coiled ea Pier aes 7 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY | GIFT OF Anonymous Corne! ri A1 S| wiih t Hii 192 Cornell University The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022211209 Bp James Russell Lowell. POEMS, Cabinet Edition. 16mo, $1.00. Household Edition. With Portrait. 12m0, $r- 50; full gilt, $2.00. Family Edition. Wjustrated. 8vo, full gilt, $2.50. Illustrated Library Edition. 8v0, $3.00. THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. Tilustrated. 16mo, brocaded binding, $1.50. Tue Same. Illustrated by the best artists. A Holiday Book 4to, half leather, $10.00. Tur Sams. New Edition, illustrated with Photogravures and with Portrait. 16mo, $1.50. Limited Large-Paper Edition of above. 12mo, vellum, $5.00, Tue Samg, With The Cathedral, etc. 32mo, 75 cents; paper, 25 cents; 16mo, paper, 15 cents. THE BIGLOW PAPERS. Riverside Aldine Edition. Series I. and II. Each, 16mo, $1.00. New One Volume Edition. _16mo. THREE MEMORIAL POEMS. Square 16mo, $1.25. THE ROSE. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.50. A FABLE FOR CRITICS. With Portraits. Crown 8vo, $1.00, UNDER THE OLD ELM, etc. 16mo, paper, 15 cents. HEARTSEASE AND RUE. 16mo, $1.25. FIRESIDE TRAVELS. 12mo, $1.50. Riverside Aldine Edition. 16mo, $1.00. AMONG MY BOOKS. First Series. 12mo0, $2.00. AMONG MY BOOKS. Second Series. 12mo, $2.00. MY STUDY WINDOWS. 12mo, $2.00. + POLITICAL ESSAYS. 12mo, $1.50. WORKS. 6 vols. r2mo, $10.50. DEMOCRACY, AND OTH ER ADDRESSES. 16mo, $1.25. BOOKS AND LIBRARIES, etc. 16mo, paper, rs cents, WORKS. New Riverside Edition. With Portraits. 10 vols. crown 8vo, each, $1.50; the set, $15.00. Vols. 1-4, Literary Essays; 5, Political Essays 6, Literary and Political Addresses ; ~10, Poem: LoweLl BI BIRTH DAY BOOK. Illustrated. 32mo, $1.co. LOWELL CALENDAR BOOK. 32mo, paper, 25 cents. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE, etc. 32mo, 75 cents. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston AND New York. MY STUDY WINDOWS. 4 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A. M., PROFESSOR OF BELLES-LEITRES IN HARVARD COLLEGE. (Hea Pape ty EIS BOSTON: HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street. Che Riverside Press, Cambridge. 1891. Ps QGSO. A | /87/ Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871. BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington 4). €8 476 THIRTIETH EDITION. The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. PREFATORY NOTE. “N /LY former volume of Essays has been so kindly received that I am emboldened to make an- other and more miscellaneous collection. The papers here gathered have been written at intervals during the last fifteen years, and I knew no way so effectual to rid my mind of them and make ready for a new departure, as this of shutting them between two covers where they can haunt me, at least, no more. I should have preferred a simpler title, but publishers nowadays are inexorable on this point, and I was too much occupied for happiness of choice. That which I have desperately snatched is meant to imply both the books within and the world without, and perhaps may pass muster in the case of one who has always found his most fruitful study in the open air. To PROFESSOR F. J. CHILD. My pear Cup, — You were good enough to like my Essay on Chaucer (about whom you know so much more than I), and I shalt accordingly so far presume upon our long friendsnip as to inscribe the volume containing it with your name. Always heartily yours, J. R. LOWELL. CamBringe, Christmas, 1870. CONTENTS. My Garpen AcquaInTANcE . 5 7 . . ‘ 1 A Goop Worp ror Winter . a 5 On a Cerrain ConpEscension IN ForEIGNERS . - 54 A Great Pustic CaaracTer . 7 ‘ . ; 83 —CARLYLE 5 , 2 . . ; . . . 115 ABRAHAM LincoLn . > 5 : . : 150 Tas Lire anp Letters or James Gates Percitvan . 178 LTHOREAU . é F ‘ F : 5 5 < 193 Swinsurne’s TRAGEDIES . : é . é . 210 “CHAUCER . ; 3 ds a ok 3 etd 227 Lisrary or Otp AuTHORS . i ‘ ‘ . . 290 EMERSON, tue LEecrurer . ° .e £. os @ 375 Pore . < . 3 . : ‘ . ‘ . 385 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. —_+——_ NE of the most delightful books in my father’s library was White’s Natural History of Selborne. For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure 1 found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially garrulous Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ; in tenderness toward what he would have called the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descrip- tions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me familiar with his neighborhood. Since J first read him, I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I still see them through his eyes rather than by any recol- lection of actual and personal vision. The book has also the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White seems never to have had any harder work to do than to study the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are the journal of Adam in Paradise, 1 a 2 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. “ Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.”’ It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. It is vastly better than to “ See great Diocletian walk In the Salonian garden's noble shade,” for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the noises of Rome, while here the world has no entrance. No rumor of the revolt of the American Colonies seems to have reached him. “The natural term of an hog’s life” has more interest for him than that of an empire. Burgoyne may surrender and welcome ; of what conse- quence is that compared with the fact that we can explain the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over “to scratch themselves with one claw”? All the couriers in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White’s little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house- martin a day earlier or later than last year is a piece of news worth sending express to all his correspondents. Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent humor, so much the more delicious because unsuspected by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in adding to the list of the British, and still more of the Selbornian, fauna! I believe he would gladly have con- sented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that means the occasional presence within the parish limits of either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a little elated by “having considerable acquaintance with a tame brown owl.” Most of us have known our share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered one. The great events of Mr. White’s life, too, have that disproportionate importance which is always humorous. To think of his hands having actually been thought worthy (as neither Willoughby’s nor Ray’s were) to hold MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 a stilted plover, the Charadrius himantopus, with no back toe, and therefore “liable, in speculation, to perpetual vacillations” ! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex of “an old family tortoise,” which had then been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of tracing the growth of his passion; but in 1780 we find him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. “The rattle and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my garden.” It reads like a Court Journal : “Yesterday morning H. R. H. the Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle.” This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon took more of the sun’s rays. The tortoise had always known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade of it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before frost, —a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on his back. There are moods in which this kind of history is infi- nitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to look down upon as the drudges of instinct are members of a commonwealth whose constitution rests on immov- able bases. Never any need of reconstruction there ! They never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as an- other and no more. They do not use their poor wits in 4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. regulating God’s clocks, nor think they cannot go astray so long as they carry their guide-board about with them, —a delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post which points every way and alwaysright. It is good for us now and then to converse with a world like Mr. White’s, where Man is the least important of animals. But one who, like me, has always lived in the country and always on the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sym- pathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower than 4° above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our fingers just as they were closing upon it? No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans espe- cially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value ther- mometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The other day (5th July) J marked 98° in the shade, my high- water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen it before. I happened to meet a neighbor ; as we mopped our brows at each other, he told me that he had just cleared 100°, and I went home a beaten man. I had not felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of sunshine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vul- garity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity be- came all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own) ; but MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5 it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his herald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down on mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar weakness in Mr. White.. He, too, has shared in these mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that he had a true country-gentleman’s interest in the weather- cock ; that his first question on coming down of a morn- ing was, like Barabas’s, “ Into what quarter peers my halcyon’s bill?” It is an innocent and healthful employment of the mind, distracting one from too continual study of him-: self, and leading him to dwell rather upon the indiges- tions of the elements than his own. “Did the wind back round, or go about with the sun?” is a rational question that bears not remotely on the making of hay and the prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that the regulated observation of the vane in many different places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the lives of those whose single achievement is to record the wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such men are doubtless sent into the world for this special end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observa- tion, whatever its object, that has not its final use and value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their myriad correspondents upon the signs of the political at- mosphere may also fill their appointed place in a well-reg- ulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so many more jack-o’-lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the observations on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge of the subject has been derived from a lifelong success in getting a living out of the public without paying any 6 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. equivaient therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter to some explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is cleansed. For many years I have been in the habit of noting down some of the leading events of my embowered soli- tude, such as the coming of certain birds and the like, — a kind of mémoires pour servir, after the fashion of White, rather than properly digested natural history. I thought it not impossible that a few simple stories of my winged acquaintances might be found entertaining by persons of kindred taste. There is a common notion that animals are better meteorologists than men, and I have little doubt that in immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of our sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or shepherd would be their match), but I have seen nothing that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting the horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know be- forehand whether the winter will be severe or the sum- mer rainless. I more than suspect that the clerk of the weather himself does not always know very long in ad- vance whether he is to draw an order for hot or cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to be wiser. I have noted but two days’ difference in the coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which covered the ground several inches deep for a number of days. They struck work and left us for a while, no doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 7 them. It should seem that their coming was dated by the height of the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty matrimony ; “ So nature pricketh hem in their corages "; but their going is another matter. The chimney-swal- lows leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as their latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to at- tempt the long rowing-match that is before them. On the other hand, the wild-geese probably do not leave the North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their bugles sounding southward so late as the middle of December. What may be called local migrations are doubtless dictated by the chances of food. I have once been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and whenever the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never before this summer (1870) have the king-birds, hand- somest of flycatchers, built in my orchard ; though I always know where to find them within half a mile. The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here till last July, when I found a female busy among my raspberries and surprisingly bold. I hope she was pros- pecting with a view to settlement in our garden. She seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win over so delightful a neighbor. The return of the robin is commonly announced by the newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and 1 8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 de- grees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably with- in, like Emerson’s Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The robin has a bad reputation among people who do not value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, T admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to fall. But for a’ that and twice as muckle ’s a’ that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he has not wholly forfeited that superiority which belongs to the children of nature. He has a finer taste in fruit than could be distilled from many successive committees of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson’s. He feels and freely exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earli- est mess of green peas; his all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But if he get also the lion’s share of the raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones in the woods, that solace the pedestrian and give a mo- mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one’s fruit, and knows to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden. I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Mean-— while a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them from day to day till they should have secreted sugar MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 9 enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morn- ing. But the robins too had somehow kept note of them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jews into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I went with my basket, at least a dozen of these winged vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alight- ing on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill re- marks about me of aderogatory nature. They had fairly sacked the vine. Not Wellington’s veterans made cleaner work of a Spanish town; not Federals or Con- federates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them a profounder secret to. her than I had meant. The tat- tered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest- home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my basket, — as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an eagle’s nest ! I could not help laughing ; and the robins seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There was a native grape-vine close by, blue with its less refined abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign flavor. Could I tax them with want of taste? The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled. There are a hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought. But when they come after cherries to the tree near my window, they muffle their voices, and their faint pop, pip, pop! sounds far away at the bottom of the gar- den, where they know | shall not suspect them of rob- bing the great black-walnut of its bitter-rinded store.* * The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the most beguiling mockery of distance. 10 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of the fringe-tree! After they have pinched and shaken all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. “Do J look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw vermin? I throw myself upon a jury of my peers. Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that his vow forbids him.” Can such an open bosom cover such depravity? Alas, yes! I have no doubt his breast was redder at that very moment with the blood of my raspberries. On the whole, he isa doubtful friend in the garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, and is not averse from early pears. But when we re- member how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaust- less in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than harm. For my own part, I would rather have his cheer- fulness and kind neighborhood than many berries. For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer re- gard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of them have built in a gigantic syringa, near our front door, and I have known the male to sing almost unin- terruptedly during the evenings of early summer till twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 11 over, and, as it were, rehearsing their song in an under- tone, which makes their nearness always unobtrusive. Though there is the most trustworthy witness to the imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once, during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means so close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the notes of some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is as shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his nest or his fledglings are approached does he become noisy and almost aggressive. I have known him to station his young in a thick cornel-bush on the edge of the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the robin contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder who ventures to steal Azs berries. After all, his claim is only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire crop if he get a chance. Dr. Watts’s statement that “ birds in their little nests agree,” like too many others intended to form the infant mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the most peaceful relation of the different species to each other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous of neighbors. A few years ago, I was much interested in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. They had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window. A very pleasant thing it was to see their little home growing with mutual help, to watch their industrious skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of endearment, frugally cut short by the common-sense of the tiny housewife. They had brought their work 12 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. nearly to an end, and had already begun to line it with fern-down, the gathering of which demanded more dis- tant journeys and longer absences. But, alas! the syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not more than twenty feet away, and these “giddy neigh- bors” had, as it appeared, been all along jealously watch- ful, though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than “To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots Came stealing.” Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a vengeful dab at the nest in passing. They did not fall-to and deliberately destroy it, for they might have been caught at their mischief. As it was, whenever the yellow- birds came back, their enemies were hidden in their own sight-proof bush. Several times their unconscious vic- tims repaired damages, but at length, after counsel taken together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlet- tered folk, they came to the conclusion that the Devil was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecutions of witchcraft. The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have succeeded in driving off the blue-jays who used to build in our pines, their gay colors and quaint noisy ways making them welcome and amusing neighbors. I once had the chance of doing a kindness to a household of them, which they received with very friendly condescen- sion. I had had my eye for some time upon a nest, and was puzzled by a constant fluttering of what seemed full-grown wings in it whenever I drew nigh. At last I climbed the tree, in spite of angry protests from the old birds against my intrusion. The mystery had a very simple solution. In building the nest, a long piece ef packthread had been somewhat loosely woven in. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 13 Three of the young had contrived to entangle them- selves in it, and had become full-grown without being able to launch themselves upon the air. One was un- harmed ; another had so tightly twisted the cord about its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed para- lyzed ; the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn through the flesh of the thigh and so much harmed itself that I thought it humane to put an end to its misery. When I took out my knife to cut their hempen bonds, the heads of the family seemed to divine my friendly intent. Suddenly ceasing their cries and threats, they perched quietly within reach of my hand, and watched me in my work of manumission. This, owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an affair of some delicacy ; but erelong I was rewarded by seeing one of them fly away to a neighboring tree, while the cripple, making a parachute of his wings, came light- ly to the ground, and hopped off as well as he could with one leg, obsequiously waited on by his elders. A week later I had the satisfaction of meeting him in the pine- walk, in good spirits, and already so far recovered as to be able to balance himself with the lame foot. I have no doubt that in his old age he accounted for his lame- ness by some handsome story of a wound received at the famous Battle of the Pines, when our tribe, over- come by numbers, was driven from its ancient camping- ground. Of late years the jays have visited us only at intervals ; and in winter their bright plumage, set off by the snow, and their cheerful cry, are especially wel- come. They would have furnished sop with a fable, for the feathered crest in which they seem to take so much satisfaction is often their fatal snare. Country boys make a hole with their finger in the snow-crust just large enough to admit the jay's head, and, hollow- ing it out somewhat beneath, bait it with a few kernels 14 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. of corn. The crest slips easily into the trap, but refuses to be pulled out again, and he who came to feast remains a prey. Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settle- ment in my pines, and twice have the robins, who claim a right of pre-emption, so successfully played the part of border-ruffians as to drive them away, — to my great regret, for they are the best substitute we have for rooks. At Shady Hill (now, alas! empty of its so long- loved household) they build by hundreds, and nothing can be more cheery than their creaking clatter (like a convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy poli- tics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the turf as martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled with my corn, so far as I could discover. For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an irresistible bait for boys, and their settlement was broken up. They grew so wonted as to throw off a great part of their shyness, and to tolerate my near approach. One very hot day I stood for some time within twenty feet of a mother and three children, who sat on an elm bough over my head, gasping in the sultry air, and holding their wings half-spread for coolness. All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimen- tal, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover, and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint Preux standard, has something the effect of a Mississippi boat- man quoting Tennyson. Yet there are few things to my ear more melodious than his caw of a clear winter morn- ing as it drops to you filtered through five hundred MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15 fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller birds makes the moral character of the crow, for all his deaconlike demeanor and garb, somewhat questionable. He could never sally forth without insult. The golden robins, especially, would chase him as far as I could fol- low with my eye, making him duck clumsily to avoid their importunate bills. I do not believe, however, that he robbed any nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy community, is allowed to poison the river, supplied him with dead alewives in abundance. I used to watch him making his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and coming back with a fish in his beak to his young savages, who, no doubt, like it in that condition which makes it savory to the Kanakas and other corvine races of men. Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen seven males flashing about the garden at once. A merry crew of them swing their hammocks from the pendulous boughs. During one of these latter years, when the canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as winter, these birds went to the trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, and chose for the purpose trees which are safe from those swarming vandals, such as the ash and the button-wood. One year a pair (disturbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm, within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E. Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web all strands of brilliant color, and J thought it a striking example of that instinct of concealment noticeable in many birds, though it should seem in this instance that the nest was amply protected by its position from all marauders but owls and squirrels. Last year, however, I had the fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. A pair of orioles built on the lowest trailer of a weeping elm, which hung within ten feet of our drawing-room 16 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. window, and so low that I could reach it from the ground. The nest was wholly woven and felted with ravellings of woollen carpet in which scarlet predomi- nated. Would the same thing have happened in the woods? Or did the nearness of a human dwelling perhaps give the birds a greater feeling of security? They are very bold, by the way, in quest of cordage, and I have often watched them stripping the fibrous bark from a honeysuckle growing over the very door. But, indeed, all my birds look upon me as if I were a Ynere tenant at will, and they were landlords. With shame I confess it, I have been bullied even by a hum- ming-bird. This spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree of its lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs came purring toward me, couching his long bill like a lance, his throat sparkling with angry fire, to warn me off from a Missouri-currant whose honey he was sipping. And many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed. This summer, by the way, a pair of these winged emeralds fastened their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same elm which the orioles had enlivened the year before. We watched all their proceedings from the window through an opera-glass, and saw their two nest- lings grow from black needles with a tuft of down at the lower end, till they whirled away on their first short experimental flights. They became strong of wing in a surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the male bird after, though the female was regular as usual in her visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not think it ground enough for a generalization, but in the many times when I watched the old birds feeding their young, the mother atways alighted, while the father as uniformly remained upon the wing. The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tinkling through the garden in blossoming-time, but this year, MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 17 owing to the long rains early in the season, their favorite meadows were flooded, and they were driven to the up- land. So I had a pair of them domiciled in my grass- field. The male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in full bloom, and, while I stood perfectly still close by, he would circle away, quivering round the entire field of five acres, with no break in his song, and settle down again among the blossoms, to be hurried away almost immediately by a new rapture of music. He had the volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, and, like him, appeared to be proclaiming the merits of some quack remedy. Opodeldoc-opodeldoc-try-Doctor-Lincoln s-opodel- doc ! he seemed to repeat over and over again, with a rapidity that would have distanced the deftest-tongued Figaro that ever rattled. I remember Count Gurowski saying once, with that easy superiority of knowledge about this country which is the monopoly of foreigners, that we had no singing-birds! Well, well, Mr. Hepworth Dixon has found the typical America in Oneida and Salt Lake City. Of course, an intelligent European is the best judge of these matters. The truth is there are more singing-birds in Europe because there are fewer forests. These songsters love the neighhorhood of man because hawks and owls are rarer, while their own food is more abundant. Most people seem to think, the more trees, the more birds. Even Chateaubriand, who first tried the primitive-forest-cure, and whose description of the wilderness in its imaginative effects is unmatched, fancies the “people of the air singing their hymns to him.” So far as my own observation goes, the farther one penetrates the sombre solitudes of the woods, the more seldom does he hear the voice of any singing-bird. In spite of Chateaubriand’s minuteness of detail, in spite of that marvellous reverberation of the decrepit tree falling of its own weight, which he was the first te B 18 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. notice, I cannot help doubting whether he made his way very deep into the wilderness. At any rate, in a letter to Fontanes, written in 1804, he speaks of mes chevaux paissant & quelque distance. To be sure Chateaubriand was apt to mount the high horse, and this may have been but an afterthought of the grand seigneur, but certainly one would not make much headway on horse- back toward the druid fastnesses of the primeval pine. The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in a meadow within a quarter of a mile of us. A houseless lane passes through the midst of their camp, and in clear westerly weather, at the right season, one may hear a score of them singing at once. When they are breeding, if I chance to pass, one of the male birds always accompanies me like a constable, flitting from post to post of the rail-fence, with a short note of re- proof continually repeated, till I am fairly out of the neighborhood. Then he will swing away into the air and run down the wind, gurgling music without stint over the unheeding tussocks of meadow-grass and dark clumps of bulrushes that mark his domain. We have no bird whose song will match the nightin- gale’s in compass, none whose note is so rich as that of the European blackbird; but for mere rapture I have never heard the bobolink’s rival. But his opera- season is a short one. The ground and tree sparrows are our most constant performers. It is now late in August, and one of the latter sings every