quoted it. They are to real inns
as the skull of Yorick to his face. Where these
villages occurred at a distance from the river, it
was difficult to account for them. On the river-
bank, a saw-mill or a tannery served as a logical
premise, and saved them from total inconsequen-
tiality. As we trailed along, at the rate of about
four miles an hour, it was discovered that one of
our mail-bags was missing. " Guess somebody '11
pick it up," said the driver coolly; "'t any rate,
likely there's nothin' in it." Who knows how

10 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

long it took some Elam D. or Zebulon K. to com-
pose the missive intrusted to that vagrant bag, and
how much longer to persuade Pamela Grace or
Sophronia Melissa that it had really and truly been
written ? The discovery of our loss was made by
a tall man who sat next to me on the top of the
coach, every one of whose senses seemed to be
prosecuting its several investigation as we went
along. Presently, sniffing gently, he remarked :
" 'Pears to me 's though I smelt sunthin'. Ain't
the aix het, think ? " The driver pulled up, and,
sure enough, the off fore-wheel was found to be
smoking. In three minutes he had snatched a rail
from the fence, made a lever, raised the coach, and
taken off the wheel, bathing the hot axle and box
with water from the river. It was a pretty spot,
and I was not sorry to lie under a beech-tree
(Tityrus-like, meditating over my pipe) and watch
the operations of the fire-annihilator. I could not
help contrasting the ready helpfulness of our driver,
all of whose wits were about him, current, and
redeemable in the sp'ecie of action on emergency,
with an incident of travel in Italy, where, under
a somewhat similar stress of circumstances, our
vetturino had nothing for it but to dash his hat on
the ground and call on Sant' Antonio, the Italian
Hercules.

There being four passengers for the Lake, a
vehicle called a mud-wagon was detailed at New-
port for our accommodation. In this we jolted and
rattled along at a livelier pace than in the coach.
As we got farther north, the country (especially

A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 11

the hills) gave evidence of longer cultivation.
About the thriving town of Dexter we saw fine
farms and crops. The houses, too, became pret-
tier ; hop-vines were trained about the doors, and
hung their clustering thyrsi over the open win-
dows. A kind of wild rose (called by the country
folk the primrose) and asters were planted about
the door-yards, and orchards, commonly of natural
fruit, added to the pleasant home-look. But every-
where we could see that the war between the white
man and the forest was still fierce, and that it
would be a long while yet before the axe was
buried. The haying being over, fires blazed or
smouldered against the stumps in the fields, and
the blue smoke widened slowly upward through the
"quiet August atmosphere. It seemed to me that I
could hear a sigh now and then from the imme-
morial pines, as they stood watching these camp-
fires of the inexorable invader. Evening set in,
and, as we crunched and crawled up the long
gravelly hills, I sometimes began to fancy that
Nature had forgotten to make the corresponding
descent on the other side. But erelong we were
rushing down at full speed ; and, inspired by the
dactylic beat of the horses' hoofs, I essayed to re-
peat the opening lines of Evangeline. At the mo-
ment I was beginning, we plunged into a hollow,
where the soft clay had been overcome by a road of
unhewn logs. I got through one line to this cor-
duroy accompaniment, somewhat as a country choir
stretches a short metre on the Procrustean rack of
a long-drawn tune. The result was like this : —

12 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL

" Thihis ihis thehe fohorest prihihimeheval ; thehe murhurmuring
pihines hahand thehe hehemlohocks ! "

At a quarter past eleven, P. M., we reached
Greenville, (a little village which looks as if it had
dripped down from the hills, and settled in the hol-
low at the foot of the lake,) having accomplished
seventy-two miles in eighteen hours. The tavern
was totally extinguished. The driver rapped upon
the bar-room window, and after a while we saw
heat-lightnings of unsuccessful matches followed by
a low grumble of vocal thunder, which I am afraid
took the form of imprecation. Presently there was
a great success, and the steady blur of lighted tal-
low succeeded the fugitive brilliance of the pine.
A hostler fumbled the door open, and stood staring
at but not seeing us, with the sleep sticking out all
over him. We at last contrived to launch him,
more like an insensible missile than an intelligent
or intelligible being, at the slumbering landlord,
who came out wide-awake, and welcomed us as so
many half-dollars, — twenty-five cents each for bed,
ditto breakfast. O Shenstone, Shenstone ! The
only roost was in the garret, which had been made
into a single room, and contained eleven double-
beds, ranged along the walls. It was like sleeping
in a hospital. However, nice customs curtsy to
eighteen-hour rides, and we slept.

Saturday, 13^. — This morning I performed
my toilet in the bar-room, where there was an
abundant supply of water, and a halo of interested
spectators. After a sufficient breakfast, we em-
barked on the little steamer Moosehead, and were

A MOO SEE E AD JOURNAL 13

soon throbbing- up the lake. The boat, it appeared,
had been chartered by a party, this not being one
of her regular trips. Accordingly we were mulcted
in twice the usual fee, the philosophy of which I
could not understand. However, it always comes
easier to us to comprehend why we receive than
why we pay. I dare say it was quite clear to the
captain. There were three or four clearings on the
western shore ; but after passing these, the lake
became wholly primeval, and looked to us as it did
to the first adventurous Frenchman who paddled
across it. Sometimes a cleared point would be pink
with the blossoming willow-herb, " a cheap and
excellent substitute " for heather, and, like all such,
not quite so good as the real thing. On all sides
rose deep-blue mountains, of remarkably graceful
outline, and more fortunate than common in their
names. There were the Big and Little Squaw,
the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. It was de-
bated whether we saw Katahdin or not, (perhaps
more useful as an intellectual exercise than the
assured vision would have been), and presently
Mount Kineo rose abruptly before us, in shape
not unlike the island of Capri. Mountains are
called great natural features, and why they should
not retain their names long enough for these also to
become naturalized, it is hard to say. Why should
every new surveyor rechristen them with the guber-
natorial patronymics of the current year? They
are geological noses, and as they are aquiline or
pug, indicate terrestrial idiosyncrasies. A cos-
mical physiognomist, after a glance at them, will

14 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

draw no vague inference as to the character of the
country. The word nose is no better than any
other word ; but since the organ has got that name,
it is convenient to keep it. Suppose we had to
label our facial prominences every season with the
name of our provincial governor, how should we
like it ? If the old names have no other meaning,
they have that of age ; and, after all, meaning is
a plant of slow growth, as every reader of Shake-
speare knows. It is well enough to eall mountains
after their discoverers, for Nature has a knack of
throwing doublets, and somehow contrives it that
discoverers have good names. Pike's Peak is a cu-
rious hit in this way. But these surveyors' names
have no natural stick in them. They remind one
of the epithets of poetasters, which peel off like a
badly gummed postage-stamp. The early settlers
did better, and there is something pleasant in the
sound of Graylock, Saddleback, and Great Hay-
stack.

" I love those names
Wherewith the exiled farmer tames
Nature down to companionship

With his old world's more homely mood,
And strives the shaggy wild to clip

In the arms of familiar habitude."

It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount
Hitchcock may sound as well hereafter as Helles-
pont and Peloponnesus, when the heroes, their
namesakes, have become mythic with antiquity.
But that is to look forward a great way. I am no
fanatic for Indian nomenclature, — the name of
my native district having been Pigsgusset, — but
let us at least agree on names for ten years.

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 15

There were a couple of loggers on board, in red
flannel shirts, and with rifles. They were the first
I had seen, and I was interested in their appear-
ance. They were tall, well-knit men, straight as
Kobin Hood, and with a quiet, self-contained look
that pleased me. I fell into talk with one of
them.

" Is there a good market for the farmers here in
the woods ? " I asked.

" None better. They can sell what they raise at
their doors, and for the best of prices. The lum-
berers want it all, and more."

" It must be a lonely life. But then we all have
to pay more or less life for a living."

"Well, it is lonesome. Shouldn't like it.
After all, the best crop a man can raise is a good
crop of society. We don't live none too long, any-
how ; and without society a fellow could n't tell
more 'n half the time whether he was alive or not."

This speech gave me a glimpse into the life of
the lumberers' camp. It was plain that there a
man would soon find out how much alive he was,
— there he could learn to estimate his quality,
weighed in the nicest self-adjusting balance. The
best arm at the axe or the paddle, the surest eye
for a road or for the weak point of a jam, the
steadiest foot upon the squirming log, the most
persuasive voice to the tugging oxen, — all these
things are rapidly settled, and so an aristocracy is
evolved from this democracy of the woods, for good
old mother Nature speaks Saxon still, and with
her either Canning or Kenning means King.

16 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

A string of five loons was flying back and forth
in long, irregular zigzags, uttering at intervals
their wild, tremulous cry, which always seems far
away, like the last faint pulse of echo dying among
the hills, and which is one of those few sounds
that, instead of disturbing solitude, only deepen
and confirm it. On our inland ponds they are
usually seen in pairs, and I asked if it were com-
mon to meet five together. My question was an-
swered by a queer-looking old man, chiefly remark-
able for a pair of enormous cowhide boots, over
which large blue trousers of f rocking strove in vain
to crowd themselves.

" Wahl, 't ain't ushil," said he, "and it's called
a sign o' rain comin', that is."

" Do you think it will rain ? "

With the caution of a veteran auspex, he evaded
a direct reply. " Wahl, they du say it 's a sign o'
rain comin'," said he.

I discovered afterward that my interlocutor was
Uncle Zeb. Formerly, every New England town
had its representative uncle. He was not a pawn-
broker, but some elderly man who, for want of more
defined family ties, had gradually assumed this
avuncular relation to the community, inhabiting the
border-land between respectability and the alms-
house, with no regular calling, but ready for odd
jobs at haying, wood-sawing, whitewashing, associ-
ated with the demise of pigs and the ailments of
cattle, and possessing as much patriotism as might
be implied in a devoted attachment to " New Eng-
land " — with a good deal of sugar and very little

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 17

water in it. Uncle Zeb was a good specimen of this
palaeozoic class, extinct among us for the most part,
or surviving, like the Dodo, in the Botany Bays of
society. He was ready to contribute (somewhat
muddily) to all general conversation ; but his chief
topics were his boots and the 'Roostick war. Upon
the lowlands and levels of ordinary palaver he
would make rapid and unlooked-for incursions;
but, provision failing, he would retreat to these
two fastnesses, whence it was impossible to dislodge
him, and to which he knew innumerable passes
and short cuts quite beyond the conjecture of com-
mon woodcraft. His mind opened naturally to
these two subjects, like a book to some favorite
passage. As the ear accustoms itself to any sound
recurring regularly, such as the ticking of a clock,
and, without a conscious effort of attention, takes
no impression from it whatever, so does the mind
find a natural safeguard against this pendulum
species of discourse, and performs its duties in the
parliament by an unconscious reflex action, like
the beating of the heart or the movement of the
lungs. If talk seemed to be flagging, our Uncle
would put the heel of one boot upon the toe of the
other, to bring it within point-blank range, and
say, " Wahl, I stump the Devil himself to make
that 'ere boot hurt my foot," leaving us in doubt
whether it were the virtue of the foot or its case
which set at naught the wiles of the adversary ; or,
looking up suddenly, he would exclaim, "Wahl,
we eat some beans to the 'Roostick war, I tell
you ! " When his poor old clay was wet with gin,

18 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

his thoughts and words acquired a rank flavor from
it, as from too strong a fertilizer. At such times,
too, his fancy commonly reverted to a prehistoric
period of his life, when he singly had settled all
the surrounding country, subdued the Injuns and
other wild animals, and named all the towns.

We talked of the winter-camps and the life
there. " The best thing is," said our Uncle, " to
hear a log squeal thru the snow. Git a good, col',
frosty mornin', in Febuary say, an' take an' hitch
the critters on to a log that '11 scale seven thousan',
an' it '11 squeal as pooty as an' thin' you ever hearn,
I tell you."

A pause.

" Lessee, — seen Cal Hutchins lately ? "

"No."

" Seems to me 's though I hed n't seen Cal sence
the 'Roostick war. Wahl," &c., &c.

Another pause.

" To look at them boots you 'd think they was
too large ; but kind o' git your foot into 'em, and
they 're as easy 's a glove." (I observed that he
never seemed really to get his foot in, — there was
always a qualifying kind o'.) " Wahl, my foot
can play in 'em like a young hedgehog."

By this time we had arrived at Kineo, — a flour-
ishing village of one house, the tavern kept by
'Squire Barrows. The 'Squire is a large, hearty
man, with a voice as clear and strong as a north-
west wind, and a great laugh suitable to it. His
table is neat and well supplied, and he waits upon
it himself in the good old landlordly fashion. One

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 19

may be much better off here, to my thinking, than
in one of those gigantic Columbaria which are
foisted upon us patient Americans for hotels, and
where one is packed away in a pigeon-hole so near
the heavens that, if the comet should flirt its tail,
(no unlikely thing in the montH of flies,) one would
run some risk of being brushed away. Here one
does not pay his diurnal three dollars for an undi-
vided five-hundredth part of the pleasure of look-
ing at gilt gingerbread. Here, one's relations are
with the monarch himself, and one is not obliged to
wait the slow leisure of those "attentive clerks"
whose praises are sung by thankful deadheads, and
to whom the slave who pays may feel as much
gratitude as might thrill the heart of a brown-paper
parcel toward the express-man who labels it and
chucks it under his counter.

Sunday, ~L4th. — The loons were right. About
midnight it began to rain in earnest, and did not
hold up till about ten o'clock this morning. " This
is a Maine dew," said a shaggy woodman cheerily,
as he shook the water out of his wide-awake, " if it
don't look out sharp, it '11 begin to rain afore it
thinks on't." The day was mostly spent within
doors ; but I found good and intelligent society.
We should have to be shipwrecked 011 Juan Fer-
nandez not to find men who knew more than we.
In these travelling encounters one is thrown upon
his own resources, and is worth just what he car-
ries about him. The social currency of home, the
smooth-worn coin which passes freely among friends
and neighbors, is of no account. We are thrown

20 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

back upon the old system of barter ; and, even with
savages, we bring away only as much of the wild
wealth of the woods as we carry beads of thought
and experience, strung one by one in painful years,
to pay for them with. A useful old jackknife will
buy more than the daintiest Louis Quinze paper-
folder fresh from Paris. Perhaps the kind of in-
telligence one gets in these out-of-the-way places
is the best, — where one takes a fresh man after
breakfast instead of the damp morning paper, and
where the magnetic telegraph of human sympathy
flashes swift news from brain to brain.

Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow's weather can
be discussed. The augury from the flight of birds
is favorable, — the loons no longer prophesying
rain. The wind also is hauling round to the right
quarter, according to some, — to the wrong, if we
are to believe others. Each man has his private
barometer of hope, the mercury in which is more
or less sensitive, and the opinion vibrant with its
rise or fall. Mine has an index which can be
moved mechanically. I fixed it at set fair, and re-
signed myself. I read an old volume of the Patent-
Office Report on Agriculture, and stored away a
beautiful pile of facts and observations for future
use, which the current of occupation, at its first
freshet, would sweep quietly off to blank oblivion.
Practical application is the only mordant which
will set things in the memory. Study, without it,
is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get
intellectual bread. One learns more metaphysics
from a single temptation than from all the philoso-

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 21

phers. It is curious, though, how tyrannical the
habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to
escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being
left alone with so much as our own minds. I have
seen a sensible man study a stale newspaper in a
country tavern, and husband it as he would an old
shoe on a raft after shipwreck. Why not try a bit
of hibernation? There are few brains that would
not be better for living on their own fat a little
while. With these reflections2 I, notwithstanding,
spent the afternoon over my Report. If our own
experience is of so little use to us, what a dolt is
he who recommends to man or nation the experi-
ence of others ! Like the mantle in the old ballad,
it is always too short or too long, and exposes or
trips us up. "Keep out of that candle," says old
Father Miller, " or you '11 get a singeing." " Pooh,
pooh, father, I 've been dipped in the new asbestos
preparation," and frozz! it is all over with young
Hopeful. How many warnings have been drawn
from Pretorian bands, and Janizaries, and Mame-
lukes, to make Napoleon III. impossible in 1851!
I found myself thinking the same thoughts over
again, when we walked later on the beach and
picked up pebbles. The old time-ocean throws
upon its shores just such rounded and polished re-
sults of the eternal turmoil, but we only see the
beauty of those we have got the headache in stoop-
ing for ourselves, and wonder at the dull brown
bits of common stone with which our comrades
have stuffed their pockets. Afterwards this little
fable came of it.

22 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

DOCTOR LOBSTER.

A PERCH, who had the toothache, once
Thus moaned, like any human dunce :
:l Why must great souls exhaust so soon
Life's thin and unsubstantial boon ?
Existence on such sculpin terms,
Their vulgar loves and hard-won worms,
What is it all but dross to me,
Whose nature craves a larger sea ;
Whose inches, six from head to tail,
Enclose the spirit of a whale ;
Who, if great baits were still to win,
By watchful eye and fearless fin
Might with the Zodiac's awful twain
Room for a third immortal gain ?
Better the crowd's unthinking plan,
The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan!
O Death, thou ever roaming shark,
Ingulf me in eternal dark ! ' '

The speech was cut in two by flight :
A real shark had come in sight ;
No metaphoric monster, one
It soothes despair to call upon,
But stealthy, sidelong, grim, i-wis,
A bit of downright Nemesis ;
While it recovered from the shock,
Our fish took shelter 'neath a rock:
This was an ancient lobster's house,
A lobster of prodigious nows,
So old that barnacles had spread
Their white encampments o'er his head,
And of experience so stupend,
His claws were blunted at the end,
Turning life's iron pages o'er,
That shut and can be oped no more.

Stretching a hospitable claw,
"At once," said he, " the point I saw;

A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 23

My dear young friend, your case I rue,

Your great-great-grandfather I knew ;

He was a tried and tender friend

I know, — I ate him in the end :

In this vile sea a pilgrim long,

Still my sight 's good, my memory strong ;

The only sign that age is near

Is a slight deafness in this ear ;

I understand your case as well

As this my old familiar shell ;

This Welt-schmerz is a brand-new notion,

Come in since first I kne w the ocean ;

We had no radicals, nor crimes,

Nor lohster-pots, in good old times ;

Your traps and nets and hooks we owe

To Messieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ;

I say to all my sons and daughters,

Shun Red Republican hot waters ;

No lobster ever cast his lot

Among the reds, but went to pot :

Your trouble 's in the jaw, you said ?

Come, let me just nip off your head,

And, when a new one comes, the pain

Will never trouble you again :

Nay, nay, fear naught : 't is nature's law.

Four times I 've lost this starboard claw ;

And still, erelong, another grew,

Good as the old, — and better too ! "

The perch consented, and next day
An osprey, marketing that way,
Picked up a fish without a head,
Floating with belly up, stone dead.

MORAL.

Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws,
And sauce for goose is gander's sauce ;
But perch's heads are n't lobster's claws.

Monday, \5>ih. — The morning was fine, and we
were called at four o'clock. At the moment my

24 A MOOSEUEAD JOURNAL

door was knocked at, I was mounting a giraffe with
that charming nil admirari which characterizes
dreams, to visit Prester John. Rat-tat-tat-tat !
upon my door and upon the horn gate of dreams
also. I remarked to my skowhegan (the Tatar for
giraffe-driver) that I was quite sure the animal had
the raps, a common disease among them, for I heard
a queer knocking noise inside him. It is the sound
of his joints, O Tambourgi ! (an Oriental term
of reverence,) and proves him to be of the race of
El Keirat. Rat-tat-tat-too ! and I lost my dinner
at the Prester's, embarking for a voyage to the
Northwest Carry instead. Never use the word
canoe, my dear Storg, if you wish to retain your
self-respect. Birch is the term among us back-
woodsmen. I never knew it till yesterday ; but,
like a true philosopher, I made it appear as if I
had been intimate with it from childhood. The
rapidity with which the human mind levels itself
to the standard around it gives us the most perti-
nent warning as to the company we keep. It is
as hard for most characters to stay at their own
average point in all companies, as for a thermom-
eter to say 65° for twenty-four hours together. I
like this in our friend Johannes Taurus, that he
carries everywhere and maintains his insular tem-
perature, and will have everything accommodate
itself to that. Shall I confess that this morning I
would rather have broken the moral law, than have
endangered the equipoise of the birch by my awk-
wardness ? that I should have been prouder of a
compliment to my paddling, than to have had both

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 25

my guides suppose me the author of Hamlet?
Well, Cardinal Richelieu used to jump over chairs.

We were to paddle about twenty miles ; but we
made it rather more by crossing and recrossing the
lake. Twice we landed, — once at a camp, where
we found the cook alone, baking bread and ginger-
bread. Monsieur Soyer would have been startled
a little by this shaggy professor, — this Pre-Ra-
phaelite of cookery. He represented the salceratus
period of the art, and his bread was of a brilliant
yellow, like those cakes tinged with saffron, which
hold out so long against time and the flies in little
water-side shops of seaport towns, — dingy extrem-
ities of trade fit to moulder on Lethe wharf. His
water was better, squeezed out of ice-cold granite
in the neighboring mountains, and sent through
subterranean ducts to sparkle up by the door 01
the camp.

" There 's nothin' so sweet an' hulsome as your
real spring water," said Uncle Zeb, " git it pure.
But it 's dreffle hard to git it that ain't got suiithin'
the matter of it. Snow-water '11 burn a man's in-
side out, — I lamed that to the 'Roostick war, —
and the snow lays terrible long on some o' thes'ere
hills. Mo an' Eb Stiles was up old Ktahdn onct
jest about this time o' year, an' we come acrost a
kind o' holler like, as full o' snow as your stockin 's
full o' your foot. / see it fust, an' took an'
rammed a settin'-pole — wahl, it was all o' twenty
foot into 't, an' couldn't fin' no bottom. I dunno
as there 's snow-water enough in this to do no hurt.
I don't somehow seem' to think that real spring-

26 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

water 's so plenty as it used to be." And Uncle
Zeb, with perhaps a little over-refinement of scru-
pulosity, applied his lips to the Ethiop ones of a
bottle of raw gin, with a kiss that drew out its very
soul, — a basia that Secundus might have sung.
He must have been a wonderful judge of water, for
he analyzed this, and detected its latent snow sim-
ply by his eye, and without the clumsy process of
tasting. I could not help thinking that he had
made the desert his dwelling-place chiefly in order
to enjoy the ministrations of this one fair spirit
unmolested.

We pushed on. Little islands loomed trembling
between sky and water, like hanging gardens.
Gradually the filmy trees defined themselves, the
aerial enchantment lost its potency, and we came
up with common prose islands that had so late been
magical and poetic. The old story of the attained
and unattained. About noon we reached the head
of the lake, and took possession of a deserted won-
gen, in which to cook and eat our dinner. No Jew,
I am sure, can have a more thorough dislike of salt
pork than I have in a normal state, yet I had
already eaten it raw with hard bread for lunch, and
relished it keenly. We soon had our tea-kettle
over the fire, and before long the cover was chatter-
ing with the escaping steam, which had thus vainly
begged of all men to be saddled and bridled, till
James Watt one day happened to overhear it.
One of our guides shot three Canada grouse, and
these were turned slowly between the fire and a bit
of salt pork, which dropped fatness upon them as

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 27

it fried. Although my fingers were certainly not
made before knives and forks, yet they served as a
convenient substitute for those more ancient inven-
tions. We sat round, Turk-fashion, and ate thank-
fully, while a party of aborigines of the Mosquito
tribe, who had camped in the wongen before we
arrived, dined upon us. I do not know what the
British Protectorate of the Mosquitoes amounts to ;
but, as I squatted there at the mercy of these blood-
thirsty savages, I no longer wondered that the clas-
sic Everett had been stung into a willingness for
war on the question.

" This 'ere 'd be about a complete place for a
camp, ef there was on'y a spring o' sweet water
handy. Frizzled pork goes wal, don't it? Yes,
an' sets wal, too," said Uncle Zeb, and he again
tilted his bottle, which rose nearer and nearer to
an angle of forty-five at every gurgle. He then
broached a curious dietetic theory: "The reason
we take salt pork along is cos it packs handy : you
git the greatest amount o' board in the smallest
compass, — let alone that it 's more nourishin' than
an' thin' else. It kind o' don't disgest so quick, but
stays by ye, anourishin' ye all the while.

" A feller can live wal on frizzled pork an' good
spring-water, git it good. To the 'Eoostick war
we did n't ask for nothin* better, — on'y beans."
( Tilt, tilt, gurgle, gurgle.} Then, with an appar-"
ent feeling of inconsistency, "But then, come to
git used to a particular kind o' spring-water, an*
it makes a feller hard to suit. Most all sorts o'
water taste kind o' msipid away from home. Now,

28 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

I 've gut a spring to my place that 's as sweet —
wahl, it 's as sweet as maple sap. A feller ac"ts
about water jest as he doos about a pair o' boots.
It 's all on it in gittin' wonted. Now, them boots,"
&c., &c. ( Gurgle, gurgle, gurgle, smack /)

All this while he was packing away the remains
of the pork and hard bread in two large firkins.
This accomplished, we re embarked, our uncle on
his way to the birch essaying a kind of song in
four or five parts, of which the words were hila-
rious and the tune profoundly melancholy, and
which was finished, and the rest of his voice appar-
ently jerked out of him in one sharp falsetto note,
by his tripping over the root of a tree. We pad-
dled a short distance up a brook which came into
the lake smoothly through a little meadow not
far off. We soon reached the Northwest Carry,
and our guide, pointing through the woods, said:
" That 's the Canny dy road. You can travel that
clearn to Kebeck, a hunderd an' twenty mile," — a
privilege of which I respectfully declined to avail
myself. The offer, however, remains open to the
public. The Carry is called two miles ; but this is
the estimate of somebody who had nothing to lug.
I had a headache and all my baggage, which,
with a traveller's instinct, I had brought with me.
(P. S. _ I did not even take the keys out of my
Docket, and both my bags were wet through before
I came back.) My estimate of the distance is
eighteen thousand six hundred and seventy-four
miles and three quarters, — the fraction being the
part left to be travelled after one of my com-

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 29

panions most kindly insisted on relieving me of
my heaviest bag. I know very well that the an-
cient Roman soldiers used to carry sixty pounds'
weight, and all that ; but I am not, and never shall
be, an ancient Roman soldier, — no, not even in
the miraculous Thundering Legion. Uncle Zeb
slung the two provender firkins across his shoulder,
and trudged along, grumbling that " he never see
sech a contrairy pair as them." He had begun
upon a second bottle of his "particular kind o'
spring-water," and, at every rest, the gurgle of this
peripatetic fountain might be heard, followed by a
smack, a fragment of mosaic song, or a confused
clatter with the cowhide boots, being an arbitrary
symbol, intended to represent the festive dance.
Christian's pack gave him not half so much trouble
as the firkins gave Uncle Zeb. It grew harder
and harder to sling them, and with every fresh
gulp of the Batavian elixir, they got heavier. Or
rather, the truth was, that his hat grew heavier,
in which he was carrying on an extensive manu-
facture of bricks without straw. At last affairs
reached a crisis, and a particularly favorable pitch
offering, with a puddle at the foot of it, even the
boots afforded no sufficient ballast, and away went
our uncle, the satellite firkins accompanying faith-
fully his headlong flight. Did ever exiled monarch
or disgraced minister find the cause of his fall in
himself ? Is there not always a strawberry at the
bottom of our cup of life, on which we can lay all
the blame of our deviations from the straight path ?
Till now Uncle Zeb had contrived to give a gloss

30 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

of volition to smaller stumblings and gyrations, by
exaggerating them into an appearance of playful
burlesque. But the present case was beyond any
such subterfuges. He held a bed of justice where
he sat, and then arose slowly, with a stern deter-
mination of vengeance stiffening every muscle of
his face. But what would he select as the culprit ?
" It 's that cussed firkin," he mumbled to himself.
" I never knowed a firkin cair on so, — no, not in
the 'Roostehicick war. There, go long, will ye?
and don't come back till you Ve larned how to walk
with a genelman ! " And, seizing the unhappy
scapegoat by the bail, he hurled it into the forest.
It is a curious circumstance, that it was not the
firkin containing the bottle which was thus con-
demned to exile.

The end of the Carry was reached at last, and,
as we drew near it, we heard a sound of shouting
and laughter. It came from a party of men making
hay of the wild grass in Seboomok meadows, which
lie around Seboomok pond, into which the Carry
empties itself. Their camp was near, and our two
hunters set out for it, leaving us seated in the
birch on the plashy border of the pond. The re-
pose was perfect. Another heaven hallowed and
deepened the polished lake, and through that nether
world the fish-hawk's double floated with balanced
wings, or, wheeling suddenly, flashed his whitened
breast against the sun. As the clattering king,
fisher flew unsteadily across, and seemed to push
his heavy head along with ever-renewing effort, a
visionary mate flitted from downward tree to tree

A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 31

below. Some tall alders shaded ns from the sun,
in whose yellow afternoon light the drowsy forest
was steeped, giving out that wholesome resinous
perfume, almost the only warm odor which it is
refreshing to breathe. The tame hay-cocks in the
midst of the wildness gave one a pleasant reminis-
cence of home, like hearing one's native tongue in
a strange country.

Presently our hunters came back, bringing with
them a tall, thin, active-looking man, with black
eyes, that glanced unconsciously on all sides, like
one of those spots of sunlight which a child dances
up and down the street with a bit of looking-glass.
This was M., the captain of the hay-makers, a
famous river-driver, and who was to have fifty men
under him next winter. I could now understand
that sleepless vigilance of eye. He had consented
to take two of our party in his birch to seek for
moose. A quick, nervous, decided man, he got
them into the birch, and was off instantly, without
a superfluous word. He evidently looked upon
them as he would upon a couple of logs which he
was to deliver at a certain place. Indeed, I doubt
if life and the world presented themselves to Napier
himself in a more logarithmic way. His only
thought was to do the immediate duty well, and to
pilot his particular raft down the crooked stream
of life to the ocean beyond. The birch seemed to
feel him as an inspiring soul, and slid away straight
and swift for the outlet of the pond. As he disap-
peared under the over-arching alders of the brook,
our two hunters could not repress a grave and

32 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

measured applause. There is never any extrava-
gance among these woodmen ; their eye, accustomed
to reckoning the number of feet which a tree will
scale, is rapid and close in its guess of the amount
of stuff in a man. It was laudari a laudato, how-
ever, for they themselves were accounted good men
in a birch. I was amused, in talking with them
about him, to meet with an instance of that ten-
dency of the human mind to assign some utterly
improbable reason for gifts which seem unaccount-
able. After due praise, one of them said, " I guess
he 's got some Injun in him," although I knew very
well that the speaker had a thorough contempt for
the red-man, mentally and physically. Here was
mythology in a small way, — the same that under
more favorable auspices hatched Helen out of an
egg and gave Merlin an Incubus for his father. I
was pleased with all I saw of M. He was in his
narrow sphere a true o^a£ Mpuv, and the ragged
edges of his old hat seemed to become coronated as
I looked at him. He impressed me as a man
really educated, — that is, with his aptitudes drawn
out and ready for use. He was A. M. and LL. D.
in Woods College, — Axe-master and Doctor of
Logs. Are not our educations commonly like a
pile of books laid over a plant in a pot ? The com-
pressed nature struggles through at every crevice,
but can never get the cramp and stunt out of it.
We spend all our youth in building a vessel fdr
our voyage of life, and set forth with streamers
flying ; but the moment we come nigh the great
loadstone mountain of our proper destiny, out leap

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 33

all our carefully-driven bolts and nails, and we get
many a mouthful of good salt brine, and many a
buffet of the rough water of experience, before we
secure the bare right to live.

We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn aisle of
alder, on each side of which spired tall firs, spruces,
and white cedars. The motion of the birch re-
minded me of the gondola, and they represent
among water-craft ihefelidce, the cat tribe, stealthy,
silent, treacherous, and preying by night. I closed
my eyes, and strove to fancy myself in the dumb
city, whose only horses are the bronze ones of St.
Mark and that of Colleoni. But Nature would
allow no rival, and bent down an alder-bough to
brush my cheek and recall me. Only the robin
sings in the emerald chambers of these tall sylvan
palaces, and the squirrel leaps from hanging bal-
cony to balcony.

The rain which the loons foreboded had raised
the west branch of the Penobscot so much, that
a strong current was setting back into the pond ;
and, when at last we brushed through into the
river, it was full to the brim, — too full for moose,
the hunters said. Rivers with low banks have al-
ways the compensation of giving a sense of entire
fulness. The sun sank behind its horizon of pines,
whose pointed summits notched the rosy west in an
endless black sierra. At the same moment the
golden moon swung slowly up in the east, like the
other scale of that Homeric balance in which Zeus
weighed the deeds of men. Sunset and moonrise
at once ! Adam had no more in Eden — except the

34 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

head of Eve upon his shoulder. The stream was
so smooth, that the floating logs we met seemed to
hang in a glowing atmosphere, the shadow-half be-
ing as real as the solid. And gradually the mind
was etherized to a like dreamy placidity, till fact
and fancy, the substance and the image, floating
on the current of reverie, became but as the upper
and under halves of one unreal reality.

In the west still lingered a pale-green light. I
do not know whether it be from lifelong familiarity,
but it always seems to me that the pinnacles of
pine-trees make an edge to the landscape which
tells better against the twilight, or the fainter
dawn before the rising moon, than the rounded
and cloud-cumulus outline of hard-wood trees.

After paddling a couple of miles, we found the
arbored mouth of the little Malahoodus River,
famous for moose. We had been on the lookout
for it, and I was amused to hear one of the hunters
say to the other, to assure himself of his familiarity
with the spot, " You drove the West Branch last
spring, did n't you ? " as one of us might ask about
a horse. We did not explore the Malahoodus far,
but left the other birch to thread its cedared soli-
tudes, while we turned back to try our fortunes in
the larger stream. We paddled on about four
miles farther, lingering now and then opposite the
black mouth of a moose-path. The incidents of
our voyage were few, but quite as exciting and
profitable as the items of the newspapers. A stray
log compensated very well for the ordinary run of
accidents, and the floating carkiss of a moose which

A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 35

we met could pass muster instead of a singular dis-
covery of human remains by workmen in digging a
cellar. Once or twice we saw what seemed ghosts
of trees ; but they turned out to be dead cedars, in
winding-sheets of long gray moss, made spectral by
the moonlight. Just as we were turning to drift
back down-stream, we heard a loud gnawing sound
close by us on the bank. One of our guides
thought it a hedgehog, the other a bear. I in-
clined to the bear, as making the adventure more
imposing. A rifle was fired at the sound, which
began again with the most provoking indifference,
ere the echo, flaring madly at first from shore to
shore, died far away in a hoarse sigh.

Half past Eleven, P. M. — No sign of a moose
yet. The birch, it seems, was strained at the
Carry, or the pitch was softened as she lay on the^
shore during dinner, and she leaks a little. If
there be any virtue in the sitzbad, I shall discover
it. If I cannot extract green cucumbers from the
moon's rays, I get something quite as cool. One
of the guides shivers so as to shake the birch.

Quarter to Twelve. — Later from the Freshet!
— The water in the birch is about three inches
deep, but the dampness reaches already nearly to
the waist. I am obliged to remove the matches
from the ground-floor of my trousers into the upper
story of a breast-pocket. Meanwhile, we are to sit
immovable, — for fear of frightening the moose, —
which induces cramps.

Half past Twelve. — A crashing is heard on the
left bank. This is a moose in good earnest. We

36 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

are besought to hold our breaths, if possible. My
fingers so numb, I could not, if I tried. Crash !
crash ! again, and then a plunge, followed by dead
stillness. " Swimmin' crik," whispers guide, sup-
pressing all unnecessary parts of speech, — "don't
stir." I, for one, am not likely to. A cold fog
which has been gathering for the last hour has fin-
ished me. I fancy myself one of those naked pigs
that seem rushing out of market-doors in winter,
frozen in a ghastly attitude of gallop. If I were
to be shot myself, I should feel no interest in it.
As it is, I am only a spectator, having declined a
gun. Splash! again; this time the moose is in
sight, and click ! click ! one rifle misses fire after
the other. The fog has quietly spiked our bat-
teries. The moose goes crashing up the bank, and
presently we can hear it chawing its cud close by.
So we lie in wait, freezing.

At one o'clock, I propose to land at a deserted
wongen I had noticed on the way up, where I will
make a fire, and leave them to refrigerate as much
longer as they please. Axe in hand, I go plung-
ing through waist-deep weeds dripping with dew,
haunted by an intense conviction that the gnawing
sound we had heard was a bear, and a bear at least
eighteen hands high. There is something pokerish
about a deserted dwelling, even in broad daylight ;
but here in the obscure wood, and the moon filter-
ing unwillingly through the trees ! Well, I made
the door at last, and found the place packed fuller
with darkness than it ever had been with hay.
Gradually I was able to make things out a little,

A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL 37

and began to hack f rozenly at a log which I groped
out. I was relieved presently by one of the guides.
He cut at once into one of the uprights of the build-
ing till he got some dry splinters, and we soon had
a fire like the burning of a whole wood-wharf in our
part of the country. My companion went back to
the birch, and left me to keep house. First I
knocked a hole in the roof (which the fire began
to lick in a relishing way) for a chimney, and then
cleared away a damp growth of " pison-elder," to
make a sleeping place. Whe'n the unsuccessful
hunters returned, I had everything quite comfort-
able, and was steaming at the rate of about ten
horse-power a minute. Young Telemachus l was
sorry to give up the moose so soon, and, with the
teeth chattering almost out of his head, he declared
that he would like to stick it out all night. How-
ever, he reconciled himself to the fire, and, making
our beds of some " splits " which we poked from
the roof, we lay down at half past two. I, who
have in-herited a habit of looking into every closet
before I go to bed, for fear of fire, had become in
two days such a stoic of the woods, that I went to
sleep tranquilly, certain that my bedroom would be
in a blaze before morning. And so, indeed, it was ;
and the withes that bound it together being burned
off, one of the sides fell in without waking me.

Tuesday, 16^A. — After a sleep of two hours and
a half, so sound that it was as good as eight, we
started at half past four for the hay-makers' camp

1 This was my nephew, Charles Russell Lowell, who fell at the
head of his brigade in the battle of Cedar Creek.

38 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL

again. We found them just getting breakfast.
We sat down upon the deacon-seat before the fire
blazing between the bedroom and the salle a man-
ger, which were simply two roofs of spruce-bark,
sloping to the ground on one side, the other three
being left open. We found that we had, at least,
been luckier than the other party, for M. had
brought back his convoy without even seeing a
moose. As there was not room at the table for all of
us to breakfast together, these hospitable woodmen
forced us to sit down first, although we resisted
stoutly. Our breakfast consisted of fresh bread,
fried salt pork, stewed whortleberries, and tea. Our
kind hosts refused to take money for it, nor would
M. accept anything for his trouble. This seemed
even more open-handed when I remembered that
they had brought all their stores over the Carry
upon their shoulders, paying an ache extra for
every pound. If their hospitality lacked anything
of hard external polish, it had all the deeper grace
which springs only from sincere manliness. I have
rarely sat at a table d'hote which might not have
taken a lesson from them in essential courtesy. I
have never seen a finer race of men. They have
all the virtues of the sailor, without that unsteady
roll in the gait with which the ocean proclaims it-
self quite as much in the moral as in the physical
habit of a man. They appeared to me to have hewn
out a short northwest passage through wintry woods
to those spice-lands of character which we dwellers
in cities must reach, if at all, by weary voyages in
the monotonous track of the trades.

A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 39

By the way, as we were embirching last evening
for our moose-chase, I asked what I was to do with
my baggage. " Leave it here," said our guide, and
he laid the bags upon a platform of alders, which
he bent down to keep them beyond reach of the
rising water.

" Will they be safe here ? "

" As safe as they would be locked up in your
house at home."

And so I found them at my return ; only the
hay-makers had carried them to their camp for
greater security against the chances of the weather.

We got back to Kineo in time for dinner ; and
in the afternoon, the weather being fine, went up
the mountain. As we landed at the foot, our guide
pointed to the remains of a red shirt and a pair of
blanket trousers. " That," said he, " is the reason
there 's such a trade in ready-made clo'es. A suit
gits pooty well wore out by the time a camp breaks
up in the spring, and the lumberers want to look
about right when they come back into the settle-
ments, so they buy somethin' ready-made, and
heave ole bust-up into the bush." True enough,
thought I, this is the Ready-made Age. It is
quicker being covered than fitted. So we all go
to the slop-shop and come out uniformed, every
mother's son with habits of thinking and doing cut
on one pattern, with no special reference to his
peculiar build.

Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 750
above the lake. The climb is very easy, with fine
outlooks at every turn over lake and forest. Near

40 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL

the top is a spring of water, which even Uncle Zeb
might have allowed to be wholesome. The little
tin dipper was scratched all over with names, show-
ing that vanity, at least, is not put out of breath
by the ascent. O Ozymandias, King of kings !
We are all scrawling on something of the kind.
" My name is engraved on the institutions of my
country," thinks the statesman. But, alas ! insti-
tutions are as changeable as tin-clippers ; men are
content to drink the same old water, if the shape
of the cup only be new, and our friend gets two
lines in the Biographical Dictionaries. After all,
these inscriptions, which make us smile up here,
are about as valuable as the Assyrian ones which
Hincks and Rawlinson read at cross-purposes.
Have we not Smiths and Browns enough, that we
must ransack the ruins of Nimroud for more?
Near the spring we met a Bloomer ! It was the
first chronic one I had ever seen. It struck me as
a sensible costume for the occasion, and it will be
the only wear in the Greek Kalends, when women
believe that sense is an equivalent for grace.

The forest primeval is best seen from the top of
a mountain. It then impresses one by its extent,
like an Oriental epic. To be in it is nothing, for
then an acre is as good as a thousand square miles.
You cannot see five rods in any direction, and the
ferns, mosses, and tree-trunks just around you are
the best of it. As for solitude, night will make a
better one with ten feet square of pitch dark ; and
mere size is hardly an element of grandeur, except
in works of man, — as the Colosseum. It is

A MOO SERE AD JOURNAL 41

through one or the other pole of vanity that men
feel the sublime in mountains. It is either, How
small great I am beside it! or, Big as you are,
little I's soul will hold a dozen of you. The true
idea of a forest is not a selva selvaggia, but some-
thing humanized a little, as we imagine the forest
of Arden, with trees standing at royal intervals, —
a commonwealth, and not a communism. To some
moods, it is congenial to look over endless leagues
of unbroken savagery without a Jiint of man.

Wednesday. — This morning fished. Telemachus
caught a laker of thirteen pounds and a half, and
I an overgrown cusk, which we threw away, but
which I found afterwards Agassiz would have been
glad of, for all is fish that comes to his net,
from the fossil down. The fish, when caught, are
straightway knocked on the head. A lad who went
with us seeming to show an over-zeal in this oper-
ation, we remonstrated. But he gave a good,
human reason for it, — " lie no need to ha' gone
and been a fish if he didn't like it," — an excuse
which superior strength or cunning has always
found sufficient. It was some comfort, in this case,
to think that St. Jerome believed in a limitation
of God's providence, and that it did not extend to
inanimate things or creatures devoid of reason.

Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my Oriental
adventures, and somewhat, it must be owned, in the
diffuse Oriental manner. There is very little about
Moosehead Lake in it, and not even the Latin
name for moose, which I might have obtained by
sufficient research. If I had killed one, I would

42 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL

have given you his name in that dead language. I
did not profess to give you an account of the lake ;
but a journal, and, moreover, my journal, with a
little nature, a little human nature, and a great
deal of I in it, which last ingredient I take to
be the true spirit of this species of writing ; all the
rest being so much water for tender throats which
cannot take it neat.

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

1854

A MEMOIR ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG IN
ROME.

0

IN those quiet old winter evenings, around our
Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my dear Storg,
that we talked of the advantages of travel, and in
speeches not so long that our cigars would forget
their fire (the measure of just conversation) de-
bated the comparative advantages of the Old and
New Worlds. You will remember how serenely
I bore the imputation of provincialism, while I
asserted that those advantages were reciprocal;
that an orbed and balanced life would revolve be-
tween the Old and the New as opposite, but not
antagonistic poles, the true equator lying some-
where midway between them. I asserted also, that
there were two epochs at which a man might travel,
— before twenty, for pure enjoyment, and after
thirty, for instruction. At twenty, the eye is suffi-
ciently delighted with merely seeing; new things
are pleasant only because they are not old ; and we
take everything heartily and naturally in the right
way, — for even mishaps are like knives, that either
serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade
or the handle. After thirty, we carry along our

44 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

scales, with lawful weights stamped by experience,
and our chemical tests acquired by study, with
which to ponder and assay all arts, institutions,
and manners, and to ascertain either their absolute
worth or their merely relative value to ourselves.
On the whole, I declared myself in favor of the
after thirty method, — was it partly (so difficult is
it to distinguish between opinions and personalities)
because I had tried it myself, though with scales so
imperfect and tests so inadequate? Perhaps so,
but more because I held that a man should have
travelled thoroughly round himself and the great
terra incognita just outside and inside his own
threshold, before he undertook voyages of discovery
to other worlds. "Far countries he can safest
visit who himself is doughty," says Beowulf. Let
him first thoroughly explore that strange country
laid down on the maps as SEAUTON ; let him look
down into its craters, and find whether they be
burnt-out or only smouldering ; let him know be-
tween the good and evil fruits of its passionate
tropics ; let him experience how healthful are its
serene and high-lying table-lands ; let him be many
times driven back (till he wisely consent to be baf-
fled) from its speculatively inquisitive northwest
passages that lead mostly to the dreary solitudes
of a sunless world, before he think himself morally
equipped for travels to more distant regions. So
thought pithy Thomas Fuller. " Who," he says,
" hath sailed about the world of his own heart,
sounded each creek, surveyed each corner, but that
still there remains therein much ' terra incognita '

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 45

to himself?"1 But does he commonly even so
much as think of this, or, while buying amplest
trunks for his corporeal apparel, does it once occur
to him how very small a portmanteau will contain
all his mental and spiritual outfit? It is more
often true that a man who could scarce be induced
to expose his unclothed body even to a village of
prairie-dogs, will complacently display a mind as
naked as the day it was born, without so much as
a fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in every gallery of
Europe, —

" Not caring1, so that sumpter-horse, the back,
Be hung with gaudy trappings, in what coarse,
Yea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul."

If not with a robe dyed in the Tyrian purple of
imaginative culture, if not with the close-fitting,
work-day dress of social or business training, — at
least, my dear Storg, one might provide himself
with the merest waist-clout of modesty !

But if it be too much to expect men to traverse
and survey themselves before they go abroad, we
might certainly ask that they should be familiar
with their own villages. If not even that, then it
is of little import whither they go ; and let us hope
that, by seeing how calmly their own narrow neigh-
borhood bears their departure, they may be led to
think that the circles of disturbance set in motion
by the fall of their tiny -drop into the ocean of
eternity will not have a radius of more than a
week in .any direction; and that the world can
endure the subtraction of even a justice of the

1 Holy State .• The Constant Virgin.

46 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

peace with provoking equanimity. In this way, at
least, foreign travel may do them good, — may
make them, if not wiser, at any rate less fussy. Is
it a great way to go to school, and a great fee to
pay for the lesson ? We cannot give too much for
the genial stoicism which, when life flouts us, and
says, Put that in your pipe and smoke it! can
puff away with as sincere a relish as if it were
tobacco of Mount Lebanon in a narghileh of Da-
mascus.

It has passed into a scornful proverb, that it
needs good optics to see what is not to be seen ;
and yet I should be inclined to say that the first
essential of a good traveller was to be gifted with
eyesight of precisely that kind. All his senses
should be as delicate as eyes ; and, above all, he
should be able to see with the fine eye of imagina-
tion, compared with which all the other organs
with which the mind grasps and the memory holds
are as clumsy as thumbs. The demand for this
kind of traveller and the opportunity for him in-
crease as we learn more and more minutely the dry
facts and figures of the most inaccessible corners
of the earth's surface. There is no hope of another
Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, with his statistics of
Dreamland, who makes no difficulty of impressing
"fourscore thousand rhinocerots " to draw the
wagons of the King of Tartary's army, or of kill-
ing eight hundred and fifty thousand men with a
flourish of his quill, — for what were a few ciphers
to him, when his inkhorn was full and all Christen-
dom to be astonished ? — but there is all the more

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 47

need of voyagers who give us something better
than a census of population, and who know of
other exports from strange countries than can be

expressed by $ . Give me the traveller who

makes me feel the mystery of the Figure at Sai's,
whose veil hides a new meaning for every beholder,
rather than him who brings back a photograph of
the uncovered countenance, with its one unvarying
granite story for all. There is one glory of the
Gazetteer with his fixed facts, and another of the
Poet with his variable quantities of fancy.

After all, my dear Storg, it is to know things
that one has need to travel, and not men. Those
force us to come to them, but these come to us, —
sometimes whether we will or no. These exist for
us in every variety in our own town. You may
find your antipodes without a voyage to China ; he
lives there, just round the next corner, precise, for-
mal, the slave of precedent, making all his teacups
with a break in the edge, because his model had
one, and your fancy decorates him with an endless-
ness of airy pigtail. There, too, are John Bull,
Jean Crapaud, Hans Sauerkraut, Pat Murphy, and
the rest.

It has been written :

" He needs no ship to cross the tide,
Who, in the lives around him, sees
Fair window-prospects opening1 wide
O'er history's fields on every side,
Rome, Egypt, England, Ind, and Greece.

" Whatever moulds of various brain
E'er shaped the world to weal or woe,
Whatever empires' wax and wane,

48 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

To him who hath not eyes in vain,
His village-microcosm can show."

But every thing is not a Thing, and all things are
good for nothing out of their natural habitat. If
the heroic Barnum had succeeded in transplanting
Shakespeare's house to America, what interest
would it have had for us, torn out of its appro-
priate setting in softly-hilled Warwickshire, which
showed us that the most English of poets must be
Lorn in the most English of counties ? I mean by
a Thing that which is not a mere spectacle, that
which some virtue of the mind leaps forth to, as it
also sends forth its sympathetic flash to the mind,
as soon as they come within each other's sphere of
attraction, and, with instantaneous coalition, form
a new product, — knowledge.

Such, in the understanding it gives us of early
Roman history, is the little territory around Rome,
the gentis cunabula, without a sight of which Livy
and Niebuhr and the maps are vain. So, too, one
must go to Pompeii and the Museo Borbonico, to
get a true conception of that wondrous artistic
nature of the Greeks, strong enough, even in that
petty colony, to survive foreign conquest and to
assimilate barbarian blood, showing a grace and
fertility of invention whose Roman copies Rafaello
himself could only copy, and enchanting even the
base utensils of the kitchen with an inevitable sense
of beauty to which we subterranean Northmen
have not yet so much as dreamed of climbing.
Mere sights one can see quite as well at home.
Mont Blanc does not tower more grandly in the

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 49

memory than did the dream-peak which loomed
afar on the morning horizon of hope, nor did the
smoke-palm of Vesuvius stand more erect and fair,
with tapering stem and spreading top, in that Par-
thenopean air, than under the diviner sky of imag-
ination. I know what Shakespeare says about
homekeeping youths, and I can fancy what you
will add about America being interesting only as a
phenomenon, and uncomfortable to live in, because
we have not yet done with getting ready to live.
But is not your Europe, on the other hand, a place
where men have done living for the present, and
of value chiefly because of the men who had done
living in it long ago? And if, in our rapidly
moving country, one feel sometimes as if he had
his home on a railroad-train, is there not also a
satisfaction in knowing that one is going some-
where ? To what end visit Europe, if people carry
with them, as most do, their old parochial horizon,
going hardly as Americans even, much less as
men ? Have we not both seen persons abroad who
put us in mind of parlor gold-fish in their vase,
isolated in that little globe of their own element,
incapable of communication with the strange world
around them, a show themselves, while it was al-
ways doubtful if they could see at all beyond the
limits of their portable prison? The wise man
travels to discover himself; it is to find himself out
that he goes out of himself and his habitual asso-
ciations, trying everything in turn till he find that
one activity, that royal standard, sovran over him
by divine right, toward which all the disbanded

50 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

powers of his nature and the irregular tendencies
of his life gather joyfully, as to the common rally-
ing-point of their loyalty.

All these things we debated while the ilex logs
upon the hearth burned down to tinkling coals,
over which a gray, soft moss of ashes grew betimes,
mocking the poor wood with a pale travesty of that
green and gradual decay on forest-floors, its natural
end. Already the clock at the Cappuccini told
the morning quarters, and on the pauses of our
talk no sound intervened but the muffled hoot of
an owl in the near convent-garden, or the rattling
tramp of a patrol of that French army which keeps
him a prisoner in his own city who claims to lock
and unlock the doors of heaven. But still the dis-
course would eddy round one obstinate rocky tenet
of mine, for I maintained, you remember, that the
wisest man was he who stayed at home ; that to see
the antiquities of the Old World was nothing,
since the youth of the world was really no farther
away from us than our own youth ; and that, more-
over, we had also in America things amazingly old,
as our boys, for example. Add, that in the end
this antiquity is a matter of comparison, which
skips from place to place as nimbly as Emerson's
Sphinx, and that one old thing is good only till we
have seen an older. England is ancient till we go
to Rome ; Etruria dethrones Rome, but only to
pass this sceptre of antiquity which so lords it over
our fancies to the Pelasgi, from whom Egypt
straightway wrenches it, to give it up in turn to
older India. And whither then? As well rest

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 51

upon the first step, since the effect of what is old
upon the mind is single and positive, not cumulative.
As soon as a thing is past, it is as infinitely far
away from us as if it had happened millions of
years ago. And if the learned Huet be correct,
who reckoned that all human thoughts and records
could be included in ten folios, what so frightfully
old as we ourselves, who can, if we choose, hold in
our memories every syllable of recorded time, from
the first crunch of Eve's teeth in the apple down-
ward, being thus ideally contemporary with hoariest
Eld?

" Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To us are nothing novel, nothing strange."

Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what the
phrenologists call) inhabitiveness and adhesiveness,
— how I stand by the old thought, the old thing,
the old place, and the old friend, till I am very
sure I have got a better, and even then migrate
painfully. Remember the old Arabian story, and
think how hard it is to pick up all the pomegranate-
seeds of an opponent's argument, and how, so long
as one remains, you are as far from the end as
ever. Since I have you entirely at my mercy, (for
you cannot answer me under five weeks,) you will
not be surprised at the advent of this letter. I
had always one impregnable position, which was,
that, however good other places might be, there was
only one in which we could be born, and which
therefore possessed a quite peculiar and inalienable
virtue. We had the fortune, which neither of us
have had reason to call other than good, to journey

52 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

together through the green, secluded valley of boy-
hood ; together we climbed the mountain wall which
shut in, and looked down upon, those Italian plains
of early manhood ; and, since then, we have met
sometimes by a well, or broken bread together at
an oasis in the arid desert of life, as it truly is.
With this letter I propose to make you my fellow-
traveller in one of those fireside voyages which,
as we grow older, we make oftener and oftener
through our own past. Without leaving your elbow-
chair, you shall go back with me thirty years, which
will bring you among things and persons as thor-
oughly preterite as Romulus or Numa. For so
rapid are our changes in America that the transi-
tion from old to new, the shifting from habits and
associations to others entirely different, is as rapid
almost as the passing in of one scene and the draw-
ing out of another on the stage. And it is this
which makes America so interesting to the philo-
sophic student of history and man. Here, as in
a theatre, the great problems of anthropology —
which in the Old World were ages in solving, but
which are solved, leaving only a dry net result —
are compressed, as it were, into the entertainment
of a few hours. Here we have I know not how
many epochs of history and phases of civilization
contemporary with each other, nay, within five
minutes of each other, by the electric telegraph.
In two centuries we have seen rehearsed the dis-
persion of man from a small point over a whole
continent; we witness with our own eyes the action
of those forces which govern the great migration of

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 53

the peoples now historical in Europe ; we can watch
the action and reaction of different races, forms
of government, and higher or lower civilizations.
Over there, you have only the dead precipitate, de-
manding tedious analysis ; but here the elements
are all in solution, and we have only to look to see
how they will combine. History, which every day
makes less account of governors and more of man,
must find here the compendious key to all that pic-
ture-writing of the Past. Therefore it is, my dear
Storg, that we Yankees may still esteem our Amer-
ica a place worth living in. But calm your appre-
hensions ; I do not propose to drag you with me on
such an historical circumnavigation of the globe,
but only to show you that (however needful it may
be to go abroad for the study of aesthetics) a man
who uses the eyes of his heart may find here also
pretty bits of what may be called the social pic-
turesque, and little landscapes over which that
Indian-summer atmosphere of the Past broods as
sweetly and tenderly as over a Roman ruin. Let
us look at the Cambridge of thirty years since.

The seat of the oldest college in America, it
had, of course, some of that cloistered quiet which
characterizes all university towns. Even now deli-
cately-thoughtful A. H. C. tells me that he finds in
its intellectual atmosphere a repose which recalls
that of grand old Oxford. But, underlying this, it
had an idiosyncrasy of its own. Boston was not
yet a city, and Cambridge was still a country vil-
lage, with its own habits and traditions, not yet feel-
ing too strongly the force of suburban gravitation.

54 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

Approaching it from the west by what was then
called the New Road (so called no longer, for we
change our names as readily as thieves, to the
great detriment of all historical association), you
would pause on the brow of Symonds' Hill to enjoy
a view singularly soothing and placid. In front of
you lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and
horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts a
colony, and were fortunately unable to emigrate
with the Tories by whom, or by whose fathers, they
were planted. Over it rose the noisy belfry of the
College, the square, brown tower of the church, and
the slim, yellow spire of the parish meeting-house,
by no means ungraceful, and then an invariable
characteristic of New England religious architec-
ture. On your right, the Charles slipped smoothly
through green and purple salt-meadows, darkened,
here and there, with the blossoming black-grass as
with a stranded cloud-shadow. Over these marshes,
level as water, but without its glare, and with softer
and more soothing gradations of perspective, the
eye was carried to a horizon of softly-rounded hills.
To your left hand, upon the Old Road, you saw
some half-dozen dignified old houses of the colonial
time, all comfortably fronting southward. If it
were early June, the rows of horse-chestnuts along
the fronts of these houses showed, through every
crevice of their dark heap of foliage, and on the
end of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flow-
ers, while the hill behind was white or rosy with
the crowding blooms of various fruit-trees. There
is no sound, unless a horseman clatters over the

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 55

loose planks of the bridge, while his antipodal
shadow glides silently over the mirrored bridge be-
low, or unless,

" O winged rapture, feathered soul of spring,
Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one,
Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June
Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds,
The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind
With rippling wings that quiver not for flight,
But only joy, or, yielding to its will,
Runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air."

Such was the charmingly rural picture which he
who, thirty years ago, went eastward over Symonds'
Hill had given him for nothing, to hang in the
Gallery of Memory. But we are a city now, and
Common Councils have as yet no notion of the truth
(learned long ago by many a European hamlet)
that picturesqueness adds to the actual money value
of a town. To save a few dollars in gravel, they
have cut a kind of dry ditch through the hill, where
you suffocate with dust in summer, or flounder
through waist-deep snow-drifts in winter, with no
prospect but the crumbling earth-walls on either
side. The landscape was carried away cart-load by
cart-load, and, dumped down on the roads, forms a
part of that unfathomable pudding, which has, I
fear, driven many a teamster and pedestrian to the
use of phrases not commonly found in English dic-
tionaries.

We called it "the Village" then (I speak of
Old Cambridge), and it was essentially an English
village, quiet, unspeculative, without enterprise, suf-
ficing to itself, and only showing such differences

56 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

from the original type as the public school and the
system of town government might superinduce. A
few houses, chiefly old, stood around the bare
Common, with ample elbow-room, and old women,
capped and spectacled, still peered through the
same windows from which they had watched Lord
Percy's artillery rumble by to Lexington, or caught
a glimpse of the handsome Virginia General who
had come to wield our homespun Saxon chivalry.
People were still living who regretted the late un-
happy separation from the mother island, who had
seen no gentry since the Vassalls went, and who
thought that Boston had ill kept the day of her
patron saint, Botolph, on the 17th of June, 1775.
The hooks were to be seen in Massachusetts Hall
from which had swung the hammocks of Burgoyne's
captive redcoats. If memory does not deceive me,
women still washed clothes in the town spring, clear
as that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for all the
travel to the metropolis. Commencement had not
ceased to be the great holiday of the Puritan Com-
monwealth, and a fitting one it was, — the festival
of Santa Scholastica, whose triumphal path one
may conceive strewn with leaves of spelling-book
instead of bay. The students (scholars they were
called then) wore their sober uniform, not osten-
tatiously distinctive or capable of rousing demo-
cratic envy, and the old lines of caste were blurred
rather than rubbed out, as servitor was softened
into beneficiary. The Spanish king felt sure that
the gesticulating student was either mad or reading
Don Quixote, and if, in those days, you met a youth

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 57

swinging his arms and talking to himself, you might
conclude that he was either a lunatic or one who
was to appear in a "part" at the next Exhibition
or Commencement. A favorite place for the re-
hearsal of these orations was the retired amphi-
theatre of the Gravel-pit, perched unregarded on
whose dizzy edge, I have heard many a burst of
plusquam Ciceronian eloquence, and (often re-
peated) the regular saluto vos, prcestantissimce
&c., which every year (with a glance at the gal-
lery) causes a flutter among the fans innocent
of Latin, and delights to applauses of conscious
superiority the youth almost as innocent as they.
It is curious, by the way, to note how plainly one
can feel the pulse of self in the plaudits of an au-
dience. At a political meeting, if the enthusiasm
of the lieges hang fire, it may be exploded at once
by an allusion to their intelligence or patriotism ;
and at a literary festival, the first Latin quotation
draws the first applause, the clapping of hands
being intended as a tribute to our own familiarity
with that sonorous tongue, and not at all as an
approval of the particular sentiment conveyed in it.
For if the orator should say, "Well has Tacitus
remarked, A?nericani omnes quadam vi natures
furca dignissimi," it would be all the same. But
the Gravel-pit was patient, if irresponsive ; nor did
the declaimer always fail to bring down the house,
bits of loosened earth falling now and then from
the precipitous walls, their cohesion perhaps over-
come by the vibrations of the voice, and happily
satirizing the effect of most popular discourses,

58 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

which prevail rather with the earthy than the spir-
itual part of the hearer. Was it possible for us in
those days to conceive of a greater potentate than
the President of the University, in his square doc-
tor's cap, that still filially recalled Oxford and
Cambridge? If there was a doubt, it was sug-
gested only by the Governor, and even by him on
artillery-election days alone, superbly martial with
epaulets and buckskin breeches, and bestriding the
war-horse, promoted to that solemn duty for his
tameness and steady habits.

Thirty years ago, the town had indeed a char-
acter. Railways and omnibuses had not rolled
flat all little social prominences and peculiarities,
making every man as much a citizen everywhere as
at home. No Charlestown boy could come to our
annual festival without fighting to avenge a certain
traditional porcine imputation against the inhab-
itants of that historic spot, to which our youth gave
vent in fanciful imitations of the dialect of the sty,
or derisive shouts of " Charlestown hogs ! " The
penny newspaper had not yet silenced the tripod
of the barber, oracle of news. Everybody knew
everybody, and all about everybody, and village
wit, whose high 'change was around the little mar-
ket-house in the town square, had labelled every
more marked individuality with nicknames that
clung like burs. Things were established then, and
men did not run through all the figures on the dial
of society so swiftly as now, when hurry and com-
petition seem to have quite unhung the modulating
pendulum of steady thrift and competent train-

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 59

ing. Some slow-minded persons even followed their
father's trade, — a humiliating spectacle, rarer
every day. We had our established loafers, to-
pers, proverb-mongers, barber, parson, nay, post-
master, whose tenure was for life. The great polit-
ical engine did not then come down at regular
quadrennial intervals, like a nail-cutting machine,
to make all official lives of a standard length, and
to generate lazy and intriguing expectancy. Life
flowed in recognized channels, f narrower perhaps,
but with all the more individuality and force.

There was but one white -and -yellow -washer,
whose own cottage, fresh -gleaming every June
through grape-vine and creeper, was his only sign
and advertisement. He was said to possess a secret,
which died with him like that of Luca della Rob-
bia, and certainly conceived all colors but white
and yellow to savor of savagery, civilizing the stems
of his trees annually with liquid lime, and meditat-
ing how to extend that candent baptism even to
the leaves. His pie-plants (the best in town), com-
pulsory monastics, blanched under barrels, each
in his little hermitage, a vegetable Certosa. His
fowls, his ducks, his geese, could not show so
much as a gray feather among them, and he would
have given a year's earnings for a white peacock.
The flowers which decked his little door-yard
were whitest China-asters and goldenest sunflowers,
which last, backsliding from their traditional Par-
see faith, used to puzzle us urchins not a little by
staring brazenly every way except towards the sun.
Celery, too, he raised, whose virtue is its paleness,

60 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

and the silvery onion, and turnip, which, though
outwardly conforming to the green heresies of sum-
mer, nourish a purer faith subterraneously, like
early Christians in the catacombs. In an obscure
corner grew the sanguine beet, tolerated only for
its usefulness in allaying the asperities of Satur-
day's salt-fish. He loved winter better than sum-
mer, because Nature then played the whitewasher,
and challenged with her snows the scarce inferior
purity of his overalls and neck-cloth. I fancy that
he never rightly liked Commencement, for bring-
ing so many black coats together. He founded
no school. Others might essay his art, and were
allowed to try their prentice hands on fences and
the like coarse subjects, but the ceiling of every
housewife waited on the leisure of Newman (ich-
neumon the students called him for his diminutive-
ness), nor would consent to other brush than his.
There was also but one brewer, — Lewis, who made
the village beer, both spruce and ginger, a grave
and amiable Ethiopian, making a discount always
to the boys, and wisely, for they were his chiefest
patrons. He wheeled his whole stock in a white-
roofed handcart, on whose front a signboard pre-
sented at either end an insurrectionary bottle ; yet
insurgent after no mad Gallic fashion, but soberly
and Saxonly discharging itself into the restraining
formulary of a tumbler, symbolic of orderly pre-
scription. The artist had struggled manfully with
the difficulties of his subject, but had not succeeded
so well that we did not often debate in which of
the twin bottles Spruce was typified, and in which

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 61

Ginger. We always believed that Lewis mentally
distinguished between them, but by some peculiar-
ity occult to exoteric eyes. This ambulatory chapel
of the Bacchus that gives the colic, but not inebri-
ates, only appeared at the Commencement holidays,
and the lad who bought of Lewis laid out his
money well, getting respect as well as beer, three
sirs to every glass, — " Beer, sir ? yes, sir : spruce
or ginger, sir ? " I can yet recall the innocent
pride with which I walked away after that some-
what risky ceremony, (for a bottle sometimes blew
up,) dilated not alone with carbonic acid gas, but
with the more ethereal fixed air of that titular flat-
tery. Nor was Lewis proud. When he tried his
fortunes in the capital on Election-days, and stood
amid a row of rival venders in the very flood of
custom, he never forgot his small fellow-citizens,
but welcomed them with an assuring smile, and
served them with the first.

The barber's shop was a museum, scarce second
to the larger one of Greenwood in the metropolis.
The boy who was to be clipped there was always
accompanied to the sacrifice by troops of friends,
who thus inspected the curiosities gratis. While
the watchful eye of R. wandered to keep in check
these rather unscrupulous explorers, the unpaus-
ing shears would sometimes overstep the bound-
aries of strict tonsorial prescription, and make a
notch through which the phrenological develop-
ments could be distinctly seen. As Michael An-
gelo's design was modified by the shape of his
block, so R., rigid in artistic proprieties, would con-

62 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

trive to give an appearance of design to this aber-
ration, by making it the key-note to his work,
and reducing the whole head to an appearance of
premature baldness. What a charming place it
was, — how full of wonder and delight ! The sun-
ny little room, fronting southwest upon the Com-
mon, rang with canaries and Java sparrows, nor
were the familiar notes of robin, thrush, and bobo-
link wanting. A large white cockatoo harangued
vaguely, at intervals, in what we believed (on K.'s
authority) to be the Hottentot language. He had
an unveracious air, but in what inventions of for-
mer grandeur he was indulging, what sweet South-
African Argos he was remembering, what tropi-
cal heats a*nd giant trees by unconjectured rivers,
known only to the wallowing hippopotamus, we
could only guess at. The walls were covered with
curious old Dutch prints, beaks of albatross and
penguin, and whales' teeth fantastically engraved.
There was Frederick the Great, with head drooped
plottingly, and keen sidelong glance from under
the three-cornered hat. There hung Bonaparte,
too, the long-haired, haggar^ general of Italy, his
eyes sombre with prefigured destiny ; and there
was his island grave ; — the dream and the fulfil-
ment. Good store of sea-fights there was also ;
above all, Paul Jones in the Bonhomme Richard :
the smoke rolling courteously to leeward, that we
might see him dealing thunderous wreck to the two
hostile vessels, each twice as large as his own, and
the reality of the scene corroborated by streaks of
red paint leaping from the mouth of every gun.

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 63

Suspended over the fireplace, with the curling-tongs,
were an Indian bow and arrows, and in the cor-
ners of the room stood New Zealand paddles and
war-clubs, quaintly carved. The model of a ship
in glass we variously estimated to be worth from a
hundred to a thousand dollars, R. rather favoring
the higher valuation, though never distinctly com-
mitting himself. Among these wonders, the only
suspicious one was an Indian tomahawk, which had
too much the peaceful look of a shingling-hatchet.
Did any rarity enter the town, it gravitated natu-
rally to these walls, to the very nail that waited to
receive it, and where, the day after its accession, it
seemed to have hung a lifetime. We always had
a theory that R. was immensely rich, (how could
he possess so much and be otherwise ?) and that he
pursued his calling from an amiable eccentricity.
He was a conscientious artist, and never submitted
it to the choice of his victim whether he would be
perfumed or not. Faithfully was the bottle shaken
and the odoriferous mixture rubbed in, a fact red-
olent to the whole school-room in the afternoon.
Sometimes the persuasive toiisor would impress
one of the attendant volunteers, and reduce his
poll to shoe-brush crispness, at cost of the reluctant
ninepence hoarded for Fresh Pond and the next
half-holiday. So purely indigenous was our popu-
lation then, that R. had a certain exotic charm, a
kind of game flavor, by being a Dutchman.

Shall the two groceries want their vates sacer,
where E. & W. I. goods and country prodooce
were sold with an energy mitigated by the quiet

64 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

genius of the place, and where strings of urchins
waited, each with cent in hand, for the unweighed
dates (thus giving an ordinary business transaction
all the excitement of a lottery), and buying, not
only that cloying sweetness, but a dream also of
Egypt, and palm-trees, and Arabs, in which vision
a print of the Pyramids in our geography tyran-
nized like that taller thought of Cowper's ?

At one of these the unwearied students used to
ply a joke handed down from class to class. Enter
A, and asks gravely, " Have you any sour apples,
Deacon ? "

" Well, no, I have n't any just now that are ex-
actly sour ; but there 's the bell-flower apple, and
folks that like a sour apple generally like that."
(Exit A.)

Enter B. "Have you any sweet apples, Dea-
con?"

" Well, no, I have n't any just now that are ex-
actly sweet ; but there 's the bell-flower apple, and
folks that like a sweet apple generally like that."
(Exit B.)

There is not even a tradition of any one's ever
having turned the wary Deacon's flank, and his
Laodicean apples persisted to the end, neither one
thing nor another. Or shall the two town-consta-
bles be forgotten, in whom the law stood worthily
and amply embodied, fit either of them to fill the
uniform of an English beadle? Grim and silent
as Ninevite statues they stood on each side of the
meeting-house door at Commencement, propped by
long staves of blue and red, on which the Indian

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 65

with bow and arrow, and the mailed arm with the
sword, hinted at the . invisible sovereignty of the
state ready to reinforce them, as

" For Achilles' portrait stood a spear
Grasped in an armed hand."

Stalwart and rubicund men they were, second only,
if second, to S., champion of the county, and not
incapable of genial unbendings when the fasces
were laid aside. One of them still survives in
octogenarian vigor, the Herodotus of village and
college legend, and may it be long ere he depart,
to carry with him the pattern of a courtesy, now,
alas! old-fashioned, but which might profitably
make part of the instruction of our youth among
the other humanities ! Long may K. M. be spared
to us, so genial, so courtly, the last man among us
who will ever know how to lift a hat with the nice
graduation of social distinctions. Something of a
Jeremiah now, he bewails the decline of our man-
ners. " My children," he says, " say, 4 Yes sir,'
and 4 No sir ' ; my grandchildren, ' Yes ' and 4 No ' ;
and I am every day expecting to hear ' D — n your
eyes ! ' for an answer when I ask a service of my
great-grandchildren. Why, sir, I can remember
when more respect was paid to Governor Hancock's
lackey at Commencement, than the Governor and
all his suite get now." M. is one of those invalu-
able men who remember your grandfather, and
value you accordingly.

In those days the population was almost wholly
without foreign admixture. Two Scotch gardeners
there were, — Rule, whose daughter (glimpsed per-

66 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

haps at church, or possibly the mere Mrs. Harris of
fancy) the students nicknamed Anarchy or Miss
Rule, — and later Fraser, whom whiskey sublimed
into a poet, full of bloody histories of the Forty-
twa, and showing an imaginary French bullet,
sometimes in one leg, sometimes in the other, and
sometimes, toward nightfall, in both. He asserted
that he had been at Coruna, calling it by its
archaic name of the Groyne, and thus raising
doubts in the mind of the young listener who could
find no such place on his map. With this claim
to a military distinction he adroitly contrived to
mingle another to a natural one, asserting double
teeth all round his jaws, and, having thus created
two sets of doubts, silenced both at once by a single
demonstration, displaying the grinders to the con-
fusion of the infidel.

The old court-house stood then upon the square.
It has shrunk back out of sight now, and students
box and fence where Parsons once laid down the
law, and Ames and Dexter showed their skill in
the fence of argument. Times have changed, and
manners, since Chief Justice Dana (father of Rich-
ard the First, and grandfather of Richard the
Second) caused to be arrested for contempt of
court a butcher who had come in without a coat to
witness the administration of his country's laws,
and who thus had his curiosity exemplarily grati-
fied. Times have changed also since the cellar
beneath it was tenanted by the twin-brothers Snow.
Oyster men were they indeed, silent in their sub-
terranean burrow, and taking the ebbs and flows

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 67

of custom with bivalvian serenity. Careless of the
months with an R in them, the maxim of Snow
(for we knew them but as a unit) was, " When
'ysters are good, they air good ; and when they
ain't, they is n't." Grecian F. (may his shadow
never be less !) tells this, his great laugh expected
all the while from deep vaults of chest, and then
coming in at the close, hearty, contagious, mount-
ing with the measured tread of a jovial but stately
butler who brings ancientest goodfellowship from
exhaustless bins, and enough, without other sauce,
to give a flavor of stalled ox to a dinner of herbs.
Let me preserve here an anticipatory elegy upon
the Snows, written years ago by some nameless
college rhymer.

DIFFUGERE NIVES.

Here lies, or lie, — decide the question, you,

If they were two in one or one in two. —

P. & S. Snow, whose memory shall not fade,

Castor and Pollux of the oyster-trade :

Hatched from one egg1, at once the shell they burst,

(The last, perhaps, a P. S. to the first,)

So homoousian both in look and soul,

So undiscernibly a single whole,

That whether P. was S., or S. was P.,

Surpassed all skill in etymology ;

One kept the shop at once, and all we know

Is that together they were the Great Snow,

A snow not deep, yet with a crust so thick

It never melted to the son of Tick ;

Perpetual ? nay, our region was too low,

Too warm, too southern, for perpetual Snow ;

Still, like fair Leda's sons, to whom 'twas given

To take their turns in Hades and in Heaven,

Our Dioscuri new would bravely share

The cellar's darkness and the upper air ;

68 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

Twice every year would each the shades escape,

And, like a sea-bird, seek the wave -washed Cape,

Where (Rumor voiced) one spouse sufficed for both;

No bigamist, for she upon her oath,

Unskilled in letters, could not make a guess

At any difference twixt P. and S- —

A thing not marvellous, since Fame agrees

They were as little different as two peas,

And she, like Paris, when his Helen laid

Her hand 'mid snows from Ida's top conveyed

To cool their wine of Chios, could not know,

Between those rival candors, which was Snow.

Whiche'er behind the counter chanced to be

Oped oysters oft, his clam-shells seldom he ;

If e'er he laughed, 'twas with no loud guffaw,

The fun warmed through him with a gradual thaw :

The nicer shades of wit were not his gift,

Nor was it hard to sound Snow's simple drift ;

His were plain jokes, that many a tfrne before

Had set his tarry messmates in a roar,

When floundering cod beslimed the deck's wet planks,—

The humorous specie of Newfoundland Banks.

But Snow is gone, and, let us hope, sleeps well,
Buried (his last breath asked it) in a shell ;
Fate with an oystef-knif e sawed off his thread.
And planted him upon his latest bed.

Him on the Stygian shore my fancy sees
Noting choice shoals for oyster colonies,
Or, at a board stuck full of ghostly forks,
Opening for practice visionary Yorks.
And whither he has gone, may we too go, —
Since no hot place were fit for keeping Snow !

Jam satis nivis.

Cambridge has long had its port, but the greater
part of its maritime trade was, thirty years ago,
intrusted to a single Argo, the sloop Harvard,
which belonged to the College, and made annual

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 69

voyages to that vague Orient known as Down East,
bringing back the wood that, in those days, gave to
winter life at Harvard a crackle and a cheerfulness,
for the loss of which the greater warmth of an-
thracite hardly compensates. New England life, to
be genuine, must have in it some sentiment of the
sea, — it was this instinct that printed the device
of the pine-tree on the old money and the old flag,
— and these periodic ventures of the sloop Harvard
made the old Viking fibre vibrate in the hearts of
all the village boys. What a perspective of mystery
and adventure did her sailing open to us ! With
what pride did we hail her return ! She was our
scholiast upon Robinson Crusoe and the mutiny of
the Bounty. Her captain still lords it over our
memories, the greatest sailor that ever sailed the
seas, and we should not look at Sir John Franklin
himself with such admiring interest as that with
which we enhaloed some larger boy who had made
a voyage in her, and had come back without braces
(gallowses we called them) to his trousers, and
squirting ostentatiously the juice of that weed which
still gave him little private returns of something
very like sea-sickness. All our shingle vessels were
shaped and rigged by her, who was our glass of
naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form. We
had a secret and wild delight in believing that she
carried a gun, and imagined her sending grape and
canister among the treacherous savages of Oldtown.
Inspired by her were those first essays at navigation
on the Winthrop duck-pond, of the plucky boy who
was afterwards to serve two famous years before
the mast.

70 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

The greater part of what is now Cambridgeport
was then (in the native dialect) a huckleberry
pastur. Woods were not wanting on its outskirts,
of pine, and oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo
with downward limbs. Its veins did not draw
their blood from the quiet old heart of the village,
but it had a distinct being of its own, and was
rather a great caravansary than a suburb. The
chief feature of the place was its inns, of which
there were five, with vast barns and court-yards,
which the railroad was to make as silent and de-
serted as the palaces of Nimroud. Great white-
topped wagons, each drawn by double files of six
or eight horses, with its dusty bucket swinging from
the hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting
silent underneath, or in midsummer panting on the
lofty perch beside the driver, (how elevated thither
baffled conjecture,) brought all the wares and pro-
ducts of the country to their mart and seaport in
Boston. These filled the inn-yards, or were ranged
side by side under broad-roofed sheds, and far into
the night the mirth of their lusty drivers clamored
from the red-curtained bar-room, while the single
lantern, swaying to and fro in the black cavern of
the stables, made a Rembrandt of the group of
ostlers and horses below. There were, beside the
taverns, some huge square stores where groceries
were sold, some houses, by whom or why inhabited
was to us boys a problem, and, on the edge of the
marsh, a currier's shop, where, at high tide, on a
floating platform, men were always beating skins
in a way to remind one of Don Quixote's fulling-

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 71

mills. Nor did these make all the Port. As there
is always a Coming Man who never comes, so there
is a man who always comes (it may be only a
quarter of an hour) too early. This man, so far
as the Port is concerned, was Rufus Davenport.
Looking at the marshy flats .of Cambridge, and
considering their nearness to Boston, he resolved
that there should grow up a suburban Venice.
Accordingly, the marshes were bought, canals were
dug, ample for the commerce of both Indies, and
four or five rows of brick houses were built to meet
the first wants of the wading settlers who were ex-
pected to rush in — WHENCE ? This singular ques-
tion had never occurred to the enthusiastic projec-
tor. There are laws which govern human migrations
quite beyond the control of the speculator, as many
a man with desirable building-lots has discovered
to his cost. Why mortal men will pay more for a
chess-board square in that swamp, than for an acre
on the breezy upland close by, who shall say ? And
again, why, having shown such a passion for your
swamp, they are so coy of mine, who shall say?
Not certainly any one who, like Davenport, had got
up to6 early for his generation. If we could only
carry that slow, imperturbable old clock of Oppor-
tunity, that never strikes a second too soon or too
late, in our fobs, and push the hands forward as
we can those of our watches ! With a foreseeing
economy of space which now seems ludicrous, the
roofs of this forlorn-hope of houses were made flat,
that the swarming population might have where
to dry their clothes. But A. u. C. 30 showed the

72 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

same view as A. u. C. 1, — only that the brick
blocks looked as if they had been struck by a
malaria. The dull weed upholstered the decaying
wharves, and the only freight that heaped them
was the kelp and eel-grass left by higher floods.
Instead of a Venice, behold a Torzelo ! The un-
fortunate projector took to the last refuge of the
unhappy — book-making, and bored the reluctant
public with what he called a right-aim Testament,
prefaced by a recommendation from General Jack-
son, who perhaps, from its title, took it for some
treatise on ball-practice.

But even Cambridgeport, my dear Storg, did
not want associations poetic and venerable. The
stranger who took the " Hourly " at Old Cam-
bridge, if he were a physiognomist and student of
character, might perhaps have had his curiosity ex-
cited by a person who mounted the coach at the
Port. So refined was his whole appearance, so
fastidiously neat his apparel, — but with a neatness
that seemed less the result of care and plan than a
something as proper to the man as whiteness to the
lily, — that you would have at once classed him
with those individuals, rarer than great captains
and almost as rare as great poets, whom Nature
sends into the world to fill the arduous office of
Gentleman. Were you ever emperor of that Bara-
taria which under your peaceful sceptre would
present, of course, a model of government, this
remarkable person should be Duke of Bien seance
and Master of Ceremonies. There are some men
whom destiny has endowed with the faculty of

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 73

external neatness, whose clothes are repellent of
dust and mud, whose unwithering white neck-cloths
persevere to the day's end, unappeasably seeing the
sun go down upon their starch, and whose linen
makes you fancy them heirs in the maternal line to
the instincts of all the washeirwomen from Eve
downward. There are others whose inward natures
possess this fatal cleanness, incapable of moral dirt-
spot. You are not long in discovering that the
stranger combines in himself both these properties.
A nimbus of hair, fine as an infant's, and early
white, showing refinement of organization and the
predominance of the spiritual over the physical,
undulated and floated around a face that seemed
like pale flame, and over which the flitting shades
of expression chased each other, fugitive and gleam-
ing as waves upon a field of rye. It was a coun-
tenance that, without any beauty of feature, was
very beautiful. I have said that it looked like pale
flame, and can find no other words for the impres-
sion it gave. Here was a man all soul, his body
seeming a lamp of finest clay, whose service was to
feed with magic oils, rare and fragrant, that waver-
ing fire which hovered over it. You, who are an
adept in such matters, would have detected in the
eyes that artist-look which seems to see pictures
ever in the air, and which, if it fall on you, makes
you feel as if all the world were a gallery, and
yourself the rather indifferent Portrait of a Gentle-
man hung therein. As the stranger brushes by
you in alighting, you detect a single incongruity,
— a smell of dead tobacco- smoke. You ask his
name, and the answer is, " Mr. Allston."

74 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

" Mr. Allston ! " and you resolve to note down
at once in your diary every look, every gesture,
every word of the great painter ? Not in the least.
You have the true Anglo-Norman indifference, and
most likely never think of him again till you hear
that one of his pictures has sold for a great price,
and then contrive to let your grandchildren know
twice a week that you met him once in a coach, and
that he said, " Excuse me, sir," in a very Titian-
esque manner, when he stumbled over your toes in
getting out. Hitherto Boswell is quite as unique
as Shakespeare. The country-gentleman, journey-
ing up to London, inquires of Mistress Davenant
at the Oxford inn the name of his pleasant com-
panion of the night before. " Master Shakespeare,
an 't please your worship." And the Justice, not
without a sense of the unbending, sa}^s, "Truly,
a merry and conceited gentleman ! " It is lucky
for the peace of great men that the world seldom
finds out contemporaneously who its great men are,
or, perhaps, that each man esteems himself the
fortunate he who shall draw the lot of memory
from the helmet of the future. Had the eyes of
some Stratford burgess been achromatic telescopes,
capable of a perspective of two hundred years!
But, even then, would not his record have been
fuller of says I's than of says he's? Neverthe*
less, it is curious to consider from what infinitely
varied points of view we might form our estimate
of a great man's character, when we remember that
he had his points of contact with the butcher, the
baker, and the candlestick-maker, as well as with

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 75

the ingenious A, the sublime B, and the Right
Honorable C. If it be true that no man ever clean
forgets everything, and that the act of drowning
(as is asserted) forthwith brightens up all those
o'er-rusted impressions, would it not be a curious
experiment, if, after a remarkable person's death,
the public, eager for minutest particulars, should
gather together all who had ever been brought into
relations with him, and, submerging them to the
hair's-breadth hitherward of the drowning-point,
subject them to strict cross-examination by the
Humane Society, as soon as they become conscious
between the resuscitating blankets? All of us
probably have brushed against destiny in the street,
have shaken hands with it, fallen asleep with it in
railway carriages, and knocked heads with it in
some one or other of its yet unrecognized incarna-
tions.

Will it seem like presenting a tract to a colpor-
teur, my dear Storg, if I say a word or two about
an artist to you over there in Italy ? Be patient,
and leave your button in my grasp yet a little
longer. T. G. A., a person whose opinion is worth
having, once said to me, that, however one's notions
might be modified by going to Europe, one always
came back with a higher esteem for Allston. Cer-
tainly he is thus far the greatest English painter of
historical subjects. And only consider how strong
must have been the artistic bias in him, to have
made him a painter at all under the circumstances.
There were no traditions of art, so necessary for
guidance and inspiration. Blackburn, Smibert,

76 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

Copley, Trumbull, Stuart, — it was, after all, but
a Brentford sceptre which their heirs could aspire
to, and theirs were not names to conjure with, like
those from which Fame, as through a silver trum-
pet, had blown for three centuries. Copley and
Stuart were both remarkable men ; but the one
painted like an inspired silk-mercer, and the other,
though at his best one of the greatest of por-
trait-painters, seems sometimes to have mixed his
colors with the claret of which he and his genera-
tion were so fond. And what could a successful
artist hope for, at that time, beyond the mere
wages of his work ? His picture would hang in
cramped back-parlors, between deadly cross-fires
of lights, sure of the garret or the auction-room ere-
long, in a country where the nomad population
carry no household gods with them but their five
wits and their ten fingers. As a race, we care noth-
ing about Art ; but the Puritan and the Quaker are
the only Englishmen who have had pluck enough
to confess it. If it were surprising that Allston
should have become a painter at all, how almost
miraculous that he should have been a great and
original one ! I call him original deliberately,
because, though his school be essentially Italian, it
is of less consequence where a man buys his tools,
than what use he makes of them. Enough Eng-
lish artists went to Italy and came back painting-
history in a very Anglo-Saxon manner, and creat-
ing a school as melodramatic as the French, with-
out its perfection in technicalities. But Allston
carried thither a nature open on the southern side,

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 77

and brought it back so steeped in rich. Italian sun-
shine that the east winds (whether physical or in-
tellectual) of Boston and the dusts of Cambridge-
port assailed it in vain. To that bare wooden
studio one might go to breathe Venetian air, and,
better yet, the very spirit wherein the elder bro-
thers of Art labored, etherealized by metaphysical
speculation, and sublimed by religious fervor. The
beautiful old man ! Here was genius with no vol-
canic explosions (the mechanic result of vulgar
gunpowder often), but lovely as a Lapland night ;
here was fame, not sought after nor worn in any
cheap French fashion as a ribbon at the button-
hole, but so gentle, so retiring, that it seemed no
more than an assured and emboldened modesty ;
here was ambition, undebased by rivalry and inca-
pable of the sidelong look ; and all these massed
and harmonized together into a purity and depth
of character, into a tone, which made the daily life
of the man the greatest masterpiece of the artist.

But let us go back to the Old Town. Thirty
years since, the Muster and the Cornwallis allowed
some vent to those natural instincts which Puritan-
ism scotched, but not killed. The Cornwallis had
entered upon the estates of the old Guy-Fawkes
procession, confiscated by the Revolution. It was
a masquerade, in which that grave and suppressed
humor, of which the Yankees are fuller than other
people, burst through all restraints, and disported
itself in all the wildest vagaries of fun. Commonly
the Yankee in his pleasures suspects the presence
of Public Opinion as a detective, and accordingly

78 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

is apt to pinion himself in his Sunday suit. It is a
curious commentary on the artificiality of our lives,
that men must be disguised and masked before they
will venture into the obscurer corners of their in-
dividuality, and display the true features of their
nature. One remarked it in the Carnival, and one
especially noted it here among a race naturally
self-restrained ; for Silas and Ezra and Jonas were
not only disguised as Redcoats, Continentals, and
Indians, but not unfrequently disguised in drink
also. It is a question whether the Lyceum, where
the public is obliged to comprehend all vagrom
men, supplies the place of the old popular amuse-
ments. A hundred and fifty years ago, Cotton
Mather bewails the carnal attractions of the tavern
and the training-field, and tells of an old Indian
who imperfectly understood the English tongue,
but desperately mastered enough of it (when under
sentence of death) to express a desire for instant
hemp rather than listen to any more ghostly conso-
lations. Puritanism — I am perfectly aware how
great a debt we owe it — tried over again the old
experiment of driving out nature with a pitchfork,
and had the usual success. It was like a ship in-
wardly on fire, whose hatches must be kept hermet-
ically battened down ; for the admittance of an
ounce of Heaven's own natural air would explode
it utterly. Morals can never be safely embodied
in the constable. Polished, cultivated, fascinating
Mephistopheles ! it is for the ungovernable break-
ings-away of the soul from unnatural compressions
that thou waitest with a deprecatory smile. Then

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 79

it is that thou offerest thy gentlemanly arm to un-
guarded youth for a pleasant stroll through the
City of Destruction, and, as a special favor, intro-
ducest him to the bewitching Miss Circe, and to
that model of the hospitable old English gentle-
man, Mr. Comus.

But the Muster and the Cornwallis were not
peculiar to Cambridge. Commencement-day was.
Saint Pedagogus was a worthy whose feast could
be celebrated by men who quarrelled with minced-
pies, and blasphemed custard through the nose.
The holiday preserved all the features of an Eng-
lish fair. Stations were marked out beforehand
by the town constables, and distinguished by num-
bered stakes. These were assigned to the different
venders of small wares and exhibitors of rarities,
whose canvas booths, beginning at the market-
place, sometimes half encircled the Common with
their jovial embrace. Now all the Jehoiada-boxes
in town were forced to give up their rattling depos-
its of specie, if not through the legitimate orifice,
then to the brute force of the hammer. For hither
were come all the wonders of the world, making
the Arabian Nights seem possible, and these we
beheld for half price ; not without mingled emo-
tions, — pleasure at the economy, and shame at not
paying the more manly fee. Here the mummy
unveiled her withered charms, — a more marvellous
Ninon, still attractive in her three-thousandth year.
Here were the Siamese twins ; ah ! if all such
forced and unnatural unions were made a show of !
Here were the flying horses (their supernatural

80 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

effect injured — like that of some poems — by the
visibility of the man who turned the crank), on
which, as we tilted at the ring, we felt our shoul-
ders tingle with the accolade, and heard the clink of
golden spurs at our heels. Are the realities of
life ever worth half so much as its cheats ? And
are there any feasts half so filling at the price as
those Barmecide ones spread for us by Imagina-
tion? Hither came the Canadian giant, surrep-
titiously seen, without price, as he alighted, in
broad day, (giants were always foolish,) at the
tavern. Hither came the great horse Columbus,
with shoes two inches thick, and more wisely intro-
duced by night. In the trough of the town-pump
might be seen the mermaid, its poor monkey's
head carefully sustained above water, to keep it
from drowning. There were dwarfs, also, who
danced and sang, and many a proprietor regretted
the transaudient properties of canvas, which al-
lowed the frugal public to share in the melody
without entering the booth. Is it a slander of
J. H., who reports that he once saw a deacon, emi-
nent for psalmody, lingering near one of those
vocal tents, and, with an assumed air of abstraction,
furtively drinking in, with unhabitual ears, a song,
not secular merely, but with a dash of libertinism?
The New England proverb says, " All deacons are
good, but — there 's odds in deacons." On these
days Snow became superterranean, and had a stand
in the square, and Lewis temperately contended
with the stronger fascinations of egg-pop. But
space would fail me to make a catalogue of every-

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 81

thing. No doubt, Wisdom also, as usual, had her
quiet booth at the corner of some street, without
entrance-fee, and, even at that rate, got never a
customer the whole day long. For the bankrupt
afternoon there were peep-shows, at a cent each.

But all these shows and their showmen are as
clean gone now as those of Caesar and Timour and
Napoleon, for which the world paid dearer. They
are utterly gone out, not leaving so much as a
snuff behind, — as little thought of now as that
John Eobins, who was once so considerable a phe-
nomenon as to be esteemed the last great Anti-
christ and son of perdition by the entire sect of
Muggletonians. Were Commencement what it
used to be, I should be tempted to take a booth
myself, and try an experiment recommended by a
satirist of some merit, whose works were long ago
dead and (I fear) deedeed to boot.

"Menenius, thou who fain wouldst know how calmly men can

pass

Those biting portraits of themselves, disguised as fox or ass,
Go borrow coin enough to buy a full-length psyche-glass,
Engage a rather darkish room in some well-sought position,
And let the town break out with bills, so much per head admis-
sion,

GREAT NATURAL CURIOSITY ! ! THE BIGGEST LIVING FOOL ! !
Arrange your mirror cleverly, before it set a stool,
Admit the public one by one, place each upon the seat,
Draw up the curtain, let him look his fill, and then retreat.
Smith mounts and takes a thorough view, then comes serenely

down,

Goes home and tells his wife the thing is curiously like Brown ;
Brown goes and stares, and tells his wife the wonder's core and

pith
Is that 'tis just the counterpart of that conceited Smith.

82 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

Life calls us all to such a show : Menenins, trust in me,
While thou to see thy neighbor smil'st, he does the same for
thee."

My dear Storg, would you come to my show,
and, instead of looking in my glass, insist on tak-
ing your money's worth in staring at the exhib-
iter?

Not least among the curiosities which the day
brought together were some of the graduates, post-
humous men, as it were, disentombed from country
parishes and district-schools, but perennial also, in
whom freshly survived all the college jokes, and
who had no intelligence later than their Senior
year. These had gathered to eat the College
dinner, and to get the Triennial Catalogue (their
libro oToro), referred to oftener than any volume
but the Concordance. Aspiring men they were
certainly, but in a right unworldly way; this
scholastic festival opening a peaceful path to the
ambition which might else have devastated man-
kind with Prolusions on the Pentateuch, or Geneal-
ogies of the Dormouse Family. For since in the
academic processions the classes are ranked in the
order of their graduation, and he has the best
chance at the dinner who has the fewest teeth to
eat it with, so, by degrees, there springs up a com-
petition in longevity, — the prize contended for be-
ing the oldest surviving graduateship, This is an
office, it is true, without emolument, but having
certain advantages, nevertheless. The incumbent,
if he come to Commencement, is a prodigious lion,
and commonly gets a paragraph in the newspapers

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 83

once a year with the (fiftieth) last survivor of
Washington's Life-Guard. If a clergyman, he is
expected to ask a blessing and return thanks at the
dinner, a function which he performs with cente-
narian longanimity, as if he reckoned the ordinary
life of man to be fivescore years, and that a grace
must be long to reach so far away as heaven.
Accordingly, this silent race is watched, on the
course of the Catalogue, with an interest worthy of
Newmarket; and as star after star rises in the
galaxy of death, till one name is left alone, an
oasis of life in the stellar desert, it grows solemn.
The natural feeling is reversed, and it is the soli-
tary life that becomes sad and monitory, the Sty-
lites there on the lonely top of his century-pillar,
who has heard the passing-bell of youth, love,
friendship, hope, — of everything but immitigable
eld.

Dr. K. was President of the University then, a
man of genius, but of genius that evaded utiliza-
tion,— a great water-power, but without rapids,
and flowing with too smooth and gentle a current
to be set turning wheels and whirling spindles. His
was not that restless genius of which the man seems
to be merely the representative, and which wreaks
itself in literature or politics, but of that milder
sort, quite as genuine, and perhaps of more contem-
poraneous value, which is the man, permeating the
whole life with placid force, and giving to word,
look, and gesture a meaning only justifiable by our
belief in a reserved power of latent reinforcement.
The man of talents possesses them like so many

84 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

tools, does his job with them, and there an end ;
but the man of genius is possessed by it, and it
makes him into a book or a life according to its
whim. Talent takes the existing moulds, and
makes its castings, better or worse, of richer or
baser metal, according to knack and opportunity ;
but genius is always shaping new ones, and runs
the man in them, so that there is always that hu-
man feel in its results which gives us a kindred
thrill. What it will make, we can only conjecture,
contented always with knowing the infinite balance
of possibility against which it can draw at pleasure.
Have you ever seen a man whose cheque would be
honored for a million pay his toll of one cent ? and
has not that bit of copper, no bigger than your
own, and piled with it by the careless toll-man,
given you a tingling vision of what golden bridges
he could pass, — into what Elysian regions of taste
and enjoyment and culture, barred to the rest of us ?
Something like it is the impression made by such
characters as K.'s on those who come in contact
with them.

There was that in the soft and rounded (I had
almost said melting) outlines of his face which
reminded one of Chaucer. The head had a placid
yet dignified droop like his. He was an anachro-
nism, fitter to have been Abbot of Fountains or
Bishop Golias, courtier and priest, humorist and
lord spiritual, all in one, than for the mastership
of a provincial college, which combined, with its
purely scholastic functions, those of accountant and
chief of police. For keeping books he was incom-

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 85

petent (unless it were those lie borrowed), and the
only discipline he exercised was by the unobtrusive
pressure of a geiitlemanliness which rendered in-
subordination to him impossible. But the world
always judges a man (and rightly enough, too)
by his little faults, which he "shows a hundred
times a day, rather than by his great virtues, which
he discloses perhaps but once in a lifetime, and to
a single person, — nay, in proportion as they are
rarer, and he is nobler, is shyer of letting their ex-
istence be known at all. He was one of those mis-
placed persons whose misfortune it is that their
lives overlap two distinct eras, and are already so
impregnated with one that they can never be in
healthy sympathy with the other. Born when the
New England clergy were still an establishment
and an aristocracy, and when office was almost al-
ways for life, and often hereditary, he lived to be
thrown upon a time when avocations of all colors
might be shuffled together in the life of one man,
like a pack of cards, so that you could not pro-
phesy that he who was ordained to-day might not
accept a colonelcy of filibusters to-morrow. Such
temperaments as his attach themselves, like bar-
nacles, to what seems permanent ; but presently
the good ship Progress weighs anchor, and whirls
them away from drowsy tropic inlets to arctic
waters of unnatural ice. To such crustaceous na-
toPres, created to cling upon the immemorial rock
amid softest mosses, comes the bustling Nineteenth
Century and says, " Come, come, bestir yourself
and be practical J get out of that old shell of yours

86 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

forthwith ! " Alas ! to get out of the shell is to
die!

One of the old travellers in South America tells
of fishes that built their nests in trees, (piscium et
summa hcesit genus ulmo,) and gives a print of
the mother fish upon her nest, while her mate
mounts perpendicularly to her without aid of legs
or wings. Life shows plenty of such incongruities
between a man's place and his nature, (not so
easily got over as by the traveller's undoubting en-
graver,) and one cannot help fancying that K. was
an instance in point. He never encountered, one
would say, the attraction proper to draw out his
native force. Certainly, few men who impressed
others so strongly, and of whom so many good
things are remembered, left less behind them to
justify contemporary estimates. He printed noth-
ing, and was, perhaps, one of those the electric
sparkles of whose brains, discharged naturally and
healthily in conversation, refuse to pass through
the non-conducting medium of the inkstand. His
ana would make a delightful collection. One or
two of his official ones will be in place here.
Hearing that Porter's flip (which was exemplary)
had too great an attraction for the collegians, he
resolved to investigate the matter himself. Ac-
cordingly, entering the old inn one day, he called
for a mug of it, and, having drunk it, said, " And
so, Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come to driflk
your flip, do they ? " " Yes, sir, — sometimes."
" Ah, well, I should think they would. Good day,
Mr. Porter,'' and departed, saying nothing more ;

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 87

for he always wisely allowed for the existence of a
certain amount of human nature in ingenuous youth.
At another time the " Harvard Washington " asked
leave to go into Boston to a collation which had
been offered them. " Certainly, young gentlemen,"
said the President, " but have yon engaged any one
to bring home your muskets ? " — the College be-
ing responsible for these weapons, which belonged
to the State. Again, when a student came with a
physician's certificate, and asked leave of absence,
K. granted it at once, and then added, " By the way,

Mr. , persons interested in the relation which

exists between states of the atmosphere and health
have noticed a curious fact in regard to the climate
of Cambridge, especially within the College limits,
— the very small number of deaths in proportion
to the cases of dangerous illness." This is told of
Judge W., himself a wit, and capable of enjoying
the humorous delicacy of the reproof.

Shall I take Brahmin Alcott's favorite word,
and call him a demonic man ? No, the Latin ge-
nius is quite old-fashioned enough for me, means the
same thing, and its derivative geniality expresses,
moreover, the base of K.'s being. How he sug-
gested cloistered repose, and quadrangles mossy with
centurial associations ! How easy he was, and how
without creak was every movement of his mind !
This life was good enough for him, and the next
not too good. The gentleman-like pervaded even
his prayers. His were not the manners of a man
of the world, nor of a man of the other world
either ; but both met in him to balance each other

88 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

in a beautiful equilibrium. Praying, lie leaned
forward upon the pulpit-cushion as for conversa-
tion, and seemed to feel himself (without irrever-
ence) on terms of friendly, but courteous, familiar-
ity with Heaven. The expression of his face was
that of tranquil contentment, and he appeared less
to be supplicating expected mercies than thankful
for those already found, — as if he were saying the
gratias in the refectory of the Abbey of Theleme.
Under him flourished the Harvard Washington
Corps, whose gyrating banner, inscribed Tarn
Marti quam Mercurio (atqui magis Lyceo should
have been added,) on the evening of training-days,
was an accurate dynamometer of Willard's punch
or Porter's flip. It was they who, after being roy-
ally entertained by a maiden lady of the town, en-
tered in their orderly book a vote that Miss Blank
was a gentleman. I see them now, returning from
the imminent deadly breach of the law of Rechab,
unable to form other than the serpentine line of
beauty, while their officers, brotherly rather than
imperious, instead of reprimanding, tearfully em-
braced the more eccentric wanderers from military
precision. Under him the Med. Facs. took their
equal place among the learned societies of Europe,
numbering among their grateful honorary mem-
bers Alexander, Emperor of all the Russias, who
(if College legends may be trusted) sent them in
return for their diploma a gift of medals confis-
cated by the authorities. Under him the College
fire-engine was vigilant and active in suppressing
any tendency to spontaneous combustion among the

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 89

Freshmen, or rushed wildly to imaginary conflagra-
tions, generally in a direction where punch was to
be had. All these useful conductors for the natu-
ral electricity of youth, dispersing it or turning it
harmlessly into the earth, are taken away now, —
wisely or not, is questionable.

An academic town, in whose atmosphere there
is always something antiseptic, seems naturally to
draw to itself certain varieties and to preserve cer-
tain humors (in the Ben Jonsonian sense) of char-
acter, — men who come not to study so much as
to be studied. At the headquarters of Washington
once, and now of the Muses, lived C , but be-
fore the date of these recollections. Here for seven
years (as the law was then) he made his house his
castle, sunning himself in his elbow-chair at the
front-door, on that seventh day, secure from every
arrest but Death's. Here long survived him his
turbaned widow, studious only of Spinoza, and re-
fusing to molest the canker-worms that annually
disleaved her elms, because we were all vermicular
alike. She had been a famous beauty once, but
the canker years had left her leafless, too ; and I
used to wonder, as I saw her sitting always tur-
baned and always alone at her accustomed window,
whether she were ever visited by the reproachful
shade of him who (in spite of Rosalind) died bro-
ken-hearted for her in her radiant youth.

And this reminds me of J. F., who, also crossed
in love, allowed no mortal eye to behold his face
for many years. The eremitic instinct is not pe-
culiar to the Thebais, as many a New England

90 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

village can testify ; and it is worthy* of considera-
tion that the Romish Church has not forgotten this
among her other points of intimate contact with
human nature. F. became purely vespertinal,
never stirring abroad till after dark. He occupied
two rooms, migrating from one to the other, as the
necessities of housewifery demanded, thus shunning
all sight of womankind, and being practically more
solitary in his dual apartment than Montaigne's
Dean of St. Hilaire in his single one. When it
was requisite that he should put his signature to
any legal instrument, (for he was an anchorite of
ample means,) he wrapped himself in a blanket,
allowing nothing to be seen but the hand which
acted as scribe. What impressed us boys more
than anything else was the rumor that he had suf-
fered his beard to grow, — such an anti-Sheffieldism
being almost unheard of in those days, and the
peculiar ornament of man being associated in our
minds with nothing more recent than the patri-
archs and apostles, whose effigies we were obliged
to solace ourselves with weekly in the Family
Bible. He came out of his oysterhood at last, and
I knew him well, a kind-hearted man, who gave
annual sleigh-rides to the town-paupers, and sup-
plied the poorer children with school-books. His
favorite topic of conversation was Eternity, and,
like many other worthy persons, he used to fancy
that meaning was an affair of aggregation, and
that he doubled the intensity of what he said by
the sole aid of the multiplication-table. "Eter-
nity ! " he used to say, " it is not a day ; it is not a

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 91

year ; it is not a hundred years ; it is not a thou-
sand years ; it is not a million years ; no, sir," (the
sir being thrown in to recall wandering attention,)
" it is not ten million years ! " and so on, his enthu-
siasm becoming a mere frenzy when he got among
his sextillions, till I sometimes wished he had con-
tinued in retirement. He used to sit at the open
window during thunder-storms, and had a Grecian
feeling about death by lightning. In a certain
sense he had his desire, for he died suddenly, —
not by fire from heaven, but by the red flash of
apoplexy, leaving his whole estate to charitable
uses.

If K. were out of place as President, that was
not P. as Greek Professor. Who that ever saw
him can forget him, in his old age, like a lusty
winter, frosty but kindly, with great silver spec-
tacles of the heroic period, such as scarce twelve
noses of these degenerate days could bear? He
was a natural celibate, not dwelling " like the fly
in the heart of the apple," but like a lonely bee
rather, absconding himself in Hymettian flowers,
incapable of matrimony as a solitary palm-tree.
There was, to be sure, a tradition of youthful dis-
appointment, and a touching story which L. told

me perhaps confirms it. When Mrs. died, a

carriage with blinds drawn followed the funeral
train at some distance, and, when the coffin had
been lowered into the grave, drove hastily away to
escape that saddest of earthly sounds, the first rattle
of earth upon the lid. It was afterward known
that the carriage held a single mourner, — our

92 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

grim and undemonstrative Professor. Yet I can-
not bring myself to suppose him susceptible to any
tender passion after that single lapse in the imma-
turity of reason. He might have joined the Ab-
derites in singing their mad chorus from the
Andromeda ; bat it would have been in deference
to the language merely, and with a silent protest
against the sentiment. I fancy him arranging his
scrupulous toilet, not for Amaryllis or Nea3ra, but,
like Machiavelli, for the society of his beloved
classics. His ears had needed no prophylactic
wax to pass the Sirens' isle ; nay, he would have
kept them the wider open, studious of the dialect
in which they sang, and perhaps triumphantly de-
tecting the 2Eolic digamma in their lay. A thor-
oughly single man, single-minded, single-hearted,
buttoning over his single heart a single - breasted
surtout, and wearing always a hat of a single fash-
ion, — did he in secret regard the dual number of
his favorite language as a weakness ? The son of
an officer of distinction in the Revolutionary War,
lie mounted the pulpit with the erect port of a
soldier, and carried his cane more in the fashion of
a weapon than a staff, but with the point lowered,
in token of surrender to the peaceful proprieties
of his calling. Yet sometimes the martial instincts

O

would burst the cerements of black coat and cler-
ical neckcloth, as once, when the students had got
into a fight upon the training-field, and the licen-
tious soldiery, furious with rum, had driven them
at point of bayonet to the College gates, and even
threatened to lift their arms against the Muses'

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 93

bower. Then, like Major Goffe at Deerfield, sud-
denly appeared the gray-haired P., all his father
resurgent in him, and shouted : " Now, my lads,
stand your ground, you 're in the right now \
Don't let one of them set foot within the Col-
lege grounds ! " Thus he allowed arms to get the
better of the toga ; but raised it, like the Pro-
phet's breeches, into a banner, and carefully ush-
ered resistance with a preamble of infringed right.
Fidelity was his strong characteristic, and burned
equably in him through a life of eighty-three years.
He drilled himself till inflexible habit stood sen-
tinel before all those postern - weaknesses which
temperament leaves unbolted to temptation. A
lover of the scholar's herb, yet loving freedom
more, and knowing that the animal appetites ever
hold one hand behind them for Satan to drop a
bribe in, he would never have two cigars in his
house at once, but walked every day to the shop to
fetch his single diurnal solace. Nor would he trust
himself with two on Saturdays, preferring (since
he could not violate the Sabbath even by that in-
finitesimal traffic) to depend on Providential ra-
vens, which were seldom wanting in the shape of
some black-coated friend who knew his need, and
honored the scruple that occasioned it. He was
faithful, also, to his old hats, in which appeared
the constant service of the antique world, and
which he preserved forever, piled like a black
pagoda under his dressing-table. No scarecrow
was ever the residuary legatee of his beavers,
though one of them in any of the neighboring

94 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

peach-orchards would have been sovereign against
an attack of Freshmen. He wore them all in turn,
getting through all in the course of the year, like
the sun through the signs of the zodiac, modulating
them according to seasons and celestial phenomena,
so that never was spider-web or chick weed so sensi-
tive a weather-gauge as they. Nor did his political
party find him less loyal. Taking all the tickets,
he would seat himself apart, and carefully compare
them with the list of regular nominations as printed
in his Daily Advertiser, before he dropped his
ballot in the box. In less ambitious moments, it
almost seems to me that I would rather have had
that slow, conscientious vote of P.'s alone, than to
have been chosen Alderman of the Ward !

If you had walked to what was then Sweet Au-
burn by the pleasant Old Road, on some June
morning thirty years ago, you would very likely
have met two other characteristic persons, both
phantasmagoric now, and belonging to the past.
Fifty years earlier, the scarlet-coated, rapiered fig-
ures of Vassall, Lechmere, Oliver, and Brattle
creaked up and down there on red-heeled shoes,
lifting the ceremonious three-cornered hat, and of-
fering the fugacious hospitalities of the snuff-box.
They are all shadowy alike now, not one of your
Etruscan Lucumos or Roman Consuls more so,
my dear Storg. First is W., his queue slender
and tapering, like the tail of a violet crab, held out
horizontally by the high collar of his sheplierd's-
gray overcoat, whose style was of the latest when
he studied at Leyden in his hot youth. The age

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 95

of cheap clothes sees no more of those faithful old
garments, as proper to their wearers and as distinc-
tive as the barks of trees, and by long use inter-
penetrated with their very nature. Nor do we see
so many Humors (still in the old sense) now that
every man's soul belongs to the Public, as when
social distinctions were more marked, and men felt
that their personalities were their castles, in which
they could intrench themselves against the world.
Nowadays men are shy of letting their true selves
be seen, as if in some former life they had com-
mitted a crime, and were all the time afraid of Dis-
covery and arrest in this. Formerly they used to
insist on your giving the wall to their peculiarities,
and you may still find examples of it in the parson
or the doctor of retired villages. One of W.'s
oddities was touching. A little brook used to run
across the street, and the sidewalk was carried over
it by a broad stone. Of course there is no brook
now. What use did that little glimpse of a ripple
serve, where the children used to launch their chip
fleets ? W., in going over this stone, which gave a
hollow resonance to the tread, had a trick of strik-
ing upon it three times with his cane, and mutter-
ing, " Torn, Tom, Tom ! " I used to think he was
only mimicking with his voice the sound of the
blows, and possibly it was that sound which sug-
gested his thought, for he was remembering a fa-
vorite nephew, prematurely dead. Perhaps Tom
had sailed his boats there; perhaps the reverber-
ation under the old man's foot hinted at the hol-
lowness of life; perhaps the fleeting eddies of

96 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

the water brought to mind the fugaces annos.
W., like P., wore amazing spectacles, fit to trans-
mit no smaller image than the page of mightiest
folios of Dioscorides or Hercules de Saxonia, and
rising full-disked upon the beholder like those
prodigies of two moons at once, portending change
to monarchs. The great collar disallowing any in-
dependent rotation of the head, I remember he
used to turn his whole person in order to bring
their foci to bear upon an object. One can fancy
that terrified Nature would have yielded up her
secrets at once, without cross-examination, at their
first glare. Through them he had gazed fondly
into the great mare's-nest of Junius, publishing
his observations upon the eggs found therein in a
tall octavo. It was he who introduced vaccination
to this Western World. Malicious persons disput-
ing his claim to this distinction, he published this
advertisement : " Lost, a gold snuff-box, with the
inscription, ' The Jenner of the Old World to the
Jenner of the New.' Whoever shall return the

same to Dr. shall be suitably rewarded." It

was never returned. Would the search after it
have been as fruitless as that of the alchemist after
his equally imaginary gold? Malicious persons
persisted in believing the box as visionary as the
claim it was meant to buttress with a semblance of
reality. He used to stop and say good-morning
kindly, and pat the shoulder of the blushing
school-boy who now, with the fierce snow-storm
wildering without, sits and remembers sadly those
old meetings and partings in the June sunshine.

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 97

Then there was S., whose resounding " Haw,
haw, haw ! by Shorge ! " positively enlarged the
income of every dweller in Cambridge. In down-
right, honest good cheer and good neighborhood, it
was worth five hundred a year to every one of us.
Its jovial thunders cleared the mental air of every
sulky cloud. Perpetual childhood dwelt in him,
the childhood of his native Southern France, and
its fixed air was all the time bubbling up and
sparkling and winking in his eyes. It seemed as
if his placid old face were only a mask behind
which a merry Cupid had ambushed himself, peep-
ing out all the while, and ready to drop it when the
play grew tiresome. Every word he uttered seemed
to be hilarious, no matter what the occasion. If
he were sick, and you visited him, if he had met
with a misfortune, (and there are few men so wise
that they can look even at the back of a retiring
sorrow with composure,) it was all one ; his great
laugh went off as if it were set like an alarm-clock,
to run down, whether he would or no, at a certain
nick. Even after an ordinary Good morning!
(especially if to an old pupil, and in French,) the
wonderful Haw, haiv, haw ! by Shorge ! would
burst upon you unexpectedly, like a' salute of artil-
lery on some holiday which you had forgotten.
Everything was a joke to him, — that the oath of
allegiance had been administered to him by your
grandfather, — that he had taught Prescott his first
Spanish (of which he was proud), — no matter what.
Everything came to him marked by Nature Right
side up, with care, and he kept it so. The world

98 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO

to him, as to all of us, was like a medal, on the
obverse of which is stamped the image of Joy, and
on the reverse that of Care. S. never took the
foolish pains to look at that other side, even if
he knew its existence ; much less would it have oc-
curred to him to turn it into view, and insist that
his friends should look at it with him. Nor was
this a mere outside good-humor; its source was
deeper, in a true Christian kindliness and amenity.
Once, when he had been knocked down by a tip-
sily-driven sleigh, and was urged to prosecute the
offenders, " No, no," he said, his wounds still fresh,
" young blood ! young blood ! it must have its way ;
I was young myself." Was ! few men come into
life so young as S. went out. He landed in Boston
(then the front door of America) in '93, and, in
honor of the ceremony, had his head powdered
afresh, and put on a suit of court-mourning for
Louis XVI. before he set foot on the wharf. My
fancy always dressed him in that violet silk, and
his soul certainly wore a full court-suit. What
was there ever like his bow? It was as if you
had received a decoration, and could write yourself
gentleman from that day forth. His hat rose, re-
greeting your own, and, having sailed through the
stately curve of the old regime, sank gently back
over that placid brain, which harbored no thought
less white than the powder which covered it. I
have sometimes imagined that there was a gradu-
ated arc over his head, invisible to other eyes than
his, by which he meted out to each his rightful
share of castorial consideration. I carry in my

CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO 99

memory three exemplary bows. The first is that
of an. old beggar, who, already carrying in his
hand a white hat, the gift of benevolence, took off
the black one from his head also, and profoundly
saluted me with both at once, giving me, in return
for my alms, a dual benediction*, puzzling as a nod
from Janus Bifrons. The second I received from
an old Cardinal, who was taking his walk just out-
side the Porta San Giovanni at Rome. I paid him
the courtesy due to his age and rank. Forthwith
rose, first, the Hat ; second, the hat of his confes-
sor; third, that of another priest who attended
him ; fourth, the fringed cocked-hat of his coach-
man; fifth and sixth, the ditto, ditto, of his two
footmen. Here was an investment, indeed ; six
hundred per cent, interest on a single bow! The
third bow, worthy to be noted in one's almanac
among the other mirabilia, was that of S., in which
courtesy had mounted to the last round of her
ladder, — and tried to draw it up after her.

But the genial veteran is gone even while I am
writing this, and I will play Old Mortality no
longer. Wandering among these recent graves,

my dear friend, we may chance upon ; but

no, I will not end my sentence. I bid you heartily
farewell !

LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL IN ITALY
AND ELSEWHERE

1854

I

AT SEA

THE sea was meant to be looked at from shore,
as mountains are from the plain. Lucretius made
this discovery long ago, and was blunt enough to
blurt it forth, romance and sentiment — in other
words, the pretence of feeling what we do not feel
— being inventions of a later day. To be sure,
Cicero used to twaddle about Greek literature and
philosophy, much as people do about ancient art
nowadays ; but I rather sympathize with those
stout old Romans who despised both, and believed
that to found an empire was as grand an achieve-
ment as to build an epic or to carve a statue. But
though there might have been twaddle, (as why
not, since there was a Senate?) I rather think
Petrarch was the first choragus of that sentimental
dance which so long led young folks away from
the realities of life like the piper of Hamelin, and
whose succession ended, let us hope, with Chateau-
briand. But for them, Byron, whose real strength
lay in his sincerity, would never have talked about

AT SEA 101

tha " sea bounding beneath him like a steed that
knows his rider," and all that sort of thing. Even
if it had been true, steam has been as fatal to that
part of the romance of the sea as to hand-loom
weaving. But what say you to a twelve days' calm
such as we dozed through in mid- Atlantic and in
mid- August ? I know nothing so tedious at once
and exasperating as that regular slap of the wilted
sails when the ship rises and falls with the slow
breathing of the sleeping sea, one greasy, brassy
swell following another, slow, smooth, immitigable
as the series of Wordsworth's Ecclesiastical Son-
nets. Even at his best, Neptune, in a tete-a-tete,
has a way of repeating himself, an obtuseness to
the ne quid nimis, that is stupefying. It reminds
me of organ-music and my good friend Sebastian
Bach. A fugue or two will do very well ; but a
concert made up of nothing else is altogether too
epic for me. There is nothing so desperately mo-
notonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the
cruelty of pirates. Fancy an existence in which
the coming up of a clumsy finback whale, who says
Pooh ! to you solemnly as you lean over the taff-
rail, is an event as exciting as an election on
shore ! The dampness seems to strike into the
wits as into the lucifer-matches, so that one may
scratch a thought half a dozen times and get noth-
ing at last but a faint sputter, the forlorn hope of
fire, which only goes far enough to leave a sense of
suffocation behind it* Even smoking becomes an
employment instead of a solace. Who less likely
to come to their wit's end than W. M. T. and

102 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

A. H. C. ? Yet I have seen them driven to five
meals a day for mental occupation. I sometimes sit
and pity Noah ; but even he had this advantage
over all succeeding navigators, that, wherever he
landed, he was sure to get no ill news from home.
He should be canonized as the patron-saint of
newspaper correspondents, being the only man who
ever had the very last authentic intelligence from
everywhere.

The finback whale recorded just above has much
the look of a brown-paper parcel, — the whitish
stripes that run across him answering for the pack-
thread. He has a kind of accidental hole in the
top of his head, through which he pooh-poohs the
rest of creation, and which looks as if it had been
made by the chance thrust of a chestnut rail. He
was our first event. Our second was harpooning a
sunfish, which basked dozing on the lap of the sea,
looking so much like the giant turtle of an alder-
man's dream, that I am persuaded he would have
let himself be made into mock-turtle soup rather
than acknowledge his imposture. But he broke
away just as they were hauling him over the side,
and sank placidly through the clear water, leaving
behind him a crimson trail that wavered a moment
and was gone.

The sea, though, has better sights than these.
When we were up with the Azores, we began to
meet flying-fish and Portuguese men-of-war beau-
tiful as the galley of Cleopatra, tiny craft that
dared these seas before Columbus. I have seen
one of the former rise from the crest of a wave,

AT SEA 103

and, glancing from another some two hundred feet
beyond, take a fresh flight of perhaps as far. How
Calderon would have similized this pretty creature
had he ever seen it ! How would he have run him
up and down the gamut of simile ! If a fish, then
a fish with wings ; if a bird, th'en a bird, with fins ;
and so on, keeping up the light shuttle-cock of a
conceit as is his wont. Indeed, the poor thing is
the most killing bait for a comparison, and I assure
you I have three or four in my inkstand ; — but be
calm, they shall stay there. Moore, who looked
on all nature as a kind of Graclus ad Parnassum,
a thesaurus of similitude, and spent his life in a
game of What is my thought like ? with himself,
did the flying-fish on his way to Bermuda. So
I leave him in peace.

The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, all
the more so that I had never heard of it, is the
trail of a shoal of fish through the phosphorescent
water. It is like a flight of silver rocketsr or the
streaming of northern lights through that silent
nether heaven. 1 thought nothing could go beyond
that rustling star-foam which was churned up by
our ship's bows, or those eddies and disks of dreamy
flame that rose and wandered out of sight behind
us.

'T was fire our ship was plunging through,
Cold fire that o'er the quarter flew ;
And wandering- moons of idle flame
Grew full and waned, and went and came,
Dappling with light the huge sea-snake
That slid behind us in the wake.

But there was something even more delicately rare

LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

in the apparition of the fish, as they turned up in
gleaming furrows the latent moonshine which the
ocean seemed to have hoarded against these vacant
interlunar nights. In the Mediterranean one day,
as we were lying becalmed, I observed the water
freckled with dingy specks, which at last gathered
to a pinkish scum on the surface. The sea had
been so phosphorescent for some nights, that when
the Captain gave me my bath, by dousing me with
buckets from the house on deck, the spray flew
off my head and shoulders in sparks. It occurred
to me that this dirty-looking scum might be the
luminous matter, and I had a pailful dipped up to
keep till after dark. When I went to look at it
after nightfall, it seemed at first perfectly dead ;
but when I shook it, the whole broke out into what
I can only liken to milky flames, whose lambent
silence was strangely beautiful, and startled me al-
most as actual projection might an alchemist. I
could not bear to be the death of so much beauty ;
so I poured it all overboard again.

Another sight worth taking a voyage for is that
of the sails by moonlight. Our course was " south
and by east, half south," so that we seemed bound
for the full moon as she rolled up over our waver-
ing horizon. Then I used to go forward to the
bowsprit and look back. Our ship was a clipper,
with every rag set. stunsails, sky-scrapers, and all ;
nor was it easy to believe that such a wonder could
be built of canvas as that white many-storied pile
of cloud that stooped over me or drew back as we
rose and fell with the waves.

AT SEA 105

These are all the wonders I can recall of my five
weeks at sea, except the sun. Were you ever alone
with the sun ? You think it a very simple ques-
tion ; but I never was, in the full sense of the
word, till I was held up to him one cloudless day
on the broad buckler of the ocean. I suppose one
might have the same feeling in the desert. I re-
member getting something like it years ago, when
I climbed alone to the top of a mountain, and lay
face up on the hot gray moss, striving to get a no-
tion of how an Arab might feel. It was my Amer-
ican commentary of the Koran, and not a bad one.
In a New England winter, too, when everything is
gagged with snow, as if some gigantic physical geo-
grapher were taking a cast of the earth's face in
plaster, the bare knob of a hill will introduce you
to the sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea
you may be alone with him day after day, and
almost all day long. I never understood before
that nothing short of full daylight can give the
supremest sense of solitude. Darkness will not do
so, for the imagination peoples it with more shapes
than ever were poured from the frozen loins of the
populous North. The sun, I sometimes think, is a
little grouty at sea, especially at high noon, feeling
that he wastes his beams on those fruitless furrows.
It is otherwise with the moon. She " comforts the
night," as Chapman finely says, and I always found
her a companionable creature.

In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. It
is the true magic-circle of expectation and conjec-
ture, — almost as good as a wishing-ring. What

106 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

will rise over that edge we sail towards daily and
never overtake ? A sail ? an island ? the new
shore of the Old World ? Something rose every
day, which I need not have gone so far to see, but
at whose levee I was a much more faithful courtier
than on shore. A cloudless sunrise in mid-ocean
is beyond comparison for simple grandeur. It is
like Dante's style, bare and perfect. Naked sun
meets naked sea, the true classic of nature. There
may be more sentiment in morning on shore, — the
shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, the silver point-lace
of sparkling hoar-frost, — but there is also more
complexity, more of the romantic. The one savors
of the elder Edda, the other of the Minnesingers.

And I thus floating, lonely elf,

A kind of planet by myself,

The mists draw up and furl away,

And in the east a warming gray,

Faint as the tint of oaken woods

When o'er their buds May breathes and broods,

Tells that the golden sunrise-tide

Is lapsing up earth's thirsty side,

Each moment purpling on the crest

Of some stark billow farther west :

And as the sea-moss droops and hears

The gurgling flood thatnears and nears,

And then with tremulous content

Floats out each thankful filament,

So waited I until it came,

God's daily miracle, — 0 shame

That I had seen so many days

Unthankful, without wondering praise,

Not recking more this bliss of earth

Than the cheap fire that lights my hearth !

But now glad thoughts and holy pomr

Into my heart, as once a year

To San Miniato's open door,

AT SEA 107

In long procession, chanting clear,

Through slopes of sun, through shadows hoar,

The coupled monks slow-climbing sing,

And like a golden censer swing

From rear to front, from front to rear

Their alternating bursts of praise,

Till the roof's fading seraphs gaze

Down through an odorous mist, that crawls

Lingeringly up the darkened walls,

And the dim arches, silent long,

Are startled with triumphant song.

I wrote yesterday that the sea still rimmed our
prosy lives with mystery and conjecture. But one
is shut up on shipboard like Montaigne in his
tower, with nothing to do but to review his own
thoughts and contradict himself. Dire, redire, et
me contredire, will be the staple of my journal till
I see land. I say nothing of such matters as the
montagna Itruna on which Ulysses wrecked ; but
since the sixteenth century could any man reason-
ably hope to stumble on one of those wonders which
were cheap as dirt in the days of St. Saga? Faus-
tus, Don Juan, and Tannhiiuser are the last ghosts
of legend, that lingered almost till the Gallic cock-
crow of universal enlightenment and disillusion.
The Public School has done for Imagination. What
shall I see in Outre-Mer, or on the way thither, but
what can be seen with eyes ? To be sure, I stick
by the sea-serpent, and would fain believe that sci-
ence has scotched, not killed him. Nor is he to
be lightly given up, for, like the old Scandinavian
snake, he binds together for us the two hemispheres
of Past and Present, of Belief and Science. He is
the link which knits us seaboard Yankees with our

108 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

Norse progenitors, interpreting between the age of
the dragon and that of the railroad-train. We
have made ducks and drakes of that large estate of
wonder and delight bequeathed to us by ancestral
vikings, and this alone remains to us unthrif t Heirs
of Linn.

I feel an undefined respect for a man who has
seen the sea-serpent. He is to his brother-fishers
what the poet is to his fellow-men. Where they
have seen nothing better than a school of horse-
mackerel, or the idle coils of ocean round Half-way
Rock, he has caught authentic glimpses of the with-
drawing mantle-hem of the Edda age. I care not
for the monster himself. It is not the thing, but
the belief in the thing, that is dear to me. May
it be long before Professor Owen is comforted with
the sight of his unfleshed vertebrae, long before
they stretch many a rood behind Kimball's or Bar-
num's glass, reflected in the shallow orbs of Mr.
and Mrs. Public, which stare, but see not! I
speak of him in the singular number, for I insist
on believing that there is but one left, - without
chance of duplicate. When we read that Captain
Spalding, of the pink-stern Three Pollies, has be-
held him rushing through the brine like an infinite
series of bewitched mackerel-casks, we feel that the
mystery of old Ocean, at least, has not yet been
sounded, — that Faith and Awe survive there un-
evaporate. I once ventured the horse-mackerel
theory to an old fisherman, browner than a tomcod.
" Hos-mackril ! " he exclaimed indignantly, " hos-
mackril be — " (here he used a phrase commonly

AT SEA 109

indicated in laical literature by the same sign which
serves for Doctorate in Divinity,) " don't yer spose
I know a hos-mackril? " The intonation of that
"/" would have silenced Professor Monkbarns
Owen with his provoking phoca forever. What if
one should ask Mm if he knew a" trilobite ?

The fault of modern travellers is, that they see
nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene periods
and tertiary formations, and tell us how the world
looked to the plesiosaur. They take science (or
nescience) with them, instead of that soul of gener-
ous trust their elders had. All their senses are
sceptics and doubters, materialists reporting things
for other sceptics to doubt still further upon. Na-
ture becomes a reluctant witness upon the stand,
badgered with geologist hammers and phials of acid.
There have been no travellers since those included
in Hakluyt and Purchas, except Martin, perhaps,
who saw an inch or two into the invisible at the
Western Islands. We have peripatetic lecturers,
but no more travellers. Travellers' stories are no
longer proverbial. We have picked nearly every
apple (wormy or otherwise) from the world's tree
of knowledge, and that without an Eve to tempt us.
Two or three have hitherto hung luckily beyond
reach on a lofty bough shadowing the interior of
Africa, but there is a German Doctor at this very
moment pelting at them with sticks and stones. It
may be only next week, and these too, bitten by
geographers and geologists, will be thrown away.

Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity
is subjected to chemic tests. We must have exact

110 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of facts pressed,
dried, or preserved in spirits, instead of the large,
vague world our fathers had. With them science
was poetry ; with us, poetry is science. Our modern
Eden is a hortus siccus. Tourists defraud rather
than enrich us. They have not that sense of a3S-
thetic proportion which characterized the elder trav-
eller. Earth is no longer the fine work of art it was,
for nothing is left to the imagination. Job Hortop,
arrived at the height of the Bermudas, thinks it
full time to indulge us in a merman. Nay, there
is a story told by Webster, in his Witchcraft, of
a merman with a mitre, who, on being sent back
to his watery diocese of finland, made what ad-
vances he could toward an episcopal benediction by
bowing his head thrice. Doubtless he had been
consecrated by St. Antony of Padua. A dumb
bishop would be sometimes no unpleasant phenom-
enon, by the way. Sir John Hawkins is not satis-
fied with telling us about the merely sensual Cana-
ries, but is generous enough to throw us in a hand-
ful of " certain flitting islands " to boot. Henry
Hawkes describes the visible Mexican cities, and
then is not so frugal but that he can give us a few
invisible ones. Thus do these generous ancient
mariners make children of us again. Their succes-
sors show us an earth effete and in a double sense
past bearing, tracing out with the eyes of indus-
trious fleas every wrinkle and crowfoot.

The journals of the elder navigators are prose
Odysseys. The geographies of our ancestors were
works of fancy and imagination. They read poems

AT SEA 111

where we yawn over items. Their world was a
huge wonder-horn, exhaustless as that which Thor
strove to drain. Ours would scarce quench the
small thirst of a bee. No modern voyager brings
back the magical foundation-stones of a Tempest.
No Marco Polo, traversing the Hesert beyond the
city of Lok, would tell of things able to inspire the
mind of Milton with

" Calling1 shapes and beckoning- shadows dire,
And airy tongnes that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."

It was easy enough to believe the story of Dante,
when two thirds of even the upper-world were yet
untraversed and unmapped. With every step of
the recent traveller our inheritance of the wonder-
ful is diminished. Those beautifully pictured
notes of the Possible are redeemed at a ruinous dis-
count in the hard and cumbrous coin of the Actual.
How are we not defrauded and impoverished ? Does
California vie with El Dorado ? or are Bruce's
Abyssinian kings a set-off for Prester John ? A
bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. And
if the philosophers have not even yet been able to
agree whether the world has any existence inde-
pendent of ourselves, how do we not gain a loss in
every addition to the catalogue of Vulgar Errors ?
Where are the fishes which nidificated in trees ?
Where the monopodes sheltering themselves from
the sun beneath their single umbrella-like foot, —
umbrella-like in everything but the fatal necessity
of being borrowed ? Where the Acephali, with
whom Herodotus, in a kind of ecstasy, wound up

112 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

his climax of men with abnormal top-pieces ?
Where the Roc whose eggs are possibly boulders,
needing no far-fetched theory of glacier or iceberg
to account for them ? Where the tails of the men
of Kent ? Where the no legs of the bird of para-
dise ? Where the Unicorn, with that single horn
of his, sovereign against all manner of poisons?
Where that Thessalian spring, which, without cost
to the country, convicted and punished perjurers ?
Where the Amazons of Orellana? Where, in short,
the Fountain of Youth ? All these, and a thousand
other varieties, we have lost, and have got nothing
instead of them. And those who have robbed us
of them have stolen that which not enriches them-
selves. It is so much wealth cast into the sea be-
yond all approach of diving-bells. We owe no
thanks to Mr. J. E. Worcester, whose Geography
we studied enforcedly at school. Yet even he had his
relentings, and in some softer moment vouchsafed
us a fine, inspiring print of the Maelstrom, answer-
able to the twenty-four mile diameter of its suc-
tion. Year by year, more and more of the world
gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the
arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. Our youth
are no longer ingenuous, as indeed no ingenuity is
demanded of them. Everything is accounted for,
everything cut and dried, and the world may be
put together as easily as the fragments of a dis-
sected map. The Mysterious bounds nothing now
on the North, South, East, or West. We have
played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is
never a plum left in it.

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 113

II

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

The first sight of a shore so historical as that of
Europe gives an American a strange thrill. What
we always feel the artistic want of at home is back-
ground. It is all idle to say we are Englishmen,
and that English history is ours too. It is pre-
cisely in this that we are not Englishmen, inasmuch
as we only possess their history through our minds,
and not by life-long association with a spot and an
idea we call England. History without the soil it
grew in is more instructive than inspiring, — an ac-
quisition, and not an inheritance. It is laid away
in our memories, and does not run in our veins.
Surely, in all that concerns aesthetics, Europeans
have us at an immense advantage. They start at
a point which we arrive at after weary years, for
literature is not shut up in books, nor art in gal-
leries : both are taken in by unconscious absorption
through the finer pores of mind and character in
the atmosphere of society. "We are not yet out of
our Crusoe-hood, and must make our own tools as
best we may. Yet I think we shall find the good
of it one of these days, in being thrown back more
wholly on nature ; and our literature, when we
have learned to feel our own strength, and to re-
spect our own thought because it is ours, and not
because the European Mrs. Grundy agrees with
it, will have a fresh flavor and a strong body that
will recommend it, especially as what we import

114 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

is watered more and more liberally with every vin-
tage.

My first glimpse of Europe was the shore of
Spain. One morning a cream-colored blur on the
now unwavering horizon's edge was pointed out to
me as Cadiz. Since we got into the Mediterranean,
we have been becalmed for some days within easy
view of land. All along are fine mountains, brown
all day, and with a bloom on them at sunset like
that of a ripe plum. Here and there at their feet
little white towns are sprinkled along the edge of
the water, like the grains of rice dropped by the
princess in the story. Sometimes we see larger
buildings on the mountain slopes, probably con-
vents. I sit and wonder whether the farther peaks
may not be the Sierra Morena (the rusty saw) of
Don Quixote. I resolve that they shall be, and
am content. Surely latitude and longitude never
showed me any particular respect, that I should be
over-scrupulous with them.

But after all, Nature, though she may be more
beautiful, is nowhere so entertaining as in man,
and the best thing I have seen and learned at sea
is our Chief Mate. My first acquaintance with
him was made over my knife, which he asked to
look at, and, after a critical examination, handed
back to me, saying, " I should n't wonder if that
'ere was a good piece o' stuff." Since then he has
transferred a part of his regard for my knife to its
owner. I like folks who like an honest bit of steel,
and take no interest whatever in " your Raphaels,
Correggios, and stuff." There is always more than

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 115

the average human nature in a man who has a
hearty sympathy with iron. It is a manly metal,
with no sordid associations like gold and silver.
My sailor fully came up to my expectation on
further acquaintance. He might well be called an
old salt who had been wrecked on Spitzbergen be-
fore I was born. He was not an American, but I
should never have guessed it by his speech, which
was the purest Cape Cod, and I reckon myself a
good taster of dialects. Nor was he less Ameri-
canized in all his thoughts and feelings, a singular
proof of the ease with which our omnivorous coun-
try assimilates foreign matter, provided it be Prot-
estant, for he was a grown man ere he became an
American citizen. He used to walk the deck with
his hands in his pockets, in seeming abstraction,
but nothing escaped his eye. How he saw, I could
never make out, though I had a theory that it was
with his elbows. After he had taken me (or my
knife) into his confidence, he took care that I
should see whatever he deemed of interest to a
landsman. Without looking up, he would say,
suddenly, " Ther 's a whale blowin' clearn up to
win'ard," or, " Them 's porpises to leeward : that
means change o' wind." He is as impervious to
cold as a polar bear, and paces the deck during his
watch much as one of those yellow hummocks goes
slumping up and down his cage. On the Atlan-
tic, if the wind blew a gale from the northeast, and
it was cold as an English summer, he was sure to
turn out in a calico shirt and trousers, his furzy
brown chest half bare, and slippers, without stock-

116 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

ings. But lest you might fancy this to have
chanced by defect of wardrobe, he comes out in a
monstrous pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean,
when the evening is so hot that Adam would have
been glad to leave off his fig-leaves. " It 's a kind
o' damp and unwholesome in these 'ere waters,"
he says, evidently regarding the Midland Sea as a
vile standing -pool, in comparison with the bluff
ocean. At meals he is superb, not only for his
strengths, but his weaknesses. He has some how
or other come to think me a wag, and if I ask him
to pass the butter, detects an occult joke, and
laughs as much as is proper for a mate. For you
must know that our social hierarchy on shipboard
is precise, and the second mate, were he present,
would only laugh half as much as the first. Mr.
X. always combs his hair, and works himself into
a black frock-coat (on Sundays he adds a waist-
coat) before he comes to meals, sacrificing himself
nobly and painfully to the social proprieties. The
second mate, on the other hand, who eats after us,
enjoys the privilege of shirt-sleeves, and is, I think,
the happier man of the two. We do not have
seats above and below the salt, as in old time, but
above and below the white sugar. Mr. X. always
takes brown sugar, and it is delightful to see how
he ignores the existence of certain delicates which
he considers above his grade, tipping his head on
one side with an air of abstraction, so that he may
seem not to deny himself, but to omit helping him-
self from inadvertence or absence of mind. At
such times he wrinkles his forehead in a peculiar

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 117

manner, inscrutable at first as a cuneiform inscrip-
tion, but as easily read after you once get the key.
The sense of it is something like this : " I, X.,
know my place, a height of wisdom attained by
few. Whatever you may think, I do not see that
currant jelly, nor that preserved grape. Espe-
cially, a kind Providence has made me blind to
bowls of white sugar, and deaf to the pop of cham-
pagne corks. It is much that a merciful compen-
sation gives me a sense of the dingier hue of Ha-
vana, and the muddier gurgle of beer. Are there
potted meats ? My physician has ordered me three
pounds of minced salt- junk at every meal." There
is such a thing, you know, as a ship's husband:
X. is the ship's poor relation.

As I have said, he takes also a below-the-white-
sugar interest in the jokes, laughing by precise
point of compass, just as he would lay the ship's
course, all yawing being out of the question with
his scrupulous decorum at the helm. Once or
twice I have got the better of him, and touched
him off into a kind of compromised explosion, like
that of damp fireworks, that splutter and simmer
a little, and then go out with painful slowness and
occasional relapses. But his fuse is always of the
unwillingest, and you must blow your match, and
touch him off again and again with the same joke.
Or rather, you must magnetize him many times to
get him en rapport with a jest. This once accom-
plished, you have him, and one bit of fun will last
the whole voyage. He prefers those of one sylla-
ble, the a-b abs of humor. The gradual fattening

118 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

of the steward, a benevolent mulatto with whiskers
and ear-rings, who looks as if he had been meant
for a woman, and had become a man by accident,
as in some of those stories of the elder physiolo-
gists, is an abiding topic of humorous comment
with Mr. X. " That 'ere stooard," he says, with a
brown grin like what you might fancy on the face
of a serious and aged seal, " 's agittin' as fat 's a
porpis. He was as thin 's a shingle when he come
aboord last v'yge. Them trousis '11 bust yit. He
don't darst take 'em off nights, for the whole ship's
company could n't git him into 'em agin." And
then he turns aside to enjoy the intensity of his
emotion by himself, and you hear at intervals low
rumblings, an indigestion of laughter. He tells me
of St. Elmo's fires, Marvell's corposants, though
with him the original corpos santos has suffered
a sea change, and turned to comepleasants, pledges
of fine weather. I shall not soon find a pleas-
anter companion. It is so delightful to meet a
man who knows just what you do not. Nay, I think
the tired mind finds something in plump ignorance
like what the body feels in cushiony moss. Talk
of the sympathy of kindred pursuits ! It is the
sympathy of the upper and nether millstones, both
forever grinding the same grist, and wearing each
other smooth. One has not far to seek for book-
nature, artist-nature, every variety of superinduced
nature, in short, but genuine human-nature is hard
to find. And how good it is ! Wholesome as a
potato, fit company for any dish. The freemasonry
of cultivated men is agreeable, but artificial, and I

IN THE MEDITERRANEAN 119

like better the natural grip with which manhood
recognizes manhood.

X. has one good story, and with that I leave
him, wishing him with all my heart that little in-
land farm at last which is his calenture as he paces
the windy deck. One evening, when the clouds
looked wild and whirling, I asked X. if it was
coming on to blow. " No, ' guess not," said he ;
" bumby the moon '11 be up, and scoff away that
'ere loose stuff." His intonation set the phrase
" scoff away " in quotation-marks as plain as print.
So I put a query in each eye, and he went on.
" Ther' was a Dutch cappen onct, an' his mate
come to him in the cabin, where he sot takin' his
schnapps, an' says, ' Cappen, it 's agittin' thick, an'
looks kin' o' squally, hed n't we 's good 's shorten
sail?' 'Gimmy my alminick,' says the cappen.
So he looks at it a spell, an' says he, 4 The moon 's
doo in less 'n half an hour, an' she '11 scoff away
ev'ythin' clare agin.' So the mate he goes, an'
bumby down he comes agin, an' says, ' Cappen,
this 'ere 's the allfiredest, powerfullest moon 't ever
you did see. She 's scoffed away the maintogal-
lants'l, an' she 's to work on the foretops'l now.
Guess you 'd better look in the alminick agin, an'
fin' out when this moon sets.' So the cappen
thought 't was 'bout time to go on deck. Dreadful
slow them Dutch cappens be." And X. walked
away, rumbling inwardly, like the rote of the sea
heard afar.

And so we arrived at Malta. Did you ever hear
of one of those eating-houses, where, for a certain

120 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

fee, the guest has the right to make one thrust
with a fork into a huge pot, in which the whole
dinner is bubbling, getting perhaps a bit of boiled
meat, or a potato, or else nothing? Well, when
the great caldron of war is seething, and the na-
tions stand round it striving to fish out something
to their purpose from the mess, Britannia always
has a great advantage in her trident. Malta is
one of the titbits she has impaled with that awful
implement. I was not sorry for it, when I reached
my clean inn, with its kindly English landlady.

Ill

ITALY

The father of the celebrated Mr. Jonathan Wild
was in the habit of saying, that " travelling was
travelling in one part of the world as well as an-
other ; it consisted in being such a time from
home, and in traversing so many leagues ; and he
appealed to experience whether most of our travel-
lers in France and Italy did not prove at their re-
turn that they might have been sent as profitably
to Norway and Greenland." Fielding himself, the
author of this sarcasm, was a very different kind of
traveller, as his Lisbon journal shows ; but we think
he told no more than the truth in regard to the far
greater part of those idle people who powder them-
selves with dust from the highways and blur their
memories with a whirl through the galleries of
Europe. They go out empty, to come home unpro-

ITALY 121

fitably full. They go abroad to escape themselves,
and fail, as Goethe says they always must, in the
attempt to jump away from their own shadows.
And yet even the dullest man, if he went honestly
about it, might bring home something worth hav-
ing from the dullest place. If Ovid, instead of sen-
timentalizing in the Tristia, had left behind him
a treatise on the language of the Geta3 which he
learned, we should have thanked him for something
more truly valuable than all his poems. Could
men only learn how comfortably the world can get
along without the various information which they
bring home about themselves ! Honest observation
and report will long continue, we fear, to be one of
the rarest of human things, so much more easily
are spectacles to be had than eyes, so much cheaper
is fine writing than exactness. Let any one who
has sincerely endeavored to get anything like facts
with regard to the battles of our civil war only con-
sider how much more he has learned concerning
the splendid emotions of the reporter than the
events of the fight, (unless he has had the good
luck of a peep into the correspondence of some
pricelessly uncultivated private,) and he will feel
that narrative, simple as it seems, can be well done
by two kinds of men only, — those of the highest
genius and culture, and those wholly without either.
It gradually becomes clear to us that the easiest
things can be done with ease only by the very few-
est people, and those specially endowed to that end.
The English language, for instance, can show but
one sincere diarist, Pepys ; and yet it should seem

122 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

a simple matter enough to jot down the events of
every day for one's self without thinking of Mrs.
Posterity Grundy, who has a perverse way, as if
she were a testatrix and not an heir, of forgetting
precisely those who pay most assiduous court to
her. One would think, too, that to travel and tell
what you have seen should be tolerably easy ; but
in ninety-nine books out of a hundred does not the
tourist bore us with the sensations he thinks he
ought to have experienced, instead of letting us
know what he saw and felt ? If authors would only
consider that the way to write an enlivening book
is not by seeing and saying just what would be ex-
pected of them, but precisely the reverse, the public
would be gainers. What tortures have we not seen
the worthiest people go through in endeavoring to
get up the appropriate emotion before some famous
work in a foreign gallery, when the only sincere
feeling they had was a praiseworthy desire to es-
cape ! If one does not like the Yenus of Melos, let
him not fret about it, for he may be sure she never
will.

Montaigne felt obliged to separate himself from
travelling-companions whose only notion of their
function was that of putting so many leagues a
day behind them. His theory was that of Ulys-
ses, who was not content with seeing the cities of
many men, but would learn their minds also. And
this way of taking time enough, while we think it
the best everywhere, is especially excellent in a
country so much the reverse of fast as Italy, where
impressions need to steep themselves in the sun

ITALY 123

and ripen slowly as peaches, and where carpe diem
should be translated take your own time. But is
there any particular reason why everybody should
go to Italy, or, having done so, should tell every-
body else what he supposes he ought to have seen
there ? Surely, there must be some adequate cause
for so constant an effect.

Boswell, in a letter to Sir Andrew Mitchell, says,
that, if he could only see Rome, " it would give him
talk for a lifetime." The utmost stretch of his
longing is to pass " four months on classic ground,"
after which he will come back to Auchinleck uti
conviva satur, — a condition in which we fear the
poor fellow returned thither only too often, though
unhappily in no metaphorical sense. We rather
think, that, apart from the pleasure of saying he
had been there, Boswell was really drawn to Italy
by the fact that it was classic ground, and this not
so much by its association with great events as with
great men, for whom, with all his weaknesses, he
had an invincible predilection. But Italy has a
magnetic virtue quite peculiar to her, which com-
pels alike steel and straw, finding something in
men of the most diverse temperaments by which to
draw them to herself. Like the Siren, she sings
to every voyager a different song, that lays hold on
the special weakness of his nature. The German
goes thither because Winckelmann and Goethe
went, and because he can find there a sausage
stronger than his own ; the Frenchman, that he
may flavor his infidelity with a bitter dash of Ul-
tramontanism, or find fresher zest in his chattering

124 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

boulevard after the sombre loneliness of Rome ;
the Englishman, because the same Providence that
hears the young ravens when they cry is careful to
furnish prey to the courier also, and because his
money will make him a Milor in partibus. But
to the American, especially if he be of an imagi-
native temper, Italy has a deeper charm. She
gives him cheaply what gold cannot buy for him at
home, a Past at once legendary and authentic, and
in which he has an equal claim with every other
foreigner. In England he is a poor relation whose
right in the entail of home traditions has been
docked by revolution ; of France his notions are
purely English, and he can scarce help feeling
something like contempt for a people who habitu-
ally conceal their meaning in French ; but Rome
is the mother-country of every boy who has de-
voured Plutarch or taken his daily doses of Flo-
rus. Italy gives us antiquity with good roads, cheap
living, and, above all, a sense of freedom from
responsibility. For him who has escaped thither
there is no longer any tyranny of public opinion 5
its fetters drop from his limbs when he touches
that consecrated shore, and he rejoices in the re-
covery of his own individuality. He is no longer
met at every turn with " Under which king, bezo-
nian ? Speak, or die ! " He is not forced to take
one side or the other about table-tipping, or the
merits of General Blank, or the constitutionality
of anarchy. He has found an Eden where he need
not hide his natural self in the livery of any opin-
ion, and may be as happy as Adam, if he be wise

ITALY 125

enough to keep clear of the apple of High Art.
This may be very weak, but it is also very agree-
able to certain temperaments ; and to be weak is
to be miserable only where it is a duty to be strong.

Coming from a country where everything seems
shifting like a quicksand, where men shed their
homes as snakes their skins, where you may meet a
three-story house, or even a church, on the high-
way, bitten by the universal gad-fly of bettering its
position, where we have known a tree to be cut
down merely because "it had got to be so old,"
the sense of permanence, unchangeableness, and
repose which Italy gives us is delightful. The
oft-repeated non e piu come era prima may be
true enough of Rome politically, but it is not true
of it in most other respects. To be sure, gas and
railroads have got in at last ; but one may still
read by a lucerna and travel by vettura, if he like,
using Alberti as a guide-book, and putting up at
the Bear as a certain keen-eyed Gascon did three
centuries ago.

There is, perhaps, no country with which we are
so intimate as with Italy, — none of which we are
always so willing to hear more. Poets and prosers
have alike compared her to a beautiful woman ;
and while one finds nothing but loveliness in her,
another shudders at her fatal fascination. She is
the very Witch- Venus of the Middle Ages. Eoger
Ascham says, " I was once in Italy myself, but I
thank God my abode there was but nine days ; and
yet I saw in that little time, in one flity, more lib-
erty to sin than ever I heard tell of in our noble

126 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

city of London in nine years." He quotes triumph-
antly the proverb, — Inglese italianato, diavolo in-
carnato. A century later, the entertaining " Rich-
ard Lassels, Gent., who Travelled through Italy
Five times as Tutor to several of the English No-
bility and Gentry," and who is open to new engage-
ments in that kind, declares, that, " For the Coun-
try itself, it seemed to me to be Nature s Darling,
and the Eldest Sister of all other Countries ; car-
rying away from them all the greatest blessings and
favours, and receiving such gracious looks from the
Sun and Heaven, that, if there be any fault in
Italy, it is, that her Mother Nature hath cockered
her too much, even to make her become Wanton."
Plainly, our Tannhauser is but too ready to go back
to the Venus-berg !

Another word about Italy seems a dangerous ex-
periment. Has not all been told and told and told
again ? Is it not one chief charm of the land, that
it is changeless without being Chinese ? Did not
Abbot Samson, in 1159, Scotti liabitum induens,
(which must have shown his massive calves to
great advantage,) probably see much the same pop-
ular characteristics that Hawthorne saw seven hun-
dred years later ? Shall a man try to be entertain-
ing after Montaigne, aesthetic after Winckelmann,
wise after Goethe, or trenchant after Forsyth?
Can he hope to bring back anything so useful as
the fork, which honest Tom Coryate made prize of
two centuries and a half ago, and put into the
greasy fingers of Northern barbarians? Is not
the Descrittione of Leandro Alberti still a com-

ITALY 127

petent itinerary? And can one hope to pick up a
fresh Latin quotation, when Addison and Eustace
have been before him with their scrap-baskets ?

If there be anything which a person of even
moderate accomplishments may be presumed to
know, it is Italy. The only open question left
seems to be, whether Shakespeare were the only
man that could write his name who had never been
there. I have read my share of Italian travels,
both in prose and verse, but, as the nicely discrimi-
nating Dutchman found that " too moch lager-beer
was too moch, but too moch brahndee was jost
bright," so I am inclined to say that too much
Italy is just what we want. After Des Brosses, we
are ready for Henri Beyle, and Ampere, and Hil-
lard, and About, and Gallenga, and Julia Kava-
nagh ; Corinne only makes us hungry for George
Sand. That no one can tell us anything new is as
undeniable as the compensating fact that no one
can tell vis anything too old.

There are two kinds of travellers, — those who
tell us what they went to see, and those who tell
us what they saw. The latter class are the only
ones whose journals are worth the sifting ; and the
value of their eyes depends on the amount of indi-
vidual character they took with them, and of the
previous culture that had sharpened and tutored
the faculty of observation. In our conscious age
the frankness and naivetS of the elder voyagers is
impossible, and we are weary of those humorous
confidences on the subject of fleas with which we
are favored by some modern travellers, whose

128 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

motto should be (slightly altered) from Horace, —
Flea-bit, et toto cantabitur urbe. A naturalist self-
sacrificing enough may have this experience nearer
home.

The impulse which sent the Edelmann Storg
and me to Subiaco was given something like two
thousand years ago. Had we not seen the Ponte
Sant' Antonio, we should not have gone to Subiaco
at this particular time ; and had the Romans been
worse masons, or more ignorant of hydrodynamics
than they were, we should never have seen the
Ponte Sant' Antonio. But first we went to Tivoli,
— two carriage-loads of us, a very agreeable mix-
ture of English, Scots, and Yankees, — on Tues-
day, the 20th April. I shall not say anything
about Tivoli. A water-fall in type is likely to
be a trifle stiffish. Old association and modern
beauty ; nature and artifice ; worship that has
passed away and the religion that abides forever ;
the green gush of the deeper torrent and the white
evanescence of innumerable cascades, delicately pal-
pitant as a fall of northern lights ; the descendants
of Sabine pigeons flashing up to immemorial dove-
cots, for centuries inaccessible to man, trooping
with noisy rooks and daws ; the fitful roar and the
silently hovering iris, which, borne by the wind
across the face of the cliff, transmutes the traver-
tine to momentary opal, and whose dimmer ghost
haunts the moonlight, — as well attempt to describe
to a Papuan savage that wondrous ode of Words-
worth which rouses and stirs in the soul all its dor-

ITALY 129

mant instincts of resurrection as with a sound of
the last trumpet. No, it is impossible. Even By-
ron's pump sucks sometimes, and gives an unpleas-
ant dry wheeze, especially, it seems to me, at Terni.
It is guide-book poetry, enthusiasm manufactured
by the yard, which the hurried traveller (John
and Jonathan are always in a hurry when they
turn peripatetics) puts on when he has not a rag
of private imagination to cover his nakedness
withal. It must be a queer kind of love that could
" watch madness with unalterable mien," when the
patient, whom any competent physician would have
ordered into a strait-waistcoat long ago, has shiv-
ered himself to powder down a precipice. But
there is no madness in the matter. Velino goes
over in his full senses, and knows perfectly well
that he shall not be hurt, that his broken frag-
ments will reunite more glibly than the head and
neck of Orrilo. He leaps exultant, as to his
proper doom and fulfilment, and out of the mere
waste and spray of his glory the god of sunshine
and song builds over the crowning moment of his
destiny a triumphal arch beyond the reach of time
and of decay.

The first day we made the Giro, coming back to
a merry dinner at the Sibilla in the evening. Then
we had some special tea, — for the Italians think
tea-drinking the chief religious observance of the
Inglesi, — and then we had fifteen pauls' worth of
illumination, which wrought a sudden change in the
scenery, like those that seem so matter-of-course in
dreams, turning the Claude we had seen in the

130 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

morning into a kind of Piranesi-Rembrandt. The
illumination, by the way, which had been prefig-
ured to us by the enthusiastic Italian who conducted
it as something second only to the Girandola,
turned out to be one blue-light and two armfuls of
straw.

The Edelmann Storg is not fond of pedestrian
locomotion, — nay, I have even sometimes thought
that he looked upon the invention of legs as a pri-
vate and personal wrong done to himself. I am
quite sure that he inwardly believes them to have
been a consequence of the fall, and that the happier
Pre-Adamites were monopodes, and incapable of
any but a vehicular progression. A carriage, with
horses and driver complete, he takes to be as simple
a production of nature as a potato. But he is fond
of sketching, and after breakfast, on the beautiful
morning of Wednesday, the 21st, I persuaded him
to walk out a mile or two and see a fragment of
aqueduct ruin. It is a single glorious arch, but-
tressing the mountain-side upon the edge of a sharp
descent to the valley of the Anio. The old road to
Subiaco passes under it, and it is crowned by a
crumbling tower built in the Middle Ages (when-
ever that was) against the Gaetani. While Storg
sketched, I clambered. Below you, where the val-
ley widens greenly towards other mountains, which
the ripe Italian air distances with a bloom like that
on unplucked grapes, are more arches, ossified arte-
ries of what was once the heart of the world.
Storg's sketch was highly approved of by Leopoldo,
our guide, and by three or four peasants, who,

ITALY 131

being on their way to their morning's work in the
fields, had, of course, nothing in particular to do,
and stopped to see us see the ruin. Any one who
has remarked how grandly the Romans do nothing
will be slow to believe them an effete race. Their
style is as the colossal to all otter, and the name of
Eternal City fits Rome also, because time is of no
account in it. The Roman always waits as if he
could afford it amply, and the slow centuries move
quite fast enough for him. Time is to other races
the field of a task-master, which they must painfully
till; but to the Roman it is an entailed estate,
which he enjoys and will transmit. The Neapoli-
tan's laziness is that of a loafer; the Roman's is
that of a noble. The poor Anglo-Saxon must count
his hours, and look twice at his small change of
quarters and minutes ; but the Roman spends from
a purse of Fortunatus. His piccolo quarto d'ora
is like his grosso, a huge piece of copper, big
enough for a shield, which stands only for a half-
dime of our money. We poor fools of time always
hurry as if we were the last type of man, the full
stop with which Fate was closing the colophon of
her volume, as if we had just read in our news-
paper, as we do of the banks on holidays, Hig01 The
world will close to-day at twelve o'clock, an hour
earlier than usual. But the Roman is still an
Ancient, with a vast future before him to tame and
occupy. He and his ox and his plough are just as
they were in Virgil's time or Ennius's. We beat
him in many things ; but in the impregnable fast-
ness of his great rich nature he defies us.

132 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

We got back to Tivoli, — Storg affirming that he
had walked fifteen miles. We saw the Temple of
Cough, which is not the Temple of Cough, though
it might have been a votive structure put up by
some Tiburtine Dr. Wistar. We saw the villa of
Maecenas, which is not the villa of Maecenas, and
other equally satisfactory antiquities. All our Eng-
lish friends sketched the Citadel, of course, and
one enthusiast attempted a likeness of the fall,
which I unhappily mistook afterward for a sem-
blance of the tail of one of the horses on the Monte
Cavallo. Then we went to the Villa d' Este, fa-
mous on Ariosto's account, — and which Ariosto
never saw. But the laurels were worthy to have
made a chaplet for him, and the cypresses and the
views were as fine as if he had seen them every
day of his life.

Perhaps something I learned in going to see one
of the gates of the town is more to the purpose,
and may assist one in erecting the horoscope of
Italia Unita. When Leopoldo first proposed to
drag me through the mud to view this interesting
piece of architecture, I demurred. But as he was
very earnest about it, and as one seldom fails get-
ting at a bit of character by submitting to one's
guide, I yielded. Arrived at the spot, he put me
at the best point of view, and said, —

" Behold, Lordship ! "

" I see nothing out of the common," said I.

" Lordship is kind enough here to look at a gate,
the like of which exists not in all Italy, nay, in the
whole world, — I speak not of England," for he
thought me an Inglese.

ITALY 133

" I am not blind, Leopoldo ; where is the mira-
cle ? "

" Here we dammed up the waters of the Anio,
first by artifice conducted to this spot, and letting
them out upon the Romans, who stood besieging
the town, drowned almost a wliole army of them.
(Lordship conceives ?) They suspected nothing till
they found themselves all torn to pieces at the foot
of the hill yonder. (Lordship conceives ?) ETi !
per Bacco ! we watered their porridge for them."

Leopoldo used toe as Lord Buchan did /, mean-
ing any of his ancestors.

" But tell me a little, Leopoldo, how many years
is it since this happened ? "

" Non saprei, signoria ; it was in the antiquest
times, certainly; but the Romans never come to
our Fair, that we don't have blows about it, and
perhaps a stab or two. Lordship understands ? "

I was quite repaid for my pilgrimage. I think
I understand Italian politics better for hearing Leo-
poldo speak of the Romans, whose great dome is in
full sight of Tivoli, as a foreign nation. But what
perennial boyhood the whole story indicates !

Storg's sketch of the morning's ruin was so suc-
cessful that I seduced him into a new expedition to
the Ponte Sant' Antonio, another aqueduct arch
about eight miles off. This was for the afternoon,
and I succeeded the more easily, as we were to go
on horseback. So I told Leopoldo to be at the gate
of the Villa of Hadrian, at three o'clock, with three
horses. Leopoldo's face, when I said three, was
worth seeing ; for the poor fellow had counted on

134 ' LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

nothing more than trotting beside our horses for
sixteen miles, and getting half a dollar in the even-
ing. Between doubt and hope, his face seemed to
exude a kind of oil, which made it shine externally,
after having first lubricated all the muscles in-
wardly.

" With three horses, Lordship ? "

u Yes, three."

" Lordship is very sagacious. With three horses
they go much quicker. It is finished, then, and
they will have the kindness to find me at the gate
with the beasts, at three o'clock precisely."

Leopoldo and I had compromised upon the term
"Lordship." He had found me in the morning
celebrating due rites before the Sibyl's Temple
with strange incense of the nicotian herb, and had
marked me for his prey. At the very high tide of
sentiment, when the traveller lies with oyster-like
openness in the soft ooze of reverie, do these para-
sitic crabs, the ciceroni, insert themselves as his
inseparable bosom companions. Unhappy bivalve,
lying so softly between thy two shells, of the actual
and the possible, the one sustaining, the other
widening above thee, till, oblivious of native mud,
thou fanciest thyself a proper citizen only of the
illimitable ocean which floods thee, — there is no
escape ! Vain are thy poor crustaceous efforts at
self-isolation. The foe henceforth is a part of thy
consciousness, thy landscape, and thyself, happy
only if that irritation breed in thee the pearl of
patience and of voluntary abstraction.

" Excellency wants a guide, very experienced,

ITALY 135

who has conducted with great mutual satisfaction
many of his noble compatriots."

Puff, puff, and an attempt at looking as if I did
not see him.

44 Excellency will deign to look at my book of
testimonials. When we return, Excellency will
add-his own."

Puff, puff.

" Excellency regards the cascade, prceceps Anio,
as the good Horatius called it."

I thought of the dissolve frigus of the landlord
in Roderick Random, and could not help smiling.
Leopoldo saw his advantage.

" Excellency will find Leopoldo, when he shall
choose to be ready."

" But I will positively not be called Excellency.
I am not an ambassador, nor a very eminent Chris-
tian, and the phrase annoys me."

" To be sure, Excell — Lordship."

" I am an American."

"Certainly, an American, Lordship," — as if
that settled the matter entirely. If I had told him
I was a Caffre, it would have been just as clear to
him. He surrendered the " Excellency," but on
general principles of human nature, I suppose,
would not come a step lower than " Lordship."
So we compromised on that. — P. S. It is won-
derful how soon a republican ear reconciles itself
with syllables of this description. I think citizen
would find greater difficulties in the way of its
naturalization, and as for brother — ah ! well, in a
Christian sense, certainly.

136 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

Three o'clock found us at the Villa of Hadrian.
We had explored that incomparable ruin, and con-
secrated it, in the Homeric and Anglo-Saxon man-
ner, by eating and drinking. Some of us sat in
the shadow of one of the great walls, fitter for a
city than a palace, over which a Nile of ivy, gush-
ing from one narrow source, spread itself in widen-
ing inundations. A happy few listened to stories
of Bagdad from Mrs. Rich, whose silver hair
gleamed, a palpable anachronism, like a snowfall
in May, over that ever-youthful face, where the
few sadder lines seemed but the signature of Age
to a deed of quitclaim and release. Dear Tito,
that exemplary traveller who never lost a day,
had come back from renewed explorations, con-
vinced by the eloquent custode that Serapeion was
the name of an officer in the Praetorian Guard. I
was explaining, in addition, that Naumachia, in
the Greek tongue, signified a place artificially
drained, when the horses were announced.

This put me to reflection. I felt, perhaps, a
little as Mazeppa must, when told that his steed
was at the door. For several years I had not been
on the back of a horse, and was it not more than
likely ,that these mountains might produce a yet
more refractory breed of these ferocious animals
than common ? Who could tell the effect of graz-
ing on a volcanic soil like that hereabout ? I had
vague recollections that the saddle nullified the
laws governing the impulsion of inert bodies, ex-
acerbating the centrifugal forces into a virulent
activity, and proportionably narcotizing the cen-

ITALY 137

tripetal. The phrase ratio proportioned to the
squares of the distances impressed me with an awe
which explained to me how the laws of nature had
been of old personified and worshipped. Meditat-
ing these things, I walked with a cheerful aspect
to the gate, where my saddled and bridled martyr-
dom awaited me.

" Eccomi qua!" said Leopoldo, hilariously.
"Gentlemen will be good enough to select from
the three best beasts in Tivoli."

"Oh, this one will serve me as well as any,"
said I, with an air of indifference, much as I have
seen a gentleman help himself inadvertently to the
best peach in the dish. I am not more selfish than
becomes a Christian of the nineteenth century, but
I looked on this as a clear case of tabula in nau-
fragio, and had noticed that the animal in question
had that tremulous droop of the lower lip which
indicates senility, and the abdication of the wilder
propensities. Moreover, he was the only one pro-
vided with a curb bit, or rather with two huge iron
levers which might almost have served Archimedes
for his problem. Our saddles were flat cushions
covered with leather, brought by years of friction
to the highest state of polish. Instead of a pom-
mel, a perpendicular stake, about ten inches high,
rose in front, which, in case of a stumble, would
save one's brains, at the risk of certain eviscera-
tion. Behind, a glary slope invited me constantly
to slide over the horse's tail. The selfish prudence
of my choice had well-nigh proved the death of me,
for this poor old brute, with that anxiety to oblige

138 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

a forestiero which characterizes everybody here,
could never make up his mind which of his four
paces (and he had the rudiments of four — walk,
trot, rack, and gallop) would be most agreeable to
me. The period of transition is always unpleasant,
and it was all transition. He treated me to a
hodge-podge of all his several gaits at once. Saint
Vitus was the only patron saint I could think
of. My head jerked one way, my body another,
while each of my legs became a pendulum vibrating
furiously, one always forward while the other was
back, so that I had all the appearance and all the
labor of going afoot, and at the same time was
bumped within an inch of my life. Waterton's
alligator was nothing to it; it was like riding a
hard-trotting armadillo bare-backed. There is a
species of equitation peculiar to our native land, in
which a rail from the nearest fence, with no pre-
liminary incantation of Horse and hattock! is
converted into a steed, and this alone may stand
the comparison. Storg in the mean while was tri-
umphantly taking the lead, his trousers working
up very pleasantly above his knees, an insurrec-
tionary movement which I also was unable to sup-
press in my own. I could bear it no longer.

" Le-e-o-o-p-o-o-o-l-l-l-d-d-o-o-o ! " jolted I.

" Command, Lordship ! " and we both came to
a stop.

" It is necessary that we change horses immedi-
ately, or I shall be jelly."

" Certainly, Lordship ; " and I soon had the
pathetic satisfaction of seeing him subjected to all

ITALY 139

the excruciating experiments that had been tried
upon myself. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili,
thought his extempore lordship, Christopher Sly,
to himself.

Meanwhile all the other accessories of our ride
were delicious. It was a clear, cool day, and we
soon left the high road for a bridle-path along the
side of the mountain, among gigantic olive-trees,
said to be five hundred years old, and which had
certainly employed all their time in getting into
the weirdest and wonderfullest shapes. Clearly
in this green commonwealth there was no heavy
roller of public opinion to flatten all character to a
lawn-like uniformity. Everything was individual
and eccentric. And there was something fearfully
human, too, in the wildest contortions. It was
some such wood that gave Dante the hint of his
human forest in the seventh circle, and I should
have dreaded to break a twig, lest I should hear
that voice complaining,

11 Perch6 mi scerpi ?
Non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno ? "

Our path lay along a kind of terrace, and at
every opening we had glimpses of the billowy Cam-
pagna, with the great dome bulging from its rim,
while on our right, changing ever as we rode, the
Alban mountain showed us some new grace of that
sweeping outline peculiar to volcanoes. At inter-
vals the substructions of Roman villas would crop
out from the soil like masses of rock, and deserving
to rank as a geological formation by themselves.
Indeed, in gazing into these dark caverns, one does

140 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

not think of man more than at Staffa. Nature has
adopted these fragments of a race who were dear to
her. She has not suffered these bones of the great
Queen to lack due sepulchral rites, but has flung
over them the ceremonial handfuls of earth, and
every year carefully renews the garlands of memo-
rial flowers. Nay, if what they say in Rome be
true, she has even made a new continent of the
Colosseum, and given it & flora of its own.

At length, descending a little, we passed through
farm-yards and cultivated fields, where, from Leo-
poldo's conversations with the laborers, we dis-
covered that he himself did not know the way for
which he had undertaken to be guide. However,
we presently came to our ruin, and very noble it
was. The aqueduct had here been carried across a
deep gorge, and over the little brook which wim-
pled along below towered an arch, as a bit of
Shakespeare bestrides the exiguous rill of a dis-
course which it was intended to ornament. The
only human habitation in sight was a little casetta
on the top of a neighboring hill. What else of
man's work could be seen was a ruined castle of
the Middle Ages, and, far away upon the horizon,
the eternal dome. A valley in the moon could
scarce have been lonelier, could scarce have sug-
gested more strongly the feeling of preteriteness
and extinction. The stream below did not seem so
much to sing as to murmur sadly, Conclusum est ;
periisti ! and the wind, sighing through the arch,
answered, Periisti ! Nor was the silence of Monte
Cavi without meaning. That cup, once full of

ITALY 141

fiery wine, in which it pledged Vesuvius and
later born, was brimmed with innocent water now.
Adam came upon the earth too late to see the glare
of its last orgy, lighting the eyes of saurians in the
reedy Campagna below. I almost fancied I could
hear a voice like that which crted to the Egyptian
pilot, Great Pan is dead! I was looking into
the dreary socket where once glowed the eye that
saw the whole earth vassal. Surely, this was the
world's autumn, and I could hear the feet of Time
rustling through the wreck of races and dynasties,
cheap and inconsiderable as fallen leaves.

But a guide is not engaged to lead one into the
world of imagination. He is. as deadly to senti-
ment as a sniff of hartshorn. His position is a
false one, like that of the critic, who is supposed to
know everything, and expends himself in showing
that he does not. If you should ever have the luck
to attend a concert of the spheres, under the pro-
tection of an Italian cicerone, he will expect you
to listen to him rather than to it. He will say :
" Ecco, Signoria, that one in the red mantle is
Signor Mars, eh ! what a noblest basso is Signor
Mars ! but nothing (Lordship understands ?) to
what Signor Saturn used to be, (he with the golden
belt, Signoria,*) only his voice is in ruins now, —
scarce one note left upon another ; but Lordship
can see what it was by the remains, Roman re-
mains, Signoria, Roman remains, the work of
giants. (Lordship understands ?) They make no
such voices now. Certainly, Signor Jupiter (with
the yellow tunic, there) is a brave artist and a

142 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

most sincere tenor ; but since the time of the Re-
public " (if he think you an oscurante, or since the
French, if he suspect you of being the least red)
"we have no more good singing." And so on.

It is a well-known fact to all persons who are in
the habit of climbing Jacob's-ladders, that, if any
one speak to you during the operation, the fabric
collapses, and you come somewhat uncomfortably
to the ground. One can be hit with a remark,
when he is beyond the reach of more material mis-
siles. Leopoldo saw by my abstracted manner that
I was getting away from him, and I was the only
victim he had left, for Storg was making a sketch
below. So he hastened to fetch me down again.

"Nero built this arch, Lordship." (He didn't,
but Nero was Leopoldo's historical scapegoat.)
" Lordship sees the dome ? he will deign to look
the least little to the left hand. Lordship has
much intelligence. Well, Nero always did thus.
His works always, always, had Rome in view."

He had already shown me two ruins, which
he ascribed equally to Nero, and which could only
have seen Rome by looking through a mountain.
However, such trifles are nothing to an accom-
plished guide.

I remembered his quoting Horace in the morn-
ing.

u Do you understand Latin, Leopoldo ? "

" I did a little once, Lordship. I went to the
Jesuits' school at Tivoli. But what use of Latin
to a poverino like me ? "

" Were you intended for the church ? Wrhy did
you leave the school ? "

ITALY 143

" Eh, Lordship ! " and one of those shrugs which
might mean that he left it of his own free will, or
that he was expelled at point of toe. He added
some contemptuous phrase about the priests.

" But, Leopoldo, you are a good Catholic ? "

" Eh, Lordship, who knows*? A man is no
blinder for being poor, — nay, hunger sharpens
the eyesight sometimes. The cardinals (their
Eminences !) tell us that it is good to be poor, and
that, in proportion as we lack on earth, it shall be
made up to us in Paradise. Now, if the cardinals
(their Eminences !) believe what they preach, why
do they want to ride in such handsome carriages ? "

" But are there many who think as you do ? "

" Everybody, Lordship, but a few women and
fools. What imports it what the fools think ? "

An immense deal, I thought, an immense deal ;
for of what material is public opinion manufac-
tured?

" Do you ever go to church ? "

" Once a year, Lordship, at Easter, to mass and
confession."

" Why once a year ? "

" Because, Lordship, one must have a certificate
from the priest. One might be sent to prison else,
and one had rather go to confession than to jail.
Eh, Lordship, it is a porcheria."

Ifc is proper to add, that in what Leopoldo said
of the priests he was not speaking of his old mas-
ters, the Jesuits. One never hears anything in
Italy against the purity of their lives, or their
learning and ability, though much against their

144 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

unscrupulousness. Nor will any one who has ever
enjoyed the gentle and dignified hospitality of the
Benedictines be ready to believe any evil report of
them.

By this time Storg had finished his sketch, and
we remounted our grazing steeds. They were
brisker as soon as their noses were turned home-
ward, and we did the eight miles back in an hour.
The setting sun streamed through and among the
Michael Angelesque olive-trunks, and, through the
long colonnade of the bridle-path, fired the scarlet
waistcoats and bodices of homeward villagers, or
was sullenly absorbed in the long black cassock
and flapped hat of a priest, who courteously sa-
luted the strangers. Sometimes a mingled flock
of sheep and goats (as if they had walked out of
one of Claude's pictures) followed the shepherd,
who, satyr-like, in goat-skin breeches, sang such
songs as were acceptable before Tubal Cain struck
out the laws of musical time from his anvil. The
peasant, in his ragged brown cloak, or with blue
jacket hanging from the left shoulder, still strides
Komanly, — incedit rex, — and his eyes have a
placid grandeur, inherited from those which watched
the glittering snake of the Triumph, as it undu-
lated along the Via Sacra. By his side moves
with equal pace his woman-porter, the caryatid of
a vast entablature of household-stuff, and learning
in that harsh school a sinuous poise of body and a
security of step beyond the highest snatch of the
posture-master.

As we drew near Tivoli the earth was fast

ITALY 145

swinging into shadow. The darkening Campagna,
climbing the sides of the nearer Monticelli in a
gray belt of olive-spray, rolled on towards the blue
island of Soracte, behind which we lost the sun.
Yes, we had lost the sun ; but in the wide chimney
of the largest room at the Sibilla there danced
madly, crackling with ilex and laurel, a bright
ambassador from Suiiland, Monsieur Le Feu, no
pinchbeck substitute for his royal master. As we
drew our chairs up, after the dinner due to Leo-
poldo's forethought, "Behold," said I, "the Resi-
dent of the great king near the court of our (this-
day-created) Hogan Moganships."

We sat looking into the fire, as it wavered from
shining shape to shape of unearthliest fantasy, and
both of us, no doubt, making out old faces among
the embers, for we both said together, " Let us talk
of old times."

" To the small hours," said the Edelmann ; " and
instead of blundering off to Torneo to intrude chat-
teringly upon the midnight privacy of Apollo, let
us promote the fire, there, to the rank of sun by
brevet, and have a kind of undress rehearsal of
those night wanderings of his here upon the ample
stage of the hearth."

So we went through the whole catalogue of Do
you remembers ? and laughed at all the old stories,
so dreary to an outsider. Then we grew pensive,
and talked of the empty sockets in that golden
band of our young friendship, — of S., with Gre-
cian front, but unsevere, and Saxon M., to whom
laughter was as natural as for a brook to ripple.