day and all day long in the garden. Till within a fortnight, a pair of indigo-birds would keep up their lively duo for an hour together. While I write, I hear an oriole gay as in June, and the plaintive may-be of the goldfinch tells me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know not what the experience of others may have been, but the only bird I have ever heard sing in the night has been the MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 19 chip-bird. I should say he sang about as often during the darkness as cocks crow. One can hardly help fancy- ing that he sings in his dreams. “ Father of light, what sunnie seed, What glance of day hast thou confined Into this bird? To all the breed This busie ray thou hast assigned; Their magnetism works all night, And dreams of Paradise and light.” On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity of a Swiss clock. - The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that end, bring us the flicker every suramer, and almost daily I hear his wild scream and laugh close at hand, himself invisible. He is a shy bird, but a few days ago I had the satisfaction of studying him through the blinds as he sat on a tree within a few feet of me. Seen so near and at rest, he makes good his claim to the title of pigeon-woodpecker. Lumberers have a notion that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes through the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The regular rings of such perforations which one may see in almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability to this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail visits us, and, unseen among the currant-bushes, calls Bob White, Bob White, as if he were playing at hide-and- seek with that imaginary being. A rarer visitant is the turtle-dove, whose pleasant coo (something like the muffied crow of a cock from a coop covered with snow) I have sometimes heard, and whom I once had the good luck to see close by me in the mulberry-tree. The wild- pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen for many years.* Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then quarters him- self upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish in a tree They made their appearance again this summer (1870). 20 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once offered me a near shot from my study-window one drizzly day for several hours. But it was Sunday, and I gave him the benefit of its gracious truce of God. Certain birds have disappeared from our neighborhood within my memory. I remember when the whippoorwill could be heard in Sweet Auburn. The night-hawk, once common, is now rare. The brown thrush has moved far- ther up country. For years I have not seen or heard any of the larger owls, whose hooting was one of my boy- ish terrors. The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that eastward takes his way, has come and gone again in my time. The bank-swallows, wellnigh innumerable during my boyhood, uo longer frequent the crumbly cliff of the gravel-pit by the river. The barn-swallows, which once swarmed in our barn, flashing through the dusty sun- streaks of the mow, have been gone these many years. My father would lead me out to see them gather on the roof, and take counsel before their yearly migration, as Mr. White used to see them at Selborne. heu, fugaces ! Thank fortune, the swift still glues his nest, and rolls his distant thunders night and day in the wide-throated chim- neys, still sprinkles the evening air with his merry twit- tering. The populous heronry in Fresh Pond meadows has been wellnigh broken up, but still a pair or two haunt the old home, as the gypsies of Ellangowan their ruined huts, and every evening fly over us riverwards, clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk as they go, and, in cloudy weather, scarce higher than the tops of the chimneys. Sometimes I have known one to alight in one of our trees, though for what purpose I never could divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled me in the same way, perched at high noon in a pine, springing their watchman’s rattle when they flitted away from my curi- osity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy heads along as a man does a wheelbarrow. MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 21 Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country is growing less wild. I once found a summer duck’s nest within quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trou- vaille would be impossible now as Kidd’s treasure. And yet the mere taming of the neighborhood does not quite satisfy me as an explanation. ‘Twenty years ago, on my way to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few rods of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth of any kind to conceal them, and yet these ordinarily shy birds were almost as indifferent to my passing as common poultry would have been. Since bird-nesting has become scientific, and dignified itself as odlogy, that, no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our losses. But some old friends are constant. Wilson’s thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic of ornithologists. He flits before me through the pine- walk like the very genius of solitude. A pair of pewees have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. Always on the same brick, and never more than a single pair, though two broods of five each are raised there every summer. How do they settle their claim to the homestead? By what right of primogeniture? Once the children of a man employed about the place odlogized the nest, and the pewees left us for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the mess- mates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he snaps a fly on the wing with the unerring precision a stately Trasteverina shows in the capture of her smaller deer. The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morn- ing; and, during the early summer he preludes his matutinal ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle. 22 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. unheard at any other time. He saddens with the sea- son, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to eheu, pewee / asif in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so familiar as often to pursue a fly through the open window into my library. There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these old friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, at some time or other, a happy home- stead among its boughs, to which I cannot say, “Many light hearts and