146 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

But Leopoldo had not done with us. We were
to get back to Rome in the morning, and to that
end must make a treaty with the company which
ran the Tivoli diligence, the next day not being the
regular period of departure for that prodigious
structure. We had given Leopoldo twice his fee,
and, setting a mean value upon our capacities in
proportion, he expected to bag a neat percentage
on our bargain. Alas ! he had made a false esti-
mate of the Anglo-Norman mind, which, capable of
generosity as a compliment to itself, will stickle for
the dust in the balance in a matter of business, and
would blush at being done by Mercury himself.

Accordingly, at about nine o'clock there came a
vknock at the door, and, answering our Favorisca !
in stalked Leopoldo, gravely followed by the two
commissioners of the company.

" Behold me returned, Lordship, and these men
are the Vetturini."

Why is it that men who have to do* with horses
are the same all over Christendom ? Is it that
they acquire equine characteristics, or that this par-
ticular mystery is magnetic to certain sorts of men ?
Certainly they are marked unmistakably, and these
two worthies would have looked perfectly natural
in Yorkshire or Vermont. They were just alike, —
fortemque G y an, forte mque Cloanthum, — and you
could not split an epithet between them. Simul-
taneously they threw back their large overcoats,
and displayed spheroidal figures, over which the
strongly pronounced stripes of their plaided waist-
coats ran like parallels of latitude and longitude

ITALY 147

over a globe. Simultaneously they took off their
hats and said, " Your servant, gentlemen." In Italy
it is always necessary to make a combinazione be-
forehand about even the most customary matters,
for there is no fixed highest price for anything.
For a minute or two we stood reckoning each
other's forces. Then I opened the first trench
with the usual, " How much do you wish for carry-
ing us to Rome at half-past seven to-morrow morn-
ing?"

The enemy glanced one at the other, and the
result of this ocular witenagemot was that one said,
" Four scudi, gentlemen."

The Edelmann Storg took his cigar from his
mouth in order to whistle, and made a rather in-
decorous allusion to four gentlemen in the diplo-
matic service of his Majesty, the Prince of the
Powers of the Air.

" Whe-ew ! quattro diavoli ! " said he.

"Macche!" exclaimed I, attempting a flank-
movement, " I had rather go on foot ! " and threw
as much horror into my face as if a proposition
had been made to me to commit robbery, murder,
and arson all together.

" For less than three scudi and a half the dili-
gence parts not from Tivoli at an extraordinary
hour," said the stout man, with an imperturbable
gravity, intended to mask his retreat, and to make
it seem that he was making the same proposal as
at first.

Storg saw that they wavered, and opened upon
them with his flying artillery of sarcasm.

148 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

"Do you take us for Inglesi? We are very
well here, and will stay at the Sibilla," he sniffed
scornfully.

" How much will Lordship give ? " (This was
showing the white feather.)

" Fifteen pauls," (a scudo and a half,) " fiuona-
mano included."

" It is impossible, gentlemen ; for less than two
scudi and a half the diligence parts not from
Tivoli at an extraordinary hour."

" Fifteen pauls."

"Will Lordship give two scudi?" (with a
slight flavor of mendicancy.)

" Fifteen pauls," (growing firm as we saw them
waver.)

"Then, gentlemen, it is all over; it is impos-
sible, gentlemen."

" Very good ; a pleasant evening to you ! " and
they bowed themselves out.

As soon as the door closed behind them, Leo-
poldo, who had looked on in more and more anx-
ious silence as the chance of plunder was whittled
slimmer and slimmer by the sharp edges of the
parley, saw instantly that it was for his interest
to turn state's evidence against his accomplices.

"They will be back in a moment," he said know-
ingly, as if he had been of our side all along.

" Of course ; we are aware of that." — It is
always prudent to be aware of everything in trav-
elling.

And, sure enough, in five minutes re-enter the
stout men, as gravely as if everything had been

ITALY 149

thoroughly settled, and ask respectfully at what
hour we would have the diligence.

This will serve as a specimen of Italian bargain-
making. They do not feel happy if they get their
first price. So easy a victory makes them sorry
they had not asked twice as much, and, besides,
they love the excitement of the contest. I have
seen as much debate over a little earthen pot (value
two cents) on the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence, as
would have served for an operation of millions in
the funds, the demand and the offer alternating so
rapidly that the litigants might be supposed to be
playing the ancient game of morra. It is a part
of the universal fondness for gaming, and lotteries.
An English gentleman once asked his Italian
courier how large a percentage he made on all of
his employer's money which passed through his
hands. " About five per cent ; sometimes more,
sometimes less," was the answer. " Well, I will
add that to your salary, in order that I may be rid
of this uncomfortable feeling of being cheated."
The courier mused a moment, and said, " But no,
sir, I should not be happy ; then it would not be
sometimes more, sometimes less, and I should miss
the excitement of the game."

22d. — This morning the diligence was at the
door punctually, and, taking our seats in the coupe,
we bade farewell to La Sibilla. But first we ran
back for a parting glimpse at the waterfall. These
last looks, like lovers' last kisses, are nouns of mul-
titude, and presently the povero stall iere, signori,
waited upon us, cap in hand, telling us that the

150 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

vetturino was impatient, and begging for drink-
money in the same breath. Leopoldo hovered
longingly afar, for these vultures respect times
and seasons, and while one is fleshing his beak
upon the foreign prey, the others forbear. The
passengers in the diligence were not very lively.
The Romans are a grave people, and more so than
ever since '49. Of course, there was one priest
among them There always is ; for the mantis
religiosa is as inevitable to these public convey-
ances as the curculio is to the plum, and one could
almost fancy that they were bred in the same way,
— that the egg was inserted when the vehicle was
green, became developed as it ripened, and never
left it till it dropped withered from the pole.
There was nothing noticeable on the road to Rome,
except the strings of pack-horses and mules which
we met returning with empty lime-sacks to Tivoli,
whence comes the supply of Rome. A railroad
was proposed, but the government would not allow
it, because it would interfere with this carrying-
trade, and wisely granted instead a charter for
a road to Frascati, where there was no business
whatever to be interfered with. About a mile of
this is built in a style worthy of ancient Rome ;
and it is possible that eventually another mile
may be accomplished, for some half-dozen labor-
ers are at work upon it with wheelbarrows, in the
leisurely Roman fashion. If it be ever finished, it
will have nothing to carry but the conviction of its
own uselessness. A railroad has been proposed to
Civita Vecchia; but that is out of the question,

ITALY 151

because it would be profitable. On the whole, one
does not regret the failure of these schemos. One

O

would not approach the solitary emotion of a life-
time, such as is the first sight of Rome, at the rate
of forty miles an hour. It is better, after pain-
fully crawling up one of those long paved hills, to
have the postilion turn in his saddle, and, pointing
with his whip, (without looking, for he knows in-
stinctively where it is,) say, Ecco San Pietro !
Then you look tremblingly, and see it hovering
visionary on the horizon's verge, and in a moment
you are rattling and rumbling and wallowing down
into the valley, and it is gone. So you play hide-
and-seek with it all the rest of the way, and have
time to converse with your sensations. You fancy
you have got used to it at last ; but from the next
hill-top, lo, there it looms again, a new wonder,
and you do not feel sure that it will keep its tryst
till you find yourself under its shadow. The Dome
is to the Eternal City what Vesuvius is to Naples ;
only a greater wonder, for Michael Angelo hung
it there. The traveller climbs it as he would a
mountain, and finds the dwellings of men high up
on its sacred cliffs. It has its annual eruption, too,
at Easter, when the fire trickles and palpitates down
its mighty shoulders, seen from far-off Tivoli. —
No, the locomotive is less impertinent at Portici,
hailing the imprisoned Titan there with a kindred
shriek. Let it not vex the solemn Roman ghosts,
or the nobly desolate Campagna, with whose soli-
tudes the shattered vertebra of the aqueducts are
in truer sympathy.

152 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

24th. — To-day our journey to Subiaco properly
begins. The jocund morning had called the beg-
gars to their street-corners, and the women to the
windows ; the players of morra (a game probably
as old as the invention of fingers), of chuck-far-
thing, and of bowls, had cheerfully begun the labors
of the day ; the plaintive cries of the chair-seaters,
frog-venders, and certain other peripatetic mer-
chants, the meaning of whose vocal advertisements
I could never penetrate, quaver at regular inter-
vals, now near and now far away ; a solitary Jew
with a sack over his shoulder, and who never is
seen to stop, slouches along, every now and then
croaking a penitential Cenci ! as if he were some-
how the embodied expiation (by some post-Ovidian
metamorphosis) of that darkest Roman tragedy ;
women are bargaining for lettuce and endive ; the
slimy Triton in the Piazza Barberina spatters him-
self with vanishing diamonds ; a peasant leads an
ass on which sits the mother with the babe in her
arms, — a living flight into Egypt ; in short, the
beautiful spring day had awakened all of Rome
that can awaken yet, (for the ideal Rome waits for
another morning,) when we rattled along in our car-
rettella on the way to Palestrina. A carrettella is
to the perfected vehicle, as the coracle to the steam-
ship ; it is the first crude conception of a wheeled
carriage. Doubtless the inventor of it was a pro-
digious genius in his day, and rode proudly in
it, envied by the more fortunate pedestrian, and
cushioned by his own inflated imagination. If the
chariot of Achilles were like it, then was Hector

ITALY 153

happier at the tail than the son of Thetis on the
box. It is an oblong basket upon two wheels, with
a single seat rising in the middle. We had not
jarred over a hundred yards of the Quattro Fon-
tane, before we discovered tha^ no elastic propug-
naculum had been interposed between the body
and the axle, so that we sat, as it were, on paving-
stones, mitigated only by so much as well-seasoned
ilex is less flinty-hearted than tufo or breccia. If
there were any truth in the theory of develop-
ments, I am certain that we should have been fur-
nished with a pair of rudimentary elliptical springs,
at least, before half our day's journey was over.
However, as one of those happy illustrations of
ancient manners, which one meets with so often
here, it was instructive ; for I now clearly under-
stand that it was not merely by reason of pomp
that Hadrian used to be three days in getting to
his villa, only twelve miles off. In spite of the
author of " Vestiges," Nature, driven to extrem-
ities, can develop no more easy cushion than a blis-
ter, and no doubt treated an ancient emperor and
a modern republican with severe impartiality.

It was difficult to talk without biting one's
tongue ; but as soon as we had got fairly beyond
the gate, and out of sight of the last red-legged
French soldier, and tightly-buttoned doganiere, our
driver became loquacious.

"I am a good Catholic, — better than most,"
said he, suddenly.

" What do you mean by that ? "

" Eh ! they say Saint Peter wrought miracles,

154 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

and there are enough who don't believe it ; but
/ do. There 's the Barberini Palace, — behold one
miracle of Saint Peter ! There 's the Farnese, —
behold another ! There 's the Borghese, — behold
a third ! But there 's no end of them. No saint,
nor all the saints put together, ever worked so
many wonders as he ; and then, per Bacco ! he is
the uncle of so many folks, — why, that 's a mira-
cle in itself, and of the greatest ! "

Presently he added : " Do you know how we
shall treat the priests when we make our next
revolution? We shall treat them as they treat
us, and that is after the fashion of the buffalo.
For the buffalo is not content with getting a man
down, but after that he gores him and thrusts him,
always, always, as if he wished to cram him to the
centre of the earth. Ah, if I were only keeper
of hell-gate! Not a rascal of them all should
ever get out into purgatory while I stood at the
door ! "

We remonstrated a little, but it only exasperated
him the more.

" Blood of Judas ! they will eat nothing else
than gold, when a poor fellow's belly is as empty
as San Lorenzo yonder. They '11 have enough of
it one of these days — but melted ! How do you
think they will like it for soup ? "

Perhaps, if our vehicle had been blessed with
springs, our vetturino would have been more placa-
ble. I confess a growing moroseness in myself,
and a wandering speculation or two as to the possi-
ble fate of the builder of our chariot in the next

ITALY 155

world. But I am more and more persuaded every
day, that, as far as the popular mind is concerned,
Eomanism is a dead thing in Italy. It survives
only because there is nothing else to replace it with,
for men must wear their o!4 habits (however
threadbare and out at elbows) till they get bet-
ter. It is literally a superstition, — a something
left to stand over till the great commercial spirit
of the nineteenth century balances his accounts
again, and then it will be banished to the limbo
of profit and loss. The Papacy lies dead in the
Vatican, but the secret is kept for the present, and
government is carried on in its name. After the
fact gets abroad, perhaps its ghost will terrify men
a little while longer, but only while they are in the
dark, though the ghost of a creed is a hard thing
to give a mortal wound to, and may be laid, after
all, only in a Red Sea of blood.

So we rattled along till we came to a large al-
bergo just below the village of Colonna. While
our horse was taking his rinfresco, we climbed up
to it, and found it desolate enough, — the houses
never rebuilt since Consul Kienzi sacked it five
hundred years ago. It was a kind of gray incrus-
tation on the top of the hill, chiefly inhabited by
pigs, chickens, and an old woman with a distaff,
who looked as sacked and ruinous as everything
around her. There she sat in the sun, a dreary,
doting Clotho, who had outlived her sisters, and
span endless destinies which none was left to cut
at the appointed time. Of course she paused from
her work a moment, and held out a skinny hand,

156 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

with the usual, " Noblest gentlemen, give me some-
thing for charity." We gave her enough to pay
Charon's ferriage across to her sisters, and de-
parted hastily, for there was something uncanny
about the place. In this climate even the finger-
marks of Bum herself are indelible, and the walls
were still blackened with Rienzi's fires.

As we waited for our carrettella, I saw four or
five of the lowest-looking peasants come up and
read the handbill of a tombola (a kind of lottery)
which was stuck up beside the inn-door. One of
them read it aloud for our benefit, and with re-
markable propriety of accent and emphasis. This
benefit of clergy, however, is of no great conse-
quence where there is nothing to read. In Rome,
this morning, the walls were spattered with pla-
cards condemning the works of George Sand, Eu-
gene Sue, Gioberti, and others. But in Rome one
may contrive to read any book he likes ; and I
know Italians who are familiar with Swedenborg,
and even Strauss.

Our stay at the albergo was illustrated by one
other event, — a nightingale singing in a full-blos-
somed elder-bush on the edge of a brook just
across the road. So liquid were the notes, and so
full of spring, that the twig he tilted on seemed a
conductor through which the mingled magnetism
of brook and blossom flowed into him and were
precipitated in music. Nature understands thor-
oughly the value of contrasts, and accordingly a
donkey from a shed hard by, hitched and hesitated
and agonized through his bray, so that we might

ITALY 157

be conscious at once of the positive and negative
poles of song. It was pleasant to see with what
uncloubting enthusiasm he went through his solo,
and vindicated Providence from the imputation of
weakness in making such trifles as the nightingale
yonder. " Give ear, O heaven and earth ! " he
seemed to say, " nor dream that good, sound com-
mon-sense is extinct or out of fashion so long as I
live." I suppose Nature made the donkey half ab-
stractedly, while she was feeling her way up to her
ideal in the horse, and that his bray is in like man-
ner an experimental sketch for the neigh of her
finished animal.

We drove on to Palestrina, passing for some
distance over an old Roman road, as carriageable
as when it was built. Palestrina occupies the place
of the once famous Temple of Fortune, whose
ruins are perhaps a fitter monument of the fickle
goddess than ever the perfect fane was.

Come hither, weary ghosts that wail
O'er buried Nimroud's carven walls,

And ye whose nightly footsteps frail

From the dread hush of Memphian halls
Lead forth the whispering funerals !

Come hither, shade of ancient pain

That, muffled sitting, hear'st the foam

To death-deaf Carthage shout in vain,
And thou that in the Sibyl's tome
Tear-stain'st the never after Rome !

Come, Marius, Wolsey, all ye great

On whom proud Fortune stamped her heel,

And see herself the sport of Fate,
Herself discrowned and made to feel
The treason of her slippery wheel !

158 LEA VES FROM MY JOURNAL

One climbs through a great part of the town by
stone steps, passing fragments of Pelasgic wall,
(for history, like geology, may be studied here in
successive rocky strata,) and at length reaches the
inn, called the Cappellaro, the sign of which is a
great tin cardinal's hat, swinging from a small
building on the other side of the street, so that a
better view of it may be had from the hostelry it-
self. The landlady, a stout woman of about sixty
years, welcomed us heartily, and burst forth into
an eloquent eulogy on some fresh sea-fish which
she had just received from Rome. She promised
everything for dinner, leaving us to choose ; but
as a skilful juggler flitters the cards before you,
and, while he seems to offer all, forces upon you
the one he wishes, so we found that whenever we
undertook to select from her voluble bill of fare,
we had in some unaccountable manner always or-
dered sea-fish. Therefore, after a few vain efforts,
we contented ourselves, and, while our dinner was
cooking, climbed up to the top of the town. Here
stands the deserted Palazzo Barberini, in which is
a fine Roman mosaic pavement. It was a dreary
old place. On the ceilings of some of the apart-
ments were fading out the sprawling apotheoses of
heroes of the family, (themselves long ago faded
utterly,) who probably went through a somewhat
different ceremony after their deaths from that
represented here. One of the rooms on the
ground-floor was still occupied, and from its huge
grated windows there swelled and subsided at in-
tervals a confused turmoil of voices, some talking,

ITALY 159

some singing, some swearing, and some lamenting,
as if a page of Dante's Inferno had become sud-
denly alive under one's eye. This was the prison,
and in front of each window a large stone block
allowed tete-h-t£te discourses between the prisoners
and their friends outside as welt as the passing in
of food. English jails were like this in Queen
Elizabeth's time and later. In Heywood's " Wo-
man killed with Kindness," Acton says of his
enemy Mountford, in prison for debt, —

"shall we hear

The music of his voice cry from the grate
Meat, for the Lord's sake ? "

Behind the palace rises a steep, rocky hill, with a
continuation of ruined castle, the innocent fastness
now of rooks and swallows. We walked down to a
kind of terrace, and watched the Alban Mount
(which saw the sunset for us by proxy) till the
bloom trembled nearer and nearer to its summit,
then went wholly out, we could not say when, and
day was dead. Simultaneously we thought of din-
ing, and clattered hastily down to the Cappellaro.
We had to wait yet half an hour for dinner, and
from where I sat I could see through the door of
the dining-room a kind of large hall into which a
door from the kitchen also opened. Presently I saw
the landlady come out with a little hanging lamp
in her hand, and seat herself amply before a row of
baskets ranged upside-down along the wall. She
carefully lifted the edge of one of these, and, after
she had groped in it a moment, I heard that hoarse
choking scream peculiar to fowls when seized by

160 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

the leg in the dark, as if their throats were in their
tibiae after sunset. She took out a fine young cock
and set him upon his feet before her, stupid with
sleep, and blinking helplessly at the lamp, which
he perhaps took for a sun in reduced circum-
stances, doubtful whether to crow or cackle. She
looked at him admiringly, felt of him, sighed, gazed
sadly at his coral crest, and put him back again.
This ceremony she repeated with five or six of the
baskets, and then went back into the kitchen. I
thought of Thessalian hags and Arabian enchan-
tresses, and wondered if these were transformed
travellers, — for travellers go through queer trans-
formations sometimes. Should Storg and I be
crowing and scratching to-morrow morning, instead
of going to Subiaco ? Should we be Plato's men,
with the feathers, instead of without them? I
would probe this mystery. So, when the good
woman came in to lay the table, I asked what she
had been doing with the fowls.

" 1 thought to kill one for the gentlemen's soup ;
but they were so beautiful my heart failed me.
Still, if the gentlemen wish it — only I thought two
pigeons would be more delicate."

Of course we declined to be accessory to such a
murder, and she went off delighted, returning in a
few minutes with our dinner. First we had soup,
then a roasted kid, then boiled pigeons, (of which
the soup had been made,) and last the pesci di
mare, which were not quite so great a novelty to us
as to our good hostess. However, hospitality, like
so many other things, is reciprocal, and the guest

ITALY 161

must bring his half, or it is naught. The pros-
perity of a dinner lies in the heart of him that eats
it, and an appetite twelve miles long enabled us to
do as great justice to the fish as if we were crowd-
ing all Lent into one meal. The landlady came
and sat by us ; a large and serious cat, winding her
great tail round her, settled herself comfortably
on the table, licking her paws now and then, with
a poor relation's look at the fish ; a small dog
sprang into an empty chair, and a large one, with
very confidential manners, would go from one to
the other of us, laying his paw upon our arms as if
he had an important secret to communicate, and
alternately pricking and drooping his ears in hope
or despondency. The albergatrice forthwith began
to tell us her story, — how she was a widow, how
she had borne thirteen children, twelve still living,
and how she received a pension of sixty scudi a
year, under the old Roman law, for her meritorious-
ness in this respect. The portrait of the son she
had lost hung over the chimney-place, and, pointing
to it, she burst forth into the following droll thren-
ody. The remarks in parenthesis were screamed
through the kitchen-door, which stood ajar, or ad-
dressed personally to us.

" O my son, my son ! the doctors killed him, just
as truly as if they had poisoned him ! O how
beautiful he was ! beautiful ! beautiful ! ! BEAUTI-
FUL ! ! ! (Are not those fish done yet ?) Look,
that is his likeness, — but he was handsomer. He
was as big as that" (extending her arms), — "big
breast, big shoulders, big sides, big legs ! (Eat

162 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

'em, eat 'em, they won't hurt you, fresh sea-fish,
fresh ! fresh ! ! FRESH ! ! !) I told them the doc-
tors had murdered him, when they carried him with
torches ! He had been hunting, and brought home
some rabbits, I remember, for he was not one that
ever came empty-handed, and got the fever, and
you treated him for consumption, and killed him !
(Shall I come out there, or will you bring some
more fish ?) " So she went on, talking to herself,
to us, to the little serva in the kitchen, and to
the medical profession in general, repeating every
epithet three times, with increasing emphasis, till
her voice rose to a scream, and contriving to mix
up her living children with her dead one, the fish,
the doctors, the serva, and the rabbits, till it was
hard to say whether it was the fish that had large
legs, whether the doctors had killed them, or the
serva had killed the doctors, and whether the bello !
bello ! ! hello ! ! ! referred to her son or a particu-
larly fine rabbit.

25 £ A. — Having engaged our guide and horses
the night before, we set out betimes this morning
for Olevano. From Palestrina to Cavi the road
winds along a narrow valley, following the course
of a stream which rustles rather than roars below.
Large chestnut-trees lean every way on the steep
sides of the hills above us, and at every opening
we could see great stretches of Campagna rolling
away and away toward the bases of purple moun-
tains streaked with snow. The sides of the road
were drifted with heaps of wild hawthorn and
honeysuckle in full bloom, and bubbling with in-

ITALY 163

numerable nightingales that sang unseen. Over-
head the sunny sky tinkled with larks, as if the
frost in the air were breaking up and whirling
away on the swollen currents of spring.

Before long we overtook a little old man hob-
bling toward Cavi, with a bag upon his back.
This was the mail ! Happy country, which Hurry
and Worry have not yet subjugated ! Then we
clattered up and down the narrow paved streets of
Cavi, through the market-place, full of men dressed
all alike in blue jackets, blue breeches, and white
stockings, who do not stare at the strangers, and so
out at the farther gate. Now oftener and oftener
we meet groups of peasants in gayest dresses, rag-
ged pilgrims with staff and scallop, singing (horri-
bly) ; then processions with bag-pipes and pipes
in front, droning and squealing (horribly) ; then
strings of two-wheeled carts, eight or nine in each,
and in the first the priest, book in hand, setting
the stave, and all singing (horribly). This must
be inquired into. Gigantic guide, who, splendid
with blue sash and silver knee-buckles, has con-
trived, by incessant drumming with his heels, to
get his mule in front, is hailed.

" Ho, Petruccio, what is the meaning of all this
press of people ? "

" Festa, Lordship, at Genezzano."

" What Fcsta ? "

" Of the Madonna, Lordship," and touches his
hat, for they are all dreadfully afraid of her for
some reason or other.

We are in luck, this being the great festa of the

164 LEAVES FROM 3/F JOURNAL

year among the mountains, — a thing which people
go out of Rome to see.

" Where is Genezzano ? "

" Just over yonder, Lordship," and pointed to the
left, where was what seemed like a monstrous crys-
tallization of rock on the crown of a hill, with three
or four taller crags of castle towering in the midst,
and all gray, except the tiled roofs, whose wrin-
kled sides were gold-washed with a bright yellow
lichen, as if ripples, turned by some spell to stone,
had contrived to detain the sunshine with which they
were touched at the moment of transformation.

The road, wherever it came into sight, burned
with brilliant costumes, like an illuminated page
of Froissart. Gigantic guide meanwhile shows an
uncomfortable and fidgety reluctance to turn aside
and enter fairyland, which is wholly unaccountable.
Is the huge earthen creature an Afrite, under sa-
cred pledge to Solomon, and in danger of being
sealed up again, if he venture near the festival of
our Blessed Lady ? If so, that also were a cere-
mony worth seeing, and we insist. He wriggles
and swings his great feet with an evident impulse
to begin kicking the sides of his mule again and
fly. The way over the hills from Genezzano to
Olevano he pronounces scomodissima, demanding
of every peasant who goes by if it be not entirely
impassable. This leading question, put in all the
tones of plausible entreaty he can command, meets
the invariable reply, " E scomoda, davvero ; ma
per le bestie — eh ! " (it is bad, of a truth, but for
the beasts — eh !) and then one of those indescrib-

ITALY 165

able shrugs, unintelligible at first as the compass
to a savage, but in which the expert can make
twenty hair's-breadth distinctions between N. E.
and N. N. E.

Finding that destiny had written it on his fore-
head, the guide at last turned and went cantering
and kicking toward Genezzano, we following. Just
before you reach the town, the road turns sharply
to the right, and, crossing a little gorge, loses itself
in the dark gateway. Outside the gate is an open
space, which formicated with peasantry in every
variety of costume that was not Parisian. Laugh-
ing women were climbing upon their horses (which
they bestride like men) ; pilgrims were chanting,
and beggars (the howl of an Italian beggar in the
country is something terrible) howling in discord-
ant rivalry. It was a scene lively enough to make
Heraclitus shed a double allowance of tears ; but
our giant was still discomforted. As soon as we
had entered the gate, he dodged into a little back-
street, just as we were getting out of which the
mystery of his unwillingness was cleared up. He
had been endeavoring to avoid a creditor. But it
so chanced (as Fate can hang a man with even a
rope of sand) that the enemy was in position just
at the end of this very lane, where it debouched
into the Piazza of the town.

The disputes of Italians are very droll things,
and I will accordingly bag that which is now im-
minent, as a specimen. They quarrel as unac-
countably as dogs, who put their noses together,
dislike each other's kind of smell, and instantly

166 LEA VES FROM MY JOURNAL

tumble one over the other, with noise enough to
draw the eyes of a whole street. So these peo-
ple burst out, without apparent preliminaries, into
a noise and fury and war-dance which would imply
the very utmost pitch and agony of exasperation.
And the subsidence is as sudden. They explode
each other on mere contact, as if by a law of na-
ture, like two hostile gases. They do not grow
warm, but leap at once from zero to some degree
of white-heat, to indicate which no Anglo-Saxon
thermometer of wrath is highly enough graduated.
If I were asked to name one universal character-
istic of an Italian town, I should say, two men
clamoring and shaking themselves to pieces at
each other, and a woman leaning lazily out of a
window, and perhaps looking at something else.
Till one gets used to this kind of thing, one ex-
pects some horrible catastrophe ; but during eight
months in Italy I have only seen blows exchanged
thrice. In the present case the explosion was of
harmless gunpowder.

" Why - haven't -you-paid-those-fif ty- five-bajocchi-
at-ihe-pizzicarolo' s ? " began the adversary, speak-
ing with such inconceivable rapidity that he made
only one word, nay, as it seemed, one monosylla-
ble, of the whole sentence. Our giant, with a
controversial genius which I should not have sus-
pected in him, immediately, and with great adroit-
ness, changed the ground of dispute, and, instead
of remaining an insolvent debtor, raised himself at
once to the ethical position of a moralist, resisting
an unjust demand from principle.

ITALY 167

" It was only/br£?/-five," roared he.

" But I say^/z/ty-five," screamed the other, and
shook his close-cropped head as a boy does an ap-
ple on the end of a switch, as if he meant pre-
sently to jerk it off at his antagonist.

" IJirbone ! " yelled the guide, gesticulating so
furiously with every square inch of his ponderous
body that I thought he would throw his mule over,
the poor beast standing all the while with droop-
ing head and ears while the thunders of this man-
quake burst over him. So feels the tortoise that
sustains the globe when earth suffers fiery convul-
sions.

" Birbante ! " retorted the creditor, and the op-
probrious epithet clattered from between his shak-
ing jaws as a refractory copper is rattled out of
a Jehoiada-box by a child.

" Andate vi far f rig g ere /" howled giant.

" Andate ditto, ditto ! " echoed creditor, — and
behold, the thing is over ! The giant promises to
attend to the affair when he comes back, the cred-
itor returns to his booth, and we ride on.

Speaking of Italian quarrels, I am tempted to
parenthesize here another which I saw at Civita
Vecchia. We had been five days on our way from
Leghorn in a French steamer, a voyage performed
usually, I think, in about thirteen hours. It was
heavy weather, blowing what a sailor would call
half a gale of wind, and the caution of our cap-
tain, not to call it fear, led him to put in for shelter
first at Porto Ferrajo in Elba, and then at Santo
Stefano on the Italian coast. Our little black

168 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

water-beetle of a mail-packet was knocked about
pretty well, and all the Italian passengers disap-
peared in the forward cabin before we were out
of port. When we were fairly at anchor within
the harbor of Civita Vecchia, they crawled out
again, sluggish as winter flies, their vealy faces
mezzotinted with soot. One of them presently
appeared in the custom-house, his only luggage
being a cage closely covered with a dirty red hand-
kerchief, which represented his linen.

" What have you in the cage ? " asked the doga-
niere.

" Eh ! nothing other than a parrot."

" There is a duty of one scudo and one bajoccho,
then."

" Santo diavolo ! but what hoggishness ! "

Thereupon instant and simultaneous blowup, or
rather a series of explosions, like those in honor of
a Neapolitan saint's-day, lasting about ten minutes,
and followed by as sudden quiet. In the course of
it, the owner of the bird, playing irreverently on
the first half of its name, (pappagallo,) hinted that
it would be a high duty for his Holiness himself
(Papa). After a pause for breath, he said quietly,
as if nothing had happened, "Very good, then,
since I must pay, I will," and began fumbling for
the money.

" Meanwhile, do me the politeness to show me
the bird," said the officer.

" With all pleasure," and, lifting a corner of the
handkerchief, there lay the object of dispute on his
back, stone-dead, with his claws curled up help-

ITALY 169

lessly on each side his breast. I believe the owner
would have been pleased had it even been his
grandmother who had thus evaded duty, so exqui-
site is the pleasure of an Italian in escaping pay-
ment of anything.

"I make a present of the poor bird," said he
blandly.

The publican, however, seemed to feel that he
had been somehow cheated, and I left them in high
debate, as to whether the bird were dead when
it entered the custom-house, and, if it had been,
whether a dead parrot were dutiable. Do not
blame me for being entertained and trying to en-
tertain you with these trifles. I remember Virgil's
stern

" Che per poco e che teco non mi risso,"

but Dante's journey was of more import to himself
and others than mine.

I am struck by the freshness and force of the
passions in Europeans, and cannot help feeling as
if there were something healthy in it. When I
think of the versatile and accommodating habits of
America, it seems like a land without thunder-
storms. In proportion as man grows commercial,
does he also become dispassionate and incapable of
electric emotions? The driving-wheels of all-pow-
erful natures are in the back of the head, and, as
man is the highest type of organization, so a nation
is better or worse as it advances toward the high-
est type of man, or recedes from it. But it is ill
with a nation when the cerebrum sucks the cerebel-
lum dry, for it cannot live by intellect alone. The

170 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

broad foreheads always carry the day at last, but
only when they are based on or buttressed with
massive hind-heads. It would be easier to make a
people great in whom the animal is vigorous, than
to keep one so after it has begun to spindle into
over-intellectuality. The hands that have grasped
dominion and held it have been large and hard ;
those from which it has slipped, delicate, and apt
for the lyre and the pencil. Moreover, brain is
always to be bought, but passion never comes to
market. On the whole, I am rather inclined to
like this European impatience and fire, even while
I laugh at it, and sometimes find myself surmising
whether a people who, like the Americans, put up
quietly with all sorts of petty personal impositions
and injustices, will not at length find it too great a
bore to quarrel with great public wrongs.

Meanwhile, I must remember that I am in Genez-
zano, and not in the lecturer's desk. We walked
about for an hour or two, admiring the beauty
and grand bearing of the women, and the pictur-
esque vivacity and ever-renewing uiiassuetude of
the whole scene. Take six of the most party-colored
dreams, break them to pieces, put them into a
fantasy-kaleidoscope, and when you look through it
you will see something that for strangeness, vivid-
ness, and mutability looked like the little Piazza of
Genezzano seen from the church porch. As we
wound through the narrow streets again to the
stables where we had left our horses, a branch of
laurel or ilex would mark a wine-shop, and, looking
till our eye cooled and toned itself down to dusky

ITALY 171

sympathy with the crypt, we could see the smoky
interior sprinkled with white head-cloths and scar-
let bodices, with here and there a yellow spot of
lettuce or the red inward gleam of a wine-flask.
The head-dress is precisely of that most ancient
pattern seen on Egyptian statues, and so colossal
are many of the wearers, that you might almost
think you saw a party of young sphinxes carousing
in the sunless core of a pyramid.

We remounted our beasts, and, for about a mile,
cantered gayly along a fine road, and then turned
into a by-path along the flank of a mountain.
Here the guide's strada scomodissima began, and
we were forced to dismount, and drag our horses
downward for a mile or two. We crossed a small
plain in the valley, and then began to climb the
opposite ascent. The path was perhaps four feet
broad, and was paved with irregularly shaped blocks
of stone, which, having been raised and lowered,
tipped, twisted, undermined, and generally capsized
by the rains and frosts of centuries, presented the
most diabolically ingenious traps and pitfalls. All
the while the scenery was beautiful. Mountains
of every shape and hue changed their slow outlines
ever as we moved, now opening, now closing round
us, sometimes peering down solemnly at us over
each other's shoulders, and then sinking slowly
out of sight, or, at some sharp turn of the path,
seeming to stride into the valley and confront us
with their craggy challenge, — a challenge which
the little valleys accepted, if we did not, matching
their rarest tints of gray and brown, and pink and

172 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

purple, or that royal dye to make which all these
were profusely melted together for a moment's or-
nament, with as many shades of various green and
yellow. Gray towns crowded and clung on the
tops of peaks that seemed inaccessible. We owe a
great deal of picturesqueness to the quarrels and
thieveries of the barons of the Middle Ages. The
traveller and artist should put up a prayer for their
battered old souls. It was to be out of their way
and that of the Saracens that people were driven
to make their homes in spots so sublime and incon-
venient that the eye alone finds it pleasant to climb
up to them. Nothing else but an American land-
company ever managed to induce settlers upon
territory of such uninhabitable quality. I have
seen an insect that makes a mask for himself out
of the lichens of the rock over which he crawls,
contriving so to deceive the birds ; and the towns
in this wild region would seem to have been built
on the same principle. Made of the same stone
with the cliffs on which they perch, it asks good
eyesight to make them out at the distance of a few
miles, and every wandering mountain-mist annihi-
lates them for the moment.

At intervals, I could hear the giant, after dig-
ging at the sides of his mule with his spurless
heels, growling to himself, and imprecating an
apoplexy (accidente) upon the path and him who
made it. This is the universal malediction here,
and once it was put into rhyme for my benefit. I
was coming down the rusty steps of San Gregorio
one day, and having paid no heed to a stout woman

ITALY 173

of thirty odd who begged somewhat obtrusively,
she screamed after me,

"Ah, vi pigli un accidente,
Voi che non date niente ! "

Ah, may a sudden apoplexy,

You who give not, come and vex ye !

Our guide could not long appease his mind with
this milder type of objurgation, but soon intensi-
fied it into accide?itaccio, which means a selected
apoplexy of uncommon size and ugliness. As the
path grew worse and worse, so did the repetition
of this phrase (for he was slow of invention) be-
come more frequent, till at last he did nothing
but kick and curse, mentally, I have no doubt, in-
cluding us in his malediction. I think it would
have gratified Longinus or Fuseli (both of whom
commended swearing) to have heard him. Before
long we turned the flank of the hill by a little
shrine of the Madonna, and there was Olevano just
above us. Like the other towns in this district, it
was the diadem of an abrupt peak of rock. From
the midst of it jutted the ruins of an old strong-
hold of the Colonna. Probably not a house has
been built in it for centuries. To enter the town,
we literally rode up a long flight of stone steps,
and soon found ourselves in the Piazza. We
stopped to buy some cigars, and the zigararo, as
he rolled them up, asked if we did not want din-
ner. We told him we should get it at the inn.
Benissimo, he would be there before us. What
he meant, we could not divine ; but it turned out
that he was the landlord, and that the inn only

174 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

became such when strangers arrived, relapsing
again immediately into a private dwelling. We
found our host ready to receive us, and went up to
a large room on the first floor. After due instruc-
tions, we seated ourselves at the open windows, —
Storg to sketch, and I to take a mental calotype of
the view. Among the many lovely ones of the
day, this was the loveliest, — or was it only that
the charm of repose was added? On our right
was the silent castle, and beyond it the silent moun-
tains. To the left we looked down over the clus-
tering houses upon a campagna-valley of peaceful
cultivation, vineyards, olive-orchards, grain-fields
in their earliest green, and dark stripes of new-
ploughed earth, over which the cloud - shadows
melted tracklessly toward the hills which round
softly upward to Monte Cavi.

When our dinner came, and with it a flask of
drowsy red Aleatico, like ink with a suspicion of
life-blood in it, such as one might fancy Shake-
speare to have dipped his quill in, we had our table
so placed that the satisfaction of our hunger might
be dissensualized by the view from the windows.
Many a glutton has eaten up farms and woodlands
and pastures, and so did we, aesthetically, saucing
our frittata and flavoring our Aleatico with land-
scape. It is a fine thing when we can accustom
our animal appetites to good society, when body
and soul (like master and servant in an Arab tent)
sit down together at the same board. This thought
is forced upon one very often in Italy, as one pic-
nics in enchanted spots, where Imagination and

ITALY 175

Fancy play the parts of the unseen waiters in the
fairy-story, and serve us with course after course
of their ethereal dishes. Sense is satisfied with
less and simpler food when sense and spirit are fed
together, and the feast of the loaves and fishes is
spread for us anew. If it be important for a state
to educate its lower classes, so is it for us person-
ally to instruct, elevate, and refine our senses, the
lower classes of our private body-politic, which, if
left to their own brute instincts, will disorder or
destroy the whole commonwealth with flaming in-
surrection.

After dinner came our guide to be paid. He, too,
had had his frittata and his fiasco (or two), and
came back absurdly comic, reminding one of the
giant who was so taken in by the little tailor. He
was not in the least tipsy ; but the wine had ex-
cited his poor wits, whose destiny it was (awkward
servants as they were !) to trip up and tumble over
each other in proportion as they became zealous.
He was very anxious to do us in some way or other ;
he only vaguely guessed how, but felt so gigantic-
ally good-natured that he could not keep his face
sober long enough. It is quite clear why the Ital-
ians have no word but recitare to express acting,
for their stage is no more theatric than their street,
and to exaggerate in the least would be ridiculous.
We graver-tempered and -mannered Septentrions
must give the pegs a screw or two to bring our
spirits up to nature's concert-pitch. Storg and I
sat enjoying the exhibition of our giant, as if we
had no more concern in it than as a comedy. It

176 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

was nothing but a spectacle to us, at which we
were present as critics, while he inveighed, expos-
tulated, argued, and besought, in a breath. Find-
ing all his attempts miscarry, or resulting in noth-
ing more solid than applause, he said, " Forse non
capiscono ? " (Perhaps you don't understand ?)
" Capiscono pur' troppo" (They understand only
too well,) replied the landlord, upon which terrce
filius burst into a laugh, and began begging for
more buonamano. Failing in this, he tightened his
sash, offered to kiss our lordships' hands, an act of
homage which we declined, and departed, carefully
avoiding Genezzano on his return, I make no doubt.
We paid our bill, and after I had written in the
guest-book

Bere Aleatico

Mi 6 molto simpatico,

went down to the door, where we found our guides
and donkeys, the host's handsome wife and hand-
somer daughter, with two of her daughters, and a
crowd of women and children waiting to witness the
exit of the foreigners. We made all the mothers
and children happy by a discriminating largesse of
copper among the little ones. They are a charming
people, the natives of these out-of-the-way Italian
towns, if kindness, courtesy, and good looks make
people charming. Our beards and felt hats, which
make us pass for artists, were our passports to the
warmest welcome and the best cheer everywhere.
Reluctantly we mounted our donkeys, and trotted
away, our guides (a man and a boy) running by
the flank (true henchmen,

ITALY 177

or flunkeys) and inspiring the little animals with
pokes in the side, or with the even more effectual
ahrrrrrr ! Is there any radical affinity between
this rolling fire of r's and the word arra, which
means hansel or earnest-money? The sound is
the same, and has a marvellous spur-power over
the donkey, who seems to understand that full
payment of goad or cudgel is to follow. I have
known it to move even a Sicilian mule, the least
sensitive and most obstinate of creatures with ears,
except a British church-warden.

We wound along under a bleak hill, more deso-
late than anything I had ever seen. The old gray
rocks seemed not to thrust themselves out of the
rusty soil, but rather to be stabbed into it, as if
they had been hailed down upon it by some volcano.
There was nearly as much look of design as there
is in a druidical circle, and the whole looked like
some graveyard in an extinguished world, the mon-
ument of mortality itself, such as Bishop Wilkins
might have found in the moon, if he had ever got
thither. The path grew ever wilder, and Rojate,
the next town we came to, grim and grizzly under
a grim and grizzly sky of low-trailing clouds which
had suddenly gathered, looked drearier even than
the desolations we had passed. It was easy to un-
derstand why rocks should like to live here well
enough ; but what could have brought men hither,
and then kept them here, was beyond all reason-
able surmise. Barren hills stood sullenly aloof all
around, incapable of any crop but lichens.

We entered the gate, and found ourselves in the

178 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

midst of a group of wild-looking men gathered
about the door of a wine-shop. Some of them were
armed with long guns, and we saw (for the first
time in situ) the tall bandit hat v/ith ribbons
wound round it, — such as one is familiar with in
operas, and on the heads of those inhabitants of the
Scalinata in Rome, who have a costume of their
own, and placidly serve as models through the
whole pictorial range of divine and human nature,
from the Padre Eterno to Judas. Twenty years
ago, when my notion of an Italian was divided be-
tween a monk and a bravo, the first of whom did
nothing but enter at secret doors and drink your
health in poison, while the other lived behind cor-
ners, supporting himself by the productive industry
of digging your person all over with a stiletto, I
should have looked for instant assassination from
these carousing ruffians. But the only blood shed on
the occasion was that of the grape. A ride over the
mountains for two hours had made us thirsty, and
two or three bajocchi gave a tumbler of vino asci-
utto to all four of us. "You are welcome," said
one of the men, " we are all artists after a fashion ;
we are all brothers." The manners here are more
republican, and the title of lordship disappears
altogether. Another came up and insisted that we
should drink a second flask of wine as his guests.
In vain we protested ; no artist should pass through
Rojate without accepting that token of good-will,
and with the liberal help of our guides we contrived
to gulp it down. He was for another ; but we pro-
tested that we were entirely full, and that it was

ITALY 179

impossible. I dare say the poor fellow would have
spent a week's earnings on us, if we would have
let him. We proposed to return the civility, and
to leave a paul for them to drink a good journey to
us after we were gone ; but they would not listen
to it. Our entertainer followed us along to the
Piazza, begging one of us to let him serve as
donkey-driver to Subiaco. When this was denied,
he said that there was a festa here also, and that
we must stop long enough to see the procession of
zitelle (young girls), which would soon begin. But
evening was already gathering, the clouds grew
momently darker, and fierce, damp gusts, striking
us with the suddenness of a blow, promised a wild
night. We had still eight miles of mountain-path
before us, and we struggled away. As we crossed
the next summit beyond the town, a sound of chant-
ing drifted by us on the wind, wavered hither and
thither, now heard, now lost, then a doubtful some-
thing between song and gust, and, lingering a few
moments, we saw the white head-dresses, gliding
two by two, across a gap between the houses. The
scene and the music were both in neutral tints,
a sketch, as it were, in sepia a little blurred.

Before long the clouds almost brushed us as they
eddied silently by, and then it began to rain, first
mistily, and then in thick, hard drops. Fortu-
nately there was a moon, shining placidly in the
desert heaven above all this turmoil, or we could
not have found our path, which in a few moments
became a roaring torrent almost knee-deep. It
was a cold rain, and far above us, where the moun-

180 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

tain-peaks tore gaps in the clouds, we could see the
white silence of new-fallen snow. Sometimes we
had to dismount and wade, — a circumstance which
did not make our saddles more comfortable when
we returned to them and could hear them go crosA,
crosh, as the water gurgled out of them at every
jolt. There was no hope of shelter nearer than
Subiaco, no sign of man, and no sound but the
multitudinous roar of waters on every side. Rivu-
let whispered to rivulet, and water-fall shouted to
water-fall, as they leaped from rock to rock, all
hurrying to reinforce the main torrent below, which
hummed onward toward the Anio with dilated
heart. So gathered the hoarse Northern swarms
to descend upon sunken Italy ; and so forever does
physical and intellectual force seek its fatal equi-
librium, rushing in and occupying wherever it is
drawn by the attraction of a lower level.

We forded large streams that had been dry beds
an hour before ; and so sudden was the creation of
the floods, that it gave one almost as fresh a feel-
ing of water as if one had been present in Eden
when the first rock gave birth to the first fountain.
I had a severe cold, I was wet through from the hips
downward, and yet I never enjoyed anything more
in my life, — so different is the shower-bath to
which we doom ourselves from that whose string is
pulled by the prison-warden compulsion. After
our little bearers had tottered us up and down the
dusky steeps of a few more mountain-spurs, where
a misstep would have sent us spinning down the
fathomless black nowhere below, we came out upon

ITALY 181

the highroad, and found it a fine one, as all the
great Italian roads are. The rain broke off sud-
denly, and on the left, seeming about half a mile
away, sparkled the lights of Subiaco, flashing inter-
mittently like a knot of fire-flies in a meadow. The
town, owing to the necessary windings of the road,
was still three miles off, and just as the guides had
prodded and ahrred the donkeys into a brisk jog-
gle, I resolved to give up my saddle to the boy, and
try Tom Coryate's compasses. It was partly out
of humanity to myself and partly to him, for he
was tired and I was cold. The elder guide and I
took the lead, and, as I looked back, I laughed to
see the lolling ears of Storg's* donkey thrust from
under his long cloak, as if he were coming out
from a black Arab tent. We soon left them be-
hind, and paused at a bridge over the Anio till we
heard the patter of little hoofs again. The bridge
is a single arch, bent between the steep edges of a
gorge through which the Anio huddled far below,
showing a green gleam here and there in the strug-
gling moonlight, as if a fish rolled up his burnished
flank. After another mile and a half, we reached
the gate, and awaited our companions. It was
dreary enough, — waiting always is, — and as the
snow-chilled wind whistled through the damp arch-
way where we stood, my legs illustrated feelingly
to me how they cool water in the East, by wrap-
ping the jars with wet woollen and setting them in
a draught. At last they came ; I remounted, and
we went sliding through the steep, wet streets till
we had fairly passed through the whole town. Be-

182 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

fore a long building of two stories, without a symp-
tom of past or future light, we stopped. " Ecco
la Paletta ! " said the guide, and began to pound
furiously on the door with a large stone, which he
some time before had provided for the purpose.
After a long period of sullen irresponsiveness, we
heard des^nding footsteps, light streamed through
the chinks of the door, and the invariable " Chi
e ? " which precedes the unbarring of all portals
here, came from within. " Due forestieri" an-
swered the guide, and the bars rattled in hasty
welcome. u Make us," we exclaimed, as we stiffly
climbed down from our perches, " your biggest fire
in your biggest chimney, and then we will talk of
supper ! " In five minutes two great laurel-fagots
were spitting and crackling in an enormous fire-
place ; and Storg and I were in the costume which
Don Quixote wore on the Brown Mountain. Of
course there was nothing for supper but &frittata;
but there are worse things in the world than a
frittata con prosciutto, and we discussed it like a
society just emerging from barbarism, the upper
half of our persons presenting all the essentials of
an advanced civilization, while our legs skulked
under the table as free from sartorial impertinences
as those of the noblest savage that ever ran wild in
the woods. And so eccoci finalmente arrivati !

21th. — Nothing can be more lovely than the
scenery about Subiaco. The town itself is built
on a kind of cone rising from the midst of a valley
abounding in olives and vines, with a superb
mountain horizon around it, and the green Anio

ITALY 183

cascading at its feet. As you walk to the high-
perched convent of San Benedetto, you look across
the river on your right just after leaving the town,
to a cliff over which the ivy pours in torrents,
and in which dwellings have been hollowed out.
In the black doorway of every one sits a woman
in scarlet bodice and white head-gear, with a dis-
taff, spinning, while overhead countless nightin-
gales sing at once from the fringe of shrubbery.
The glorious great white clouds look over the
mountain-tops into our enchanted valley, and some-
times a lock of their vapory wool would be torn
off, to lie for a while in some inaccessible ravine
like a snow-drift ; but it seemed as if no shadow
could fly over our privacy of sunshine to-day.
The approach to the monastery is delicious. You
pass out of the hot sun into the green shadows
of ancient ilexes, leaning and twisting every way
that is graceful, their branches velvety with bril-
liant moss, in which grow feathery ferns, fringing
them with a halo of verdure. Then comes the con-
vent, with its pleasant old monks, who show their
sacred vessels (one by Cellini) and their relics,
among which is a finger-bone of one of the Inno-
cents. Lower down is a convent of Santa Scholas-
tica, where the first book was printed in Italy.

But though one may have daylight till after
twenty-four o'clock in Italy, the days are no longer
than ours, and I must go back to La Paletta
to see about a vettura to Tivoli. I leave Storg
sketching, and walk slowly down, lingering over
the ever-changeful views, lingering opposite the

184 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

nightingale-cliff, but get back to Subiaco and the
vetturino at last. The growl of a thunder-storm
soon brought Storg home, and we leave Subiaco
triumphantly, at five o'clock, in a light carriage,
drawn by three gray stallions (harnessed abreast)
on the full gallop. I cannot describe our drive,
the mountain-towns, with their files of girls wind-
ing up from the fountain with balanced water-jars
of ruddy copper, or chattering round it bright-
hued as parrots, the ruined castles, the green gleams
of the capricious river, the one great mountain
that soaked up all the rose of sunset, and, after
all else grew dim, still glowed as if with inward
fires, and, later, the white spray-smoke of Tivoli
that drove down the valley under a clear cold
moon, contrasting strangely with the red glare of
the lime-furnace on the opposite hillside. It is
well that we can be happy sometimes without
peeping and botanizing in the materials that make
us so. It is not often that we can escape the evil
genius of analysis that haunts our modern day-
light of self -consciousness (wir haben ja aufge-
kldrt /) and enjoy a day of right Chaucer.

P. S. Now that I am printing this, a dear friend
sends me. an old letter, and says, " Slip in some-
where, by way of contrast, what you wrote me of
your visit to Passawampscot." It is odd, almost
painful, to be confronted with your past self and
your past self's doings, when you have forgotten
both. But here is my bit of American scenery, such
as it is.

ITALY 185

While we were waiting for the boat, we had
time to investigate P. a little. We wandered about
with no one to molest us or make us afraid. No ci-
cerone was lying in wait for us, no verger expected
with funeral solemnity the more than compulsory
shilling. I remember the whole population of Cor-
tona gathering round me, and beseeching me not
to leave their city till I had seen the lampadone,
whose keeper had unhappily gone out for a walk,
taking the key with him. Thank Fortune, here
were no antiquities, no galleries of Pre-Raphael-
ite art, every lank figure looking as if it had been
stretched on a rack, before which the Anglo-Saxon
writhes because he ought to like them and can-
not for the soul of him. It is a pretty little vil-
lage, cuddled down among the hills, the clay soil
of which gives them, to a pilgrim from the parched
gravelly inland, a look of almost fanatical green.
The fields are broad, and wholly given up to the
grazing of cattle and sheep, which dotted them
thickly in the breezy sunshine. The open doors
of a barn, through which the wind flowed rustling
the loose locks of the mow, attracted us. Swal-
lows swam in and out with level wings, or crossed
each other, twittering in the dusky mouth of their
hay-scented cavern. Two or three hens and a cock
(none of your gawky Shanghais, long-legged as a
French peasant on his stilts, but the true red cock
of the ballads, full-chested, coral-combed, fountain-
tailed) were inquiring for hay-seed in the back-
ground. What frame in what gallery ever en-
closed such a picture as is squared within the

186 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

groundsel, side - posts, and lintel of a barn-door,
whether for eye or fancy ? The shining floor sug-
gests the flail -beat of autumn, that pleasantest
of monotonous sounds, and the later husking -bee,
where the lads and lasses sit round laughingly busy
under the swinging lantern.

Here we found a fine, stalwart fellow shearing
oheep. This was something new to us, and we
watched him for some time with many questions,
which he answered with off-hand good-nature. Go-
ing away, I thanked him for having taught me
something. He laughed, and said, " Ef you'll take
off them gloves o' yourn, I '11 give ye a try at the
practical part on 't." He was in the right of it.
I never saw anything handsomer than those brown
hands of his, on which the sinews stood out, as he
handled his shears, tight as a drawn bowstring.
How much more admirable is this tawny vigor,
the badge of fruitful toil, than the crop of early
muscle that heads out under the forcing-glass of
the gymnasium ! Foreigners do not feel easy in
America, because there are no peasants and un-
derlings here to be humble to them. The truth is,
that none but those who feel themselves only arti-
ficially the superiors of our sturdy yeomen see in
their self-respect any uncomfortable assumption of
equality. It is the last thing the yeoman is likely
to think of. They do not like the "I say, ma
good fellah " kind of style, and commonly contrive
to snub it. They do not value condescension at
the same rate that he does who vouchsafes it to
them. If it be a good thing for an English duke

ITALY 187

that he has no social superiors, I think it can
hardly be bad for a Yankee farmer. If it be a bad
thing for the duke that he meets none but inferi-
ors, it cannot harm the farmer much that he never
has the chance. At any rate, there was no thought
of incivility in my friend HoKbinol's jibe at my
kids, only a kind of jolly superiority. But I did
not like to be taken for a city gent, so I told him
I was born and bred in the country as well as he.
He laughed again, and said, " Wai, anyhow, I rve
the advantage of ye, for you never see a sheep
shore, and I 've be'n to the Opery and shore sheep
myself into the bargain." He told me that there
were two hundred sheep in the town, and that his
father could remember when there were four times
as many. The sea laps and mumbles the soft roots
of the hills, and licks away an acre or two of good
pasturage every season. The father, an old man
of eighty, stood looking on, pleased with his son's
wit, and brown as if the Passawampscot fogs were
walnut- juice.

We dined at a little tavern, with a gilded ball
hung out for sign, — a waif, I fancy, from some
shipwreck. The landlady was a brisk, amusing
little body, who soon informed us that her husband
was own cousin to a Senator of the United States.
A very elaborate sampler in the parlor, in which
an obelisk was wept over by a somewhat costly
willow in silver thread, recorded the virtues of the
Senator's maternal grandfather and grandmother.
After dinner, as we sat smoking our pipes on the
piazza, our good hostess brought her little daugh-

188 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL.

ter, and made her repeat verses utterly unintelli-
gible, but conjecturally moral, and certainly de-
pressing. Once set agoing, she ran down like an
alarm-clock. We awaited her subsidence as that of
a shower or other inevitable natural phenomenon.
More refreshing was the talk of a tall returned
Californian, who told us, among other things, that
" he should n't mind Panahmy's bein' sunk, oilers
providin' there war n't none of our folks onto it
when it went down ! "

Our landlady's exhibition of her daughter puts
me in mind of something similar, yet oddly differ-
ent, which happened to Storg and me at Palestrina.
We jointly praised the beauty of our stout locan-
dieras little girl. " Ah, she is nothing to her
eldest sister just married," said the mother. " If
you could see her ! She is bella, bella, BELLA ! "
We thought no more of it ; but after dinner, the
good creature, with no warning but a tap at the
door and a humble con permesso, brought her in
all her bravery, and showed her off to us as simply
and naturally as if she had been a picture. The
girl, who was both beautiful and modest, bore it
with the dignified aplomb of a statue. She knew
we admired her, and liked it, but with the indif-
ference of a rose. There is something very charm-
ing, I think, in this wholly unsophisticated con-
sciousness, with no alloy of vanity or coquetry.

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 189
IV.

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC.

*

Byron hit the white, which he often shot very
wide of in his Italian Guide Book, when he called
Eome "my country." But it is a feeling which
comes to one slowly, and is absorbed into one's
system during a long residence. Perhaps one does
not feel it till one has gone away, as things always
seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is
out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Long-
ing leans and beckons. However it be, Fancy gets
a rude shock at entering Rome, which it takes her
a great while to get over. She has gradually made
herself believe that she is approaching a city of the
dead, and has seen nothing on the road from Civita
Vecchia to disturb that theory. Milestones, with
" Via Aurelia " carved upon them, have confirmed
it. It is eighteen hundred years ago with her, and
on the dial of time the shadow has not yet trembled
over the line that marks the beginning of the first
century. She arrives at the gate, and a dirty, blue
man, with a cocked hat and a white sword-belt,
asks for her passport. Then another man, as like
the first as one spoon is like its fellow, and hav-
ing, like him, the look of being run in a mould,
tells her that she must go to the custom-house. It
is as if a ghost, who had scarcely recovered from
the jar of hearing Charon say, " I '11 trouble you
for your obolus, if you please," should have his

190 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

portmanteau seized by the Stygian tide-waiters to
be searched. Is there anything, then, contraband
of death ? asks poor Fancy of herself.

But it is the misfortune (or the safeguard) of
the English mind that Fancy is always an outlaw,
liable to be laid by the heels wherever Constable
Common Sense can catch her. She submits quietly
as the postilion cries, " Yee-ip ! " cracks his whip,
and the rattle over the pavement begins, strug-
gles a moment when the pillars of the colonnade
stalk ghostly by in the moonlight, and finally gives
up all for lost when she sees Bernini's angels polk-
ing on their pedestals along the sides of the Ponte
Sant' Angelo with the emblems of the Passion in
their arms.

You are in Rome, of course ; the sbirro said so,
the doganiere bowed it, and the postilion swore it ;
but it is a Rome of modern houses, muddy streets,
dingy cafes, cigar-smokers, and French soldiers,
the manifest junior of Florence. And yet full of
anachronisms, for in a little while you pass the col-
umn of Antoninus, find the Dogana in an ancient
temple whose furrowed pillars show through the
recent plaster, and feel as if you saw the statue of
Minerva in a Paris bonnet. You are driven to a
hotel where all the barbarian languages are spoken
in one wild conglomerate by the Commissionnaire,
have your dinner wholly in French, and wake the
next morning dreaming of the Tenth Legion, to see
a regiment of Chasseurs de Vincennes trotting by.

For a few days one undergoes a tremendous re-
coil. Other places have a distinct meaning. Lon-

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 191

don is the visible throne of King Stock ; Versailles
is the apotheosis of one of Louis XIV.'s cast peri-
wigs; Florence and Pisa are cities of the Middle
Ages ; but Rome seems to be a parody upon itself.
The ticket that admits you to see the starting of
the horses at carnival has S. P. Q. R. at the top of
it, and you give the custode a paul for showing you
the wolf that suckled Romulus and Remus. The
Senatus seems to be a score or so of elderly gentle-
men in scarlet, and the Populusque Romanus a
swarm of nasty friars.

But there is something more than mere earth in
the spot where great deeds have been done. The
surveyor cannot give the true dimensions of Mara-
thon or Lexington, for they are not reducible to
square acres. Dead glory and greatness leave
ghosts behind them, and departed empire has a
metempsychosis, if nothing else has. Its spirit
haunts the grave, and waits, and waits till at last
it finds a body to its mind, slips into it, and histo-
rians moralize on the fluctuation of human affairs.
By and by, perhaps, enough observations will
have been recorded to assure us that these recur-
rences are firmamental, and historionomers will
have measured accurately the sidereal years of
races. When that is once done, events will move
with the quiet of an orrery, and nations will con-
sent to their peridynamis and apodynamis with
planetary composure.

Be this as it may, you become gradually aware
of the presence of this imperial ghost among the
Roman ruins. You receive hints and startles of it

192 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

through the senses first, as the horse always shies
at the apparition before the rider can see it. Then,
little by little, you become assured of it, and seem
to hear the brush of its mantle through some hall
of Caracalla's baths, or one of those other solitudes
of Rome. And those solitudes are without a par-
allel ; for it is not the mere absence of man, but
the sense of his departure, that makes a profound
loneliness. Musing upon them, you cannot but
feel the shadow of that disembodied empire, and,
remembering how the foundations of the Capitol
were laid where a human head was turned up, you
are impelled to prophesy that the Idea of Rome
will incarnate itself again as soon as an Italian
brain is found large enough to hold it, and to give
unity to those discordant members.

But, though I intend to observe no regular pat-
tern in my Roman mosaic, which will resemble
more what one finds in his pockets after a walk, —
a pagan cube or two from the palaces of the Cae-
sars, a few Byzantine bits, given with many shrugs
of secrecy by a lay-brother at San Paolo fuori le
mura, and a few more (quite as ancient) from the
manufactory at the Vatican, — it seems natural to
begin what one has to say of Rome with something
about St. Peter's; for the saint sits at the gate
here as well as in Paradise.

It is very common for people to say that they
are disappointed in the first sight of St. Peter's ;
and one hears much the same about Niagara. I
cannot help thinking that the fault is in them-
selves ; and that if the church and the cataract

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 193

were in the habit of giving away their thoughts
with that rash generosity which characterizes tour-
ists, they might perhaps say of their visitors,
" Well, if you are those Men of whom we have
heard so much, we are a little disappointed, to tell
the truth ! " The refined tourist expects some-
what too much when he takes it for granted that
St. Peter's will at once decorate him with the order
of imagination, just as Victoria knights an alder-
man when he presents an address. Or perhaps
he has been getting up a little architecture on the
road from Florence, and is discomfited because he
does not know whether he ought to be pleased or
not, which is very much as if he should wait to be
told whether it was fresh water or salt which makes
the exhaustless grace of Niagara's emerald curve,
before he benignly consented to approve. It would
be wiser, perhaps, for him to consider whether,
if Michael Angelo had had the building of him,
his own personal style would not have been more
impressive.

It is not to be doubted that minds are of as
many different orders as cathedrals, and that the
Gothic imagination is vexed and discommoded in
the vain endeavor to flatten its pinnacles, and fit
itself into the round Roman arches. But if it be
impossible for a man to like everything, it is quite
possible for him to avoid being driven mad by what
does not please him; nay, it is the imperative
duty of a wise man to find out what that secret is
which makes a thing pleasing to another. In ap-
proaching St. Peter's, one must take his Protestant

194 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

shoes off his feet, and leave them behind him, in
the Piazza Rusticucci. Otherwise the great Basil-
ica, with those outstretching colonnades of Bra-
mante, will seem to be a bloated spider lying in
wait for him, the poor heretic fly. As he lifts the
heavy leathern flapper over the door, and is dis-
charged into the interior by its impetuous recoil,
let him disburthen his mind altogether of stone and
mortar, and think only that he is standing before
the throne of a dynasty which, even in its decay, is
the most powerful the world ever saw. Mason-
work is all very well in itself, but it has nothing to
do with the affair at present in hand.

Suppose that a man in pouring down a glass of
claret could drink the South of France, that he
could so disintegrate the wine by the force of imag-
ination as to taste in it all the clustered beauty and
bloom of the grape, all the dance and song and sun-
burnt jollity of the vintage. Or suppose that in
eating bread he could transubstantiate it with the
tender blade of spring, the gleam-flitted corn-ocean
of summer, the royal autumn, with its golden beard,
and the merry funerals of harvest. This is what
the great poets do for us, we cannot tell how, with
their fatally-chosen words, crowding the happy veins
of language again with all the life and meaning and
music that had been dribbling away from them
since Adam. And this is what the Roman Church
does for religion, feeding the soul not with the es-
sential religious sentiment, not with a drop or two
of the tincture of worship, but making us feel one
by one all those original elements of which worship

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 195

is composed ; not bringing the end to us, but mak-
ing us pass over and feel beneath our feet all the
golden rounds of the ladder by which the climbing
generations have reached that end ; not handing
us drily a dead and extinguished Q. E. D., but let-
ting it rather declare itself by the glory with which
it interfuses the incense-clouds of wonder and aspi-
ration and beauty in which it is veiled. The se-
cret of her power is typified in the mystery of the
Real Presence. She is the only church that has
been loyal to the heart and soul of man, that has
clung to her faith in the imagination, and that
would not give over her symbols and images and
sacred vessels to the perilous keeping of the icono-
clast Understanding. She has never lost sight of
the truth, that the product human nature is com-
posed of the sum of flesh and spirit, and has accord-
ingly regarded both this world and the next as the
constituents of that other world which we possess
by faith. She knows that poor Panza, the body,
has his kitchen longings and visions, as well as Qui-
xote, the soul, his ethereal, and has wit enough to
supply him with the visible, tangible raw material
of imagination. She is the only poet among the
churches, and, while Protestantism is unrolling a
pocket surveyor' s-plan, takes her votary to the pin-
nacle of her temple, and shows him meadow, up-
land, and tillage, cloudy heaps of forest clasped
with the river's jewelled arm, hillsides white with
the perpetual snow of flocks, and, beyond all, the
interminable heave of the unknown ocean. Her
empire may be traced upon the map by the boun'

196 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

daries of races ; the understanding is her great
foe ; and it is the people whose vocabulary was in-
complete till they had invented the arch word Hum-
bug that defies her. With that leaden bullet John
Bull can bring down Sentiment when she flies her
highest. And the more the pity for John Bull.
One of these days some one whose eyes are sharp
enough will read in the Times a standing adver-
tisement, " Lost, strayed, or stolen from the farm-
yard of the subscriber the valuable horse Pega-
sus. Probably has on him part of a new plough-
harness, as that is also missing. A suitable reward,
etc. J. BULL."

Protestantism reverses the poetical process I
have spoken of above, and gives not even the bread
of life, but instead of it the alcohol, or distilled
intellectual result. This was very well so long as
Protestantism continued to protest ; for enthusiasm
sublimates the understanding into imagination.
But now that she also has become an establish-
ment, she begins to perceive that she made a
blunder in trusting herself to the intellect alone.
She is beginning to feel her way back again, as
one notices in Puseyism, and other such hints.
One is put upon reflection when one sees burly
Englishmen, who dine on beef and porter every
day, marching proudly through St. Peter's on
Palm Sunday, with those frightfully artificial palm-
branches in their hands. Komanism wisely pro-
vides for the childish in men.

Therefore I say again, that one must lay aside
his Protestantism in order to have a true feeling

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 197

of St. Peter's. Here in Rome is the laboratory of
that mysterious enchantress, who has known so
well how to adapt herself to all the wants, or, if
you will, the weaknesses of human nature, making
the retirement of the convent-cell a merit to the
solitary, the scourge or the fast a piety to the as-
cetic, the enjoyment of pomp and music and incense
a religious act in the sensual, and furnishing for
the very soul itself a confidante in that ear of the
dumb confessional, where it may securely disbur-
then itself of its sins and sorrows. And the dome
of St. Peter's is the magic circle within which she
works her most potent incantations. I confess that
I could not enter it alone without a kind of awe.

But, setting entirely aside the effect of this
church upon the imagination, it is wonderful, if
one consider it only materially. Michael Angelo
created a new world in which everything was colos-
sal, and it might seem that he built this as a fit
temple for those gigantic figures with which he
peopled it to worship in. Here his Moses should
be high-priest, the service should be chanted by his
prophets and sibyls, and those great pagans should
be brought hither from San Lorenzo in Florence,
to receive baptism.

However unsatisfactory in other matters, statis-
tics are of service here. I have seen a refined
tourist who entered, Murray in hand, sternly re-
solved to have St. Peter's look small, brought to
terms at once by being told that the canopy over
the high altar (looking very like a four-post bed-
stead) was ninety-eight feet high. If he still ob-

198 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

stinates himself, lie is finished by being made to
measure one of the marble putti, which look like
rather stoutish babies, and are found to be six feet,
every sculptor's son of them. This ceremony is the
more interesting, as it enables him to satisfy the
guide of his proficiency in the Italian tongue by
calling them putty at every convenient opportunity.
Otherwise both he and his assistant terrify each
other into mutual unintelligibility with that lingua
franca of the English-speaking traveller, which is
supposed to bear some remote affinity to the French
language, of which both parties are as ignorant as
an American Ambassador.

Murray gives all these little statistical nudges to
the Anglo-Saxon imagination ; but he knows that
its finest nerves are in the pocket, and accordingly
ends by telling you how much the church cost. I
forget how much it is ; but it cannot be more, I
fancy, than the English national debt multiplied
into itself three hundred and sixty-five times. If
the pilgrim, honestly anxious for a sensation, will
work out this little sum, he will be sure to receive
all that enlargement of the imaginative faculty
which arithmetic can give him. Perhaps the most
dilating fact, after all, is that this architectural
world has also a separate atmosphere, distinct from
that of Rome by some ten degrees, and unvarying
through the year.

I think that, on the whole, Jonathan gets ready
to be pleased with St. Peter's sooner than Bull.
Accustomed to our lath and plaster expedients for
churches, the portable sentry-boxes of Zion, mere

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 199

solidity and permanence are pleasurable in them-
selves ; and if he get grandeur also, he has Gospel
measure. Besides, it is easy for Jonathan to travel.
He is one drop of a fluid mass, who knows where
his home is to-day, but can make no guess of where
it may be to-morrow. Even in a form of govern-
ment he only takes lodgings for the night, and is
ready to pay his bill and be off in the morning.
He should take his motto from Bishop Golias's
ujfiki est proposition in tdberna mori" though
not in the sufistic sense of that misunderstood
Churchman. But Bull can seldom be said to travel
at all, since the first step of a true traveller is out
of himself. He plays cricket and hunts foxes on
the Campagna, makes entries in his betting-book
while the Pope is giving his benediction, and points
out Lord Calico to you awfully during the Sistine
Miserere. If he let his beard grow, it always has
a startled air, as if it suddenly remembered its
treason to Sheffield, and only makes him look more
English than ever. A masquerade is impossible to
him, and his fancy balls are the solemnest facts in
the world. Accordingly, he enters St. Peter's with
the dome of St. Paul's drawn tight over his eyes,
like a criminal's cap, and ready for instant execu-
tion rather than confess that the English Wren
had not a stronger wing than the Italian Angel.
1 like this in Bull, and it renders him the pleasant-
est of travelling-companions ; for he makes you
take England along with you, and thus you have
two countries at once. And one must not forget
in an Italian inn that it is to Bull he owes the clean

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napkins and sheets, and the privilege of his morn'
ing bath. Nor should Bull himself fail to remem-
ber that he ate with his fingers till the Italian gave
him a fork.

Browning has given the best picture of St.
Peter's on a festival-day, sketching it with a few
verses in his large style. And doubtless it is the
scene of the grandest spectacles which the world can
see in these latter days. Those Easter pomps, where
the antique world marches visibly before you in
gilded mail and crimson doubtlet, refresh the eyes,
and are good so long as they continue to be merely
spectacle. But if one think for a moment of the
servant of the servants of the Lord in cloth of
gold, borne on men's shoulders, or of the children
receiving the blessing of their Holy Father, with
a regiment of French soldiers to protect the fa-
ther from the children, it becomes a little sad. If
one would feel the full meaning of those ceremo-
nials, however, let him consider the coincidences
between the Romish and the Buddhist forms of
worship, and remembering that the Pope is the di-
rect heir, through the Pontifex Maximus, of rites
that were ancient when the Etruscans were mod-
ern, he will look with a feeling deeper than cu-
riosity upon forms which record the earliest con-
quests of the Invisible, the first triumphs of mind
over muscle.

To me the noon silence and solitude of St.
Peter's were most impressive, when the sunlight,
made visible by the mist of the ever-burning lamps
in which it was entangled, hovered under the dome

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 201

like the holy dove goldenly descending. Very
grand also is the twilight, when all outlines melt
into mysterious vastness, and the arches expand
and lose themselves in the deepening shadow.
Then, standing in the desert transept, you hear
the far-off vespers swell and die like low breath-
ings of the sea on some conjectured shore.

As the sky is supposed to scatter its golden star-
pollen once every year in meteoric showers, so
the dome of St. Peter's has its annual efflores-
cence of fire. This illumination is the great show
of Papal Rome. Just after sunset, I stood upon
the Trinita dei Monti and saw the little drops
of pale light creeping downward from the cross
and trickling over the dome. Then, as the sky
darkened behind, it seemed as if the setting sun
had lodged upon the horizon and there burned
out, the fire still clinging to his massy ribs. And
when the change from the silver to the golden
illumination came, it was as if the breeze had
fanned the embers into flame again.

Bitten with the Anglo-Saxon gadfly that drives
us all to disenchant artifice, and see the springs
that fix it on, I walked down to get a nearer
look. My next glimpse was from the bridge of
Sant' Angelo ; but there was no time nor space
for pause. Foot-passengers crowding hither and
thither, as they heard the shout of Avantif from
the mile of coachmen behind, dragoon-horses curt-
sying backward just where there were most
women and children to be flattened, and the dome
drawing all eyes and thoughts the wrong way,

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made a hubbub to be got out of at any desperate
hazard. Besides, one could not help feeling ner-
vously hurried ; for it seemed quite plain to every-
body that this starry apparition must be as mo-
mentary as it was wonderful, and that we should
find it vanished when we reached the piazza. But
suddenly you stand in front of it, and see the soft
travertine of the front suffused with a tremulous,
glooming glow, a mildened glory, as if the building
breathed, and so transmuted its shadow into soft
pulses of light.

After wondering long enough, I went back to
the Pincio, and watched it for an hour longer.
But I did not wish to see it go out. It seemed
better to go home and leave it still trembling, so
that I could fancy a kind of permanence in it, and
half believe I should find it there again some lucky
evening. Before leaving it altogether, I went
away to cool my eyes with darkness, and carne
back several times ; and every time it was a new
miracle, the more so that it was a human piece of
faery-work. Beautiful as fire is in itself, I suspect
that part of the pleasure is metaphysical, and that
the sense of playing with an element which can be
so terrible adds to the zest of the spectacle. And
then fire is not the least degraded by it, because it
is not utilized. If beauty were in use, the factory
would add a grace to the river, and we should turn
from the fire-writing on the wall of heaven to look
at a message printed by the magnetic telegraph.
There may be a beauty in the use itself ; but utili-
zation is always downward, and it is this feeling

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 203

that makes Schiller's Pegasus in yoke so univer-
sally pleasing. So long as the curse of work clings
to man, he will see beauty only in play. The cap-
ital of the most frugal commonwealth in the world
burns up five thousand dollars a year in gunpowder,
and nobody murmurs. Provident Judas wished to
utilize the ointment, but the Teacher would rather
that it should be wasted in poem.

The best lesson in aesthetics I ever got (and,
like most good lessons, it fell from the lips of no
regular professor) was from an Irishman on the
day the Nymph Cochituate was formally intro-
duced to the people of Boston. I made one with
other rustics in the streets, admiring the digni-
taries in coaches with as much Christian charity as
is consistent with an elbow in the pit of one's
stomach and a heel on that toe which is your
only inheritance from two excellent grandfathers.
Among other allegorical phenomena, there came
along what I should have called a hay-cart, if I
had not known it was a triumphal car, filled with
that fairest variety of mortal grass which with us
is apt to spindle so soon into a somewhat sapless
womanhood. ThirtjMjdd young maidens in white
gowns, with blue sashes and pink wreaths of French
crape, represented the United States. (How shall
we limit our number, by the way, if ever Utah be
admitted ?) The ship, the printing-press, even the
wondrous train of express- wagons, and other solid
bits of civic fantasy, had left my Hibernian neigh-
bor unmoved. But this brought him down. Turn-
ing to me, as the most appreciative public for the

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moment, with face of as much delight as if his
head had been broken, he cried, " Now this is raly
beautiful ! Tothally regyardless uv expinse ! "
Methought my shirt-sleeved lecturer on the Beau-
tiful had hit at least one nail full on the head.
Voltaire but epigrammatized the same thought
when he said, Le superflu, chose tres-necessaire.

As for the ceremonies of the Church, one need
not waste time in seeing many of them. There is
a dreary sameness in them, and one can take an
hour here and an hour there, as it pleases him, jusfc
as sure of finding the same pattern as he would be
in the first or last yard of a roll of printed cotton.
For myself, I do not like to go and look with
mere curiosity at what is sacred and solemn to
others. To how many these Roman shows are
sacred, I cannot guess ; but certainly the Romans
do not value them much. I walked out to the
grotto of Egeria on Easter Sunday, that I might
not be tempted down to St. Peter's to see the
mockery of Pio Nono's benediction. It is certainly
Christian, for he blesses them that curse him, and
does all the good which the waving of his fingers
can do to people who would use him despitefully if
they had the chance. I told an Italian servant
she might have the day ; but she said she did not
care for it.

" But," urged I, " will you not go to receive the
blessing of the Holy Father? "

" No, sir."

"Do you not wish it?"

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 205

" Not in the least : his blessing would do me no
good. If I get the blessing of Heaven, it will
serve my turn."

There were three families of foreigners in our
house, and I believe none of the Italian servants
went to St. Peter's that day. Yet they commonly
speak kindly of Pius. I have heard the same
phrase from several Italians of the working-class.
"He is a good man," they said, "but ill-led."

What one sees in the streets of Rome is worth
more than what one sees in the churches. The
churches themselves are generally ugly. St. Peter's
has crushed all the life out of architectural genius,
and all the modern churches look as if they were
swelling themselves in imitation of the great Basil-
ica. There is a clumsy magnificence about them,
and their heaviness oppresses. Their marble in-
crustations look like a kind of architectural ele-
phantiasis, and the parts are puffy with a dropsical
want of proportion. There is none of the spring
and soar which one may see even in the Lombard
churches, and a Roman column standing near one
of them, slim and gentlemanlike, satirizes silently
their tawdry parvenuism. Attempts at mere big-
ness are ridiculous in a city where the Colosseum
still yawns in crater-like ruin, and where Michael
Angelo made a noble church out of a single room
in Diocletian's baths.

Shall I confess it? Michael Angelo seems to
me, in his angry reaction against sentimental
beauty, to have mistaken bulk and brawn for the
antithesis of feebleness. He is the apostle of the

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exaggerated, the Victor Hugo of painting and
sculpture. I have a feeling that rivalry was a
more powerful motive with him than love of art,
that he had the conscious intention to be original,
which seldom leads to anything better than being
extravagant. The show of muscle proves strength,
not power ; and force for mere force's sake in art
makes one think of Milo caught in his own log.
This is my second thought, and strikes me as per-
haps somewhat niggardly toward one in whom you
cannot help feeling there was so vast a possibility.
And then his Eve, his David, his Sibyls, his
Prophets, his Sonnets ! Well, I take it all back,
and come round to St. Peter's again just to hint
that I doubt about domes. In Rome they are so
much the fashion that I felt as if they were the
goitre of architecture. Generally they look heavy.
Those on St. Mark's in Venice are the only light
ones I ever saw, and they look almost airy, like
tents puffed out with wind. I suppose one must
be satisfied with the interior effect, which is cer-
tainly noble in St. Peter's. But for impressive-
ness both within and without there is nothing like
a Gothic cathedral for me, nothing that crowns a
city so nobly, or makes such an island of twilight
silence in the midst of its noonday clamors.

Now as to what one sees in the streets, the beg-
gars are certainly the first things that draw the
eye. Beggary is an institution here. The Church
has sanctified it by the establishment of mendicant
orders, and indeed it is the natural result of a
social system where the non-producing class makes

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 207

not only the laws, but the ideas. The beggars of
Rome go far toward proving the diversity of origin
in mankind, for on them surely the curse of Adam
never fell. It is easier to fancy that Adam Van-
rien, the first tenant of the Fool's Paradise, after
sucking his thumbs for a thousand years, took to
wife Eve Faniente, and became the progenitor of
this race, to whom also he left a calendar in which
three hundred and sixty-five days in the year were
made feasts, sacred from all secular labor. Ac-
cordingly, they not merely do nothing, but they do
it assiduously and almost with religious fervor. I
have seen ancient members of this sect as constant
at their accustomed street- corner as the bit of
broken column on which they sat ; and when a man
does this in rainy weather, as rainy weather is in
Eome, he has the spirit of a fanatic and martyr.

It is not that the Italians are a lazy people. On
the contrary, I am satisfied that they are industri-
ous so far as they are allowed to be. But, as I
said before, when a Roman does nothing, he does
it in the high Roman fashion. A friend of mine
was having one of his rooms arranged for a private
theatre, and sent for a person who was said to be
an expert in the business to do it for him. After
a day's trial, he was satisfied that his lieutenant
was rather a hindrance than a help, and resolved
to dismiss him.

" What is your charge for your day's services ? "

" Two scudi, sir."

" Two scudi ! Five pauls would be too much.
You have done nothing but stand with your hands

208 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

in your pockets and get in the way of other
people."

" Lordship is perfectly right ; but that is my
way of working."

It is impossible for a stranger to say who may
not beg in Rome. It seems to be a sudden mad-
ness that may seize any one at the sight of a for-
eigner. You see a very respectable-looking per-
son in the street, and it is odds but, as you pass
him, his hat comes off, his whole figure suddenly
dilapidates itself, assuming a tremble of profes-
sional weakness, and you hear the everlasting
qualche cosaper carita ! You are in doubt whether
to drop a bajoccho into the next cardinal's hat
which offers you its sacred cavity in answer to your
salute. You begin to believe that the hat was in-
vented for the sole purpose of ingulfing coppers,
and that its highest type is the great Triregno it-
self, into which the pence of Peter rattle.

But you soon learn to distinguish the established
beggars, and to the three professions elsewhere con-
sidered liberal you add a fourth for this latitude, —
mendicancy. Its professors look upon themselves
as a kind of guild which ought to be protected by
the government. I fell into talk with a woman
who begged of me in the Colosseum. Among
other things she complained that the government
did not at all consider the poor.

" Where is the government that does ? " I said.

" Eh gia ! Excellency ; but this government lets
beggars from the country come into Rome, which
is a great injury to the trade of us born Romans.

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 209

There is Beppo, for example ; he is a man of prop-
erty in his own town, and has a dinner of three
courses every day. He has portioned two daugh-
ters with three thousand scudi each, and left Rome
during the time of the Eepublic with the rest of
the nobility."

At first, one is shocked and pained at the exhi-
bition of deformities in the street. But by and by
he conies to look upon them with little more emo-
tion than is excited by seeing the tools of any
other trade. The melancholy of the beggars is
purely a matter of business ; and they look upon
their maims as Fortunatus purses, which will al-
ways give them money. A withered arm they
present to you as a highwayman would his pistol ;
a goitre is a life-annuity ; a St. Vitus dance is as
good as an engagement as prima ballerina at the
Apollo ; and to have no legs at all is to stand on
the best footing with fortune. They are a merry
race, on the whole, and quick-witted, like the rest
of their countrymen. I believe the regular fee for
a beggar is a quattrino, about a quarter of a cent ;
but they expect more of foreigners. A friend of
mine once gave one of these tiny coins to an old
woman ; she delicately expressed her resentment
by exclaiming, " Thanks, signoria. God will re-
ward even you ! "

A begging friar came to me one day with a sub-
scription for repairing his convent. " Ah, but I
am a heretic," said I. "Undoubtedly," with a
shrug, implying a respectful acknowledgment of a
foreigner's right to choose warm and dry lodgings

210 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

in the other world as well as in this, "but your
money is perfectly orthodox."

Another favorite way of doing nothing is to exca-
vate the Forum. I think the Fanientes like this all
the better, because it seems a kind of satire upon
work, as the witches parody the Christian offices of
devotion at their Sabbath. A score or so of old
men in voluminous cloaks shift the earth from one
side of a large pit to the other, in a manner so lei-
surely that it is positive repose to look at them.
The most bigoted anti-Fourierist might acknow-
ledge this to be attractive industry.

One conscript father trails a small barrow up
to another, who stands leaning on a long spade.
Arriving, he fumbles for his snuff-box, and offers
it deliberately to his friend. Each takes an ample
pinch, and both seat themselves to await the result.
If one should sneeze, he receives the Felicita ! of
the other ; and, after allowing the titillation to sub-
side, he replies, Grazia! Then follows a little
conversation, and then they prepare to load. But
it occurs to the barrow-driver that this is a good
opportunity to fill and light his pipe ; and to do so
conveniently he needs his barrow to sit upon. He
draws a few whiffs, and a little more conversation
takes place. The barrow is now ready ; but first
the wielder of the spade will fill his pipe also.
This done, more whiffs and more conversation.
Then a spoonful of earth is thrown into the bar-
row, and it starts on its return. But midway it
meets an empty barrow, and both stop to go
through the snuff-box ceremonial once more, and

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 211

to discuss whatever new thing has occurred in the
excavation since their last encounter. And so it
goes on all day.

As I see more of material antiquity, I begin to
suspect that my interest in it is mostly factitious.
The relations of races to the physical world (only to
be studied fruitfully on the spot) do not excite in
me an interest at all proportionate to that I feel in
their influence on the moral advance of mankind,
which one may as easily trace in his own library as
on the spot. The only useful remark I remember
to have made here is, that, the situation of Rome
being far less strong than that of any city of the
Etruscan league, it must have been built where it
is for purposes of commerce. It is the most de-
fensible point near the mouth of the Tiber. It is
only as rival trades-folk that Rome and Carthage
had any comprehensible cause of quarrel. It is
only as a commercial people that we can under-
stand the early tendency of the Romans towards
democracy. As for antiquity, after reading his-
tory, one is haunted by a discomforting suspicion
that the names so painfully deciphered in hiero-
glyphic or arrow-head inscriptions are only so
many more Smiths and Browns masking it in un-
known tongues. Moreover, if we Yankees are
twitted with not knowing the difference between
big and great, may not those of us who have
learned it turn round on many a monument over
here with the same reproach ? I confess I am be-
ginning to sympathize with a countryman of ours

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from Michigan, who asked our Minister to direct
him to a specimen ruin and a specimen gallery,
that he might see and be rid of them once for all.
I saw three young Englishmen going through the
Vatican by catalogue and number, the other day,
in a fashion which John Bull is apt to consider
exclusively American. " Number 300 ! " says the
one with catalogue and pencil, " have you seen
it ? " " Yes," answer his two comrades, and,
checking it off, he goes on with Number 301.
Having witnessed the unavailing agonies of many
Anglo-Saxons from both sides of the Atlantic in
their effort to have the correct sensation before
many hideous examples of antique bad taste, my
heart warmed toward my business-like British
cousins, who were doing their esthetics in this
thrifty auctioneer fashion. Our cart-before-horse
education, which makes us more familiar with the
history and literature of Greeks and Romans than
with those of our own ancestry, (though there is
nothing in ancient art to match Shakespeare or a
Gothic minster,) makes us the gulls of what we
call classical antiquity. Europe were worth visit-
ing, if only to be rid of this one old man of the
sea. In sculpture, to be sure, they have us on the
hip.

I am not ashamed to confess a singular sympathy
with what are known as the Middle Ages. I can-
not help thinking that few periods have left be-
hind them such traces of inventiveness and power.
Nothing is more tiresome than the sameness of
modern cities ; and it has often struck me that this

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 213

must also' have been true of those ancient ones in
which Greek architecture or its derivatives pre-
vailed, — true at least as respects public buildings.
But medieval towns, especially in Italy, even when
only fifty miles asunder, have an individuality of
character as marked as that 'of trees. Nor is it
merely this originality that attracts me, but like-
wise the sense that, however old, they are nearer to
me in being modern and Christian. Far enough
away in the past to be picturesque, they are still so
near through sympathies of thought and belief as
to be more companionable. I find it harder to
bridge over the gulf of Paganism than of centuries.
Apart from any difference in the men, I had a far
deeper emotion when I stood on the £asso di Dante,
than at Horace's Sabine farm or by the tomb of
Virgil. The latter, indeed, interested me chiefly
by its association with comparatively modern le-
gend ; and one of the buildings I am most glad to
have seen in Rome is the Bear Inn, where Mon-
taigne lodged on his arrival.

I think it must have been for some such reason
that I liked my Florentine better than my Roman
walks, though I am vastly more contented with
merely being in Rome. Florence is more noisy;
indeed, I think it the noisiest town I was ever in.
What with the continual jangling of its bells, the
rattle of Austrian drums, and the street-cries, An-
cora mi raccapriccia. The Italians are a voci-
ferous people, and most so among them the Flor-
entines. Walking through a back street one day,
I saw an old woman higgling with a peripatetic

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dealer, who, at every interval afforded him by the
remarks of his veteran antagonist, would tip his
head on one side, and shout, with a kind of wonder-
ing enthusiasm, as if he could hardly trust the
evidence of his own senses to such loveliness, 0,
che bellezza ! che, belle-e-ezza ! The two had been
contending as obstinately as the Greeks and Tro-
jans over the body of Patroclus, and I was curious
to know what was the object of so much desire
on the one side and admiration on the other. It
was a half-dozen of weazeny baked pears, beg-
garly remnant of the day's traffic. Another time
I stopped before a stall, debating whether to buy
some fine-looking peaches. Before I had made up
my mind, the vender, a stout fellow, with a voice
like a prize-bull of Bashan, opened a mouth round
and large as the muzzle of a blunderbuss, and let
fly into my ear the following pertinent observation :
"Belle, pesche! belle pe-e-eschef" (crescendo.) I
stared at him in stunned bewilderment ; but, seeing
that he had reloaded and was about to fire again,
took to my heels, the exploded syllables rattling
after me like so many buckshot. A single turnip is
argument enough with them till midnight ; nay, I
have heard a ruffian yelling over a covered basket,
which, I am convinced, was empty, and only carried
as an excuse for his stupendous vocalism. It never
struck me before what a quiet people Americans
are.

Of the pleasant places within easy walk of
Rome, I prefer the garden of the Villa Albani, as
being most Italian. One does not go to Italy for

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 215

examples of Price on the Picturesque. Compared
with landscape-gardening, it is Racine to Shake-
speare, I grant ; but it has its own charm, neverthe-
less. I like the balustraded terraces, the sun-proof
laurel walks, the vases and statues. It is only in
such a climate that it does not seem inhuman to
thrust a naked statue out of doors. Not to speak
of their incongruity, how dreary do those white
figures look at Fountains Abbey in that shrewd
Yorkshire atmosphere ! To put them there shows
the same bad taste that led Prince Polonia, as
Thackeray calls him, to build an artificial ruin
within a mile of Rome. But I doubt if the Italian
garden will bear transplantation. Farther north,
or under a less constant sunshine, it is but half-
hardy at the best. Within the city, the garden of
the French Academy is my favorite retreat, because
little frequented ; and there is an arbor there in
which I have read comfortably (sitting where the
sun could reach me) in January. By the way,
there is something very agreeable in the way these
people have of making a kind of fireside of the
sunshine. With us it is either too hot or too cool,
or we are too busy. But, on the other hand, they
have no such thing as a chimney-corner.

Of course I haunt the collections of art faith-
fully ; but my favorite gallery, after all, is the
street. There I always find something entertain-
ing, at least. The other day, on my way to the
Colonna Palace, I passed the Fountain of Trevi,
from which the water is now shut off on account of
repairs to the aqueduct. A scanty rill of soap-

216 LEAVES FROM MY JOURNAL

sudsy liquid still trickled from one of the conduits,
and, seeing a crowd, I stopped to find out what
nothing or other had gathered it. One charm of
Rome is that nobody has anything in particular to
do, or, if he has, can always stop doing it on the
slightest pretext. I found that some eels had been
discovered, and a very vivacious hunt was going
on, the chief Nimrods being boys. I happened to
be the first to see a huge eel wriggling from the
mouth of a pipe, and pointed him out. Two lads
at once rushed upon him. One essayed the cap-
ture with his naked hands, the other, more provi-
dent, had armed himself with a rag of woollen
cloth with which to maintain his grip more se-
curely. Hardly had this latter arrested his slip-
pery prize, when a ragged rascal, watching his op-
portunity, snatched it away, and instantly secured
it by thrusting the head into his mouth, and clos-
ing on it a set of teeth like an ivory vice. But
alas for ill-got gain ! Rob Roy's

"Good old plan,

That he should take who has the power,
And he should keep who can,"

did not serve here. There is scarce a square rood
in Rome without one or more stately cocked hats
in it, emblems of authority and police. I saw
the flash of the snow-white cross-belts, gleaming
through that dingy crowd like the panache of
Henri Quatre at Ivry, I saw the mad plunge of the
canvas-shielded head-piece, sacred and terrible as
that of Gessler ; and while the greedy throng were
dancing about the anguilliceps, each taking his

A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC 217

chance twitch at the undulating object of all wishes,
the captor dodging his head hither and thither,
(vulnerable, like Achilles, only in his 'eel, as a
Cockney tourist would say,) a pair of broad blue
shoulders parted the assailants as a ship's bows part
a wave, a pair of blue arms, terminating in gloves
of Berlin thread, were stretched forth, not in bene-
diction, one hand grasped the slippery Briseis by
the waist, the other bestowed a cuff on the jaw-bone
of Achilles, which loosened (rather by its author-
ity than its physical force) the hitherto refractory
incisors, a snuffy bandanna was produced, the pris-
oner was deposited in this temporary watch-house,
and the cocked hat sailed majestically away with
the property thus sequestered for the benefit of the
state.

" Gaudeant angnillse si mortuus sit homo ille,
Qui, quasi morte reas, excruciabat eas ! "

If you have got through that last sentence with-
out stopping for breath, you are fit to begin on the
Homer of Chapman, who, both as translator and
author, has the longest wind, (especially for a com-
parison,) without being long-winded, of all writers
I know anything of, not excepting Jeremy Taylor.

KEATS

1854

THERE are few poets whose works contain slighter
hints of their personal history than those of Keats ;
yet there are, perhaps, even fewer whose real lives,
or rather the conditions upon which they lived, are
more clearly traceable in what they have written.
To write the life of a man was formerly understood
to mean the cataloguing and placing of circum-
stances, of those things which stood about the life
and were more or less related to it, but were not
the life itself. But Biography from day to day
holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's
life, so far as its outward events are concerned,
may be made for him, as his clothes are by the
tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser mate-
rial ; but the gait and gesture show through, and
give to trappings, in themselves characterless, an
individuality that belongs to the man himself. It
is those essential facts which underlie the life and
make the individual man that are of importance,
and it is the cropping out of these upon the sur-
face that gives us indications by which to judge of
the true nature hidden below. Every man has his
block given him, and the figure he cuts will depend
very much upon the shape of that, — upon the

7 / /' /

MnAtt A/ fi-u -

i'

KEATS 219

knots and twists which existed in it from the be-
ginning. We were designed in the cradle, perhaps
earlier, and it is in finding out this design, and
shaping ourselves to it, that our years are spent
wisely. It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves
what we are not that has strewn history with so
many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Keats hardly lived long enough to develop a
well-outlined character, for that results commonly
from the resistance made by temperament to the
many influences by which the world, as it may hap-
pen then to be, endeavors to mould every one in
its own image. What his temperament was we
can see clearly, and also that it subordinated itself
more and more to the discipline of art.

JOHN KEATS, the second of four children, like
Chaucer and Spenser, was a Londoner, but, unlike
them, he was certainly not of gentle blood. Lord
Houghton, who seems to have had a kindly wish to
create him gentleman by brevet, says that he was
"born in the upper ranks of the middle class."
This shows a commendable tenderness for the
nerves of English society, and reminds one of
Northcote's story of the violin-player who, wishing
to compliment his pupil, George III., divided all
fiddlers into three classes, — those who could not
play at all, those who played very badly, and those
who played very well, — assuring his Majesty that
he had made such commendable progress as to
have already reached the second rank. We shall
not be too greatly shocked by knowing that the

220 KEA TS

father of Keats (as Lord Houghton had told us in
an earlier biography) " was employed in the estab-
lishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor of large
livery-stables on the Pavement in Moorfields, nearly
opposite the entrance into Finsbury Circus." So
that, after all, it was not so bad; for, first, Mr.
Jennings was a proprietor ; second, he was the
proprietor of an establishment ; third, he was the
proprietor of a large establishment; and fourth,
this large establishment was nearly opposite Fins-
bury Circus, — a name which vaguely dilates the
imagination with all sorts of potential grandeurs.
It is true Leigh Hunt asserts that Keats " was a
little too sensitive on the score of his origin," 1 but
we can find no trace of such a feeling either in his
poetry or in such of his letters as have been printed.
We suspect the fact to have been that he resented
with becoming pride the vulgar Blackwood and
Quarterly standard, which measured genius by
genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedi-
gree is of the best, tracing through Spenser to
Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at livery
even in the largest establishments in Moorfields.

As well as we can make out, then, the father of
Keats was a groom in the service of Mr. Jennings,
and married the daughter of his master. Thus, on
the mother's side, at least, we find a grandfather ;
on the father's there is no hint of such an ancestor,
and we must charitably take him for granted. It
is of more importance that the elder Keats was a
man of sense and energy, and that his wife was a

1 Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed.), vol. ii. p. 36.

KEATS 221

"lively and intelligent woman, who hastened the
birth of the poet by her passionate love of amuse-
ment," bringing him into the world, a seven-months'
child, on the 29th October, 1795, instead of the
29th of December, as would have been conven-
tionally proper. Lord Houghton describes her as
" tall, with a large oval face, and a somewhat sat-
urnine demeanour." This last circumstance does
not agree very well with what he had just before
told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us by add-
ing that " she succeeded, however, in inspiring her
children with the profoundest affection." This
was particularly true of John, who once, when be-
tween four and five years old, mounted guard at
her chamber door with an old sword, when she was
ill and the doctor had ordered her not to be dis-
turbed.1

In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his father
was killed by a fall from his horse. His mother
seems to have been ambitious for her children, and
there was some talk of sending John to Harrow.
Fortunately this plan was thought too expensive,
and he was sent instead to the school of Mr. Clarke
at Enfield with his brothers. A maternal uncle,
who had distinguished himself by his courage
under Duncan at Camperdown, was the hero of his
nephews, and they went to school resolved to main-
tain the family reputation for courage. John was
always fighting, and was chiefly noted among his
school-fellows as a strange compound of pluck and

1 Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord Hough-
ton's version the best.

222 KEATS

sensibility. He attacked an usher who had boxed
his brother's ears ; and when his mother died, in
1810, was moodily inconsolable, hiding himself for
several days in a nook under the master's desk,
and refusing all comfort from teacher or friend.

He was popular at school, as boys of spirit al-
ways are, and impressed his companions with a
sense of his power. They thought he would one
day be a famous soldier. This may have been
owing to the stories he told them of the heroic
uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were properly
famoused by the boy Homer, and whom they prob-
ably took for an admiral at the least, as it would
have been well for Keats's literary prosperity if he
had been. At any rate, they thought John would
be a great man, which is the main thing, for the
public opinion of the playground is truer and more
discerning than that of the world, and if you tell
us what the boy was, we will tell you what the man
longs to be, however he may be repressed by neces-
sity or fear of the police reports.

Lord Houghton has failed to discover anything
else especially worthy of record in the school-life
of Keats. He translated the twelve books of the
-ZEneid, read Robinson Crusoe and the Incas of
Peru, and looked into Shakespeare. He left school
in 1810, with little Latin and no Greek, but he
had studied Spence's Polymetis, Tooke's Pantheon,
and Lempriere's Dictionary, and knew gods,
nymphs, and heroes, which were quite as good com-
pany perhaps for him as aorists and aspirates. It
is pleasant to fancy the horror of those respectable

KEATS 223

writers if their pages could suddenly have become
alive under their pens with all that the young poet
saw in them.1

On leaving school he was apprenticed for five
years to a surgeon at Edmonton. His master was
a Mr. Hammond, " of some eminence " in his pro-
fession, as Lord Houghton takes care to assure us.
The place was of more importance than the master,
for its neighborhood to Enfield enabled him to
keep up his intimacy with the family of his former
teacher, Mr. Clarke, and to borrow books of them.
In 1812, when he was in his seventeenth year, Mr.
Charles Cowden Clarke lent him the " Faerie
Queene." Nothing that is told of Orpheus or Am-
phion is more wonderful than this miracle of Spen-
ser's, transforming a surgeon's apprentice into a
great poet. Keats learned at once the secret of

1 There is always some one willing to make himself a sort of
accessary after the fact in any success ; always an old woman or
two, ready to remember omens of all quantities and qualities in
the childhood of persons who have becorae distinguished. Ac-
cordingly, a certain "Mrs. Grafty, of Craven Street, Finsbury,"
assures Mr. George Keats, when he tells her that John is deter-
mined to be a poet, "that this was very odd, because when he
could just speak, instead of answering questions put to him, he
would always make a rhyme to the last word people said, and
then laugh." The early histories of heroes, like those of nations,
are always more or less mythical, and I give the story for what it
is worth. Doubtless there is a gleam of intelligence in it, for the
old lady pronounces it odd that any one should determine to be a
poet, and seems to have wished to hint that the matter was deter-
mined earlier and by a higher disposing power. There are few
children who do not soon discover the charm of rhyme, and per-
haps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs. Graftys of
Craven Street, Finsbury, when they have the chance. See Hay-
don's Autobiography, vol. i. p. 361.

224 KEA TS

his birth, and henceforward his indentures ran to
Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus could the
Muse defend her son. It is the old story, — the
lost heir discovered by his aptitude for what is
gentle and knightly. Hay don tells us " that he
used sometimes to say to his brother he feared
he should never be a poet, and if he was not he
would destroy himself." This was perhaps a half-
conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with whose
genius and fate he had an intense sympathy, it
may be from an inward foreboding of the shortness
of his own career.1

Before long we find him studying Chaucer, then
Shakespeare, and afterward Milton. But Chap-
man's translations had a more abiding influence
on his style both for good and evil. That he read
wisely, his comments on the " Paradise Lost " are
enough to prove. He now also commenced poet
himself, but does not appear to have neglected the
study of his profession. He was a youth of energy
and purpose, and, though he no doubt penned many
a stanza when he should have been anatomizing,
and walked the hospitals accompanied by the early
gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable exami-
nation in 1817. In the spring of this year, also,
he prepared to take his first degree as poet, and
accordingly published a small volume containing a
selection of his earlier essays in verse. It attracted

1 "I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read
some lines from (I think) the ' Bristowe Tragedy' with an en-
thusiasm of admiration such as could be felt only by a poet, and
•which true poetry only could have excited." — J. H. C., in Notes
fr Queries, 4th s. x. 157.

KEA TS 225

little attention, and the rest of this year seems to
have been occupied with a journey on foot in Scot-
land, and the composition of " Endymion," which
was published in 1818. Milton's " Tetrachordon "
was not better abused ; but Milton's assailants
were unorganized, and were obliged each to print
and pay for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to
the natural laws of demand and supply to furnish
him with readers. Keats was arraigned by the
constituted authorities of literary justice. They
might be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses,
but the sentence was published, and the penalty
inflicted before all England. The difference be-
tween his fortune and Milton's was that between
being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and
being set in the pillory. In the first case, the an-
noyance brushes off mostly with the mud ; in the
last, there is no solace but the consciousness of
suffering in a great cause. This solace, to a cer-
tain extent, Keats had ; for his ambition was
noble, and he hoped not to make a great reputa-
tion, but to be a great poet. Haydon says that
Wordsworth and Keats were the only men he had
ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty purpose.
It is curious that men should resent more fiercely
what they suspect to be good verses than what
they know to be bad morals. Is it because they
feel themselves incapable of the one and not of the
other ? Probably a certain amount of honest loyalty
to old idols in danger of dethronement is to be
taken into account, and quite as much of the cru-
elty of criticism is due to want of thought as to

226 KEA TS

deliberate injustice. However it be, the best poetry
has been the most savagely attacked, and men who
scrupulously practised the Ten Commandments as
if there were never a not in any of them, felt every
sentiment of their better nature outraged by the
" Lyrical Ballads." It is idle to attempt to show
that Keats did not suffer keenly from the vulgari-
ties of Blackwood and the Quarterly. He suffered
in proportion as his ideal was high, and he was
conscious of falling below it. In England, espe-
cially, it is not pleasant to be ridiculous, even if
you are a lord ; but to be ridiculous and an apoth-
ecary at the same time is almost as bad as it was
formerly to be excommunicated. A priori, there
was something absurd in poetry written by the son
of an assistant in the livery-stables of Mr. Jen-
nings, even though they were an establishment,
and a large establishment, and nearly opposite
Finsbury Circus. Mr. Gifford, the ex-cobbler,
thought so in the Quarterly, and Mr. Terry, the
actor, 1 thought so even more distinctly in Black-
wood, bidding the young apothecary " back to his
gallipots I " It is not pleasant to be talked down
upon by your inferiors who happen to have the
advantage of position, nor to be drenched with
ditch-water, though you know it to be thrown by
a scullion in a garret.

Keats, as his was a temperament in which sensi-
bility was excessive, could not but be galled by this
treatment. He was galled the more that he was

1 Hay don (Autobiography, vol. i. p. 379) says that he "strongly
suspects " Terry to have written the articles in Clackwood.

KEATS 227

also a man of strong sense, and capable of under-
standing clearly how hard it is to make men ac-
knowledge solid value in a person whom they have
once heartily laughed at. Reputation is in itself
cnly a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain
flame, and easily blown out, Kut it is the light by
which the world looks for and finds merit. Keats
longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve
it. To his friend Taylor he writes, " There is but
one way for me. The road lies through study, ap-
plication, and thought." Thrilling with the elec-
tric touch of sacred leaves, he saw in vision, like
Dante, that small procession of the elder poets to
which only elect centuries can add another lau-
relled head. Might he', too, deserve from posterity
the love and reverence which he paid to those an-
tique glories ? It was no unworthy ambition, but
everything was against him, — birth, health, even
friends, since it was partly on their account that
he was sneered at. His very name stood in his
way, for Fame loves best such syllables as are
sweet and sonorous on the tongue, like Spenserian,
Shakespearian. In spite of Juliet, there is a great
deal in names, and when the fairies come with
their gifts to the cradle of the selected child, let
one, wiser than the rest, choose a name for him
from which well-sounding derivatives can be made,
and, best of all, with a termination in on. Men
judge the current coin of opinion by the ring, and
are readier to take without question whatever is
Platonic, Baconian, Newtonian, Johnsonian, Wash-
ingtonian, Jeffersonian, Napoleonic, and all the

228 KEATS

rest. You cannot make a good adjective out of
Keats, — the more pity, — and to say a thing
is Keatsy is to contemn it. Fortune likes fine
names.

Haydon tells us that Keats was very much de-
pressed by the fortunes of his book. This was
natural enough, but he took it all in a manly way,
and determined to revenge himself by writing bet-
ter poetry. -He knew that activity, and not de-
spondency, is the true counterpoise to misfortune.
Haydon is sure of the change in his spirits, because
he would come to the painting-room and sit silent
for hours. But we rather think that the conversa-
tion, where Mr. Haydon was, resembled that in a
young author's first play, where the other inter-
locutors are only brought in as convenient points
for the hero to hitch the interminable web of his
monologue upon. Besides, Keats had been contin-
uing his education this year, by a course of Elgin
marbles and pictures by the great Italians, and
might very naturally have found little to say about
Mr. Hay don's extensive works, that he would have
cared to hear. Lord Houghton, on the other hand,
in his eagerness to prove that Keats was not killed
by the article in the Quarterly, is carried too far
towards the opposite extreme, and more than hints
that he was not even hurt by it. This would have
been true of Wordsworth, who, by a constant com-
panionship with mountains, had acquired some-
thing of their manners, but was simply impossible
to a man of Keats's temperament.

On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect

KEA TS 229

Keats the less for having been gifted with sensibil-
ity, and may even say what we believe to be true,
that his health was injured by the failure of his
book. A man cannot have a sensuous nature and
be pachydermatous at the same time, and if he be
imaginative as well as sensuo'us, he suffers just in
proportion to the amount of his imagination. It
is perfectly true that what we call the world, in
these affairs, is nothing more than a mere Brocken
spectre, the projected shadow of ourselves ; but so
long as we do not know this, it is a very passable
giant. We are not without experience of natures
so purely intellectual that their bodies had no more
concern in their mental doings and sufferings than
a house has with the good or ill fortune of its occu-
pant. But poets are not built on this plan, and espe-
cially poets like Keats, in whom the moral seems to
have so perfectly interfused the physical man, that
you might almost say he could feel sorrow with his
hands, so truly did his body, like that of Donne's
Mistress Boulstred, think and remember and fore-
bode. The healthiest poet of whom our civiliza-
tion has been capable says that when he beholds

" desert a beggar born,
And strength by limping sway disabeled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,"

alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his
day,

" And simple truth miscalled simplicity,"

as it was long afterward in Wordsworth's case,
" And captive Good attending Captain 111,"

230 KEA TS

that then even he, the poet to whom, of all others,
life seems to have been dearest, as it was also the
fullest of enjoyment, " tired of all these," had noth-
ing for it but to cry for " restful Death."

Keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill fortune
courageously. He certainly did not overestimate
" Endymion," and perhaps a sense of humor which
was not wanting in him may have served as a buf-
fer against the too importunate shock of disap-
pointment. " He made Ritchie promise," says
Haydon, " he would carry his 4 Endymion ' to the
great desert of Sahara and fling it in the midst."
On the 9th October, 1818, he writes to his pub-
lisher, Mr. Hessey, " I cannot but feel indebted to
those gentlemen who have taken my part. As for
the rest, I begin to get acquainted with my own
strength and weakness. Praise or blame has but a
momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty
in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his
own works. My own domestic criticism has given
me pain without comparison beyond what Black-
wood or the Quarterly could inflict ; and also, when
I feel I am right, no external praise can give me
such a glow as my own solitary reperception and
ratification of what is fine. J. S. is perfectly right
in regard to ' the slipshod Endymion.' That it is
so is no fault of mine. No ! though it may sound
a little paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to
make it by myself. Had I been nervous about its
being a perfect piece, and with that view asked
advice and trembled over every page, it would
not have been written ; for it is not in my nature

KEATS 231

to fumble. I will wri^e independently. I have
written independently without judgment. I may
write independently and with judgment^ hereafter.
The Genius of Poetry must work out its own sal-
vation in a man. It cannot be matured by law
and precept, but by sensation* and watchfulness in
itself. That which is creative must create itself.
In ' Endymion ' I leaped headlong into the sea,
and thereby have become better acquainted with
the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than
if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a
silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I
was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner
fail than not be among the greatest."

This was undoubtedly true, and it was naturally
the side which a large-minded person would display
to a friend. This is what he thought, but whether
it was what Imefelt, I think doubtful. I look upon
it rather as one of the phenomena of that mul-
tanimous nature of the poet, which makes him for
the moment that of which he has an intellectual
perception. Elsewhere he says something which
seems to hint at the true state of the case. " I
must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a
man : they make our prime objects a refuge as
well as a passion." One cannot help contrasting
Keats with Wordsworth, — the one altogether
poet ; the other essentially a Wordsworth, with
the poetic faculty added, — the one shifting from
form to form, and from style to style, and pour-
ing his hot throbbing life into every mould ; the
other remaining always the individual, producing

232 KEATS

works, and not so much living in his poems as
memorially recording his life in them. When
Wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on his
writings, he speaks serenely and generously of
Wordsworth the poet, as if he were an unbiassed
third person, who takes up the argument merely
in the interest of literature. He towers into
a bald egotism which is quite above and beyond
selfishness. Poesy was his employment ; it was
Keats's very existence, and he felt the rough treat-
ment of his verses as if it had been the wounding
of a limb. To Wordsworth, composing was a
healthy exercise ; his slow pulse and imperturbable
self-trust gave him assurance of a life so long that
he could wait ; and when we read his poems we
should never suspect the existence in him of any
sense but that of observation, as if Wordsworth
the poet were a half-mad land-surveyor, accompa-
nied by Mr. Wordsworth the distributor of stamps
as a kind of keeper. But every one of Keats's
poems was a sacrifice of vitality ; a virtue went
away from him into every one of them ; even yet,
as we turn the leaves, they seem to warm and thrill
our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and the
flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not won-
der he felt that what he did was to be done swiftly.
In the mean time his younger brother languished
and died, his elder seems to have been in some way
unfortunate and had gone to America, and Keats
himself showed symptoms of the hereditary disease
which caused his death at last. It is in October,
1818, that we find the first allusion to a passion

KEATS 233

which was erelong to consume him. It is plain
enough beforehand that those were not moral or
mental graces that should attract a man like Keats.
His intellect was satisfied and absorbed by his art,
his books, and his friends. He could have com-
panionship and appreciation from men ; what he
craved of woman was only repose. That luxurious
nature, which would have tossed uneasily on a
crumpled rose-leaf, must have something softer to
rest upon than intellect, something less ethereal
than culture. It was his body that needed to have
its equilibrium restored, the waste of his nervous
energy that must be repaired by deep draughts of
the overflowing life and drowsy tropical force of an
abundant and healthily poised womanhood. Writ-
ing to his sister-in-law, he says of this nameless
person : " She is not a Cleopatra, but is at least a
Charmian; she has a rich Eastern look; she has
fine eyes and fine manners. When she comes into a
room she makes the same impression as the beauty
of a leopardess. She is too fine and too conscious
of herself to repulse any man who may address her.
From habit, she thinks that nothing particular. I
always find myself at ease with such a woman ; the
picture before me always gives me a life and ani-
mation which I cannot possibly feel with anything
inferior. I am at such times too much occupied in
admiring to be awkward or in a tremble. I forget
myself entirely, because I live in her. You will by
this time think I am in love with her, so, before I
go any farther, I will tell you that I am not. She
kept me awake one night, as a tune of Mozart's

234 KEATS.

might do. I speak of the thing as a pastime and an
amusement, than which I can feel none deeper than
a conversation with an imperial woman, the very
yes and no of whose life [lips] is to me a banquet.
... I like her and her like, because one has no
sensation; what we both are is taken for granted.
. . . She walks across a room in such a manner
that a man is drawn toward her with magnetic
power. ... I believe, though, she has faults, the
same as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had.
Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly way ;
for there are two distinct tempers of mind in which
we judge of things, — the worldly, theatrical, and
pantomimical ; and the unearthly, spiritual, and
ethereal. In the former, Bonaparte, Lord Byron,
and this Charmian hold the first place in our minds ;
in the latter, John Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking
his childjs cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the
conquering feelings. As a man of the world, I love
the rich talk of a Charmian ; as an eternal being, I
love the thought of you. I should like her to ruin
me, and I should like you to save me."

It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his head
with such pains, while his whole body is so clearly
visible, as in this extract. This lady, it seems, is
not a Cleopatra, only a Charmian; but presently
we find that she is imperial. He does not love her,
but he would just like to be ruined by her, nothing
more. This glimpse of her, with her leopardess
beauty, crossing the room and drawing men after
her magnetically, is all we have. She seems to
have been still living in 1848, and, as Lord Hough-

KEATS 235

ton tells us, kept the memory of the poet sacred.
44 She is an East-Indian," Keats says, " and ought
to be her grandfather's .heir." Her name we do
not know. It appears from Dilke's " Papers of a
Critic " that they were betrothed : " It is quite a

settled thing between John K*eats and Miss .

God help them. It is a bad thing for them. The
mother says she cannot prevent it, and that her
only hope is that it will go off. He don't like any
one to look at her or to speak to her." Alas, the
tropical warmth became a consuming fire !

" His passion cruel grown took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous."

Between this time and the spring of 1820 he
seems to have worked assiduously. Of course,
worldly success was of more importance than ever.
He began "Hyperion," but had given it up in
September, 1819, because, as he said, " there were
too many Miltonic inversions in it." He wrote
" Lamia " after an attentive study of Dryden's
versification. This period also produced the " Eve
of St. Agnes," " Isabella," and the odes to the
"Nightingale" and to the "Grepian Urn." He
studied Italian, read Ariosto, and wrote part of a
humorous poem, " The Cap and Bells." He tried
his hand at tragedy, and Lord Houghton has pub-
lished among his "Remains," "Otho the Great,"
and all that was ever written of " King Stephen."
We think he did unwisely, for a biographer is
hardly called upon to show how ill his biographee
could do anything.

In the winter of 1820 he was chilled in riding on

236 KEA TS

the top of a stage-coach, and came home in a state
of feverish excitement. He was persuaded to go
to bed, and in getting between the cold sheets,
coughed slightly. "That is blood in my mouth,"
he said ; " bring me the candle ; let me see this
blood." It was of a brilliant red, and his medical
knowledge enabled him to interpret the augury.
Those narcotic odors that seem to breathe seaward,
and steep in repose the senses of the voyager who
is drifting toward the shore of the mysterious Other
World, appeared to envelop him, and, looking up
with sudden calmness, he said, " I know the color
of that blood ; it is arterial blood ; I cannot be de-
ceived in that color. That drop is my death-war-
rant; I must die."

There was a slight rally during the summer of
that year, but toward autumn he grew worse again,
and it was decided that he should go to Italy. He
was accompanied thither by his friend, Mr. Severn,
an artist. After embarking, he wrote to his friend,
Mr. Brown. We give a part of this letter, which is
so deeply tragic that the sentences we take almost
seem to break away from the rest with a cry of
anguish, like the branches of Dante's lamentable
wood.

" I wish to write on subjects that will not agitate
me much. There is one I must mention and have
done with it. Even if my body would recover of
itself, this would prevent it. The very thing which
I want to live most for will be a great occasion of
my death. I cannot help it. Who can help it ?
Were I in health it would make me ill, and how

KEATS 237

can I bear it in my state ? I dare say you will be
able to guess on what subject I am harping, — you
know what was my greatest pain during the first
part of my illness at your house. I wish for death
every day and night to deliver me from these pains,
and then I wish death away* for death would de-
stroy even those pains, which are better than noth-
ing. Land and sea, weakness and decline, are
great separators, but Death is the great divorcer
forever. When the pang of this thought has
passed through my mind, I may say the bitterness
of death is passed. I often wish for you, that you
might flatter me with the best. I think, without
my mentioning it, for my sake, you would be a

friend to Miss when I am dead. You think

she has many faults, but for my sake think she has
not one. If there is anything you can do for her
by word or deed I know you will do it. I am in a
state at present in which woman, merely as woman,
can have no more power over me than stocks and
stones, and yet the difference of my sensations with

respect to Miss and my sister is amazing, —

the one seems to absorb the other to a degree in-
credible. I seldom think of my brother and sister

in America ; the thought of leaving Miss is

beyond everything horrible, — the sense of dark-
ness coming over me, — I eternally see her figure
eternally vanishing ; some of the phrases she was in
the habit of using during my last nursing at Went-
worth Place ring in my ears. Is there another
life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream?
There must be ; we cannot be created for this sort
of suffering."

238 KEATS

To the same friend he writes again from Naples,
1st November, 1820 : —

" The persuasion that I shall see her no more
will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have had
her when I was in health, and I should have re-
mained well. I can bear to die, — I cannot bear
to leave her. O God ! God ! God ! Everything I
have in my trunks that reminds me of her goes
through me like a spear. The silk lining she put
in my travelling-cap scalds my head. My imagi-
nation is horribly vivid about her, — I see her, I
hear her. There is nothing in the world of suf-
ficient interest to divert me from her a moment.
This was the case when I was in England ; I can-
not recollect, without shuddering, the time that I
was a prisoner at Hunt's, and used to keep my eyes
fixed on Hampstead all day. Then there was a
good hope of seeing her again, — now ! — O that I
could be buried near where she lives ! I am afraid
to write to her, to receive a letter from her, — to
see her handwriting would break my heart. Even
to hear of her anyhow, to see her name written,
would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown,
what am I to do ? Where can I look for consola-
tion or ease ? If I had any chance of recovery,
this passion would kill me. Indeed, through the
whole of my illness, both at your house and at
Kentish Town, this fever has never ceased wearing
me out."

The two friends went almost immediately from
Naples to Rome, where Keats was treated with
great kindness by the distinguished physician, Dr.

KEATS 239

(afterward Sir James) Clark.1 But there was no
hope from the first. His disease was beyond
remedy, as his heart was beyond comfort. The
very fact that life might be happy deepened his
despair. He might not have sunk so soon, but the
waves in which he was struggling looked only the
blacker that they were shone upon by the signal-
torch that promised safety and love and rest.

It is good to know that one of Keats's last plea-
sures was in hearing Severn read aloud from a
volume of Jeremy Taylor. On first coming to
Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, but, find-
ing on the second page these lines,

"Misera me ! sollievo a me non resta
Altro che il pianto, ed il pianto e delitto,"

he laid down the book and opened it no more. On
the 14th February, 1821, Severn speaks of a change
that had taken place in him toward greater quiet-
ness and peace. He talked much, and fell at last
into a sweet sleep, in which he seemed to have
happy dreams. Perhaps he heard the soft footfall
of the angel of Death, pacing to and fro under
his window, to be his Valentine. That night he
asked to have this epitaph inscribed upon his grave-
stone : —

"HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."
On the 23d he died, without pain and as if falling
asleep. His last words were, " I am dying ; I shall

1 The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the first
house on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr. Severn's
Studio is said to have been in the Cancello over the garden gate of
the Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all Americans as the
Roman home of their countryman Crawford.

240 KEATS

die easy ; don't be frightened, be firm and thank
God it has come ! "

He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground at
Rome, in that part of it which is now disused and
secluded from the rest. A short time before his
death he told Severn that he thought his intensest
pleasure in life had been to watch the growth of
flowers ; and once, after lying peacefully awhile, he
said, " I feel the flowers growing over me." His
grave is marked by a little headstone on which are
carved somewhat rudely his name and age, and the
epitaph dictated by himself. No tree or shrub has
been planted near it, but the daisies, faithful to
their buried lover, crowd his small mound with a
galaxy of their innocent stars, more prosperous
than those under which he lived.1

In person, Keats was below the middle height,
with a head small in proportion to the breadth of
his shoulders. His hair was brown and fine, fall-
ing in natural ringlets about a face in which energy
and sensibility were remarkably mixed. Every
feature was delicately cut ; the chin was bold, and
about the mouth something of a pugnacious expres-
sion. His eyes were mellow and glowing, large,
dark, and sensitive. At the recital of a noble
action or a beautiful thought they would suffuse

1 Written in 1854. O irony of Time ! Ten years after the
poet's death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend Mr.
Dilke, that "the kindest act would be to let him rest forever in
the obscurity to which circumstances had condemned him " !
(Papers of a Critic, i. 11.) 0 Time the atoner! In 1874 I found
the grave planted with shrubs and flowers, the pious homage of
the daughter of our most eminent American sculptor.

KEATS 241

with tears, and his mouth trembled.1 Haydon says
that his eyes had an inward Delphian look that
was perfectly divine.

The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious enough,
but it should be remembered that he died at twenty-
five, and that he offends by 'superabundance and
not poverty. That he was overlanguaged at first
there can be no doubt, and in this was implied the
possibility of falling back to the perfect mean of
diction. It is only by the rich that the costly plain-
ness, which at once satisfies the taste and the im-
agination, is attainable.

Whether Keats was original or not, I do not
think it useful to discuss until it has been settled
what originality is. Lord Houghton tells us that
this merit (whatever it be) has been denied to
Keats, because his poems take the color of the
authors he happened to be reading at the time he
wrote them. But men have their intellectual an-
cestry, and the likeness of some one of them is for-
ever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a
descendant, it may be after a gap of several gen-
erations. In the parliament of the present every
man represents a constituency of the past. It is
true that Keats has the accent of the men from
whom he learned to speak, but this is to make
originality a mere question of externals, and in this
sense the author of a dictionary might bring an
action of trover against every author who used his
words. It is the man behind the words that gives
them value, and if Shakespeare help himself to a
1 Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, ii. 43.

242 KEATS

verse or a phrase, it is with ears that have learned
of him to listen that we feel the harmony of the
one, and it is the mass of his intellect that makes
the other weighty with meaning. Enough that we
recognize in Keats that indefinable newness and
unexpectedness which we call genius. The sunset
is original every evening, though for thousands of
years it has built out of the same light and vapor
its visionary cities with domes and pinnacles, and
its delectable mountains which night shall utterly
abase and destroy.

Three men, almost contemporaneous with each
other, — Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, — were
the great means of bringing back English poetry
from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering
for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensu-
ousness, and passion. Of these, Wordsworth was
the only conscious reformer, and his hostility to the
existing formalism injured his earlier poems by
tingeing them with something of iconoclastic ex-
travagance. He was the deepest thinker, Keats
the most essentially a poet, and Byron the most
keenly intellectual of the three. Keats had the
broadest mind, or at least his mind was open on
more sides, and he was able to understand Words-
worth and judge Byron, equally conscious, through
his artistic sense, of the greatnesses of the one and
the many littlenesses of the other, while Words-
worth was isolated in a feeling of his prophetic
character, and Byron had only an uneasy and jea-
lous instinct of contemporary merit. The poems of
Wordsworth, as he was the most individual, accord-

KEA TS 243

ingly reflect the moods of his own nature; those
of Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the
moods of his own taste and feeling ; and those of
Byron, who was impressible chiefly through the
understanding, the intellectual and moral wants of
the time in which he lived. Wordsworth has influ-
enced most the ideas of succeeding poets ; Keats,
their forms ; and Byron, interesting to men of im-
agination less for his writings than for what his
writings indicate, reappears no more in poetry, but
presents an ideal to youth made restless with vague
desires not yet regulated by experience nor sup-
plied with motives by the duties of life.

Keats certainly had more of the penetrative and
sympathetic imagination which belongs to the poet,
of that imagination which identifies itself with the
momentary object of its contemplation, than any
man of these later days. It is not merely that he
has studied the Elizabethans and caught their turn
of thought, but that he really sees things with their
sovereign eye, and feels them with their electrified
senses. His imagination was his bliss and bane.
Was he cheerful, he " hops about the gravel with
the sparrows " ; was he morbid, he " would reject
a Petrarcal coronation, — on account of my dying
day, and because women have cancers." So im-
pressible was he as to say that he " had no nature,"
meaning character. But he knew what the faculty
was worth, and says finely, " The imagination may
be compared to Adam's dream: he awoke and
found it truth." He had an unerring instinct for
the poetic uses of things, and for him they had no

244 KEA TS

other use. We are apt to talk of the classic re-
naissance as of a phenomenon long past, nor ever
to be renewed, and to think the Greeks and Ko-
mans alone had the mighty magic to work such a
miracle. To me one of the most interesting aspects
of Keats is that in him we have an example of the
renaissance going on almost under our own eyes,
and that the intellectual ferment was in him kin-
dled by a purely English leaven. He had properly
no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had,
but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever
could serve his purpose. His delicate senses ab-
sorbed culture at every pore. Of the self-denial
to which he trained himself (unexampled in one so
young) the second draft of Hyperion as compared
with the first is a conclusive proof. And far in-
deed is his " Lamia " from the lavish indiscrimi-
nation of " Endymion." In his Odes he showed a
sense of form and proportion which we seek vainly
in almost any other English poet, and some of his
sonnets (taking all qualities into consideration) are
the most perfect in our language. No doubt there
is something tropical and of strange overgrowth
in his sudden maturity, but it was maturity never-
theless. Happy the young poet who has the sav-
ing fault of exuberance, if he have also the shaping
faculty that sooner or later will amend it !

As every young person goes through all the
world-old experiences, fancying them something
peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with every
new generation, whose youth always finds its repre-
sentatives in its poets. Keats rediscovered the de-

KEATS 245

light and wonder that lay enchanted in the diction-
ary. Wordsworth revolted at the poetic diction
which he found in vogue, but his own language
rarely rises above it, except when it is upborne by
the thought. Keats had an instinct for fine words,
which are in themselves pictures and ideas, and
had more of the power of poetic expression than
any modern English poet. And by poetic expres-
sion I do not mean merely a vividness in particu-
lars, but the right feeling which heightens or sub-
dues a passage or a whole poem to the proper tone,
and gives entireness to the effect. There is a great
deal more than is commonly supposed in this choice
of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a
great degree vassals of him who invents a new
phrase or reapplies an old epithet. The thought
or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his
at last who utters it best. This power of language
is veiled in the old legends which make the invis-
ible powers the servants of some word. As soon
as we have discovered the word for our joy or
sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its lords.
We reward the discoverer of an anesthetic for the
body and make him member of all the societies,
but him who finds a nepenthe for the soul we elect
into the small academy of the immortals.

The poems of Keats mark an epoch in English
poetry ; for, however often we may find traces of
it in others, in them found its most unconscious
expression that reaction against the barrel-organ
style which had been reigning by a kind of sleepy
divine right for half a century. The lowest point

246 KEATS

was indicated when there was such an utter con-
founding of the common and the uncommon sense
that Dr. Johnson wrote verse and Burke prose.
The most profound gospel of criticism was, that
nothing was good poetry that could not be trans-
lated into good prose, as if one should say that the
test of sufficient moonlight was that tallow-candles
could be made of it. We find Keats at first going
to the other extreme, and endeavoring to extract
green cucumbers from the rays of tallow ; but we
see also incontestable proof of the greatness and
purity of his poetic gift in the constant return
toward equilibrium and repose in his later poems.
And it is a repose always lofty and clear-aired, like
that of the eagle balanced in incommunicable sun-
shine. In him a vigorous understanding developed
itself in equal measure with the divine faculty ;
thought emancipated itself from expression without
becoming in turn its tyrant ; and music and meaning
floated together, accordant as swan and shadow, on
the smooth element of his verse. Without losing
its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and grew
more inward, and the sensational was elevated into
the typical by the control of that finer sense which
underlies the senses and is the spirit of them.

LIBRARY OF OLt> AUTHORS1

1858-1864

MANY of our older readers can remember the
anticipation with which they looked for each suc-
cessive volume of the late Dr. Young's excellent
series of old English prose-writers, and the delight
with which they carried it home, fresh from the
press and the bindery in its appropriate livery of
evergreen. To most of us it was our first intro-
duction to the highest society of letters, and we
still feel grateful to the departed scholar who gave
us to share the conversation of such men as Lati-
mer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, and
Walton. What a sense of security in an old book
which Time has criticised for us ! What a pre-
cious feeling of seclusion in having a double wall of
centuries between us and the heats and clamors of
contemporary literature ! How limpid seems the
thought, how pure the old wine of scholarship that
has been settling for so mary generations in those
silent crypts and Falernian amphorm of the Past !
No other writers speak to us with the authority of
those whose ordinary speech was that of our trans-
lation of the Scriptures ; to no modern is that
frank unconsciousness possible which was natural
1 London : John Russell Smith. 1856-64.

248 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

to a period when yet reviews were not ; and no
later style breathes that country charm characteris-
tic of days ere the metropolis had drawn all lit-
erary activity to itself, and the trampling feet of
the multitude had banished the lark and the daisy
from the fresh privacies of language. Truly, as
compared with the present, these old voices seem
to come from the morning fields and not the paved
thoroughfares of thought.

Even the " Retrospective Review " continues to
be good reading, in virtue of the antique aroma
(for wine only acquires its bouquet by age) which
pervades its pages. Its sixteen volumes are so
many tickets of admission to the vast and devious
vaults of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
through which we wander, tasting a thimbleful
of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, or subacidulous
Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy
chooses. The years during which this review was
published were altogether the most fruitful in gen-
uine appreciation of old English literature. Books
were prized for their imaginative and not their an-
tiquarian value by young writers who sate at the
feet of Lamb and Coleridge. Rarities of style, of
thought, of fancy, were sought, rather than the bar-
ren scarcities of typography. But another race of
men seems to have sprung up, in whom the futile
enthusiasm of the collector predominates, who sub-
stitute archaeologic perversity for fine-nerved schol-
arship, and the worthless profusion of the curiosity-
shop for the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet of
Art. They forget, in their fanaticism for anti-

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 249

quity, that the dust of never so many centuries is
impotent to transform a curiosity into a gem, that
only good books absorb mellowness of tone from
age, and that a baptismal register which proves a
patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) cannot
make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous
commonplace entertaining. There are volumes
which have the old age of Plato, rich with gath-
ering experience, meditation, and wisdom, which
seem to have sucked color and ripeness from the
genial autumns of all the select intelligences that
have steeped them in the sunshine of their love and
appreciation; — these quaint freaks of russet tell of
Montaigne ; these stripes of crimson fire, of Shake-
speare; this sober gold, of Sir Thomas Browne;
this purpling bloom, of Lamb ; in such fruits we
taste the legendary gardens of Alcinoiis and the
orchards of Atlas ; and there are volumes again
which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old
Parr or older Jenkins, which have outlived their
half-dozen of kings to be the prize of showmen and
treasuries of the born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a
hundred years ago.

We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives
all books a value in our eyes ; there is for us a
recondite wisdom in the phrase, "A book is a
book " ; from the time when we made the first cat-
alogue of our library, in which " Bible, large, 1
vol.," and " Bible, small, 1 vol.," asserted their al-
phabetic individuality and were the sole J9s in our
little hive, we have had a weakness even for those
checker-board volumes that only fill up. We can-

250 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

not breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-
denial, that Himalayan selectness, which, content
with one bookcase, would have no tomes in it but
porphyrogeniti, books of the bluest blood, making
room for choicer new-comers by a continuous ostra-
cism to the garret of present incumbents. There
is to us a sacredness in a volume, however dull ;
we live over again the author's lonely labors and
tremulous hopes ; we see him, on his first appear-
ance after parturition, " as well as could be ex-
pected," a nervous sympathy yet surviving between
the late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous
offspring, as he doubtfully enters the Mermaid, or
the Devil Tavern, or the Coffee-house of Will or
Button, blushing under the eye of Ben or Dryden
or Addison, as if they must needs know him for
the author of the " Modest Enquiry into the Pre-
sent State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the " Uni-
ties briefly considered by Philomusus," of which
they have never heard and never will hear so much
as the names ; we see the country-gentlemen (sale
cause of its surviving to our day) who buy it as a
book no gentleman's library can be complete with-
out ; we see the spendthrift heir, whose horses and
hounds and Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned
in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to the hammer, the
tall octavo in tree:calf following the ancestral oaks
of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But
it must be the original foundling of the book-stall,
the engraved blazon of some extinct baronetcy
within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial-
flowers of some passion which the churchyard

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 251

smothered ere the Stuarts were yet discrowned,
suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here

oO

and there with ashes from the pipe of some dozing
poet, its binding worn and weather-stained, that
has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of Malone,
or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between
desire and the odd sixpence. When it comes to a
question of reprinting, we are more choice. The
new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared
with its battered prototype that could draw us with
a single hair of association.

It is not easy to divine the rule which has gov-
erned Mr. Smith in making the selections for his
series. A choice of old authors should be zflorile-
gium, and not a botanist's hortus siccus, to which
grasses are as important as the single shy blossom
of a summer. The old-maidenly genius of anti-
quarianism seems to have presided over the editing
of the " Library." We should be inclined to sur-
mise that the works to be reprinted had been com-
monly suggested by gentlemen with whom they
were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that
their own names should be signalized on the title-
pages with the suffix of EDITOR. The volumes al-
ready published are : Increase Mather's " Remark-
able Providences " ; the poems of Drummond of
Hawthornden ; the " Visions of Piers Ploughman" ;
the works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Over-
bury ; the " Hymns and Songs " and the " Hallelu-
jah " of George Wither ; the poems of Southwell ;
Selden's "Table-Talk"; the "Enchiridion" of
Quarles ; the dramatic works of Marston, Webster,

252 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

and Lilly ; Chapman's translation of Homer ;
Lovelace, and four volumes of "Early English
Poetry." The volume of Mather is curious and
entertaining, and fit to stand on the same shelf with
the " Magnalia " of his book-suffocated son. Cun-
ningham's comparatively recent edition, we should
think, might satisfy for a long time to come the
demand for Drummond, whose chief value to pos-
terity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas
Overbury's " Characters " are interesting illustra-
tions of contemporary manners, and a mine of foot-
notes to the works of better men, — but, with the
exception of " The Fair and Happy Milkmaid,"
they are dull enough to have pleased James the
First ; his " Wife " is a cento of far-fetched con-
ceits, — here a tomtit, and there a hen mistaken for
a pheasant, like the contents of a cockney's game-
bag, and his chief interest for us lies in his having
been mixed up with an inexplicable tragedy and
poisoned in the Tower, not without suspicion of
royal complicity. The " Piers Ploughman " is a
reprint, with very little improvement that we can
discover, of Mr. Wright's former edition. It would
have been very well to have republished the " Fair
Virtue," and " Shepherd's Hunting " of George
Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever
wrote; but we can imagine nothing more dreary
than the seven hundred pages of his " Hymns and
Songs," whose only use, that we can conceive of,
would be as penal reading for incorrigible poetas-
ters. If a steady course of these did not bring them
out of their nonsenses, nothing short of hanging

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 253

would. Take this as a sample, hit on by opening
at random : —

" Rottenness my bones possest ;
Trembling fear possessed me ;
I that troublous day might rest :
For, when his approaches be
Onward to the people made,
His strong troops will them invade."

Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases
David, putting into his mouth such punning con-
ceits as " fears are my feres," and in his " Saint
Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and
shortest-spoken of thr> Apostles drawl through
thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the
distinctions between the north and northeast sides
of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It
does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for
his faith, he is able to write good verses. We
would almost match the fortitude that quails not at
the good Jesuit's poems with his own which carried
him serenely to the fatal tree. The stuff of which
poets are made, whether finer or not, is of a very
different fibre from that which is used in the tough
fabric of martyrs. It is time that an earnest pro-
test should be uttered against the wrong done to
the religions sentiment by the greater part of what
is called religious poetry, but which is commonly a
painful something misnamed by the noun and mis-
qualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and
make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Proph-
ets which has the glow and wide -orbited metre
of constellations, may be a useful occupation to
keep country-gentlemen out of litigation or retired

254 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

clergymen from polemics ; but to regard these
metrical mechanics as sacred because nobody wishes
to touch them, as meritorious because no one can
be merry in their company, — to rank them in the
same class with those ancient songs of the Church,
sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling with the
tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the
fervor of martyrs, — nay, to set them up beside
such poems as those of Herbert, composed in the
upper chambers of the soul that open toward the
sun's rising, is to confound piety with dulness, and
the manna of heaven with its sickening namesake
from the apothecary's drawer. The " Enchiridion "
of Quarles is hardly worthy of the author of the
" Emblems," and is by no means an unattainable
book in other editions, — nor a matter of heart-
break, if it were. Of the dramatic works of Mars-
ton and Lilly it is enough to say that they are truly
works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor,
as literature, worth the paper they blot. They seem
to have been deemed worthy of republication be-
cause they were the contemporaries of true poets ;
and if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century
will buy their plays on the same principle, the sale
will be a remunerative one. It was worth while,
perhaps, to reprint Lovelace, if only to show what
dull verses may be written by a man who has made
one lucky hit. Of the "Early English Poetry,"
nine tenths had better never have been printed at
all, and the other tenth reprinted by an editor who
had some vague suspicion, at least, of what they
meant. The Homer of Chapman is so precious a

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 255

gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith's
shortcomings in consideration of it. It is a vast
placer, full of nuggets for the philologist and the
lover of poetry.

Having now run cursorily through the series of
Mr. Smith's reprints, we come to the closer ques-
tion of How are they edited ? Whatever the merit
of the original works, the editors, whether self-
elected or chosen by the publisher, should be ac-
curate and scholarly. The editing of the Homer
we can heartily commend ; and Dr. Bimbault, who
carried the works of Overbury through the press,
has done his work well ; but the other volumes of
the Library are very creditable neither to English
scholarship nor to English typography. The Intro-
ductions to some of them are enough to make us
think that we are fallen to the necessity of re-
printing our old authors because the art of writ-
ing correct and graceful English has been lost.
William B. Turnbull, Esq., of Lincoln's Inn, Bar-
rister at Law, says, for instance, in his Introduction
to Southwell : " There was resident at Uxendon,
near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a Catholic
family of the name of Bellamy whom [which]
Southwell was i^ the habit of visiting and provid-
ing with religious instruction when he exchanged
his ordinary [ordinarily] close confinement for
a purer atmosphere " (p. xxii.) Again, (p. xxii,)
" He had, in this manner, for six years, pursued,
with very great success, the objects of his mission,
when these were abruptly terminated by his foul
betrayal into the hands of his enemies in 1592."

256 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

We should like to have Mr. Turnbull explain how
the objects of a mission could be terminated by a
betrayal, however it might be with the mission it-
self. From the many similar flowers in the Intro-
duction to Mather's " Providences," by Mr. George
Offor, (in whom, we fear, we recognize a country-
man,) we select the following : " It was at this
period when, [that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand
of persecution, our Pilgrim Fathers, threatened
with torture and death, succumbed not to man, but
trusting on [in] an almighty arm, braved the dan-
gers of an almost unknown ocean, and threw them-
selves into the arms of men called savages, who
proved more beneficent than national Christians."
To whom or what our Pilgrim Fathers did succumb,
and what " national Christians " are, we leave, with
the song of the Sirens, to conjecture. Speaking of
the "Providences," Mr. Offor says, that " they
faithfully delineate the state of public opinion two
hundred years ago, the most striking feature being
an implicit faith in the power of the [in-] visible
world to hold visible intercourse with man : — not
the angels to bless poor erring mortals, but of de-
mons imparting power to witches and warlocks to
injure, terrify and destroy," — a sentence which we
defy any witch or warlock, though he were Michael
Scott himself, to parse with the astutest demonic
aid. On another page, he says of Dr. Mather, that
"he was one of the first divines who discovered
that very many strange events, which were con-
sidered preternatural, had occurred in the course
of nature or by deceitful juggling ; that the Devil

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 257

could not speak English, nor prevail with Protes-
tants ; the smell of herbs alarms the Devil ; that
medicine drives out Satan ! " We do not wonder
that Mr. Offor put a mark of exclamation at the end
of this surprising sentence, but we do confess our
astonishment that the vermilion pencil of the proof-
reader suffered it to pass unchallenged. Leaving its
bad English out of the question, we find, on refer-
ring to Mather's text, that he was never guilty of the
absurdity of believing that Satan was less eloquent
in English than in any other language ; that it was
the British (Welsh) tongue which a certain demon
whose education had been neglected (not the Devil)
could not speak ; that Mather is not fool enough to
say that the Fiend cannot prevail with Protestants,
nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor that
medicine drives him out. Anything more helplessly
inadequate than Mr. Offer's preliminary disserta-
tion on Witchcraft we never read ; but we could
hardly expect much from an editor whose citations
from the book he is editing show that he had
either not read or not understood it.

Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclas-
tic, — not sparing, as we have seen, even Priscian's
head among the rest ; but, en revanche, Mr. Turn-
bull is ultramontane beyond the editors of the Ci-
mlta Cattolica. He allows himself to say, that,
"after Southwell's death, one of his sisters, a
Catholic in heart, but timidly and blamably sim-
ulating heresy, wrought, with some relics of the
martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with des-
perate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the

258 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

skill of all physicians." Mr. Turnbull is, we sus-
pect, a recent convert, or it would occur to him
that doctors are still secure of a lucrative prac-
tice in countries full of the relics of greater saints
than even Southwell. That father was hanged
(according to Protestants) for treason, and the
relic which put the whole pharmacopoeia to shame
was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. But what-
ever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and how-
ever it may gratify Mr. Turnbull' s catechumen-
ical enthusiasm to exalt the curative properties of
this integument of his, even at the expense of
Jesuits' bark, we cannot but think that he has
shown a credulity that unfits him for writing a
fair narrative of his hero's life,, or making a toler-
ably just estimate of his verses. It is possible,
however, that these last seem prosaic as a necktie
only to heretical readers.

We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs.
Turnbull and Offor for special animadversion be-
cause they are on the whole the worst, both of
them being offensively sectarian, while that of Mr.
Offor in particular gives us almost no informa-
tion whatever. Some of the others are not with-
out grave faults, chief among which is a vague
declamation, especially out of place in critical
essays, where it serves only to weary the reader
and awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to
Wither's " Hallelujah," for instance, Mr. Farr in-
forms us that "nearly all the best poets of the
latter half of the sixteenth century — for that was
the period when the Reformation was fully es-

LIBRARY Of OLD AUTHORS 259

tablished — and the whole of the seventeenth cen-
tury were sacred poets," and that " even Shake-
speare and the contemporary dramatists of his
age sometimes attuned their well-strung harps to
the songs of Zion." Comment on statements like
these would be as useless as the assertions them-
selves are absurd.

We have quoted these examples only to justify
us in saying that Mr. Smith must select his editors
with more care if he wishes that his " Library
of Old Authors " should deserve the confidence
and thereby gain the good word of intelligent
readers, — without which such a series can neither
win nor keep the patronage of the public. It is
impossible that men who cannot construct an Eng-
lish sentence correctly, and who do not know the
value of clearness in writing, should be able to
disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have
tied in the thread of an old author's meaning;
and it is more than doubtful whether they who as-
sert carelessly, cite inaccurately, and write loosely
are not by nature disqualified for doing thoroughly
what they undertake to do. If it were unreason-
able to demand of every one who assumes to edit
one of our early poets the critical acumen, the
genial sense, the illimitable reading, the philologi-
cal scholarship, which in combination would alone
make the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to
expect some one of these qualifications singly, and
we have the right to insist upon patience and accu-
racy, which are within the reach of every one,
and without which all the others are wellnigh

260 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

vain. Now to this virtue of accuracy Mr. Offor
specifically lays claim in one of his remarkable
sentences. "We are bound to admire," he says,
" the accuracy and beauty of this specimen of
typography. Following in the path of my late
friend William Pickering, our publisher rivals
the Aldine and Elzevir presses, which have been
so universally admired." We should think that
it was the product of those presses which had
been admired, and that Mr. Smith presents a
still worthier object of admiration when he con-
trives to follow a path and rival a press at the
same time. But let that pass ; — it is the claim
to accuracy which we dispute ; and we deliberately
affirm, that, so far as we are able to judge by
the volumes we have examined, no claim more
unfounded was ever set up. In some cases, as
we shall show presently, the blunders of the origi-
nal work have been followed with painful accu-
racy in the reprint ; but many others have been
added by the carelessness of Mr. Smith's printers
or editors. In the thirteen pages of Mr. Offer's
own Introduction we have found as many as seven
typographical errors, — unless some of them are
to be excused on the ground that Mr. Offer's stud-
ies have not yet led him into those arcana where
we are taught such recondite mysteries of lan-
guage as that verbs agree with their nominatives.
In Mr. Farr's Introduction to the " Hymns and
Songs" nine short extracts from other poems of
Wither are quoted, and in these we have found
no less than seven misprints or false readings

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 261

which materially affect the sense. Textual in-
accuracy is a grave fault in the new edition of
an old poet; and Mr. Farr is not only liable to
this charge, but also to that of making blunder-
ing misstatements which are calculated to mislead
the careless or uncritical reader. Infected by the
absurd cant which has been prevalent for the last
dozen years among literary sciolists, he says, —
" The language used by Wither in all his vari-
ous works — whether secular or sacred — is pure
Saxon." Taken literally, this assertion is mani-
festly ridiculous, and, allowing it every possible
limitation, it is not only untrue of Wither, but
of every English poet, from Chaucer down. The
translators of our Bible made use of the German
version, and a poet versifying the English Scrip-
tures would therefore be likely to use more words
of Teutonic origin than in his original composi-
tions. But no English poet can write English
poetry except in English, — that is, in that com-
pound of Teutonic and Romanic which derives its
heartiness and strength from the one and its ca-
norous elegance from the other. The Saxon lan-
guage does not sing, and, though its tough mor-
tar serve to hold together the less compact Latin
words, porous with vowels, it is to the Latin that
our verse owes majesty, harmony, variety, and
the capacity for rhyme. A quotation of six lines
from Wither ends at the top of the very page
on which Mr. Farr lays down his extraordinary
dictum, and we will let this answer him, Itali-
cizing the words of Romance derivation : —

262 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

" Her true beauty leaves behind
Apprehensions in the mind,
Of more sweetness than all art
Or inventions can impart ;
Thoughts too deep to be expressed,
And too strong to be suppressed."

Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the
Works of Marston, (vol. i. p. xxii,) says, " The
dramas now collected together are reprinted abso-
lutely from the early editions, which were placed
in the hands of our printers, who thus had the ad-
vantage of following them without the intervention
of a transcriber. They are given as nearly as pos-
sible in their original state, the only moderniza-
tions attempted consisting in the alternations of the
letters i andj, and u and w, the retention of which "
(does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the " alter-
nations " ?) " would have answered no useful pur-
pose, while it would have unnecessarily perplexed
the modern reader."

This is not very clear ; but as Mr. Halliwell is
a member of several learned foreign societies, and
especially of the Royal Irish Academy, perhaps it
would be unfair to demand that he should write
clear English. As one of Mr. Smith's editors, it
was to be expected that he should not write it id-
iomatically. Some malign constellation (Taurus,
perhaps, whose infaust aspect may be supposed to
preside over the makers of bulls and blunders)
seems to have been in conjunction with heavy Sat-
urn when the Library was projected. At the top
of the same page from which we have made our
quotation, Mr. Halliwell speaks of " conveying a

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 263

favorable impression on modern readers." It was
surely to no such phrase as this that Ensign Pistol
alluded when he said, " Convey the wise it call."

A literal reprint of an old author may be of value
in two ways : the orthography may in certain cases
indicate the ancient pronunciation, or it may put
us on a scent which shall lead us to the burrow of
a word among the roots of language. But in order
to this, it surely is not needful to undertake the re-
production of all the original errors of the press ;
and even were it so, the proofs of carelessness in
the editorial department are so glaring, that we
are left in doubt, after all, if we may congratulate
ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders of
the Elizabethan type-setters in their integrity, and
without any debasement of modern alloy. If it be
gratifying to know that there lived stupid men be-
fore our contemporary Agamemnons in that kind,
yet we demand absolute accuracy in the report of
the phenomena in order to arrive at anything like
safe statistics. For instance, we find (vol. i. p.
89) "AcTtrs SECUNDUS, SCENA PRIMUS," and
(vol. iii. p. 174) " exit ambo" and we are inter-
ested to know that in a London printing-house, two
centuries and a half ago, there was a philanthro-
pist who wished to simplify the study of the Latin
language by reducing all the nouns to one gender
and all the verbs to one number. Had his emanci-
pated theories of grammar prevailed, how much
easier would that part of boys which cherubs want
have found the school-room benches ! How would
birchen bark, as an educational tonic, have fallen

264 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

in repute ! How white would have been the (now
black-and-blue) memories of Dr. Busby and so
many other educational lictors, who, with their
bundles of rods, heralded not alone the consuls, but
all other Roman antiquities to us ! We dare not,
however, indulge in the grateful vision, since there
are circumstances which lead us to infer that Mr.
Halliwell himself (member though he be of so
many learned societies) has those vague notions of
the speech of ancient Rome which are apt to pre-
vail in regions which count not the betula in their
Flora. On page xv of his Preface, he makes
Drummond say that Ben Jonson " was dilated "
(delated, — Gifford gives it in English, accused)
" to the king by Sir James Murray," — Ben, whose
corpulent person stood in so little need of that ma-
licious increment !

What is Mr. Halliwell's conception of editorial
duty ? As we read along, and the once fair com-
plexion of the margin grew more and more pitted
with pencil-marks, like that of a bad proof-sheet,
we began to think that he was acting on the prin-
ciple of every man his own washerwoman, — that
he was making blunders of set purpose, (as teach-
ers of languages do in their exercises,) in order
that we might correct them for ourselves, and so
fit us in time to be editors also, and members of
various learned societies, even as Mr. Halliwell
himself is. We fancied, that, magnanimously wav-
ing aside the laurel with which a grateful posterity
crowned General Wade, he wished us " to see these
roads 'before they were made," and develop our in-

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 265

tellectual muscles in getting over them. But no ;
Mr. Halliwell has appended notes to his edition,
and among them are some which correct misprints,
and therefore seem to imply that he considers that
service as belonging properly jfco the editorial func-
tion. We are obliged, then, to give up our theory
that his intention was to make every reader an ed-
itor, and to suppose that he wished rather to show
how disgracefully a book might be edited and yet
receive the commendation of professional critics
who read with the ends of their fingers. If this
were his intention, Marston himself never published
so biting a satire.

Let us look at a few of the intricate passages, to
help us through which Mr. Halliwell lends us the
light of his editorial lantern. In the Induction to
" What you Will " occurs the striking and unusual
phrase, "Now out up-pont," and Mr. Halliwell
favors us with the following note: "Page 221,
line 10. Up-pont. — That is, upon V Again in
the same play we find, —

" Let twattling fame cheatd others rest,
I um no dish for rumors feast."

Of course, it should read, —

" Let twattling [twaddling] Fame cheate others' rest,
I am no dish for Rumor's feast."

Mr. Halliwell comes to our assistance thus : " Page
244, line 21, [22 it should be,] I um, — a printer's
error for I am." Dignus vindice nodus ! Five
lines above, we have " whole " for " who '11," and
four lines below, " helmeth " for " whelmeth " ; but

266 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

Mr. Halliwell vouchsafes no note. In the " Fawn "
we read, " Wise neads use few words," and the
editor says in a note, " a misprint for heads " !
Kind Mr. Halliwell!

Having given a few examples of our " Editor's "
corrections, we proceed to quote a passage or two
which, it is to be presumed, he thought perfectly
clear.

" A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap,
A button'd frizado sute, skarce eate good meate,
Anchoves, caviare, but bee's satyred
And term'd phantasticall. By the muddy spawne
Of slymie neughtes, when troth, phantasticknesse
That which the naturall sophysters tearme
Phantusia incomplexa — is a function
Even of the bright immortal part of man.
It is the common passe, the sacred dore,
Unto the prive chamber of the soule ;
That bar'd, nought passe th past the baser court
Of outward scence by it th' inamorate
Most lively thinkes he sees the absent beauties
Of his lov'd mistres." (Vol. i. p. 241.)

In this case, also, the true readings are clear
enough : —

"And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn
Of slimy newts";

and

"... past the baser court
Of outward sense " ; —

but, if anything was to be explained, why are we
here deserted by our fida compagna? Again,
(vol. ii. pp. 55, 56,) we read, " This Granuffo is
a right wise good lord, a man of excellent discourse,
and never speakes his signes to me, and men of

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 267

profound reach instruct aboundantly ; hee begges
suites with signes, gives thanks with signes," etc.
This Granuffo is qualified among the "Interloc-
utors " as "a silent lord," and what fun there is
in the character (which, it must be confessed, is
rather of a lenten kind) consists in his genius for
saying nothing. It is plain enough that the pas-
sage should read, " a man of excellent discourse,
and never speaks ; his signs to me and men of pro-
found reach instruct abundantly," etc.

In both the passages we have quoted, it is not
difficult for the reader to set the text right. But
if not difficult for the reader, it should certainly
not have been so for the editor, who should have
done what Broome was said to have done for Pope
in his Homer, — " gone before and swept the way."
An edition of an English author ought to be intel-
ligible to English readers, and, if the editor do not
make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two cen-
turies lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes
to play the gentleman-usher. A play written in
our own tongue should not be as tough to us as
JEschylus to a ten years' graduate, nor do we wish
to be reduced to the level of a chimpanzee, and
forced to gnaw our way through a thick shell of
misprints and mispointings only to find (as is gen-
erally the case with Marston) a rancid kernel of
meaning after all. But even Marston sometimes
deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that
age could hardly help doing, and one of the few
instances of it is in a speech of Erichiho^ in the
first scene of the fourth act of " Sophonisba,"

268 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

(vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. Halliwell presents to
us in this shape : —

" hardby the reverent (!) mines
Of a once glorious temple rear'd to Jove
Whose very rubbish . . ' . •

. . yet beares

A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac'd, [razed,]
Hurl'd down by wrath and lust of impious kings,
So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing
Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow,
The ill-voyc'd raven, and still chattering pye,
Send out ungratef ull sounds and loathsome filth ;
Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs,

Where tombs and beautious urnes of well dead men
Stood in assured rest," etc.

The last verse and a half are worthy of Chapman ;
but why did not Mr. Halliwell, who explains up-
pont and / um, change " Joves acts were vively
limbs" to "Jove's acts were lively limned," which
was unquestionably what Marston wrote ?

In the " Scourge of Villanie," (vol. iii. p. 252,)
there is a passage which till lately had a modern
application in America, though happily archaic in
England, which Mr. Halliwell suffers to stand
thus : —

" Once Albion lived in such a cruel age
Than man did hold by servile vilenage :
Poore brats were slaves of bondmen that were borne,
And marted, sold : but that rude law is torne
And disannuld, as too too inhumane."

This should read —

" Man man did hold in servile villanage ;
Poor brats were slaves (of bondmen that were born) " ;

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 269

and perhaps some American poet will one day write
in the past tense similar verses of the barbarity of
his forefathers.

We will give one more scrap of Mr. Halli well's

text : —

" Yfaith, why then, caprichious mirth,
Skip, light moriscoes, in our frolick blond,
Flagg'd veines, sweete, plump with fresh-infused joyes! "

which Marston, doubtless, wrote thus : —

"Pfaith, why then, capricious Mirth,
Skip light moriscoes in our frolic blood !
Flagg'd veins, swell plump with IreaL-infused joys ! "

We have quoted only a few examples from
among the scores that we had marked, and against
such a style of " editing " we invoke the shade of
Marston himself. In the Preface to the Second
Edition of the " Fawn," he says, " Reader, know I
have perused this coppy, to make some satisfaction
for the first faulty impression; yet so argent hath
been my business that some errors have styll passed,
which thy discretion may amend"

Literally, to be sure, Mr. Halliwell has availed
himself of the permission of the poet, in leaving all
emendation to the reader ; but certainly he has
been false to the spirit of it in his self-assumed
office of editor. The notes to explain up-pont and
/ um give us a kind of standard of the highest
intelligence which Mr. Halliwell dares to take for
granted in the ordinary reader. Supposing this
nousometer of his to be a centigrade, in what hith-
erto unconceived depths of cold obstruction can he
find his zero-point of entire idiocy? The expansive

270 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

force of average wits cannot be reckoned upon, as
we see, to drive them up as far as the temperate
degree of misprints in one syllable, and those, too,
in their native tongue. A fortiori, then, Mr.
Halliwell is bound to lend us the aid of his great
learning wherever his author has introduced foreign
words and the old printers have made pie of them.
In a single case he has accepted his responsibility
as dragoman, and the amount of his success is not
such as to give us any poignant regret that he has
everywhere else left us to our own devices. On
p. 119, vol. ii., Francischina, a Dutchwoman,
exclaims, " O, mine aderliver love." Here is Mr.
Halli well's note : "Aderliver. — This is the speak-
er's error for alder-liever, the best beloved by all."
Certainly not " the speaker's error," for Marston
was no such fool as intentionally to make a Dutch-
woman blunder in her own language. But is it an
error for alderliever ? No, but for alderliefster.
Mr. Halliwell might have found it in many an old
Dutch song. For example, No. 96 of Hoffmann
von Fallersleben's " Niederlandische Volkslieder "
begins thus : —

" Mijn hert altijt heeft verlanghen
Naer u, die alder lief ste mijn."

But does the word mean " best beloved by all " ?
No such thing, of course ; but " best beloved of
all," — that is, by the speaker.

In " Antonio and Mellida " (vol. i. pp. 50, 51)
occur some Italian verses, and here we hoped to
fare better; for Mr. Halliwell (as we learn from
the title-page of his Dictionary) is a member of

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 271

the " Reale Academia di Firenze" This is the
Accademia della Crusca, founded for the conserva-
tion of the Italian language in its purity, and it is
rather a fatal symptom that Mr. Halliwell should
indulge in the heresy of spelling Accademia with
only one c. But let us see what our Della Orus-
can's notions of conserving are. Here is a speci-
men : —

"Bassiammi, coglier 1' aura odorata
Che in sua neggia in quello dolce labra.
Darami pirapero del tuo gradit' amore."

It is clear enough that we ought to read, —

" Lasciami coglier, . . . Che ha sua seggia, . . . Dammi 1' im-
pero."

A Delia Cruscan academician might at least have
corrected by his dictionary the spelling and number
of labra.

We think that we have sustained our indictment
of Mr. Halli well's text with ample proof. The title
of the book should have been, " The Works of John
Marston, containing all the Misprints of the origi-
nal Copies, together with a few added for the first
Time in this Edition, the whole carefully let alone
by James Orchard Halliwell, F. R. S., F. S. A."
It occurs to us that Mr. Halliwell may be also a
Fellow of the Geological Society, and may have
caught from its members the enthusiasm which
leads him to attach so extraordinary a value to
every goose-track of the Elizabethan formation. It
is bad enough to be, as Marston was, one of those
middling poets whom neither gods nor men nor
columns (Horace had never seen a newspaper)

272 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

tolerate ; but, really, even they do not deserve the
frightful retribution of being reprinted by a Halli-
well.

We have said that we could not feel even the
dubious satisfaction of knowing that the blunders
of the old copies had been faithfully followed in the
reprinting. We see reason for doubting whether
Mr. Halliwell ever read the proof-sheets. In his
own notes we have found several mistakes. For
instance, he refers to p. 159 when he means p. 153 ;
he cites " I, but her life" instead of " Up " ; and
he makes Spenser speak of " old Pithonus." Mar-
ston is not an author of enough importance to make
it desirable that we should be put in possession of
all the corrupted readings of his text, were such
a thing possible even with the most minute pains-
taking, and Mr. Halli well's edition loses its only
claim to value the moment a doubt is cast upon
the accuracy of its inaccuracies. It is a matter of
special import to us (whose means of access to
originals are exceedingly limited) that the English
editors of our old authors should be faithful and
trustworthy, and we have singled out Mr. Halli-
well's Marston for particular animadversion only
because we think it on the whole the worst edition
we ever saw of any author.

Having exposed the condition in which our editor
has left the text, we proceed to test his competency
in another respect, by examining some of the em-
endations and explanations of doubtful passages
which he proposes. These are very few ; but had
they been even fewer, they had been too many.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 273

Among the dramatis personce, of the " Fawn,"
as we said before, occurs " Granuffo, a silent lord"
He speaks only once during the play, and that in
the last scene. In Act I. Scene 2, Gonzago says,
speaking to Granuffo, —

" Now, sure, thou art a man
Of a most learned scilence, and one whose words
Have bin most pretious to me."

This seems quite plain, but Mr. Halliwell anno-
tates thus : " Scilence. — Query, science ? The com-
mon reading, silence, may, however, be what is in-
tended/' That the spelling should have troubled
Mr. Halliwell is remarkable ; for elsewhere we find
" god-boy " for " good-bye," " seace " for " cease,"
"bodies" for "boddice," "pollice" for "policy,"
"pitittying" for "pitying," " scence " for "sense,"
"Misenzius" for " Mezentius," "Ferazes" for
" Ferrarese," — and plenty beside, equally odd.
That he should have doubted the meaning is no
less strange ; for on p. 41 of the same play we
read, " My Lord Granuffo, you may likewise stay,
for I know you? I say nothing" — on pp. 55, 56,
" This Granuffo is a right wise good lord, a man of
excellent discourse and never speaks" — and on
p. 94, we find the following dialogue : —

" Gon. My Lord Granuffo, this Fawne is an excellent fellow.

"Don. Silence.

" Gon. I warrant you for my lord here."

In the same play (p. 44) are these lines : —

" I apt for love ?
Let lazy idlenes fild full of wine
Heated with meates, high fedde with lustf ull ease
Goe dote on culler [color]. As for me, why, death a sence,
I court the ladie ? "

274 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

This is Mr. Halliwell's note : " Death a seme. —
•Earth a sense,' ed. 1633. Mr. Dilke suggests:
'For me, why, earth's as sensible.' The original
is not necessarily corrupt. It may mean, — why,
you might as well think Death was a sense, one of
the senses. See a like phrase at p. 77." What
help we should get by thinking Death one of the
senses, it would demand another CEdipus to un-
riddle. Mr. Halliwell can astonish us no longer,
but we are surprised at Mr. Dilke, the very com-
petent editor of the " Old English Plays," 1815.
From him we might have hoped for better things.
" Death o' sense ! " is an exclamation. Through-
out these volumes we find a for o', — as, "a clock"
for " o'clock," " a the side " for " o' the side." A
similar exclamation is to be found in three other
places in the same play, where the sense is obvious.
Mr. Halliwell refers to one of them on p. 77, —
" Death a man ! is she delivered ? " The others
are, — " Death a justice ! are we in Normandy ? "
(p. 98) ; and " Death a discretion ! if I should
prove a foole now," or, as given by Mr. Halliwell,
" Death, a discretion ! " Now let us apply Mr.
Halliwell's explanation. " Death a man ! " you
might as well think Death was a man, that is, one
of the men ! — or a discretion, that is, one of the
discretions ! — or a justice, that is, one of the quo-
rum ! We trust Mr. Halliwell may never have the
editing of Bob Acres's imprecations. " Odd's trig-
gers ! " he would say, " that is, as odd as, or as
strange as, triggers."

Vol. iii. p. 77, "the vote-killing mandrake."

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 275

Mr. Halliwell's note is, " Vote-killing. — ' Voice-
killing,' ed. 1613. It may well be doubted whether
either be the correct reading." He then gives a
familiar citation from Browne's " Vulgar Errors."
" Vote-killing " may be a mere misprint for " note-
killing ; " but " voice-killing " is certainly the bet-
ter reading. Either, however, makes sense. Al-
though-Sir Thomas Browne does not allude to the
deadly property of the mandrake's shriek, yet Mr.
Halliwell, who has edited Shakespeare, might have
remembered the

" Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan,"
(Second Part of Henry VI., Act III. Scene 2,)

and the notes thereon in the variorum edition. In
Jacob Grimm's " Deutsche Mythologie," (Vol. II.
p. 1154,) under the word Alraun, may be found a
full account of the superstitions concerning the
mandrake. " When it is dug up, it groans and
shrieks so dreadfully that the digger will surely
die. One must, therefore, before sunrise on a Fri-
day, having first stopped one's ears with wax or
cotton-wool, take with him an entirely black dog
without a white hair on him, make the sign of the
cross three times over the alraun, and dig about it
till the root holds only by thin fibres. Then tie
these by a string to the tail of the dog, show him a
piece of bread, and run away as fast as possible.
The dog runs eagerly after the bread, pulls up the
root, and falls stricken dead by its groan of pain."
These, we believe, are the only instances in which
Mr. Halliwell has ventured to give any opinion
upon the text, except as to a palpable misprint,

276 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

here and there. Two of these we have already
cited. There is one other, — " p. 46, line 10. In-
constant. — An error for inconstant" Wherever
there is a real difficulty, he leaves us in the lurch.
For example, in " What you Will," he prints with-
out comment, —

" Ha ! he mount Chirall on the wings of fame ! "

(Vol. I. p. 239.)

which should be " mount cheval," l as it is given in
Mr. Dilke's edition (Old English Plays, vol. ii.
p. 222). We cite this, not as the worst, but the
shortest, example at hand.

Some of Mr. Halliwell's notes are useful and in-
teresting, — as that on " keeling the pot," and a
few others, — but the greater part are utterly use-
less. He thinks it necessary, for instance, to ex-
plain that "to speak pure foole is in sense equiva-
lent to 4 1 will speak like a pure fool,' " — that
" belkt up " means " belched up," — that " apre-
cocks " means " apricots." He has notes also upon
"meal-mouthed," " luxuriousnesse," "termagant,"
" fico," " estro," "a nest of goblets," which indicate
either that the " general reader " is a less intelli-
gent person in England than in America, or that
Mr. Halliwell's standard of scholarship is very low.
We ourselves, from our limited reading, can supply
him with a reference which will explain the allu-
sion to the " Scotch barnacle " much better than
his citations from Sir John Maundeville and Gi-
raldus Cambrensis, — namely, note 8, on page 179

1 " Mount our Chevalls." Dekker's Northward Ho ! Works.
iii. 56.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 277

of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr. Kamesey, court
physician to Charles II,

We turn now to Mr. Hazlitt's edition of Web-
ster. We wish he had chosen Chapman ; for Mr.
Dyce's Webster is hardly out of print, and, we be-
lieve, has just gone through a second and revised
edition. Webster was a far more considerable man
than Marston, and infinitely above him in genius.
Without the poetic nature of Marlowe, or Chap-
man's somewhat unwieldy vigor of thought, he had
that inflammability of mind which, untempered by
a solid understanding, made his plays a strange
mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declamation,
dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of
character. He was not, in the highest sense of the
word, a great dramatist. Shakespeare is the only
one of that age. Marlowe had a rare imagination,
a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of
Shakespeare and Milton in versification, and was,
perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has
produced ; but his mind had no balance-wheel.
Chapman abounds in splendid enthusiasms of dic-
tion, and now and then dilates our imaginations
with suggestions of profound poetic depth. Ben
Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent work-
man, whose plays glow, here and there, with the
golden pollen of that poetic feeling with which his
age impregnated all thought and expression ; but
his leading characteristic, like that of his great
namesake, Samuel, was a hearty common sense,
which fitted him rather to be a great critic than a

278 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

great poet. He had a keen and ready" eye for the
comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was as
much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any
man. Only Shakespeare wrote comedy and tra-
gedy with truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only
Shakespeare had that true sense of humor which,
like the universal solvent sought by the alchemists,
so fuses together all the elements of a character,
(as in Falstaff,) that any question of good or evil,
of dignified or ridiculous, is silenced by the appre-
hension of its thorough humanity. Rabelais shows
gleams of it in Panurge ; but, in our opinion, no
man ever possessed it in an equal degree with
Shakespeare, except Cervantes ; no man has since
shown anything like an approach to it, (for Mo-
liere's quality was comic power rather than humor,)
except Sterne, Fielding, and perhaps Richter.
Only Shakespeare was endowed with that healthy
equilibrium of nature whose point of rest was mid-
way between the imagination and the understand-
ing, — that perfectly unruffled brain which reflected
all objects with almost inhuman impartiality, —
that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dominating
all zones of human thought and action, — that
power of veri-similar conception which could take
away Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from
Homer, — and that creative faculty whose equal
touch is alike vivifying in Shallow and in Lear.
He alone never seeks in abnormal and monstrous
characters to evade the risks and responsibilities
of absolute truthfulness, nor to stimulate a jaded
imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. He is

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 279

never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, con-
fronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own
making, whom he must get off his hands as best he
may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it
in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom
gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet.
We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the
Elizabethan playwrights together as " great drama-
tists,"— as if Shakespeare did not differ from them
in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of
them were ; but though imagination and the power
of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon
gifts, and even in combination not without secular
examples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena
to find them joined with those faculties of percep-
tion, arrangement, and plastic instinct in the lov-
ing union which alone makes a great dramatic
poet possible. We suspect that Shakespeare will
long continue the only specimen of the genus. His
contemporaries, in their comedies, either force what
they call " a humor " till it becomes fantastical, or
hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the sewers of
human nature and of language. In their trage-
dies they become heavy without grandeur, like
Jonson, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as
Chapman and Webster too often do. Every new
edition of an Elizabethan dramatist is but the put-
ting of another witness into the box to prove the
inaccessibility of Shakespeare's stand-point as poet
and artist.

Webster's most famous works are " The Duch-
ess of Malfy " and " Vittoria Corombona," but we

280 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

are strongly inclined to call " The Devil's Law-
Case" his best play. The two former are in a
great measure answerable for the " spasmodic "
school of poets, since the extravagances of a man
of genius are as sure of imitation as the equable
self-possession of his higher moments is incapable
of it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite
of a poet, imagination, but in him it was truly un-
tamed, and Aristotle's admirable distinction be-
tween the Horrible and the Terrible in tragedy
was never better illustrated and confirmed than in
the " Duchess " and " Yittoria." His nature had
something of the sleuth-hound quality in it, and a
plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, must be
sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We do
not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of
Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan
drama was an El Dorado, whose micaceous sand,
even, was treasured as auriferous, — and no won-
der, in a generation which admired the " Botanic
Garden." Webster is the Gherardo della Notte of
his day, and himself calls his "Vittoria Corom-
bona " a " night-piece." Though he had no con-
ception of Nature in its large sense, as something
pervading a whole character and making it consis-
tent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates
an entire tragedy and makes all the characters foils
to each other and tributaries to the catastrophe,
yet there are flashes of Nature in his plays, struck
out by the collisions of passion, and dramatic inten-
sities of phrase for which it would be hard to find
the match. The " prithee, undo this button " of

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 281

Lear, by which Shakespeare makes us feel the
swelling of the old king's heart, and that the bod-
ily results of mental anguish have gone so far as
to deaden for the moment all intellectual conscious-
ness and forbid all expression of grief, is hardly
finer than the broken verse which Webster puts
into the mouth of Ferdinand when he sees the body
of his sister, murdered by his own procurement : —

" Cover her face : mine eyes dazzle : she died young."

He has not the condensing power of Shakespeare,
who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hy-
draulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone
with any of the concettisti, and abounds in imagi-
native quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and
epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller.
Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest
crystallization. Here are a few examples : —

" Oh, if there be another world i' th' moon,
As some fantastics dream, I could wish all men,
The whole race of them, for their inconstancy,
Sent thither to people that ! ' '

(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that
Lamech was the first faithless lover, he adds, —

" And he invented tents, unless men lie," —

implying that he was the prototype of nomadic
men.)

" Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds :
In the trenches, for the soldier ; in the wakeful study,
For the scholar ; in the furrows of the sea,
For men of our profession [merchants] ; all of which
Arise and spring up honor."

(" Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.)

282 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

11 Poor Jolenta ! should she hear of this,
She would not after the report keep fresh
So long as flowers on graves."

"For sin and shame are ever tied together
With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun,
They cannot without violence be undone."

" One whose mind

Appears more like a ceremonious chapel ,

Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence."

" What is death ?

The safest trench i' th' world to keep man free
From Fortune's gunshot."

" It has ever been my opinion
That there are none love perfectly indeed,
But those that hang or drown themselves for love,"

says Julio, anticipating Butler's

* ' But he that drowns, or blows out 's brains,
The Devil 's in him, if he feigns."

He also anticipated La Rochefoucauld and Byron
in their apophthegm concerning woman's last love.
In " The Devil's Law-Case," Leonora says, —

" For, as we love our youngest children best,
So the last fruit of our affection,
Wherever we bestow it, is most strong,
Most violent, most unresistible ;
Since 'tis, indeed, our latest harvest-home,
Last merriment 'fore winter. ' '

It is worth remark that there are a greater num-
ber of reminiscences, conscious or unconscious, of
Shakespeare in Webster's plays than in those of
any other Elizabethan dramatist.

In editing Webster, Mr. Hazlitt had the advan-
tage (except in a single doubtful play) of a pre-

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 283

decessor in the Rev. Alexander Dyce, beyond all
question the best living scholar of the literature of
the times of Elizabeth and James I. If he give no
proof of remarkable fitness for his task, he seems,
at least, to have been diligent and painstaking. His
notes are short and to the point, and — which we
consider a great merit — at the foot of the page. If
he had added a glossarial index, we should have
been still better pleased. Mr. Hazlitt seems to
have read over the text with some care, and he has
had the good sense to modernize the orthography,
or, as he says, has " observed the existing standard
of spelling throughout." Yet — for what reason
we cannot imagine — he prints " I " for " ay,"
taking the pains to explain it every time in a note,
and retains " banquerout " and " coram " appar-
ently for the sake of telling us that they mean
"bankrupt" and u quorum." He does not seem
to have a quick ear for scansion, which would
sometimes have assisted him to the true reading.
We give an example or two : —

"The obligation wherein we all stood hound
Cannot be concealed [cancelled] without great reproach."

"The realm, not they,

Must be regarded. Be [we] strong and bold,
We are the people's factors."

"Shall not be o'erburdened [overburdened] in our reign."

"A merry heart
And a good stomach to [a] feast are all."

" Have her meat serv'd up by bawds and ruffians." [dele " up."]

" Brother or father
In [a] dishonest suit, shall be to rne."

284 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

*' What 's she in Rome your greatness cannot awe,

Or your rich purse purchase ? Promises and threats." [dele
the second "your."]

" Through clouds of envy and disast [rous] change."
" The Devil drives; 'tis [it is] full time to go."

He has overlooked some strange blunders. What
is the meaning of

" Laugh at your misery, as foredeeming you
An idle meteor, which drawn forth, the earth
Would soon be lost i' the air " ?

We hardly need say that it should be

"An idle meteor, which, drawn forth the earth,
Would," &c.

" forwardness " for "/rowardness," (vol. ii. p.
87,) "tennis-balls struck and banc?e(Z" for "ban-
died" (Ib. p. 275,) may be errors of the press ;
but

" Come, I '11 love you wisely :
That's jealousy,"

has crept in by editorial oversight for "wisely,
that 's jealously." So have

" Ay, the great emperor of [or] the mighty Cham ";

and

" This wit [with] taking long journeys " ;

and

*' Virginius, thou dost but supply my place,
I thine : Fortune hath lift me [thee] to my chair,
And thrown me headlong to thy pleading bar " ;

and

" I '11 pour my soul into my daughter's belly, [body,]
And with my soldier's tears embalm her wounds."

We suggest that the change of an a to an r would

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 285

make sense of the following : " Come, my little
punk, with thy two compositors, to this unlawful
painting-house," [printing-house.] which Mr. Haz-
litt awkwardly endeavors to explain by this note
on the word compositors, — " i. e. (conjecturally),
making up the composition of the picture " ! Our
readers can decide for themselves ; — the passage
occurs vol. i. p. 214.

We think Mr. Hazlitt's notes are, in the main,
good ; but we should like to know his authority for
saying that pench means " the hole in a bench by
which it was taken up," — that " descant " means
" look askant on," — and that " I wis " is equiva-
lent to " I surmise, imagine," which it surely is not
in the passage to which his note is appended. On
page 9, vol. i., we read in the text,

" To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe,"

and in the note, i. e. submission. The original
has aue, which, if it mean ave, is unmeaning here."
Did Mr. Hazlitt never see a picture of the An-
nunciation with ave written on the scroll proceed-
ing from the bending angel's mouth ? We find the
same wo^d in vol. iii. p. 217 : —

*' Whose station's built on avees and applause."

Vol. iii. pp. 47, 48 : -

" And then rest, gentle bones ; yet pray
That when by the precise you are view'd,
A supersedeas be not sued
To remove you to a place more airy,
That in your stead they may keep chary
Stockfish or seacoal, for the abuses
Of sacrilege have turned graves to viler uses."

286 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

To the last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note,
44 Than that of burning men's bones for fuel."
There is no allusiori here to burning men's bones,
but simply to the desecration of graveyards by
building warehouses upon them, in digging the
foundations for which the bones would be thrown
out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the 44 Churchyard
of the Holy Trinity " ; — see Stow's Survey, ed.
1603, p. 126. Elsewhere, in the same play, Web-
ster alludes bitterly to " begging church-land."

Vol. i. p. 73, "And if he walk through the
street, he ducks at the penthouses, like an ancient
that dares not flourish at the oathtaking of the
praetor for fear of the signposts." Mr. Hazlitt's
note is, " Ancient was a standard or flag ; also an
ensign, of which Skinner says it is a corruption.
What the meaning of the simile is the present
editor cannot suggest." We confess we find no
difficulty. The meaning plainly is, that he ducks
for fear of hitting the penthouses, as an ensign on
the Lord Mayor's day dares not flourish his stan-
dard for fear of hitting the signposts. We suggest
the query, whether ancient, in this sense, be not
a corruption of the Italian word anziano.

Want of space compels us to leave many other
passages, which we had marked for comment, un-
noticed. We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt, (see
his Introduction to " Vittoria Corombona,") in un-
dertaking to give us some information concerning
the Dukedom and Castle of Bracciano, should uni-
formly spell it Bracldano. Shakespeare's Petru-
chio might have put him on his guard. We should

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 2b7

be glad also to know in what part of Italy he places
Malfi.

Mr. Hazlitt's General Introduction supplies us
with no new information, but this was hardly to be
expected where Mr. Dyce hacl already gone over
the field. We wish that he had been able to give
us better means of distinguishing the three almost
contemporary John Websters one from the other,
for we think the internal evidence is enough to
show that all the plays attributed to the author of
the " Duchess " and " Vittoria " could not have
been written by the same person. On the whole,
he has given us a very respectable, and certainly a
very pretty, edition of an eminent poet.

We could almost forgive all other shortcomings
of Mr. Smith's library for the great gift it brings
us in the five volumes of Chapman's translations.
Coleridge, sending Chapman's Homer to Words-
worth, writes, " What is stupidly said of Shake-
speare is really true and appropriate of Chapman ;
mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties.
... It is as truly an original poem as the Faery
Queene ; — it will give you small idea of Homer,
though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or
Cowper's cumbersome most anti-Homeric Milton-
ism. For Chapman writes and feels as a poet, —
as tlomer might have written had he lived in Eng-
land in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In short,
it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and
perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are,
however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweet-

288 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

ness and beauty of language, all over spirit and
feeling." l From a passage of his Preface it would
appear that Chapman had been criticised pretty
sharply in his own day for amplifying his author.
" And this one example I thought necessary to in-
sert here to show my detractors that they have no
reason to vilify my circumlocution sometimes, when
their most approved Grecians, Homer's interpre-
ters generally, hold him fit to be so converted.
Yet how much I differ, and with what authority,
let my impartial and judicial reader judge. Al-
ways conceiving how pedantical and absurd an
affectation it is in the interpretation of any author
(much more of Homer) to turn him word for
word, when (according to Horace and other best
lawgivers to translators) it is the part of every
knowing and judicial interpreter not to follow the
number and order of words, but the material things
themselves, and sentences to weigh diligently, and
to clothe and adorn them with words and such a
style and form of oration as are most apt for the
language in which they are converted." Again in
his verses To the Reader, he speaks of

" The ample transmigration to be shown
By nature-loving Poesy,"

and defends his own use of " needful periphrases,"
and says that " word for word " translation is to

" Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender."

" For even as different a production
Ask Greek and English : since, as they in sounds
And letters shun one form and unison,

1 Literary Remains, vol. i. pp. 259, 260.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 289

So have their sense and elegancy bounds
In their distinguished natures, and require
Only a judgment to make both consent
In sense and elocution."

There are two theories of translation, — literal
paraphrase and free reproduction. At best, the
translation of poetry is but an imitation of natural
flowers in cambric or wax ; and however much of
likeness there may be, the aroma, whose charm of
indefinable suggestion in the association of ideas is
so powerful, is precisely what is lost irretrievably.

" The parting genius is with sighing sent "

from where it lurked in the immortal verse, a pre-
sence divined rather than ascertained, baffling the
ear which it enchanted, escaping the grasp which
yet it thrilled, airy, evanescent, imperishable, beck-
oning the imagination with promises better than
any fulfilment. The paraphrase is a plaster-cast
of the Grecian urn ; the reproduction, if by a man
of genius, such as the late Mr. Fitzgerald, is like
Keats's ode, which makes the figures move and tho
leaves tremble again, if not with the old life, with
a sorcery which deceives the fancy. Of all Eng-
lish poets, Keats was the one to have translated
Homer.

In any other than a mere prose version of a
great poem, we have a right to demand that it give
us at least an adequate impression of force and
originality. We have a right to ask, If this poem
were published now for the first time, as the work
of a contemporary, should we read it, not with the
same, but with anything like the same conviction

290 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

of its freshness, vigor, and originality, its high
level of style and its witchery of verse, that Homer,
if now for the first time discovered, would infalli-
bly beget in us ? Perhaps this looks like asking
for a new Homer to translate the old one ; but if
this be too much, it is certainly not unfair to insist
that the feeling given us should be that of life, and
not artifice.

The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects,
alone of all English versions has this crowning
merit of being, where it is most successful, thor-
oughly alive. He has made for us the best poem
that has yet been Englished out of Homer, and in
so far gives us a truer idea of him. Of all trans-
lators he is farthest removed from the fault with
which he charges others, when he says that " our
divine master's most ingenious imitating the life
of things (which is the soul of a poem) is never
respected nor perceived by his interpreters only
standing pedantically on the grammar and words,
utterly ignorant of the sense and grace of him."
His mastery of English is something wonderful
even in an age of masters, when the language was
still a mother-tongue, and not a contrivance of ped-
ants and grammarians. He had a reverential sense
of " our divine Homer's depth and gravity, which
will not open itself to the curious austerity of
belaboring art, but only to the natural and most
ingenious soul of our thrice-sacred Poesy." His
task was as holy to him as a version of Scripture ;
he justifies the tears of Achilles by those of Jesus,
and the eloquence of his horse by that of Balaam's

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 291

less noble animal. He does not always keep close
to his original, but he sins no more, even in this,
than any of his rivals. He is especially great in
the similes. Here he rouses himself always, and
if his enthusiasm sometimes lead him to heighten a
little, or even to add outright, he gives us a picture
full of life and action, or of the grandeur and
beauty of nature, as stirring to the fancy as his
original. Of all who have attempted Homer, he
has the topping merit of being inspired by him.

In the recent discussions of Homeric translation
in England, it has always been taken for granted
that we had or could have some adequate concep-
tion of Homer's metre. Lord Derby, in his Pre-
face, plainly assumes this. But there can be no
greater fallacy. No human ears, much less Greek
ones, could have endured what, with our mechan-
ical knowledge of the verse, ignorance of the ac-
cent, and English pronunciation, we blandly ac-
cept for such music as Homer chanted. We have
utterly lost the tune and cannot reproduce it. Mr.
Newman conjectures it to have been something
like Yankee Doodle; Mr. Arnold is sure it was
the English hexameter ; and they are both partly
right so far as we may trust our reasonable impres-
sions ; for, after all, an impression is all that we
have. Cowper attempts to give the ring of the

dpyvpeoio /?ioto by

" Dread-sounding, bounding on the silver bow,"

which only too fatally recalls the old Scottish dan-
cing-tune, —

292 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

" Amaisit I gaisit
To see, led at command,
A strampant and rampant
Ferss lyon in his hand."

The attempt was in the right direction, however,
for Homer, like Dante and Shakespeare, like all
who really command language, seems fond of
playing with assonances. No doubt the Homeric
verse consented at will to an eager rapidity, and
no doubt also its general character is that of pro-
longed but unmonotonous roll. Everybody says it
is like the long ridges of the sea, some overtopping
their neighbors a little, each with an independent
undulation of its crest, yet all driven by a common
impulse, and breaking, not with the sudden snap
of an unyielding material, but one after the other,
with a stately curve, to slide back and mingle with
those that follow. Chapman's measure (in the
Iliad) has the disadvantage of an association with
Sternhold and Hopkins, but it has the merit of
length, and, where he is in the right mood, is free,
spirited, and sonorous. Above all, there is every-
where the movement of life and passion in it.
Chapman was a master of verse, making it hurry,
linger, or stop short, to suit the meaning. Like all
great versifiers he must be read with study, for the
slightest change of accent loses the expression of
an entire passage. His great fault as a translator
is that he takes fire too easily and runs beyond his
author. Perhaps he intensifies too much, though
this be a fault on the right side ; he certainly some-
times weakens the force of passages by crowding in

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 293

particulars which Homer had wisely omitted, for
Homer's simplicity is by no means mere simplicity
of thought, nor, as it is often foolishly called, of
nature. It is the simplicity of consummate art,
the last achievement of poets, and the invariable
characteristic of the greatest among them. To
Chapman's mind once warmed to its work, the
words are onty a mist, suggesting, while it hides,
the divine form of the original image or thought ;
and his imagination strives to body forth that,
as he conceives it, in all its celestial proportions.
Let us compare with Lord Derby's version, as the
latest, a passage where Chapman merely intensi-
fies, (Book XIII., beginning at the 86th verse in
Lord Derby, the 73d of Chapman, and the 76th of
Homer) : —

" Whom answered thus the son of Telamon :
' My hands, too, grasp with firmer hold the spear,
My spirit, like thine, is stirred ; I feel my feet
Instinct with fiery life ; nor should I fear
With Hector, son of Priam, in his might
Alone to meet, and grapple to the death.' "

Thus Lord Derby. Chapman renders : —

" This Telamonius thus received : ' So, to my thoughts, my hands
Burn with desire to toss my lance ; each foot beneath me stands
Bare on bright fire to use his speed ; my heart is raised so high,
That to encounter Hector's self I long insatiately-' "

There is no question which version is the more
energetic. Is Lord Derby's nearer the original in
being tamer ? He has taken the " instinct with
fiery life " from Chapman's hint. The original
has simply " restless," or more familiarly " in a
fidget." There is nothing about u grappling to the

294 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

death," and " nor should I fear " is feeble where
Chapman with his "long insatiately " is literal.
We will give an example where Chapman has am-
plified his original (Book XVI. v. 426 ; Derby,
494 ; Chapman, 405) : —

" Down jumped he from his chariot ; down leapt his foe as light ;
And as, on some far-looking rock, a cast of vultures fight,
Fly on each other, strike and truss, part, meet, and then stick by,
Tug both with crooked beaks and seres, cry, fight, and fight and

cry,
So fiercely fought these angry kings." l

Lord Derby's version is nearer : —

" He said, and from his car, accoutred, sprang ;
Patroclus saw and he too leaped to earth.
As on a lofty rock, with angry screams,
Hook-beaked, with talons curved, two vultures fight,
So with loud shouts these two to battle rushed."

Chapman has made his first line out of two in
Homer, but, granting the license, how rapid and
springy is the verse ! Lord Derby's " withs " are
not agreeable, his " shouts " is an ill-chosen word
for a comparison with vultures, " talons curved " is
feeble, and his verse is, as usual, mainly built up
of little blocks of four syllables each. " To battle "
also is vague. With whom? Homer says that
they rushed each at other. We shall not discuss
how much license is loyal in a translator, but, as
we think his chief aim should be to give a feeling
of that life and spirit which makes the immortality
of his original, and is the very breath in the nos-
trils of all poetry, he has a right to adapt himself
to the genius of his own language. If he would

1 Chapman himself was evidently pleased with this, for he cites
it as a sample of his version.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 295

do justice to his author, he must make up in one
passage for his unavoidable shortcomings in an-
other. He may here and there take for granted
certain exigencies of verse in his original which he
feels in his own case. Even^ Dante, who boasted
that no word had ever made him say what he did
not wish, should have made an exception of rhym-
ing ones, for these sometimes, even in so abundant
a language as the Italian, have driven the most
straightforward of poets into an awkward detour.
We give one more passage from Chapman : —

" And all in golden weeds

He clothed himself ; the golden scourge most elegantly done
He took and mounted to his seat ; and then the god begun
To drive his chariot through the waves. From whirl-pits every

way

The whales exulted under him, and knew their king ; the sea
For joy did open, and his horse so swift and lightly flew
The under axle-tree of brass no drop of water drew."

Here the first half is sluggish and inadequate, but
what surging vigor, what tumult of the sea, what
swiftness, in the last ! Here is Lord Derby's at-
tempt : —

" All clad in gold, the golden lash he grasped
Of curious work, and, mounting on his car,
Skimmed o'er the waves ; from all the depths below
Gambolled around the monsters of the deep,
Acknowledging their king ; the joyous sea
Parted her waves ; swift flew the bounding steeds,
Nor was the brazen axle wet with spray."

Chapman here is truer to his master, and the mo-
tion is in the verse itself. Lord Derby's is de-
scription, and not picture. " Monsters of the deep "
is an example of the hackneyed periphrases in

296 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

which he abounds, like all men to whom language
is a literary tradition, and not a living gift of the
Muses. " Lash " is precisely the wrong word.
Chapman is always great at sea. Here is another
example from the Fourteenth Book : —

" And as, when with unwieldy waves the great sea foref eels winds
That both ways murmur, and no way her certain current finds,
But pants and swells confusedly, here goes, and there will stay,
Till on it air casts one firm wind, and then it rolls away."

Observe how the somewhat ponderous movement of
the first verse- assists the meaning of the words.
He is great, too, in single phrases and lines : —

" And as, from top of some steep hill, the Lightener strips a cloud
And lets a great sky out of Heaven, in whose delightsome light
All prominent foreheads, forests, towers, and temples cheer the
sight. ' ' (Book XVI. v. 286.)

The lion " lets his rough brows down so low they
hide his eyes " ; the flames " wrastle " in the
woods; "rude feet dim the day with a fog of
dust ; " and so in a hundred other instances.

For an example of his more restrained vigor,
take the speech of Sarpedon in the Twelfth Book
of the Iliad, and for poetic beauty, the whole story
of Ulysses and Nausikaa in the Odyssey. It was
here that Keats made himself Grecian and learned
to versify.

Mr. Hooper has done his work of editing well.
But he has sometimes misapprehended his author,
and distorted his meaning by faulty punctuation.
In one of the passages already cited, Mr. Hoop-
er's text stands thus : " Lest I be prejudiced with
opinion, to dissent, of ignorance, or singularity."

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 297

All the commas which darken the sense should be
removed. Chapman meant to say, " Lest I be
condemned beforehand by people thinking I dis-
sent out of ignorance or singularity." (Iliad, vol.
i. p. 23.) So on the next page the want of a hy-
phen makes nonsense : " And saw the round com-
ing [round-coming] of this silver bow of our Phoe-
bus," that is, the crescent coming to the full circle.
In the translations, too, the pointing needs refor-
mation now and then, but shows, on the whole, a
praiseworthy fidelity. We will give a few exam-
ples of what we believe to be errors on the part of
Mr. Hooper, who, by the way, is weakest on points
which concern the language of Chapman's day.
We follow the order of the text as most convenient.
" Bid " (II. i.) is explained to mean " threaten,
challenge," where " offer " would be the right word.

"And cast
The offal of all to the deep. ' ' (II. i. 309. )

Surely a slip of Chapman's pen. He must have
intended to write " Of all the offal," a trans version
common with him and needed here to avoid a pun-
ning jingle.

" So much I must affirm our power exceeds th' inhabitant."

(II. ii. 110.)

Mr. Hooper's note is " inhabiters, viz. of Troy."
" Inhabitant " is an adjective agreeing with
" power." Our power without exceeds that within,

" Yet all this time to stay,

Out of our judgments, for our end, and now to take our way
Without it were absurd and vile." (II. ii. 257.)

A note on this passage tells us that " out of judg-

298 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

ments " means " against our inclinations." It
means simply " in accordance with our good judg-
ment," just as we still say " out of his wisdom."
Compare II. iii. 63,

"Hector, because thy sharp reproof is out of justice given,
I take it well."

" And as Jove, brandishing a star which men a comet call,
Hurls out his curled hair abroad, that from his brand exhals
A thousand sparks." (II. iv. 85.)

Mr. Hooper's note is " i Which men a com,et call '
— so both the folios. Dr. Taylor has printed
' which man a comet calls.'' This certainly suits
the rhyme, but I adhere to Chapman's text."
Both editors have misunderstood the passage.
The fault is not in " call " but in " exhals," a clear
misprint for " exhall," the spelling, as was com-
mon, being conformed to the visible rhyme.
" That " means " so that " (a frequent Elizabethan
construction) and " exhall " is governed by
" sparks." The meaning is, " As when Jove,
brandishing a comet, hurls out its curled hair so
that a thousand sparks exhale from its burning."

" The evicke skipping from the rock."

Mr. Hooper tell us, " It is doubtful what this word
really is. Dr. Taylor suggests that it may proba-
bly mean the evict, or doomed one — but ? It is
possible Chapman meant to Anglicize the Greek
cu£ ; or should we read Ibex, as the cu£ t£aAos was
such ? " The word means the chamois, and is
merely the English form of the French ibiche. Dr.
Taylor's reading would amaze us were we not fa»
miliar with the commentators on Shakespeare.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 299

" And now they out-ray to your fleet." (II. v. 793.)

" Out-ray — spread out in array; abbreviated from
array. Dr. Taylor says ' rush out,' from the Anglo-
Saxon ' reanj to flow ; but there seems no necessity
for such an etymology." We should think not !
Chapman, like Pope, made his first sketch from the
French, and corrected it by the Greek. Those who
would understand Chapman's English must allow
for traces of his French guide here and there.
This is one of them, perhaps. The word is etymo-
logically unrelated to array. It is merely the old
French oultreer, a derivative of ultra. It means
" they pass beyond their gates even to your fleet."
He had said just before that formerly " your foes
durst not a foot address without their ports." The
word occurs again, II. xxiii. 413.

"When none, though many kings put on, could make his vaunt,

he led
Tydides to renewed assault or issued first the dike."

(II. viii. 217.)

" Tydides. — He led Tydides, i. e. Tydides he led.
An unusual construction." Not in the least. The
old printers or authors sometimes put a comma
where some connecting particle was left out. We
had just now an instance where one took the place
of so. Here it supplies that. " None could make
his vaunt that he led (that is, was before) Tydides."
We still use the word in the same sense, as the
" leading " horse in a race.

"And all did wilfully expect the silver-throned morn."

(II. viii. 497.)

300 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

" Wilfully — willingly, anxiously." Wishfully, as
elsewhere in Chapman.

" And as, upon a rich man's crop of barley or of wheat,
Opposed for swiftness at their work, a sort of reapers sweat.' *

" Opposed — standing opposite to one another for
expedition's sake." We hope Mr. Hooper under-
stood his own note, for it baffles us utterly. The
meaning is simply "pitted against each other to
see which will reap most swiftly." In a note (II.
xi. 417) we are told that "the etymology [of lu-
ceni\ seems uncertain." It is nothing more than
a corruption of the old French leucerve (loup-
cervier).

" I would then make-in in deed and steep
My income in their bloods." (II. xvii. 481.)

" Income — communication, or infusion, of courage
from the Gods. The word in this sense Todd says
was a favorite in Cromwell's time." A surprising
note ! Income here means nothing more than " on-
fall," as the context shows.

" To put the best in wre." (II. xvii. 545.)

" Ure — use. Skinner thinks it a contraction of
usura. It is frequent in Chaucer. Todd gives ex-
amples from Hooker and L'Estrange." The word
is common enough, but how Mr. Hooper could
seriously quote good old Skinner for such an ety-
mology we cannot conceive. It does not mean " in
use," but "to work," being merely the English
form of en oeuvre, as " manure " is of manceuvrer.

" So troop-meal Troy pursued a while." (II. xvii. 634.)

" Troop -meal — in troops, troop by troop. So

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 301

piece-meal. To meal was to mingle, mix together ;
from the French meler. . . . The reader would do
well to consult Dr. Jamieson's excellent 4 Dictionary
of the Scottish Language ' in voce ' mell.' " No
doubt the reader might profit lay consulting it under
any other word beginning with M, and any of them
would be as much to the purpose as mell. Troop-
meal^ like inch-meal, piece-meal, implies separation,
not mingling, and is from a Teutonic root. Mr.
Hooper is always weak in his linguistic. In a note
on II. xviii. 144, he informs us that " To sterve is
to die ; and the sense of starve, with cold or hun-
ger originated in the 17th century." We would
it had! But we suspect that men had died of
both these diseases earlier. What he should have
said was that the restriction of meaning to that of
dying with hunger was modern.

II. xx. 239 we have " the God's " for " the Gods',"
and a few lines below " Anchisiades' " for " Anchi-
siades's " ; II. xxi. 407, " press'd " for " prest."

We had noted a considerable number of other
slips, but we will mention only two more. " Treen
broches " is explained to mean " branches of trees."
(Hymn to Hermes, 227.) It means "wooden
spits." In the Bacchus (28, 29) Mr. Hooper re-
stores a corrupt reading which Mr. Singer (for a
wonder) had set right. He prints, —

" Nay, which of all the Pow'r fully-divined
Esteem ye him ? "

Of course it should be powerfully - divined, for
otherwise we must read " Pow'rs." The five vol-
umes need a very careful revision in their punctu-

302 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

ation, and in another edition we should advise Mr.
Hooper to strike out every note in which he has
been tempted into etymology.

We come next to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's edition of
Lovelace. Three short pieces of Lovelace's have
lived, and deserved to live: uTo Lucasta from
Prison," " To Lucasta on going to the Wars," and
" The Grasshopper." They are graceful, airy, and
nicely finished. The last especially is a charming
poem, delicate in expression, and full of quaint
fancy, which only in the latter half is strained to
conceit. As the verses of a gentleman they are
among the best, though not of a very high order as
poetry. He is to be classed with the lucky authors
who, without great powers, have written one or two
pieces so facile in thought and fortunate in phrase
as to be carried lightly in the memory, poems in
which analysis finds little, but which are charming
in their frail completeness. This faculty of hitting
on the precise lilt of thought and measure that shall
catch the universal ear, and make them sing them-
selves in everybody's memory, is a rare gift. We
have heard many ingenious persons try to explain
the cling of such a poem as " The Burial of Sir
John Moore," and the result of all seemed to be,
that there were certain verses that were good, not
because of their goodness, but because one could not
forget them. They have the great merit of being
portable, and we have to carry so much luggage
through life that we should be thankful for what

O

will pack easily and take up no room.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 303

All that Lovelace wrote beside these three poems
is utterly worthless, mere chaff from the threshing
of his wits. Take out the four pages on which they
are printed, and we have two hundred and eighty-
nine left of the sorriest stufl; that ever spoiled
paper. The poems are obscure, without anything
in them to reward perseverance, dull without being
moral, and full of conceits so far-fetched that we
could wish the author no worse fate than to carry
them back to where they came from. We are no
enemies to what are commonly called conceits, but
authors bear them, as heralds say, with a difference.
And a terrible difference it is! With men like
Earle, Donne, Fuller, Butler, Marvell, and even
Quarles, conceit means wit ; they would carve the
merest cherry-stone of thought in the quaintest and
delicatest fashion. But with duller and more pain-
ful writers, such as Gascoigne, Marston, Felltham,
and a score of others, even with cleverer ones like
Waller, Crashawe, and Suckling, where they in-
sisted on being fine, their wit is conceit. Difficulty
without success is perhaps the least tolerable kind
of writing. Mere stupidity is a natural failing ;
we skip and pardon. But the other is Dulness in
a domino, that travesties its familiar figure, and
lures us only to disappoint. These unhappy verses
of Lovelace's had been dead and lapt in congenial
lead these two hundred years ; — what harm had
they done Mr. Hazlitt that he should disinter
them ? There is no such disenchanter of peaceable
reputations as one of these resurrection-men of lit-
erature, who will not let mediocrities rest in the

304 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

grave, where the kind sexton, Oblivion, had buried
them, but dig them up to make a profit on their
lead.

Of all Mr. Smith's editors, Mr. W. Carew Haz-
litt is the worst. He is at times positively incred-
ible, worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is
saying a good deal. Worthless as Lovelace's poems
were, they should have been edited correctly, if
edited at all. Even dulness arid dirtiness have a
right to fair play and to be dull and dirty in their
own fashion. Mr. Hazlitt has allowed all the mis-
prints of the original (or by far the greater part
of them) to stand, but he has ventured on many
emendations of the text, and in every important
instance has blundered, and that, too, even where
the habitual practice of his author in the use of
words might have led him right. The misappre-
hension shown in some of his notes is beyond the
belief of any not familiar with the way in which
old books are edited in England by the job. We
have brought a heavy indictment, and we proceed
to our proof, choosing only cases where there can
be no dispute. We should premise that Mr. Haz-
litt professes to have corrected the punctuation.

" And though he sees it full of wounds,
Cruel one, still he wounds it. (p. 34.)

Here the original reads, " Cruel still on," and the
only correction needed was a comma after " cruel."

' ' And by the glorious light

Of both those stars, which of their spheres bereft,
Only the jelly 's left." (p. 41.)

The original has " of which," and rightly, for

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 305

" their spheres bereft " is parenthetic, and the
sense is " of which only the jelly 's left." Love-
lace is speaking of the eyes of a mistress who has
grown old, and his image, confused as it is, is
based on the belief that stars shooting from their
spheres fell to the earth as jellies, — a belief, by
the way, still to be met with in New England.

Lovelace, describing a cow (and it is one of the
few pretty passages in the volume), says, —

" She was the largest, goodliest beast
That ever mead or altar blest,
Round as her udder, and more white
Than is the Milky- Way in night." (p. 64.)

Mr. Hazlitt changes to " Round was her udder,"
thus making that white instead of the cow, as
Lovelace intended. On the next page we read, —

"She takes her leave o' th' mournful neat,
Who, by her toucht, now prizeth her life,
Worthy alone the hollowed knife."

Compare Chapman (Iliads, xviii. 480) : —

" Slew all their white fleec'd sheep and neat."

The original was " prize their life," and the use of
" neat " as a singular in this way is so uncommon,
if not unprecedented, and the verse as corrected
so halting, that we have no doubt Lovelace so
wrote it. Of course " hollowed " should be " hal-
lowed," though the broader pronunciation still lin-
gers in our country pulpits.

" What need she other bait or charm
But look ? or angle but her arm ? " (p. 65. )

So the original, which Mr. Hazlitt, missing the
sense, has changed to " what hook or angle."

306 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

" Fly Joy on wings of Popinjays
To courts of fools where as your plays
Die laught at and forgot." (p. 67.)

The original has " there." Read, —

" Fly, Joy, on wings of popinjays
To courts of fools ; there, as your plays,
Die," &c.

" Where as," as then used, would make it the
" plays " that were to die.

" As he Lucasta nam'd, a groan
Strangles the fainting passing tone ;
But as she heard, Lucasta smiles,
Posses her round ; she 's slipt meanwhiles
Behind the blind of a thick bush." (p. 68.)

Mr. Hazlitt's note on " posses " could hardly be
matched by any member of the posse comitatus
taken at random : —

" This word does not appear to have any very exact
meaning. See Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic Words,
art. Posse, and Worcester's Diet., ibid., &c. The con-
text here requires to turn sharply or quickly."

The " ibid., &c." is delightful ; in other words,
"find out the meaning of posse for yourself."
Though dark to Mr. Hazlitt, the word has not the
least obscurity in it. It is only another form of
push, nearer the French pousser, from Latin pul-
sar e, and " the context here requires " nothing more
than that an editor should read a poem if he wish
to understand it. The plain meaning is, —

" But, as she heard Lucasta, smiles
Possess her round."

That is, when she heard the name Lucasta, —
for thus far in the poem she has passed under the

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 307

pseuclonyme of Amarantha. " Possess her round "
is awkward, but mildly so for Lovelace, who also
spells " commandress " in the same way with a
single s. Process is spelt presses in the report of
those who absented themselves from Church in
Stratford.

" O them, that swing'st upon the waving1 eare,
Of some well-filled oaten beard." (p. 94.)

Mr. Hazlitt, for some inscrutable reason, has
changed " haire " to "eare " in the first line, pre-
ferring the ear of a beard to its hair !
Mr. Hazlitt prints, —

" Poor verdant foole ! and now green ice, thy joys
Large and as lasting as thy peirch of grass,
Bid us lay in 'gainst winter raine and poize
Their flouds with an o'erflowing glasse." (p. 95.)

Surely we should read : —

" Poor verdant foole and now green ice, thy joys,
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass,
Bid," &c.

i. e. " Poor fool now frozen, the shortness of thy
joys, who mad'st no provision against winter, warns
us to do otherwise."

" The radiant gemme was brightly set
In as divine a carkanet ;
Of which the clearer was not kiiowne
Her minde or her complexion." (p. 101.)

The original reads rightly " for which," <&c., and,
the passage being rightly pointed, we have, —

' ' For which the clearer was not known,
Her mind or her complexion."

Of course " complexion " had not its present lim-
ited meaning.

808 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

" , . . my future daring bayes
Shall bow itself." (p. 107.)

" We should read themselves," says Mr. Haz-
litt's note authoritatively. Of course a noun end-
ing in s is plural ! Not so fast. In spite of
the dictionaries, bays was often used in the singu-
lar.

" Do plant a sprig of cypress, not of bays,"

says Robert Randolph in verses prefixed to his
brother's poems ; and Felltham in " Jonsonus Vir-
bius,"

" A greener bays shall crown Ben Jonson's name."

But we will cite Mr. Bayes himself : —

"And, where he took it up, resigns the 6a#s."

" But we (defend us !) are divine,
[Not] female, but madam born, and come
From a right-honorable wombe." (p. 115.)

Here Mr. Hazlitt has ruined both sense and metre
by his unhappy "not." We should read "Fe-
male, but madam-born," meaning clearly enough
" we are women, it is true, but of another race."

" In every hand [let] a cup be found
That from all hearts a health may sound." (p. 121.)

Wrong again, and the inserted " let " ruinous to
the measure. Is it possible that Mr. Hazlitt does
not understand so common an English construction
as this?

" First told thee into th' ayre, then to the ground." (p. 141.)

Mr. Hazlitt inserts the "to," which is not in the
original, from another version. Lovelace wrote

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 309

" ayer." We have noted two other cases (pp. 203
and 248) where he makes the word a dissyllable.
On the same page we have " shewe's " changed to
"shew" because Mr. Hazlitt did not know it
meant " show us " and not " shows." On page 170,
" their " is substituted for " her," which refers to
Lucasta, and could refer to nothing else.

Mr. Hazlitt changes "quarrels the student Mer-
cury " to " quarrels with" not knowing that quar-
rels was once used as a transitive verb (p. 189).

Wherever he chances to notice it, Mr. Hazlitt
changes the verb following two or more nouns con-
nected by an " and " from singular to plural. For
instance : —

" You, sir, alone, fame, and all conquering rhyme
File the set teeth," &c., (p. 224)

for " files." Lovelace commonly writes so ; — on
p. 181, where it escaped Mr. Hazlitt's grammatical
eye, we find, —

" But broken faith, and th' cause of it,
All damning gold, was damned to the pit."

Indeed, it was usual with writers of that day.
Milton in one of his sonnets has —

" Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng," —

and Leigh Hunt, for the sake of the archaism, in
one of his, " Patience and Gentleness is power."

Weariness, and not want of matter, compels us
to desist from further examples of Mr. Hazlitt's
emendations. But we must also give a few speci-
mens of his notes, and of the care with which he
has corrected the punctuation.

310 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

In a note on " flutes of canary" (p. 76) too long
to quote, Mr. Hazlitt, after citing the glossary of
Nares (edition of 1859, by Wright and Halliwell,
a very careless book, to speak mildly), in which
flute is conjectured to mean cask, says that he is
not satisfied, but adds, " I suspect that a flute of
canary was so called from the cask having several
vent-holes." But flute means simply a tall glass.
Lassel, describing the glass-making at Murano,
says, " For the High Dutch they have high glasses
called Flutes, a full yard long." So in Dryden's
Sir Martin Mar-all, " bring two flute-^Z asses and
some stools, ho ! We '11 have the ladies' health."
The origin of the word, though doubtful, is prob-
ably nearer to flood than flute. But conceive of
two gentlemen, members of one knows not how
many learned societies, like Messrs. Wright and
Halliwell, pretending to edit Nares, when they
query a word which they could have found in any
French or German Dictionary !

On page 93 we have, —

"Hayle, holy cold ! chaste temper, hayle! the fire
Raved o'er my purer thoughts I feel t' expire."

Mr. Hazlitt annotates thus : " Ravd seems here to
be equivalent to reared or bereaved. Perhaps the
correct reading may be ' reav'd.' See Worcester's
Dictionary, art. RAVE, where Menage's supposition
of affinity between rave and bereave is perhaps a
little too slightingly treated."

The meaning of Lovelace was, " the fire that
raved." But what Mr. Hazlitt would make with

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 311

" reaved o'er my purer thoughts," we cannot con-
ceive. On the whole, we think he must have writ-
ten the note merely to make his surprising glosso-
logical suggestion. All that Worcester does for
the etymology, by the way, is to cite Richardson,
no safe guide.

"Where now' one so so spatters, t'other: no! " (p. 112..)

The comma in this verse has, of course, no right
there, but Mr. Hazlitt leaves the whole passage so
corrupt that we cannot spend time in disinfecting
it. We quote it only for the sake of his note on
" so so." It is marvellous.

" An exclamation of approval when an actor made a
hit. The corruption seems to be somewhat akin to the
Italian, * si, sij a corruption of * sia, sia.' "

That the editor of an English poet need not un-
derstand Italian we may grant, but that he should
not know the meaning of a phrase so common in
his own language as so-so is intolerable. Lovelace
has been saying that a certain play might have
gained applause under certain circumstances, but
that everybody calls it so-so, — something very
different from " an exclamation of approval," one
should say. The phrase answers exactly to the
Italian cost cos\, while s^ (not si) is derived from
sic, and is analogous with the affirmative use of the
German so and the Yankee jes' so.

" Oh, how he hast'ned death, burnt to be fryed ! " (p. 141.)

The note on fryed is, —

" I. e. freed. Free and freed were sometimes pro-

312 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

nounced like fry and fryed ; for Lord North, in his
Forest of Varieties, 1645, has these lines : —

* Birds that long1 have lived free,
Caught and cag'd, but pine and die.'

Here evidently free is intended to rhyme with die."

" Evidently ! " An instance of the unsaf eness of
rhyme as a guide to pronunciation. It was die
that had the sound of dee, as everybody (but Mr.
Hazlitt) knows. Lovelace himself rhymes die and
she on p. 269. But what shall we say to our edi-
tor's not knowing thatyH/ was used formerly where
we should say burn ? Lovers used to fry with
love, whereas now they have got out of the frying-
pan into the fire. In this case a martyr is repre-
sented as burning (i. e. longing) to be fried (i. e.
burned).

" Her beams ne'er shed or change like th' hair of day." (p. 224.)

Mr. Hazlitt' s note is, —

" Hair is here used in what has become quite an ob-
solete sense. The meaning is outward form, nature, or
character. The word used to be by no means uncom-
mon ; but it is now, as was before remarked, out of
fashion ; and indeed I do not think that it is found even
in any old writer used exactly in the way in which Love-
lace has employed it."

We should think not, as Mr. Hazlitt understands
it ! Did he never hear of the golden hair of Apollo,
— of the intonsum Cynthium ? Don Quixote was a
better scholar where he speaks of las doradas hebras
de sus hermosos cabellos. But hair never meant
what Mr. Hazlitt says it does, even when used as

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 313

he supposes it to be here. It had nothing to do
with " outward form, nature, or character," but
had a meaning much nearer what we express by
temperament, which its color was and is thought to
indicate.

On p. 232 "wild ink" is explained to mean
" unrefined" It is a mere misprint for " vild."

Page 237, Mr. Hazlitt, explaining an allusion of
Lovelace to the "east and west" in speaking of
George Sandys, mentions Sandys's Oriental travels,
but seems not to know that he translated Ovid in
Virginia.

Pages 251, 252: —

" And as that soldier conquest doubted not,
Who but one splinter had of Castriot,
But would assault ev'n death, so strongly charmed,
And naked oppose rocks, with this bone armed."

Mr. Hazlitt reads his for this in the last verse, and
his note on " bone " is : —

"And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put
forth his hand and took it, and slew a thousand men
therewith. (Judges xv. 15.)"

Could the farce of " editing " go further ? To
make a " splinter of Castriot " an ass's jawbone is
a little too bad. We refer Mr. Hazlitt to " The
Life of George Castriot, King of Epirus and
Albania," &c., &c., (Edinburgh, 1753,) p. 32, for
an explanation of this profound difficulty. He will
there find that the Turkish soldiers wore relics of
Scanderbeg as charms.

Perhaps Mr. Hazlitt's most astounding note is
on the woxd pickear (p. 203).

314 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

" So within shot she doth pickear,
Now gall's [galls] the flank and now the rear."

" In the sense in which it is here used this word
seems to be peculiar to Lovelace. To pickear, or
pickeer, means to skirmish" And, pray, what
other possible meaning can it have here ?

Of his corrections of the press we will correct a
few samples.

Page 34, for "Love nee're his standard," read
" neere." Page 82, for " fall too," read "fall to"
(or, as we ought to print such words, " fall-to ").
Page 83, for "star-made firmament," read "star,
made firmament." Page 161, for " To look their
enemies in their hearse," read, both for sense and
metre, into. Page 176, for " the gods have kneeled,"
read had. Page 182, for " In beds they tumbled
off their own," read of. Page 184, for " in mine
one monument I lie," read owne. Page 212, for
" Deucalion's blackRung stone," read " backflung."
Of the punctuation we shall give but one specimen,
and that a fair average one : —

"Naso to his Tibullus flung the wreath,
He to Catullus thus did each bequeath.
This glorious circle, to another round,
At last the temples of a god it bound."

Our readers over ten years of age will easily
correct this for themselves.

Time brings to obscure authors * an odd kind of
reparation, an immortality, not of love and interest
and admiration, but of curiosity merely. In pro-

1 Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 315

portion as their language was uncouth, provincial,
or even barbarous, their value becomes the greater.
A book of which only a single copy escaped its
natural enemies, the pastry-cook and trunk-maker,
may contain one word that makes daylight in some
dark passage of ax great author, and its name shall
accordingly live forever in a note. Is not, then, a
scholiastic athanasy better than none ? And if lit-
erary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Bru-
nette Latini's made him insensible for a moment to
the rain of fire and the burning sand, the authors
of such books as are not properly literature may
still comfort themselves with a non omnis moriar,
laying a mournful emphasis on the adjective, and
feeling that they have not lived wholly in vain
while they share with the dodo a fragmentary con-
tinuance on earth. To be sure, the immortality,
such as it is, belongs less to themselves than to the
famous men they help to illustrate. If they escape
oblivion, it is by a back door, as it were, and they
survive only in fine print at the page's foot. At
the banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After
all, perhaps, the next best thing to being famous or
infamous is to be utterly forgotten, for this also is
to achieve a kind of definite result by living. To
hang on the perilous edge of immortality by the
nails, liable at any moment to drop into the fathom-
less ooze of oblivion, is at best a questionable
beatitude. And yet sometimes the merest barnacles
that have attached themselves to the stately keels
of Dante or Shakespeare or Milton have an inter-
est of their own by letting us know in what remote

316 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing.
Has not Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare's "dusty
death " to Anthony Copley, and Milton's " back
resounded Death ! " to Abraham Fraunce ? Nay,
is it not Bernard de Ventadour's lark that sings
forever in the diviner air of Dante's Paradise ?

" Quan vey laudeta mover
De joi sas alas contra'l rai,
Que s'oblida e s laissa cazer
Per la doussor qu 'al cor li 'n vai."

" Qual lodoletta che in aere si spazia,
Prima cantando, e poi tace contents
Dell' ultima dolcezza che la sazia."

We are not sure that Bernard's " Que s'oblida
e s laissa cazer " is not sweeter than Dante's " tace
contenta," but it was plainly the doussor that gave
its cue to the greater poet's memory, and he has
improved on it with that exquisite ultima, as his
master Virgil sometimes did on Homer.

But authors whose interest for us is mainly bib-
liographic belong rather in such collections as Mr.
Allibone's. As literature they are oppressive ; as
items of literary history they find their place in that
vast list which records not only those named for
promotion, but also the killed, wounded, and miss-
ing in the Battle of the Books. There our hearts
are touched with something of the same vague
pathos that dims the eye in some deserted grave-
yard. The brief span of our earthly immortalities
is brought home to us as nowhere else. What a
necrology of notability ! How many a controversi-
alist, terrible in his day, how many a rising genius

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 317

that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a
withering satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the
tombstone brevity of a name and date ! Think of
the aspirations, the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the
confidence (of himself and wife) in an impartial
and generous posterity, — and then read " Smith
J. [ohn?] 1713-1784 (?). The Vision of Immor-
tality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 1740, 4to.
See Loivndes" The time of his own death less
certain than that of his poem, (which we may fix
pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that
took any interest in him the indefatigable compiler
to whom a name was valuable in proportion as it
was obscure. Well, to have even so much as your
title-page read after it has rounded the corner of
its first century, and to enjoy a posthumous public
of one is better than nothing. This is the true
Valhalla of Mediocrity, the Libro <T oro of the
onymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who
exist only in name. Parson Adams would be here
had he found a printer for his sermons, and Mr.
Primrose, if a copy existed of his tracts on mono-
gamy. Papyrorcetes junior will turn here with
justifiable pride to the name of his respectable pro-
genitor. Here we are secure of perpetuity at least,
if of nothing better, and are sons, though we may
not be heirs, of fame. Here is a handy and inex-
pensive substitute for the waxen imagines of the
Roman patriciate, for those must have been incon-
venient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to
melt in warm weather (even the elder Brutus him-
self might soften in the dog-days) and not readily

318 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

salable unless to some novus homo willing to buy a
set of ancestors ready-made, as some of our own
enthusiasts in genealogy are said to order a family-
tree from the heraldic nurseryman, skilled to imp a
slip of Scroggins on a stock of De Vere or Mont-
morenci. Fame, it should seem, like electricity, is
both positive and negative, and if a writer must be
Somebody to make himself of permanent interest to
the world at large, he must not less be Nobody to
have his namelessness embalmed by M. Guerard.
The benignity of Providence is nowhere more
clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As
there is a large class of men madly desirous to
decipher cuneiform and other inscriptions, simply
because of their illegibility, so there is another
class driven by a like irresistible instinct to the
reprinting of unreadable books. Whether these
have even a philologic value for us depends on the
accuracy and learning bestowed upon them by the
editor.

For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of liter-
ature out of which something precious may not be
raked by the diligent explorer, and the late Mr.
Dyce (since Gifford, the best editor of our liter-
ature of the Tudor and Jacobean periods) might
well be called the Golden Dustman, so many were
the precious trifles sifted out by his intelligent in-
dustry. It would not be easy to name any work
more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton.
He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but
no man had such a commonplace-book as he, or
knew so exactly the meaning with which words

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 319

were used during the period he did so much to
illustrate. Elegant scholarship is not often, as in
him, patient of drudgery and conscientious in pains-
taking. Between such a man and Mr. Carew Haz-
litt the contrast is by no means agreeable. The
one was not more distinguished* by modest accuracy
than the other is by the rash conceit of that half-
knowledge which is more mischievous in an editor
than downright ignorance. This language is strong
because it is true, though we should not have felt
called upon to use it but for the vulgar flippancy
with which Mr. Hazlitt alludes depreciatingly to
the labors of his predecessors, — to such men as
Ritson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir Frederick Mad-
den, his superiors in everything that goes to the
making of a good editor. Most of them are now
dead and nailed in their chests, and it is not for us
to forget the great debt we owe to them, and others
like them, who first opened paths for us through
the tangled wilderness of our early literature. A
modern editor, with his ready-made helps of glos-
sary, annotation, and comment, should think rather
of the difficulties than the defects of these pioneers.
How different is Mr. Hazlitt's spirit from that
of the thorough and therefore modest scholar ! In
the Preface to his Altenglische Sprachproben,
Matzner says of an editor, das Beste was er ist
verdankt er Andern, an accidental pentameter that
might seem to have dropped out of Nathan der
Weise. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by getting
some friend to translate for him the whole para-
graph in which it occurs.

320 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to
superintend a new edition of Warton's History of
English Poetry, and are pained to think of the
treatment that robust scholar and genial poet is
likely to receive at the hands of an editor without
taste, discrimination, or learning. Of his taste a
single specimen may suffice. He tells us that " in
an artistic and constructive point of view, the
Mylner of Abmgton is superior to its predeces-
sor," that predecessor being Chaucer's Revels Tale,
which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to the
Miller ! Of his discrimination we have a sufficient
test in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick in a
late edition of the most graceful of our lyric poets.
Perhaps discrimination is not, after all, the right
word, for we have sometimes seen cause to doubt
whether Mr. Hazlitt ever reads carefully the very
documents he prints. For example, in the Bio-
graphical Notice prefixed to the Herrick he says
(p. xvii) : " Mr. W. Perry Herrick has plausibly
suggested that the payments made by Sir William
to his nephew were simply on account of the for-
tune which belonged to Robert in right of his father,
and which his uncle held in trust ; this was about
X400 ; and I think from allusions in the letters
printed elsewhere that this view may be the correct
one." May be ! The poet says expressly, " I en-
treat you out of my little possession to deliver to
this bearer the customarye <£10, without which I
cannot meate [?] my ioyrney." The words we
have italicized are conclusive. By the way, Mr.
Hazlitt's wise-looking query after " meate " is con-

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 321

elusive also as to his fitness for editorship. Did he
never hear of the familiar phrase " to meet the ex-
pense " ? If so trifling a misspelling can mystify
him, what must be the condition of his mind in
face of the more than Protean travesties which
words underwent before they were uniformed by
Johnson and Walker ? Mr. Hazlitt's mind, to be
sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its own
fog. In another of Herrick's letters we find, " For
what her monie can be effected (s^c) when there is
diuision 'twixt the hart and hand ? " " Her monie "
of course means harmonie, and effected is therefore
right. What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his
" (sic) " it were idle to inquire.

We have already had occasion to examine some
of Mr. Hazlitt's work, and we are sorry to say that
in the four volumes before us we find no reason for
changing our opinion of his utter disqualification
for the duties of editorship. He seldom clears up
a real difficulty (never, we might say, with lights
of his own), he frequently creates a darkness where
none was before, and the peculiar bumptiousness of
his incapacity makes it particularly offensive. We
shall bring a few instances in proof of what we
assert, our only embarrassment being in the super-
abundance of our material. In the Introduction to
the second volume of his collection, Mr. Hazlitt
speaks of " the utter want of common care on the
part of previous editors of our old poetry." Such
oversights as he has remarked upon in his notes
are commonly errors of the press, a point on which
Mr. Hazlitt, of all men, should have been char-

322 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

Stable, for liis own volumes are full of them. We
call his attention to one such which is rather amus-
ing. In his " additional notes " we find " line 77,
wylle. Strike out the note upon this word ; but
the explanation is correct. Be wroyht was a mis-
print, however, for he wroyht" The error occurs
in a citation of three lines in which lother is still
left for tother. The original note affords us so
good an example of Mr. Hazlitt's style of editing
as to be worth preserving. In the " Kyng and the
Hermit " we read, —

" He ne wyst w[h]ere that he was
Ne out of the forest for to passe,
And thus he rode all wylle.' '

And here is Mr. Hazlitt's annotation on the word
wylle : —

" i. e. evil. In a MS. of the Tale of the Basyn,
supposed by Mr. Wright, who edited it in 1836, to
be written in the Salopian dialect, are the following
lines : —

' The lother hade litull thoght,
Off husbandry cowth he nog-lit,
But alle his wyves will be wrog'ht.' " (Vol. i. p. 16.)

It is plain that he supposed will, in this very simple
passage, to mean evil f This he would seem to
rectify, but at the same time takes care to tell us
that " the explanation [of wylle~] is correct." He
is willing to give up one blunder, if only he may
have one left to comfort himself withal ! Wylle is
simply a rhyming fetch for wild, and the passage
means that the king rode at random. The use of

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 323

wild with tliis meaning is still common in such
phrases as "he struck wild." In "Havelok" we
find it in the nearly related sense of being at a
loss, knowing not what to do : —

" To lincolne barfot he yede*
Hwan he kam ther he was ful wil,
Ne hauede he no frend to gang-en til."

All wylle, in short, means the kind of editing that
is likely to be done by a gentleman who picks up
his misinformation as he goes along. We would
hint that a person must know something before he
can use even a glossary with safety.

In the " King and the Barker," when the tanner
finds out that it is the king whom he has been
treating so familiarly, and falls upon his knees,
Mr. Hazlitt prints,

" He had no meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell,"

and subjoins the follow ing note : " Radell, or rad-
dle, signifies a side of a cart ; but here, appar-
ently, stands for the cart itself. Ritson printed ner
adell" Mr. Hazlitt's explanation of raddle, which
he got from Halliwell, is incorrect. The word, as
its derivation (from O. F. rastel) implies, means
the side or end of a ^a?/-cart, in which the uprights
are set like the teeth of a rake. But what has a
cart to do here ? There is perhaps a touch of what
an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call
humor, in the tanner's forge tfulness of his raiment,
but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of
Mr. Hazlitt's own notes. The tanner was on horse-
back, as the roads of the period required that he

324 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

should be, and good old Bitson was plainly on the
right track in his reading, though his text was
muddled by a misprint. As it was, he got one
word right, and so far has the advantage of Mr.
Hazlitt. The true reading is, of course, ner a dell,
never a deal, not a whit. The very phrase occurs
in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted
in his collection, —

" For never a dell
He wyll me love aguyue." (Vol. iii. p. 2.)

That adell was a misprint in Ritson is proved by
the fact that the word does not appear in his glos-
sary. If we were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to book for
his misprints ! In the poem we have just quoted
he gravely prints, —

" Matter in dede,
My sides did blede,"

for " mother, indede," " through ryght wysenes "
for " though ryghtwisenes," " with man vnkynde "
for " sith man vnkynde," " ye knowe a parte " for
" ye knowe aperte," " here in " for " herein," all of
which make nonsense, and all come within the first
one hundred and fifty lines, and those of the short-
est, mostly of four syllables each. Perhaps they
rather prove ignorance than want of care. One
blunder falling within the same limits we have re-
served for special comment, because it affords a
good example of Mr. Hazlitt's style of editing : —

"Your herte souerayne
Clouen in twayne
By longes the blynde." (Vol. iii. p. 7.)

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHOHS 325

Here the uninstructed reader would be as com-
pletely in the dark as to what longes meant as the
editor plainly was himself. The old rhymer no
doubt wrote Longis, meaning thereby Longinus, a
personage familiar enough, one should think, to
any reader of medieval poetry. Mr. Hazlitt ab-
solves himself for not having supplied a glossary
by the plea that none is needed by the class of
readers for whom his volumes are intended. But
this will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentle-
man who often goes out of his way to explain in
his notes such simple matters as that u shape "
means "form," and that uJohan of the golden
mouthe " means " St. Chrysostom," which, indeed,
it does not, any more than Johannes Baptista
means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt
with an illustration of the passage from Bekker's
Ferabras, the more willingly as it may direct his
attention to a shining example of how an old
poem should be edited : —

" en la crotz vos pendero li fals luzieu tman,
can Longis vos f eric de sa lansa trencan :
el non avia vist en trastot son vivan ;
lo sane li venc per 1'asta entro al punh colan ;
e [el] toquet ne sos huelhs si vie el mantenan."

Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who prints sang parlez
for sanz parler} (vol. i. p. 265), will not be able
to form any notion of what these verses mean, but
perhaps he will be able to draw an inference from
the capital L that longes is a proper name. The
word truan at the end of the first verse of our cita-
tion may also suggest to him that truant is not

326 I+BRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

quite so satisfactory an explanation of the word
trewat as he seems to think. (Vol. iv. p. 24, noteJ)
In deference to Mr. Hazlitt's presumed familiarity
with an author sometimes quoted by him in his
notes, we will point him to another illustration : —

" Ac ther cam forth a knyg-ht,
With a kene spere y-grounde
Highte Long-ens, as the lettre telleth,
And longe hadde lore his sighte."

Piers Ploughman, Wright, p. 374.

Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where
Old French is in question. Upon the word Osyll
he favors us with the following note : " The black-
bird. In East Cornwall ozell is used to signify the
windpipe, and thence the bird may have had its
name, as Mr. Couch has suggested to me." (Vol.
ii. p. 25.) Of course the blackbird, alone among
fowls, is distinguished by a windpipe ! The name
is merely another form of O. F. oisil, and was
usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest
birds, just as pajaro (L. passer) in Spanish, by a
similar process in the opposite direction, came to
mean bird in general. On the very next page he
speaks of " the Romance which is vulgarly entitled
Lybeaus Disconus, i. e. Le Beau Disconnu." If
he had corrected Disconus to Desconus, all had
been well ; but Disconnu neither is nor ever was
French at all. Where there is blundering to be
done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for two
birds. Ly beaus Disconus is perfectly correct old
French, and another form of the adjective (bins)
perhaps explains the sound we give to the first syl-

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 327

lable of beauty and Beaufort. A barrister at law,
as Mr. Hazlitt is, may not be called on to know
anything about old English or modern French, but
we might fairly expect him to have at least a smat-
tering of Law French I In volume fourth, page
129, a goodman trying his wife,

" Bad her take the pot that sod ouer the fire
And set it abooue vpon the astire."

Mr. Hazlitt's note upon astire is " hearth, i. q.
astre." Knowing that the modern French was
atre, he too rashly inferred a form which never ex-
isted except in Italian. The old French word is
aistre or estre, but Mr. Hazlitt, as usual, prefers
something that is neither old French nor new. We
do not pretend to know what astire means, but a
hearth that should be abooue the pot seething over
the fire would be unusual, to say the least, in our
semi-civilized country.

In the " Lyfe of Roberte the Deuill " (vol. i. p.
232), Mr. Hazlitt twice makes a knight sentre his
lance, and tells us in a note that the " Ed. 1798
has /entered" a very easy misprint for the right
word f entered. What Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be
the meaning of sentre he has not vouchsafed to tell
us. Fautre (sometimes faltre orfeutre) means in
old French the rest of a lance. Thus in the Roman
du Eenart (26517),

" Et mist sa lance sor lefautre."

But it also meant a peculiar kind of rest. In Sir
F. Madden's edition of Gawayne (to which Mr.
Hazlitt refers occasionally) we read,

328 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

" They feutred their lances, these knyghtes good " ;

and in the same editor's " William and the Wer-
wolf,"

"With sper festened \nf enter, him for to spille."

In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says,
" There seems no reason, however, why it [f euter]
should not mean the rest attached to the armour."
But Roquefort was certainly right in calling it a
"garniture d'une selle pour tenir la lance." A
spear fastened to the saddle gave more deadly
weight to the blow. The " him for to spille " im-
plies this. So in " Merlin " (E. E. Text Soc., p.
488) : " Than thei toke speres grete and rude, and
putte hem in f ewtre, and that is the grettest crew-
elte that oon may do, ffor turnement oweth to be
with-oute felony e, and they meved to smyte hem as
in mortall werre." The context shows that the
feiotre turned sport into earnest. A citation in
Raynouard's Lexique Roman (though wrongly ex-
plained by him) directed us to a passage which
proves that this particular kind of rest for the
lance was attached to the saddle, in order to ren-
der the blow heavier : —

" Lances d, [lege as] arsons af entries
Pour plus de dures coUes rendre.V

Branche des Royaux Lignages, 4514, 4515.

Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip
to insinuate the inaccuracy and carelessness of his
predecessors. The long and useful career of Mr.
Wright, who, if he had given us nothing more than
his excellent edition of " Piers Ploughman " and
the volume of " Ancient Vocabularies," would

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 329

have deserved the gratitude of all lovers of our lit-
erature or students of our language, does not save
him from the severe justice of Mr. Hazlitt, nor is
the name of Warton too venerable to be coupled
with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright needs no
plea in abatement from us, and a mischance of Mr.
Hazlitt's own has comically avenged Warton. The
word prayer, it seems, had somehow substituted it-
self for prayse in a citation by Warton of the title
of the " Schole-House of Women." Mr. Hazlitt
thereupon takes occasion to charge him with often
" speaking at random," and after suggesting that
it might have been the blunder of a copyist, adds,
" or it is by no means impossible that Warton him-
self, having been allowed to inspect the production,
was guilty of this oversight." (Vol. iv. p. 98.)
Now, on the three hundred and eighteenth page of
the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed the fol-
lowing couplet to escape his conscientious attention :

" Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose
That prayers and glory doth consist in cloathes."

Lege, nostro periculo, PRAYSE ! Were dear old
Tom still on earth, he might light his pipe cheer-
fully with any one of Mr. Hazlitt's pages, secure
that in so doing he was consuming a brace of blun-
ders at the least. The word prayer is an unlucky
one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the " Knyght and his
Wyfe " (vol. ii. p. 18) he prints : —

"And sayd, Syre, I rede we make
In this chapel oure prayers,
That God us kepe both in ferrus."

Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many

330 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

things that everybody knows, give us a note upon
inferrus ? It would have matched his admirable
elucidation of waygose, which we shall notice pre-
sently. Is it not barely possible that the MS. may
have read prayere and in fere ? Prayere occurs
two verses further on, and not as a rhyme.

Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden
right on a question of Old English grammar, tell-
ing him superciliously that can, with an infinitive,
in such phrases as he can go, is used not " to de-
note a past tense, but an imperfect tense." By
past we suppose him to mean perfect. But even
if an imperfect tense were not a past one, we can
show by a passage in one of the poems in this very
collection that can, in the phrases referred to, some-
times not only denotes a past but a perfect tense : —

" And thorow that worde y felle in pryde ;
As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde,
And with the tywnkling l of an eye
God for-dud alle that maystrye
And so hath he done for my gylte."

Now the angel here is Lucifer, and can of hevyn
glyde means simply fell from heaven, not was fall-
ing. It is in the same tense as for-dud in the next
line. The fall of the angels is surely a fait accom-
pli. In the last line, by the way, Mr. Hazlitt
changes " my for " to " for my," and wrongly, the
my agreeing with maystrye understood. In mod-
ern English we should use mine in the same way.
But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of him-
self.

1 The careless Ritson would have printed this twynkling.

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 331

We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt's imper-
tinence to Ritson, a man of ample reading and ex-
cellent taste in selection, and who, real scholar as
he was, always drew from original sources. We
have a foible for Ritson with his oddities of spell-
ing, his acerb humor, his unconsciously deprecia-
tory mister Tyrwhitts and mister Bryants, and his
obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy's folio manu-
script. Above all, he was a most conscientious edi-
tor, and an accurate one so far as was possible with
the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted
two poems, " The Squyr of Low Degre " and " The
Knight of Curtesy," which had already been edited
by Ritson. The former of these has passages that
are unsurpassed in simple beauty by anything in
our earlier poetry. The author of it was a good ver-
sifier, and Ritson, though he corrected some glaring
errors, did not deal so trenchantly with verses man-
ifestly lamed by the copyist as perhaps an editor
should.1 Mr. Hazlitt says of Ritson's text, that
" it offers more than an hundred departures from
the original," and of the "Knight of Courtesy,"
that u Ritson's text is by no means accurate."
Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson's
emendations, without giving the least hint of it.
On the contrary, in some five or six instances, he
gives the original reading in a foot-note with an
" old ed. has " so and so, thus leaving the reader to

1 For example : —

" And in the arber was a tre
A fairer in the world might none be,"

should certainly read,

" None fairer in the world might be."

832 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

infer that the corrections were his own. Where
he has not followed Ritson, he has almost uniformly
blundered, and that through sheer ignorance. For
example, he prints,

" Alas ! it tourned to wroth her heyle,"

where Ritson had substituted wrotherheyle. The
measure shows that Ritson was right. Wroth her
heyle, moreover, is nonsense. It should have been
wrother her heyle at any rate, but the text is far
too modern to admit of that archaic form. In the
" Debate of the Body and the Soul " (Miitzner's
A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have,

"Why schope thou me to wrother-hele,"

and in " Dame Siris " (Ibid., 110),

" To g-oder hele ever came thou hider."

Mr. Hazlitt prints,

" For yf it may be found in thee
That thou them [de] fame for enuyte."

The emendation [de] is Ritson's, and is probably
right, though it would require, for the metre's sake,
the elision of that at the beginning of the verse.
But what is enuyte ? Ritson reads enmyte, which
is, of course, the true reading. Mr. Hazlitt prints
(as usual either without apprehending or without
regarding the sense),

" With browes bent and eyes full mery,"

where Ritson has brent, and gives parallel passages
in his note on the word. Mr. Hazlitt gives us

" To here the bugles there yblow,
With their bugles in that place,"

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 333

though Kitson had made the proper correction to
beyles. Mr. Hazlitt, with ludicrous nonchalance,
allows the Squire to press into the throng

" With a bastard large and longe,"

and that with the right word '(baslarde) staring
him in the face from Ritson's text. We wonder
he did not give us an illustrative quotation from
Falconbridge ! Both editors have allowed some
gross errors to escape, such as "come not" for
44 come " (v. 425) ; " so leue he be " for " ye be "
(v. 593) ; " vnto her chambre " for " vnto your "
(v. 993) ; but in general Ritson's is the better and
more intelligent text of the two. In the " Knight
of Curtesy," Mr. Hazlitt has followed Ritson's text
almost literatim. Indeed, it is demonstrable that
he gave it to his printers as copy to set up from.
The proof is this : Ritson has accented a few words
ending in te. Generally he uses the grave accent,
but now and then the acute. Mr. Hazlitt's text
follows all these variations exactly. The main dif-
ference between the two is that Ritson prints the
first personal pronoun t, and Mr. Hazlitt, I. Rit-
son is probably right ; for in the " Schole-House of
Women " (vv. 537, 538) where the text no doubt
was

"i [i. e. one] deuil a woman to speak may constrain,
But all that in hel be cannot let it again,"

Mr. Hazlitt changes " i " to " A," and says in a
note, " Old ed. has 7." That by his correction he
should miss the point was only natural ; for he evi-
dently conceives that the sense of a passage does
not in the least concern an editor. An instance or

334 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

two will suffice. In the " Knyght and his Wyfe "
(vol. ii. p. 17) we read,

" The fynd tyl hure hade myche tene
As hit was a sterfull we seme ! "

Mr. Hazlitt in a note explains tene to mean " trou-
ble or sorrow " ; but if that were its meaning here,
we should read made, and not hade, which would
give to the word its other sense of attention. The
last verse of the couplet Mr. Hazlitt seems to
think perfectly intelligible as it stands. We should
not be surprised to learn that he looked upon it as
the one gem that gave lustre to a poem otherwise
of the dreariest. We fear we shall rob it of all
its charm for him by putting it into modern Eng-
lish:—

" As it was after full well seen."

So in the " Smyth and his Dame " (vol. iii. p.
204) we read,

" It were a lytele maystry
To make a blynde man to se,"

instead of "as lytell." It might, indeed, be as
easy to perform the miracle on a blind man as on
Mr. Hazlitt. Again, in the same poem, a little
further on,

" For I tell the now trevely,
Is none so wyse ne to sle,
But ever ye may som what lere,"

which, of course, should be,

"ne so sle
But ever he may som what lere."

Worse than all, Mr. Hazlitt tells us (vol. i. p. 158)

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 335

that when they bury the great Khan, they lay his
body in a tabernacle,

" With sheld and spere and other wede
With a whit mere to gyf him in ylke."

We will let Sir John Maundeville correct the last
verse : " And they seyn that when he shale come
into another World . . . the mare schalle gheven
him my Ik" Mr. Hazlitt gives us some wretched
doggerel by " Piers of Fulham," and gives it
swarming with blunders. We take at random a
couple of specimens : —

"And loveship goith ay to warke
Where that presence is put a bake, ' '

(Vol. ii. pp. 13, 14,)

where we should read " love's ship," " wrake," and
" abake." Again, just below,

" Ffor men haue seyn here to foryn,
That love laugh et when men be forsworn."

Love should be " love." Ovid is the obscure per-
son alluded to in the "men here to foryn " :

"Jupiter e coelo perjuria ridet amantum."

We dare say Mr. Hazlitt, if he ever read the pas-
sage, took it for granted that " to foryn " meant
too foreign, and gave it up in despair. But surely
Shakespeare's

" At lovers' perjuries,
They say, Jove laughs,"

is not too foreign to have put him on the right
scent.

Mr. Hazlitt is so particular in giving us v for u

336 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

and vice versa, that such oversights are a little
annoying. Every man his own editor seems to be
his theory of the way in which old poetry should
be reprinted. On this plan, the more riddles you
leave (or make) for the reader to solve, the more
pleasure you give him. To correct the blunders in
any book edited by Mr. Hazlitt would give the
young student a pretty thorough training in ar-
chaic English. In this sense the volumes before
us might be safely recommended to colleges and
schools. When Mr. Hazlitt undertakes to cor-
rect, he is pretty sure to go wrong. For example,
in "Doctour Doubble Ale" (vol. iii. p. 309) he
amends thus : —

' ' And sometyme mikle strife is
Among the ale wyfes, [y-\vis] ; "

where the original is right as it stands. Just be-
fore, in the same poem, we have a parallel in-
stance : —

"And doctours dulpatis
That falsely to them pratis,
And bring- them to the gates."

The original probably reads (or should read) wyfis
and yatis. But it is too much to expect of Mr.
Hazlitt that he should remember the very poems
he is editing from one page to another, nay, as we
shall presently show, that he should even read
them. He will change be into ben where he should
have let it alone (though his own volumes might
have furnished him with such examples as " were
go," " have se," " is do," and fifty more), but he
will sternly retain bene where the rhyme requires

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 337

Z>e, and Ritson had so printed. In " Adam Bel "
the word pryme occurs (vol. ii. p. 140), and he
vouchsafes us the following note : " i. e. noon. It
is commonly used by early writers in this sense.
In the Four P. P., by John Hey wood, circa 1540,
the apothecary says,

' If he taste this boxe nye aboute the pryme
By the masse, he is in heven or even songe tyme.' "

Let our readers admire with us the easy " it is com-
monly used " of Mr. Hazlitt, as if he had store of
other examples in his note-book. He could an if
he would! But unhappily he borrowed this sin-
gle quotation from Nares, and, as usual, it throws
no scintilla of light upon the point in question,
for his habit in annotation is to find by means
of a glossary some passage (or passages if possi-
ble) in which the word to be explained occurs,
and then — why, then to give the word as an ex-
planation of itself. But in this instance, Mr Haz-
litt, by the time he had reached the middle of
his next volume (vol. iii. p. 281) had wholly for-
gotten that pryme was "commonly used by early
writers " for noon, and in a note on the following
passage,

' ' I know not whates a clocke
But by the countre cocke,
The mone nor yet the pryme,
Vntyll the sonne do shyne,"

he informs us that it means "six o'clock in the
morning" ! Here again this editor, who taxes
Ritson with want of care, prints mone for none
in the very verse he is annotating, and which we

338 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

may therefore presume that he had read. A man
who did not know the moon till the sun showed
it him is a match even for Mr. Hazlitt himself-
We wish it were as easy as he seems to think
it to settle exactly what pryme means when used
by our " early writers,'' but it is at least abso-
lutely certain that it did not mean noon.

But Mr. Hazlitt, if these volumes are compe-
tent witnesses, knows nothing whatever about Eng-
lish, old or new. In the " Mery Jest of Dane
Hew " he finds the following verses,

" Dame he said what shall we now doo
Sir she said so mote go
The munk in a corner ye shall lay "

which we print purposely without punctuation. Mr.
Hazlitt prints them thus,

" Dame, he said, what shall we now doo ?
Sir, she said, so mote [it] go.
The munk," &c.,

and gives us a note on the locution he has in-
vented to this effect, " ? so might it be managed."
And the Chancellor said, f doubt! Mr. Hazlitt's
query makes such a singular exception to his more
natural mood of immediate inspiration that it is
almost pathetic. The amended verse, as every-
body (not confused by too great familiarity with
our " early writers ") knows, should read,

" Sir, she said, so might I go,"

and should be followed only by a comma, to
show its connection with the next. The phrase
" so mote I go," is as common as a weed in the

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 339

works of the elder poets, both French and Eng-
lish ; it occurs several times in Mr. Hazlitt's own
collection, and its other form, " so mote I fare,"
which may also be found there, explains its mean-
ing. On the phrase point-device (vol. iii. p. 117)
Mr. Hazlitt has a positively incredible note, of
which we copy only a part : " This term, which is
commonly used in early poems " [mark once more
his intimacy with our earlier literature] "to sig-
nify extreme exactitude, originated in the points
which were marked on the astrolabe, as one of the
means which the astrologers and dabblers in the
black art adopted to enable them (as they pre-
tended) to read the fortunes of those by whom they
were consulted in the stars and planetary orbs.
The excessive precision which was held to be re-
quisite in the delineation of these points " [the
delineation of a point is good !] " &c. on the astro-
labe, led to point-device, or points-device (as it is
sometimes found spelled), being used as a prover-
bial expression for minute accuracy of any kind."
Then follows a quotation from Gower, in which an
astrolabe is spoken of "with points and cercles
merveilous," and the note proceeds thus : " Shake-
speare makes use of a similar figure of speech in
the Tempest, I. 2, where the following dialogue
takes place between Prospero and Ariel : —

' Prosp. Hast thou, spirit,

Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee ?
Ar. In every article.' "

Neither the proposed etymology nor the illustra-
tion requires any remark from us. We will only

340 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

say that point-device is excellently explained and
illustrated by Wedgwood.

We will give a few more examples out of many
to show Mr. Hazlitt's utter unfitness for the task
he has undertaken. In the " Kyng and the Her-
myt " are the following verses,

" A wyld wey, I hold, it were
The wey to wend, I you swere,
Bot ye the dey may se,"

meaning simply, " I think it would be a wild
thing (in you) to go on your way unless you
wait for daylight." Mr. Hazlitt punctuates and
amends thus : —

" A wyld wey I hold it were,
The wey to wend, I you swere,

Ye bot [by] the dey may se." (Vol. i. p. 19.)

The word hot seems a stumbling-block to Mr. Haz-
litt. On page 54 of the same volume we have,

*' Herd I neuere bi no leuedi
Hole hendinesse and curteysi."

The use of the word by as in this passage should
seem familiar enough, and yet in the " Hye Way
to the Spittel Hous" Mr. Hazlitt explains it as
meaning be. Any boy knows that without some-
times means unless (Fielding uses it often in that
sense), but Mr. Hazlitt seems unaware of the fact.
In his first volume (p. 224) he gravely prints : —

" They trowed verelye that she shoulde dye ;
With that our ladye wold her helpe and spede."

The semicolon after dye shows that this is not a
misprint, but that the editor saw no connection

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 341

between the first verse and the second. In the
same volume (p. 133) we have the verse,

" He was a gTete tenement man, and ryche of londe and lede,"

and to lede Mr. Hazlitt appends this note : " Lede,
in early English, is found in various significa-
tions, but here stands as the plural of lad, a ser-
vant." In what conceivable sense is it the plural
of lad ? And does lad necessarily mean a servant ?
The Promptorium has ladde glossed by garcio,
but the meaning servant, as in the parallel cases of
Trats, puer, garqon, and boy, was a derivative one,
and of later origin. The word means simply man
(in the generic sense) and in the plural people. So
in the " Squyr of Low Degre,"

" I will forsake both land and lede,"

and in the " Smyth and his Dame,"

" That hath both land and lyth."

The word was not " used in various significations."
Even so lately as " Flodden Ffeild " we find,

" He was a noble leed of high degree."

Connected with land it was a commonplace in
German as well as in English. So in the Tristan
of Godfrey of Strasburg,

,,Gr fceuald) fin 1 1 » t tmbe fin lant
Hit fines marfcalfeS Ijant."

Mr. Hazlitt is more nearly right than usual when
he says that in the particular case cited above lede
means servants. But were these of only one sex ?
Does he not know that even in the middle of the
last century when an English nobleman spoke of
" my people," he meant simply his domestics ?

342 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

Encountering the familiar phrase No do ! (vol.
iv. p. 64), Mr. Hazlitt changes it to Not do ! He
informs us that Goddes are (vol. i. p. 197) means
"God's heir " ! He says (vol. ii. p. 146) : "To bor-
row in the sense of to take, to guard, or to protect,
is so common in early English that it is unneces-
sary to bring forward any illustration of its use in
this way." But he relents, and presently gives us
two from Ralph Roister Doister, each containing
the phrase " Saint George to borrow ! " That bor-
row means take, no owner of books need be told,
and Mr. Hazlitt has shown great skill in borrow-
ing other people's illustrations for his notes, but
the phrase he quotes has no such meaning as he
gives it. Mr. Dyce in a note on Skelton explains
it rightly, " St. George being my pledge or surety."

We gather a few more of these flowers of expo-
sition and etymology : —

" The while thou sittest in chirche, thi bedys schalt thou bidde."

(Vol. i. p. 181.)

i. e. thou shalt offer thy prayers. Mr. Hazlitt's
note on bidde is, " i. e. bead. So in The Kyng and
the Hermit, line 111 : —

4 That herd an hermyte there within
Unto the gate he g~an to wyn
Bedying his prayer.' "

Precisely what Mr. Hazlitt understands by beading
(or indeed by anything else) we shall not presume
to divine, but we should like to hear him translate
" if any man bidde the worshyp," which comes a
few lines further on. Now let us turn to page 191
of the same volume. " May deny s ben loneliche and

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 343

no tiling sekir." Mr. Hazlitt tells us in a note that
" sekir or sicker " is a very common form of secure,
and quotes in illustration from the prose Morte
Arthurs, " A ! said Sir Launcelot, comfort your-
self e, for it shall bee unto us as a great honour, and
much more then if we died in any other places : for
of death wee be sicker." Now in the text the
word means safe, and in the note it means sure.
Indeed sure, which is only a shorter form of secure,
is its ordinary meaning. "I mak sicker,'* said
Kirkpatrick, a not unfitting motto for certain edi-
tors, if they explained it in their usual phonetic
way.

In the " Frere and the Boye," when the old man
has given the boy a bow, he says : —

" Shote therin, whan thou good thynke ;
For yf thou shote and wynke,
The pry eke thow shalte hytte."

Mr. Hazlitt' s explanation of wynke is " to close
one eye in taking aim," and he quotes a passage
from Gascoigne in support of it. Whatever Gas-
coigne meant by the word (which is very doubt-
ful), it means nothing of the kind here, and is an-
other proof that Mr. Hazlitt does not think it so
important to understand what he reads as St.
Philip did. What the old man said was, " even
if you shut both your eyes, you can't help hitting
the mark." So in " Piers Ploughman " ( Whitaker's
text),

" Wynkyng, as it were, wytterly ich saw hyt."

Again, for our editor's blunders are as endless as

344 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

the heads of an old-fashioned sermon, in the
" Schole-House of Women" (vol. iv. p. 130), Mr.
Hazlitt has a note on the phrase " make it nice,"

("And yet alwaies they bible bable

Of euery matter and make it nice,")

which reads thus : " To make it pleasant or snug.
I do not remember to have seen the word used in
this sense very frequently. But Gascoigne has it
in a precisely similar way : —

' The glosse of gorgeous Courtes by thee did please mine eye,
A stately sight me thought it was to see the braue go by,
To see their feathers flaunte, to make [marke !] their straunge

deuise ,
To lie along in ladies lappes, to lispe, and make it nice.' "

To make it nice means nothing more nor less
than to play the fool, or rather, to make a fool of
your self, f air e le niais. In old English the French
niais and nice, from similarity of form and analogy
of meaning, naturally fused together in the word
nice, which, by an unusual luck, has been promoted
from a derogatory to a respectful sense. Gas-
coigne's lispe might have put Mr. Hazlitt on his
guard, if he ever considered the sense of what he
quotes. But he never does, nor of what he edits
either. For example, in the " Smyth and his
Dame " we find the following note : " Prowe, or
projfe, is not at all uncommon as a form of profit.
In the ' Seven Names of a Prison,' a poem printed
in Reliquiae Antiquce, we have, —

* Quintum nomen istius f ovese ita probatum,
A place oiproffiov man to know bothe frend and foo.' "

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 345

Now prof and prow are radically different words.
Proff here means proof, and if Mr. Hazlitt had
read the stanza which he quotes, he would have
found (as in all the others of the same poem) the
meaning repeated in Latin in the last line, proba-
cio amicorum.

But we wish to leave our readers (if not Mr.
Hazlitt) in good humor, and accordingly we have
reserved two of his notes as bonnes bouches. In
" Adam Bel," when the outlaws ask pardon of the

king,

They kneled downe without lettyng
And each helde vp his hande."

To this passage (tolerably plain to those not too
familiar with " our early literature " ) Mr. Hazlitt
appends this solemn note : "jTo hold up the hand
was formerly a sign of respect or concurrence, or a
mode of taking an oath ; and thirdly as a signal
for mercy. In all these senses it has been em-
ployed from the most ancient times ; nor is it yet
out of practice, as many savage nations still testify
their respect to a superior by holding their hand
[either their hands or the hand, Mr. Hazlitt !] over
their head. Touching the hat appears to be a ves-
tige of the same custom. In the present passage
the three outlaws may be understood to kneel on
approaching the throne, and to hold up each a
hand as a token that they desire to ask the royal
clemency or favour. In the lines which are sub-
joined it [what?] implies a solemn assent to an
oath:

346 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

1 This swore the duke and all his men,
And all the lordes that with him lend,
And tharto to1 held they up thaire hand.' "

Minot's Poems, ed. 1825, p. 9.

The admirable Tupper could not have done better
than this, even so far as the mere English of it is
concerned. Where all is so fine, we hesitate to
declare a preference, but, on the whole, must give
in to the passage about touching the hat, which is
as good as " mobbled queen." The Americans
are still among the " savage nations " who " imply
a solemn assent to an oath " by holding up the
hand. Mr. Hazlitt does not seem to know that
the question whether to kiss the book or hold up
the hand was once a serious one in English politics.
But Mr. Hazlitt can do better even than this !
Our readers may be incredulous ; but we shall
proceed to show that he can. In the " Schole-
House of Women," among much other equally deli-
cate satire of the other sex, (if we may venture
still to call them so,) the satirist undertakes to
prove that woman was made, not of the rib of a
man, but of a dog : —

"And yet the rib, as I suppose,
That God did take out of the man
A dog vp caught, and a way gose
Eat it clene ; so that as than
The woork to finish that God began
Could not be, as we haue said,
Because the dog the rib conuaid.

1 The to is, we need not say, an addition of Mr. Hazlitt' s.
What faith can we put in the text of a man who so often copies
even his quotations inaccurately ?

LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS 347

A remedy God found as yet ;
Out of the dog he took a rib."

Mr. Hazlitt has a long note on way gose, of which
the first sentence shall suffice us : " The origin of
the term way-goose is involved in some obscurity."
We should think so, to be sure ! Let us modern-
ize the spelling and grammar, and correct the
punctuation, and then see how it looks : —

" A dog up caught and away goes,
Eats it up."

We will ask Mr. Hazlitt to compare the text, as he
prints it, with

" Into the hall he gose." (Vol. iu. p. 67.)

We should have expected a note here on the " hall
he-goose." Not to speak of the point of the joke,
such as it is, a goose that could eat up a man's rib
•could only be matched by one that could swallow
such a note, — or write it !

We have made but a small florilegium from
Mr. Hazlitt' s remarkable volumes. His editorial
method seems to have been to print as the Lord
would, till his eye was caught by some word he did
not understand, and then to make the reader com-
fortable by a note showing that the editor is as
much in the dark as he. We are profoundly thank-
ful for the omission of a glossary. It would have
been a nursery and seminary of blunder. To ex-
pose pretentious charlatanry is sometimes the un-
pleasant duty of a reviewer. It is a duty we never
seek, and should not have assumed in this case but
for the impertinence with which Mr. Eazlitt has

348 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS

treated dead and living scholars, the latchets of
whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose, and to
express their gratitude to whom is, or ought to be,
a pleasure to all honest lovers of their mother-
tongue. If he who has most to learn be the hap-
piest man, Mr. Hazlitt is indeed to be envied ;
but we hope he will learn a great deal before he
lays his prentice hands on Warton's " History of
English Poetry," a classic in its own way. If he
does not learn before, he will be likely to learn
after, and in no agreeable fashion.

, .

Si

EMERSON THE LECTURER

1861-68

IT is a singular fact, that Mr. Emerson is the
most steadily attractive lecturer in America. Into
that somewhat cold-waterish region adventurers of
the sensational kind come down now and then with
a splash, to become disregarded King Logs before
the next season. But Mr. Emerson always draws.
A lecturer now for something like a third of a
century, one of the pioneers of the lecturing sys-
tem, the charm of his voice, his manner, and his
matter has never lost its power over his earlier
hearers, and continually winds new ones in its en-
chanting meshes. What they do not fully under-
stand they take on trust, and listen, saying to
themselves, as the old poet of Sir Philip Sidney, —

"A sweet, attractive, kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,

The lineaments of gospel books."

We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees
are thought to be fond of the spread-eagle style,
and nothing can be more remote from that than
his. We are reckoned a practical folk, who would
rather hear about a new air-tight stove than about
Plato ; yet our favorite teacher's practicality is not

350 EMERSON THE LECTURER

in the least of the Poor Richard variety. If he
have any Buncombe constituency, it is that unreal-
ized commonwealth of philosophers which Plotinus
proposed to establish ; and if he were to make an
almanac, his directions to farmers would be some-
thing like this: "OCTOBER: Indian Summer;
now is the time to get in your early Vedas."
What, then, is his secret? Is it not that he out-
Yaiikees us all ? that his range includes us all ?
that he is equally at home with the potato-disease
and original sin, with pegging shoes and the Over-
soul ? that, as we try all trades, so has he tried all
cultures? and above all, that his mysticism gives
us a counterpoise to our super-practicality ?

There is no man living to whom, as a writer,
so many of us feel and thankfully acknowledge
so great an indebtedness for ennobling impulses,
— none whom so many cannot abide. What does
he mean? ask these last. Where is his system?
What is the use of it all? What the deuse have
we to do with Brahma ? I do not propose to write
an essay on Emerson at this time. I will only say
that one may find grandeur and consolation in a
starlit night without caring to ask what it means,
save grandeur and consolation ; one may like Mon-
taigne, as some ten generations before us have
done, without thinking him so systematic as some
more eminently tedious (or shall we say tediously
eminent?) authors; one may think roses as good
in their way as cabbages, though the latter would
make a better show in the witness-box, if cross-
examined as to their usefulness ; and as for Brahma,

EMERSON THE LECTURER 351

why, he can take care of himself, and won't bite us
at any rate.

The bother with Mr. Emerson is, that, though
he writes in prose, he is essentially a poet. If you
undertake to paraphrase what Jie says, and to re-
duce it to words of one syllable for infant minds,
you will make as sad work of it as the good monk
with his analysis of Homer in the " Epistolae Ob-
scurorum Virorum." We look upon him as one
of the few men of genius whom our age has pro-
duced, and there needs no better proof of it than
his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds.
Search for his eloquence in his books and you will
perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that
it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and
pith of language he belongs to a better age than
ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and
Browne, — though he does use that abominable
word reliable. His eye for a fine, telling phrase
that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman
for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice
word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A
diction at once so rich and so homely as his I
know not where to match in these days of writing
by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold.
The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the
few can find it. It is the open secret of all true
genius. It is wholesome to angle in those profound
pools, though one be rewarded with nothing more
than the leap of a fish that flashes his freckled side
in the sun and as suddenly absconds in the dark
and dreamy waters again. There is keen excite-

352 EMERSON THE LECTURER

ment, though there be no ponderable acquisition.
If we carry nothing home in our baskets, there is
ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated blood.
What does he mean, quotha ? He means inspiring
hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature. No
doubt, Emerson, like all original men, has his
peculiar audience, and yet I know none that can
hold a promiscuous crowd in pleased attention so
long as he. As in all original men, there is some-
thing for every palate. " Would you know," says
Goethe, u the ripest cherries ? Ask the boys and
the blackbirds."

The announcement that such a pleasure as a
new course of lectures by him is coming, to people
as old as I am, is something like those forebodings
of spring that prepare us every year for a familiar
novelty, none the less novel, when it arrives, be-
cause it is familiar. We know perfectly well what
we are to expect from Mr. Emerson, and yet what
he says always penetrates and stirs us, as is apt to
be the case with genius, in a very unlooked-for
fashion. Perhaps genius is one of the few things
which we gladly allow to repeat itself, — one of the
few that multiply rather than weaken the force of
their impression by iteration ? Perhaps some of us
hear more than the mere words, are moved by
something deeper than the thoughts ? If it be so,
we are quite right, for it is thirty years and more
of " plain living and high thinking " that speak to
us in this altogether unique lay-preacher. We have
shared in the beneficence of this varied culture, this
fearless impartiality in criticism and speculation,

EMERSON THE LECTURER 353

this masculine sincerity, this sweetness of nature
which rather stimulates than cloys, for a generation
long. If ever there was a standing testimonial to
the cumulative power and value of Character, (and
we need it sadly in these days^) we have it in this
gracious and dignified presence. What an antisep-
tic is a pure life ! At sixty-five (or two years be-
yond his grand climacteric, as he would prefer to
call it) he has that privilege of soul which abolishes
the calendar, and presents him to us always the un-
wasted contemporary of his own prime. I do not
know if he seem old to his younger hearers, but
we who have known him so long wonder at the
tenacity with which he maintains himself even in
the outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the
Emerson of 1868 to whom we listen. For us the
whole life of the man is distilled in the clear drop
of every sentence, and behind each word we divine
the force of a noble character, the weight of a large
capital of thinking and being. We do not go to
hear what Emerson says so much as to hear
Emerson. Not that we perceive any falling-off in
anything that ever was essential to the charm of
Mr. Emerson's peculiar style of thought or phrase.
The first lecture, to be sure, was more disjointed
even than common. It was as if, after vainly try-
ing to get his paragraphs into sequence and order,
he had at last tried the desperate expedient of
shuffling them. It was chaos come again, but it
was a chaos full of shooting-stars, a jumble of
creative forces. The second lecture, on " Criticism
and Poetry," was quite up to the level of old times,

354 EMERSON THE LECTURER

full of that power of strangely-subtle association
whose indirect approaches startle the mind into al-
most painful attention, of those flashes of mutual
understanding between speaker and hearer that are
gone ere one can say it lightens. The vice of Em-
erson's criticism seems to be, that while no man is
so sensitive to what is poetical, few men are less
sensible than he of what makes a poem. He values
the solid meaning of thought above the subtler
meaning of style. He would prefer Donne, I sus-
pect, to Spenser, and sometimes mistakes the queer
for the original.

To be young is surely the best, if the most pre-
carious, gift of life ; yet there are some of us who
would hardly consent to be young again, if it were
at the cost of our recollection of Mr. Emerson's
first lectures during the consulate of Van Buren.
We used to walk in from the country to the
Masonic Temple (I think it was), through the crisp
winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice of
his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle
music, as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of
a ship that came with unhoped-for food and rescue.
Cynics might say what they liked. Did our own
imaginations transfigure dry remainder-biscuit into
ambrosia? At any rate, he brought us life, which,
on the whole, is no bad thing. Was it all tran-
scendentalism ? magic-lantern pictures on mist? As
you will. Those, then, were just what we wanted.
But it was not so. The delight and the benefit
were that he put us in communication with a larger
style of thought, sharpened our wits with a more

EMERSON THE LECTURER 355

pungent phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an
ideal under the dry husk of our New England ;
made us conscious of the supreme and everlasting
originality of whatever bit of soul might be in any
of us ; freed us, in short, from .the stocks of prose
in which we had sat so long that we had grown
wellnigh contented in our cramps. And who that
saw the audience will ever forget it, where every
one still capable of fire, or longing to renew in him-
self the half -forgotten sense of it, was gathered?
Those faces, young and old, agleam with pale in-
tellectual light, eager with pleased attention, flash
upon me once more from the deep recesses of the
years with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful
young eyes, brimming with love and hope, wholly
vanished now in that other world we call the Past,
or peering doubtfully through the pensive gloam-
ing of memory,- your light impoverishes these
cheaper days ! I hear again that rustle of sensa-
tion, as they turned to exchange glances over some
pithier thought, some keener flash of that humor
which always played about the horizon of his mind
like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad
whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling
around me. But would my picture be complete if
I forgot that ample and vegete countenance of

Mr. K of W , — how, from its regular

post at the corner of the front bench, it turned in
ruddy triumph to the profaner audience as if he
were the inexplicably appointed fugleman of appre-
ciation ? I was reminded of him by those hearty
cherubs in Titian's Assumption that look at you as

356 EMERSON THE LECTURER

who should say, " Did you ever see a Madonna like
that ? Did you ever behold one hundred and fifty
pounds of womanhood mount heavenward before
like a rocket? "

To some of us that long-past experience remains
as the most marvellous and fruitful we have ever
had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the
body of this death. It is the sound of the trumpet
that the young soul longs for, careless what breath
may fill it. Sidney heard it in the ballad of
" Chevy Chase," and we in Emerson. Nor did it
blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of vic-
tory. Did they say he was disconnected ? So were
the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still keen
with that excitement, as we walked homeward with
prouder stride over the creaking snow. And were
they not knit together by a higher logic than our
mere sense could master? Were we enthusiasts?
I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the
man who made us worth something for once in our
lives. If asked what was left? what we carried
home? we should not have been careful for an
answer. It would have been enough if we had said
that something beautiful had passed that way. Or
we might have asked in return what one brought
away from a symphony of Beethoven ? Enough
that he had .set that ferment of wholesome discon-
tent at work in us. There is one, at least, of those
old hearers, so many of whom are now in the frui-
tion of that intellectual beauty of which Emerson
gave them both the desire and the foretaste, who
will always love to repeat : —

EMERSON THE LECTURER 357

" Che in la mente m'e fitta, ed or m'accuora
La cara e buona immagine paterna
Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora
M'insegnavaste come 1'uom s'eterna."

I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the
third lecture of the present course, in which Mr.
Emerson gave some delightful reminiscences of the
intellectual influences in whose movement he had
shared. It was like hearing Goethe read some pas-
sages of the " Wahrheit aus seinem Leben." Not
that there was not a little Dichtung, too, here and
there, as the lecturer built up so lofty a pedestal
under certain figures as to lift them into a promi-
nence of obscurity, and seem to masthead them
there. Everybody was asking his neighbor who
this or that recondite great man was, in the faint
hope that somebody might once have heard of him.
There are those who call Mr. Emerson cold. Let
them revise their judgment in presence of this loy-
alty of his that can keep warm for half a century,
that never forgets a friendship, or fails to pay even
a fancied obligation to the uttermost farthing.
This substantiation of shadows was but incidental,
and pleasantly characteristic of the man to those
who know and love him. The greater part of the
lecture was devoted to reminiscences of things
substantial in themselves. He spoke of Everett,
fresh from Greece and Germany ; of Channing ;
of the translations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, and
Dwight ; of the Dial and Brook Farm. To what
he said of the latter an undertone of good-humored
irony gave special zest. But what every one of his

358 EMERSON THE LECTURER

hearers felt was that the protagonist in the drama
was left out. The lecturer was no ^Eneas to bab-
ble the quorum magna pars fui, and, as one of his
listeners, I cannot help wishing to say how each of
them was commenting the story as it went along,
and filling up the necessary gaps in it from his own
private store of memories. His younger hearers
could not know how much they owed to the benign
impersonality, the quiet scorn of everything igno-
ble, the never-sated hunger of self-culture, that
were personified in the man before them. But the
older knew how much the country's intellectual
emancipation was due to the stimulus of his teach-
ing and example, how constantly he had kept burn-
ing the beacon of an ideal life above our lower
region of turmoil. To him more than to all other
causes together did the young martyrs of our civil
war owe the sustaining strength of thoughtful hero-
ism that is so touching in every record of their
lives. Those who are grateful to Mr. Emerson, as
many of us are, for what they feel to be most val-
uable in their culture, or perhaps I should say their
impulse, are grateful not so much for any direct
teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which only
genius can give, and without which all doctrine is
chaff.

This was something like the caret which some of
us older boys wished to fill up on the margin of the
master's lecture. Few men have been so much to
so many, and through so large a range of aptitudes
and temperaments, and this simply because all of
us value manhood beyond any or all other qualities

EMERSON THE LECTURER 359

of character. We may suspect in him, here and
there, a certain thinness and vagueness of quality,
but let the waters go over him as they list, this
masculine fibre of his will keep its lively color and
its toughness of texture. I have heard some great
speakers and some accomplished orators, but never
any that so moved and persuaded men as he. There
is a kind of undertow in that rich baritone of his
that sweeps our minds from their foothold into
deeper waters with a drift we cannot and would not
resist. And how artfully (for Emerson is a long-
studied artist in these things) does the deliberate ut-
terance, that seems waiting for the fit word, appear
to admit us partners in the labor of thought and
make us feel as if the glance of humor were a sud-
den suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying written
there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to
us ! In that closely-filed speech of his at the Burns
centenary dinner, every word seemed to have just
dropped down to him from the clouds. He looked
far away over the heads of his hearers, with a
vague kind of expectation, as into some private
heaven of invention, and the winged period came
at last obedient to his spell. " My dainty Ariel ! "
he seemed murmuring; to himself as he cast down

O

his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of ap-
proval and caught another sentence from the Sibyl-
line leaves that lay before him, ambushed behind a
dish of fruit and seen only by nearest neighbors.
Every sentence brought down the house, as I never
saw one brought down before, — and it is not so
easy to hit Scotsmen with a sentiment that has no

360 EMERSON THE LECTURER

hint of native brogue in it. I watched, for it was
an interesting study, how the quick sympathy ran
flashing from face to face down the long tables,
like an electric spark thrilling as it went, and then
exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched till
tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found my-
self caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my
excited fancy set me under the bema listening to
him who fulmined over Greece. I can never help
applying to him what Ben Jonson said of Bacon :
" There happened in my time one noble speaker,
who was full of gravity in his speaking. His lan-
guage was nobly censorious. No man ever spake
more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suf-
fered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he ut-
tered. No member of his speech but consisted of
his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or
look aside from him, without loss. He commanded
where he spoke." Those who heard him while
their natures were yet plastic, and their mental
nerves trembled under the slightest breath of di-
vine air, will never cease to feel and say : —

" Was never eye did see that face,

Was never ear did hear that tongue,
Was never mind did mind his grace,

That ever thought the travail long ;
But eyes, and ears, and every thought,
Were with his sweet perfections caught, K

m

m\v^^

THOREAtJ

1865

WHAT contemporary, if he was in the fighting
period of his life, (since Nature sets limits about
her conscription for spiritual fields, as the state
does in physical warfare,) will ever forget what
was somewhat vaguely called the " Transcendental
Movement " of thirty years ago ? Apparently set
astir by Carlyle's essays on the " Signs of the
Times," and on " History," the final and more im-
mediate impulse seemed to be given by " Sartor
Resartus." At least the republication in Boston
of that wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon
on Lear's text of the miserable forked radish gave
the signal for a sudden mental and moral mutiny.
Ecce nunc tempus acceptabile ! was shouted on all
hands with every variety of emphasis, and by
voices of every conceivable pitch, representing the
three sexes of men, women, and Lady Mary Wort-
ley Montagues. The nameless eagle of the tree
Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild-eyed en-
thusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to thrust
under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which
the new and fairer Creation was to be hatched in
due time. Redeunt Saturnia regna, — so far was
certain, though in what shape, or by what meth-

362 THOREA U

ods, was still a matter of debate. Every possible
form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought
forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets, and the
presartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs, tailored
impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed neighbors,
and sent forth to illustrate the " feathered Mer-
cury," as defined by Webster and Worcester.
Plainness of speech was carried to a pitch that
would have taken away the breath of George Fox ;
and even swearing had its evangelists, who an-
swered a simple inquiry after their health with an
elaborate ingenuity of imprecation that might have
been honorably mentioned by Marl borough in gen-
eral orders. Everybody had a mission (with a cap-
ital M) to attend to everybody-else's business. No
brain but had its private maggot, which must have
found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a
few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money
(unless earned by other people), professing to
live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some
had an assurance of instant millennium so soon as
hooks and eyes should be substituted for buttons.
Communities were established where everything
was to be common but common-sense. Men re-
nounced their old gods, and hesitated only whether
to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or
Budh. Conventions were held for every hitherto
inconceivable purpose. The belated gift of tongues,
as among the Fifth Monarchy men, spread like a
contagion, rendering its victims incomprehensible
to all Christian men ; whether equally so to the
most distant possible heathen or not was unexperi-

THOREAU 363

mented, thougli many would have subscribed liber-
ally that a fair trial might be made. It was the
pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances repro-
duced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and there
was nothing so simple that uncial letters and the
style of Diphilus the Labyrinth could not turn it
into a riddle. Many foreign revolutionists out of
work added to the general misunderstanding their
contribution of broken English in every most in-
genious form of fracture. All stood ready at a
moment's notice to reform everything but them-
selves. The general motto was : —

' ' And we '11 talk with them, too,
And take upon 's the mystery of things
As if we were God's spies."

Nature is always kind enough to give even her
clouds a humorous lining. I have barely hinted
at the comic side of the affair, for the material was
endless. This was the whistle and trailing fuse
of the shell, but there was a very solid and serious
kernel, full of the most deadly explosiveness.
Thoughtful men divined it, but the generality sus-
pected nothing. The word " transcendental " then
was the maid of all work for those who could not
think, as " Pre-Eaphaelite " has been more recently
for people of the same limited housekeeping. The
truth is, that there was a much nearer metaphysi-
cal relation and a much more distant aesthetic and
literary relation between Carlyle and the Apostles
of the Newness, as they were called in New Eng-
land, than has commonly been supposed. Both
represented the reaction and revolt against Philis-

364 THOREA U

tcrei, a renewal of the old battle begun in modern
times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, and continued
by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense,
by Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding,
Sterne, and Wordsworth in different ways have
been the leaders in England. It was simply a strug-
gle for fresh air, in which, if the windows could not
be opened, there was danger that panes would be
broken, though painted with images of saints and
martyrs. Light, colored by these reverend effigies,
was none the more respirable for being picturesque.
There is only one thing better than tradition, and
that is the original and eternal life out of which all
tradition takes its rise. It was this life which the
reformers demanded, with more or less clearness of
consciousness and expression, life in politics, life in
literature, life in religion. Of what use to import
a gospel from Judaea, if we leave behind the soul
that made it possible, the God who keeps it forever
real and present ? Surely Abana and Pharpar are
better than Jordan, if a living faith be mixed with
those waters and none with these.

Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual
progress was dead ; New England Puritanism was
in like manner dead ; in other words, Protestant-
ism had made its fortune and no longer protested ;
but till Carlyle spoke out in the Old World and
Emerson in the New, no one had dared to pro-
claim, Le roi est mort : vive le roi ! The meaning
of which proclamation was essentially this : the vital
spirit has long since departed out of this form
once so kingly, and the great seal has been in. com-

THOREA U 365

mission long enough; but meanwhile the soul of
man, from which all power emanates and to which
it reverts, still survives in undiminished royalty;
God still survives, little as you gentlemen of the
Commission seem to be awa/e of it, — nay, will
possibly outlive the whole of you, incredible as it
may appear. The truth is, that both Scotch Pres-
byterianism and New England Puritanism made
their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the her-
alds of their formal decease, and the tendency of
the one toward Authority and of the other toward
Independency might have been prophesied by who-
ever had studied history. The necessity was not
so much in the men as in the principles they rep-
resented and the traditions which overruled them.
The Puritanism of the past found its unwilling
poet in Hawthorne, the rarest creative imagina-
tion of the century, the rarest in some ideal re-
spects since Shakespeare ; but the Puritanism that
cannot die, the Puritanism that made New Eng-
land what it is, and is destined to make America
what it should be, found its voice in Emerson.
Though holding himself aloof from all active part-
nership in movements of reform, he has been the
sleeping partner who has supplied a great part of
their capital.

The artistic range of Emerson is narrow, as
every well-read critic must feel at once ; and so is
that of ^Eschylus, so is that of Dante, so is that
of Montaigne, so is that of Schiller, so is that of
nearly every one except Shakespeare ; but there
is a gauge of height no less than of breadth, of

366 THOREAU

individuality as well as of comprehensiveness, and,
above all, there is the standard of genetic power,
the test of the masculine as distinguished from
the receptive minds. There are staminate plants
in literature, that make no fine show of fruit, but
without whose pollen, quintessence of fructifying
gold, the garden had been barren. Emerson's
mind is emphatically one of these, and there is
no man to whom our aesthetic culture owes so
much. The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesi-
astically and the Revolution politically indepen-
dent, but we were still socially and intellectually
moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the
cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and
the glories of blue water. No man young enough
to have felt it can forget or cease to be grate-
ful for the mental and moral nudge which he
received from the writings of his high-minded and
brave-spirited countryman. That we agree with
him, or that he always agrees with himself, is
aside from the question ; but that he arouses in
us something that we are the better for having
awakened, whether that something be of opposi-
tion or assent, that he speaks always to what is
highest and least selfish in us, few Americans of
the generation younger than his own would be
disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi
Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty
years ago, was an event without any former par-
allel in our literary annals, a scene to be always
treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness
and its inspiration. What crowded and breathless

THOREAU 367

aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads,
what enthusiasm of approval, what grim silence
of foregone dissent ! It was our Yankee version
of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to
the last public appearances of Schelling.

I said that the Transcendental Movement was
the protestant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new
outlet and an escape from forms and creeds which
compressed rather than expressed it. In its mo-
tives, its preaching, and its results, it differed rad-
ically from the doctrine of Carlyle. The Scotch-
man, with all his genius, and his humor gigan-
tesque as that of Rabelais, has grown shriller and
shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a
common scold, and emptying very unsavory vials
of wrath on the head of the sturdy British Soc-
rates of worldly common-sense. The teaching of
Emerson tended much more exclusively to self-
culture and the independent development of the
individual man. It seemed to many almost Py-
thagorean in its voluntary seclusion from common-
wealth affairs. Both Carlyle and Emerson were
disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a far truer
sense ; and while the one, from his bias toward
the eccentric, has degenerated more and more into
mannerism, the other has clarified steadily toward
perfection of style, — exquisite fineness of mate-
rial, unobtrusive lowness of tone and simplicity
of fashion, the most high-bred garb of expression.
Whatever may be said of his thought, nothing
can be finer than the delicious limpidness of his
phrase. If it was ever questionable whether de-

368 THOREA U

mocracy could develop a gentleman, the problem
has been affirmatively solved at last. Carlyle, in
his cynicism and his admiration of force in and
for itself, has become at last positively inhuman ;
Emerson, reverencing strength, seeking the highest
outcome of the individual, has found that society
and politics are also main elements in the attain-
ment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily
manward and worldward. The two men represent
respectively those grand personifications in the
drama of ^Eschylus, Bta and Kparog.

Among the pistillate planrs kindled to fruitage
by the Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is thus far
the most remarkable ; and it is something emi-
nently fitting that his posthumous works should
be offered us by Emerson, for they are straw-
berries from his own garden. A singular mix-
ture of varieties, indeed, there is ; — alpine, some
of them, with the flavor of rare mountain air ;
others wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or
shy openings in the forest; and not a few seed-
lings swollen hugely by culture, but lacking the
fine natural aroma of the more modest kinds.
Strange books these are of his, and interesting
in many ways, — instructive chiefly as showing
how considerable a crop may be raised on a com-
paratively narrow close of mind, and how much
a man may make of his life if he will assiduously
follow it, though perhaps never truly finding it
at last.

I have just been renewing my recollection of
Mr. Thoreau's writings, and have read through his

THOREA U 369

six volumes in the order of their production. I
shall try to give an adequate report of their impres-
sion upon me both as critic and as mere reader.
He seems to me to have been a man with so high
a conceit of himself that he accepted without ques-
tioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects
and weaknesses of character as virtues and powers
peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, he finds
none of the activities which attract or employ
the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he
wanting in the qualities that make success, it is
success that is contemptible, and not himself that
lacks persistency and purpose. Was he poor,
money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a
selfish one, he condemns doing good as one of the
weakest of superstitions. To be of use was with
him the most killing bait of the wily tempter Use-
lessness. He had no faculty of generalization from
outside of himself, or at least no experience which
would supply the material of such, and he makes
his own whim the law, his own range the hori-
zon of the universe. He condemns a world, the
hollo wness of whose satisfactions he had never
had the means of testing, and we recognize Ape-
mantus behind the mask of Timon. He had little
active imagination ; of the receptive he had much.
His appreciation is of the highest quality ; his crit-
ical power, from want of continuity of mind, very
limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites a
simile from Ossian, as an example of the superi-
ority of the old poetry to the new, though, even
were the historic evidence less convincing, the sen-

370 THOREAU

timental melancholy of those poems should be con-
clusive of their modernness. He had none of the
artistic mastery which controls a great work to
the serene balance of completeness, but exquisite
mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences and
paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse
for the expression of a detached thought, senti-
ment, or image. His works give one the feeling of
a sky full of stars, — something impressive and
exhilarating certainly, something high overhead
and freckled thickly with spots of isolated bright-
ness ; but whether these have any mutual rela-
tion with each other, or have any concern with
our mundane matters, is for the most part mat-
ter of conjecture, — astrology as yet, and not as-
tronomy.

It is curious, considering what Thoreau after-
wards became, that he was not by nature an ob-
server. He only saw the things he looked for,
and was less poet than naturalist. Till he built
his Walden shanty, he did not know that the hick-
ory grew in Concord. Till he went to Maine, he
had never seen phosphorescent wood, a phenomenon
early familiar to most country boys. At forty he
speaks of the seeding of the pine as a new discov-
ery, though one should have thought that its gold-
dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn
his eye. Neither his attention nor his genius was
of the spontaneous kind. He discovered nothing.
He thought everything a discovery of his own,
from moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts
by squirrels. This is a defect in his character,

THOREAU 371

but one of his chief charms as a writer. Every-
thing grows fresh under his hand. He delved in
his mind and nature ; he planted them with all
manner of native and foreign seeds, and reaped
assiduously. He was not merely solitary, he would
be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost per-
suading himself that he was autochthonous. He
valued everything in proportion as he fancied it to
be exclusively his own. He complains in " Walden "
that there is no one in Concord with whom he could
talk of Oriental literature, though the man was
living within two miles of his hut who had intro-
duced him to it. This intellectual selfishness be-
comes sometimes almost painful in reading him.
He lacked that generosity of " communication "
which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey
tells us that Wordsworth was impatient when any
one else spoke of mountains, as if he had a pecu-
liar property in them. And we can readily under-
stand why it should be so : no one is satisfied with
another's appreciation of his mistress. But Tho-
reau seems to have prized a lofty way of thinking
(often we should be inclined to call it a remote
one) not so much because it was good in itself as
because he wished few to share it with him. It
seems now and then as if he did not seek to lure
others up " above our lower region of turmoil,"
but to leave his own name cut on the mountain
peak as the first climber. This itch of originality
infects his thought and style. To be misty is not
to be mystic. He turns commonplaces end for
end, and fancies it makes something new of them.

372 THOREA U

As we walk down Park Street, our eye is caught
by Dr. Winship's dumb-bells, one of which bears
an inscription testifying that it is the heaviest ever
put up at arm's length by any athlete ; and in read-
ing Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling as
if he sometimes invited our attention to a partic-
ular sophism or parodox as the biggest yet main-
tained by any single writer. He seeks, at all risks,
for perversity of thought, and revives the age of
concetti while he fancies himself going back to a
pre-classical nature. "A day," he says, "passed
in the society of those Greek sages, such as de-
scribed in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not be
comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-
vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds."
It is not so much the True that he loves as the
Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself
in other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him
by extravagance of statement. He wishes always
to trump your suit and to ruff when you least ex-
pect it. Do you love Nature because she is beau-
tiful ? He will find a better argument in her ugli-
ness. Are you tired of the artificial man ? He
instantly dresses you up an ideal in a Penobscot
Indian, and attributes to this creature of his other-
wise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are
common to all woodsmen, white or red, and this
simply because he has not studied the pale-faced
variety.

This notion of an absolute originality, as if one
could have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A
man cannot escape in thought, any more than he

THOREA U 373

can in language, from the past and the present.
As no one ever invents a word, and yet language
somehow grows by general contribution and neces-
sity, so it is with thought. Mr. Thoreau seems to
me to insist in public on going back to flint and
steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket
which he knows very well how to use at a pinch.
Originality consists in power of digesting and as-
similating thought, so that they become part of
our life and substance. Montaigne, for example,
is one of the most original of authors, though he
helped himself to ideas in every direction. But
they turn to blood and coloring in his style, and
give a freshness of complexion that is forever
charming. In Thoreau much seems yet to be for-
eign and unassimilated, showing itself in symptoms
of indigestion. A preacher-up of Nature, we now
and then detect under the surly and stoic garb
something of the sophist and the sentimentalizer.
I am far from implying that this was conscious
on his part. But it is much easier for a man to
impose on himself when he measures only with
himself. A greater familiarity with ordinary men
would have done Thoreau good, by showing him
how many fine qualities are common to the race.
The radical vice of his theory of life was that he
confounded physical with spiritual remoteness
from men. A man is far enough withdrawn from
his fellows if he keep himself clear of their weak-
nesses. He is not so truly withdrawn as ex-
iled, if he refuse to share in their strength. " Soli-
tude," says Cowley, "can be well fitted and set

374 THOREA U

right but upon a very few persons. They must
have enough knowledge of the world to see the
vanity of it, and enough virtue to despise all van-
ity." It is a morbid self -conscious ness that pro-
nounces the world of men empty and worthless be-
fore trying it, the instinctive evasion of one who
is sensible of some innate weakness, and retorts
the accusation of it before any has made it but
himself. To a healthy mind, the world is a con-
stant challenge of opportunity. Mr. Thoreati had
not a healthy mind, or he would not have been so
fond of prescribing. His whole life was a search
for the doctor. The old mystics had a wiser sense
of what the world was worth. They ordained a
severe apprenticeship to law, and even ceremonial,
in order to the gaining of freedom and mastery
over these. Seven years of service for Rachel were
to be rewarded at last with Leah. Seven other
years of faithfulness with her were to win them at
last the true bride of their souls. Active Life was
with them the only path to the Contemplative.

Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he
was a sorry logician. Himself an artist in rheto-
ric, he confounds thought with style when he un-
dertakes to speak of the latter. He was forever
talking of getting away from the world, but he
must be always near enough to it, nay, to the Con-
cord corner of it, to feel the impression he makes
there. He verifies the shrewd remark of Sainte-
Beuve, " On touche encore a son temps et tres-fort,
meme quand on le repousse." This egotism of his
is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps

THOREAU 375

him in the public eye. The dignity of man is an
excellent thing, but therefore to hold one's self too
sacred and precious is the reverse of excellent.
There is something delightfully absurd in six vol-
umes addressed to a world of 'such " vulgar fel-
lows " as Thoreau affirmed his fellowmen to be.
I once had a glimpse of a genuine solitary who
spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles be-
yond all human communication, and there dwelt
with his rifle as his only confidant. Compared
with this, the shanty on Walden Pond has some-
thing the air, it must be confessed, of the Hermi-
tage of La Chevrette. I do not believe that the
way to a true cosmopolitanism carries one into the
woods or the society of musquashes. Perhaps the
narrowest provincialism is that of Self ; that of
Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural man,
like the singing birds, comes out of the forest as
inevitably as the natural bear and the wildcat
stick there. To seek to be natural implies a con-
sciousness that forbids all naturalness forever. It
is as easy — and no easier — to be natural in a
salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at it, for
what we call unnaturalness always has its spring
in a man's thinking too much about himself. " It
is impossible," said Turgot, "for a vulgar man to
be simple."

I look upon a great deal of the modern senti-
mentalism about Nature as a mark of disease. It
is one more symptom of the general liver-complaint.
To a man of wholesome constitution the wdlderness
is well enough for a mood or a vacation, but not

376 THOREA U

for a habit of life. Those who have most loudly
advertised their passion for seclusion and their
intimacy with nature, from Petrarch down, have
been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, misan-
thropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy sus-
picion of themselves by professing contempt for
their kind. They make demands on the world in
advance proportioned to their inward measure of
their own merit, and are angry that the world pays
only by the visible measure of performance. It is
true of Kousseau, the modern founder of the sect,
true of Saint Pierre, his intellectual child, and of
Chateaubriand, his grandchild, the inventor, we
might almost say, of the primitive forest, and who
first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree
from natural decay in the windless silence of the
woods. It is a very shallow view that affirms trees
and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that men
in communities are just as true to the laws of their
organization and destiny ; that can tolerate the
puffin and the fox, but not the fool and the knave ;
that would shun politics because of its dema-
gogues, and snuff up the stench of the obscene fun-
gus. The divine life of Nature is more wonderful,
more various, more sublime in man than in any
other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained
by commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shake-
speare gained it, or with one's own soul among men,
as Dante, is the most delightful, as it is the most
precious, of all. In outward nature it is still man
that interests us, and we care far less for the things
seen than the way in which they are seen by poetic

THOREA U 377

eyes like "Wordsworth's or Thoreau's, and the re-
flections they cast there. To hear the to-do that
is often made over the simple fact that a man sees
the image of himself in the outward world, one is
reminded of a savage when he for the first time
catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass.
"Venerable child of Nature," we are tempted to
say, "to whose science in the invention of the
tobacco-pipe, to whose art in the tattooing of thine
undegenerate hide not yet enslaved by tailors, we
are slowly striving to climb back, the miracle thou
beholdest is sold in my unhappy country for a
shilling ! " If matters go on as they have done,
and everybody must needs blab of all the favors
that have been done him by roadside and river-
brink and woodland valk, as if to kiss and tell
were no longer treachery, it will be a positive re-
freshment to meet a man who is as superbly indif-
ferent to Nature as she is to him. By and by we
shall have John Smith, of No. -12 -12th Street,
advertising that he is not the J. S. who saw a cow-
lily on Thursday last, as he never saw one in his
life, would not see one if he could, and is prepared
to prove an alibi on the day in question.

Solitary communion with Nature does not seem
to have been sanitary or sweetening in its influence
on Thoreau's character. On the contrary, his let-
ters show him more cynical as he grew older.
While he studied with respectful attention the
minks and woodchucks, his neighbors, he looked
with utter contempt on the august drama of destiny
of which his country was the scene, and on which

378 THOREA U

the curtain had already risen. He was converting
us back to a state of nature " so eloquently," as
Voltaire said of Rousseau, " that he almost per-
suaded us to go on all fours," while the wiser fates
were making it possible for us to walk erect for the
first time. Had he conversed more with his fel-
lows, his sympathies would have widened with the
assurance that his peculiar genius had more appre-
ciation, and his writings a larger circle of readers,
or at least a warmer one, than he dreamed of.
We have the highest testimony1 to the natural
sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper,
and in his books an equally irrefragable one to the
rare quality of his mind. Ho was not a strong
thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind
strikes us as cold and wintry in its purity. A light
snow has fallen everywhere in which he seems to
come on the track of the shier sensations that
would elsewhere leave 110 trace. We think greater
compression would have done more for his fame.
A feeling of sameness comes over us as we read so
much. Trifles are recorded with an over-minute
punctuality and conscientiousness of detail. He
registers the state of his personal thermometer thir-
teen times a day. We cannot help thinking some-
times of the man who

"Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats
To learn but catechisms and alphabets
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact,"

and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet,

1 Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the
Excursions.

THOREA U 379

that " when the owl would boast, he boasts of
catching mice at the edge of a hole." We could
readily part with some of his affectations. It was
well enough for Pythagoras to say, once for all,
" When I was Euphorbus at the siege of Troy " ;
not so well for Thoreau to travesty it into " When
I was a shepherd on the plains of Assyria." A
nai've thing said over again is anything but naive.
But with every exception, there is no writing com-
parable with Thoreau's in kind, that is comparable
with it in degree where it is best ; where it disen-
gages itself, that is, from the tangled roots and
dead leaves of a second-hand Orientalism, and runs
limpid and smooth and broadening as it runs, a
mirror for whatever is grand and lovely in both
Worlds.

George Sand says neatly, that "Art is not a
Study of positive reality," (actuality were the fitter
word,) " but a seeking after iderl truth." It would
be doing very inadequate justice t j Thoreau if we
left it to be inferred that this ideal element did not
exist in him, and that too in larger proportion, if
less obtrusive, than his nature-worship. He took
nature as the mountain-path to an ideal world. If
the path wind a good deal, if he record too faith-
fully every trip over a root, if he botanize some-
what wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb
outlooks from some jutting crag, and brings us out
at last into an illimitable ether, where the breath-
ing is not difficult for those who have any true
touch of the climbing spirit. His shanty-life was
a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception

380 THOREA U

of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind.
The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. Tho-
reau's experiment actually presupposed all that
complicated civilization which it theoretically ab-
jured. He squatted on another man's land ; he
borrows an axe ; his boards, his nails, his bricks,
his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his
plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence against
him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial
civilization which rendered it possible that such a
person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all.
Magnis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was a noble
and a useful one, in the direction of " plain living
and high thinking." It was a practical sermon on
Emerson's text that " things are in the saddle and
ride mankind," an attempt to solve Carlyle's prob-
lem (condensed from Johnson) of " lessening your
denominator." His whole life was a rebuke of the
waste and aimlessness of our American luxury,
which is an abject enslavement to tawdry uphol-
stery. He had " fine translunary things " in him.
His better style as a writer is in keeping with the
simplicity and purity of his life. We have said
that his range was narrow, but to be a master is to
be a master. He had caught his English at its
living source, among the poets and prose-writers of
its best days ; his literature was extensive and
recondite ; his quotations are always nuggets of
the purest ore : there are sentences of his as per-
fect as an}7 thing in the language, and thoughts as
clearly crystallized ; his metaphors and images are
always fresh from the soil ; he had watched Nature

THOREA U 381

like a detective who is to go upon the stand ; as
we read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had
kept a diary and become its own Montaigne ; we
look at the landscape as in a Claude Lorraine
glass ; compared with his, alL other books of simi-
lar aim, even White's " Selborne," seem dry as a
country clergyman's meteorological journal in an
old almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne
and Novalis; if not with the originally creative
men, with the scarcely smaller class who are pecu-
liar, and whose leaves shed their invisible thought-
seed like ferns.

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
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