wings, Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers.” My walk under the pines would lose half its summer charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson’s thrush, nor hear in haying-time the metallic ring of his song, that justifies his rustic name of scythe-whet. I protect my game as jealously as an English squire. If anybody had odlogized a certain cuckoo’s nest I know of (I have a pair in my garden every year), it would have left me a sore place in my mind for weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the man- suetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before (forgive the involuntary pun) they had grown accustomed to man and knew his savage ways. And they repay your kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to breed contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives, which converted them to a little Hebraism and a great deal of Medfordrum. If they will not come near enough to me (as most of them will), I bring them close with an opera-glass, — a much better weapon than a gun. I would not, if I could, convert them from their pretty pagan ways. The only one I sometimes have savage doubts about is the red squirrel. I think he odlogizes. I know he eats cherries (we counted five of them at one MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 23 time in a single tree, the stones pattering down like the sparse hail that preludes a storm), and that he gnaws off the small end of pears to get at the seeds. He steals the corn from under the noses of my poultry. But what would you have? He will come down upon the limb of the tree I am lying under till he is within a yard of me. He and his mate will scurry up and down the great black- walnut for my diversion, chattering like monkeys. Can T sign his death-warrant who has tolerated me about his grounds so long? NotI. Let them steal, and welcome. I am sure I should, had I had the same bringing up and the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not believe there is one of them but does more good than harm ; and of how many featherless bipeds can this be said? A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. ug EN scarcely know how beautiful fire is,” says Shelley ; and I am apt to think there are a good many other things concerning which their knowl- edge might be largely increased without becoming burden- some. Nor are they altogether reluctant to be taught, —not so reluctant, perhaps, as unable, — and education is sure to find one fulcrum ready to her hand by which to get a purchase on them. For most of us, I have no- ticed, are not without an amiable willingness to assist at any spectacle or entertainment (loosely so called) for which no fee is charged at the door. If special tickets are sent us, another element of pleasure is added in a sense of privilege and pre-eminence (pitiably scarce in a democracy) so deeply rooted in human nature that I have seen people take a strange satisfaction in being near of kin to the mute chief personage in afuneral. It gave them a moment’s advantage over the rest of us whose grief was rated at a lower place in the procession. But the words “ admission free” at the bottom of a hand- bill, though holding out no bait of inequality, have yet a singular charm for many minds, especially in the coun- try. There is something touching in the constancy with which men attend free lectures, and in the honest patience with which they listen to them. He who pays may yawn or shift testily in his seat, or even go out with an awful reverberation of criticism, for he has bought the right to do any or all of these and paid for it. But gra- A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 25 tuitous hearers are anesthetized to suffering by a sense of virtue. They are performing perhaps the noblest, as it is one of the most difficult, of human functions in get- ting Something (no matter how small) for Nothing. They are not pestered by the awful duty of securing their money’s worth. They are wasting time, to do which elegantly and without lassitude is the highest achievement of civilization. If they are cheated, it is, at worst, only of a superfluous hour which was rotting on their hands. Not only is mere amusement made more piquant, but instruction more palatable, by this univer- sally relished sauce of gratuity. And if the philosophic observer finds an object of agreeable contemplation in the audience, as they listen to a discourse on the proba- bility of making missionaries go down better with the Feejee-Islanders by balancing the hymn-book in one pocket with a bottle of Worcestershire in the other, or toa plea for arming the female gorilla with the ballot, he also takes a friendly interest in the lecturer, and ad- mires the wise economy of Nature who thus contrives an ample field of honest labor for her bores. Even when the insidious hat is passed round after one of these eleemosynary feasts, the relish is but heightened by a conscientious refusal to disturb the satisfaction’s com- pleteness with the rattle of a single contributory penny. So firmly persuaded am I of this gratis-instinct in our common humanity, that I believe I could fill a house by advertising a free lecture on Tupper considered as a philosophic poet, or on my personal recollections of the late James K. Polk. This being so, { have sometimes wondered that the peep-shows which Nature provides with such endless variety for her children, and to which we are admitted on the bare condition of having eyes, should be so generally neglected. To be sure, eves are not so common as people think, or poets would he 2 26 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. plentier, and perhaps also these exhibitions of hers are cheapened in estimation by the fact that in enjoying them we are not getting the better of anybody else. Your true lovers of nature, however, contrive to get even this solace; and Wordsworth looking upon moun- tains as his own peculiar sweethearts, was jealous of anybody else who ventured upon even the most innocent flirtation with them. As if such fellows, indeed, could pretend to that nicer sense of what-d’ye-call-it which was so remarkable in him! Marrycomeup! Mountains, no doubt, may inspire a profounder and more exclusive pas- sion, but on the whole I am not sorry to have been born and bred among more domestic scenes, where I can be hospitable without a pang. I am going to ask you pres- ently to take potluck with me at a board where Winter shall supply whatever there is of cheer. I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant justice done him in the main. We make him the symbol of old age or death, and think we have settled the matter. As if old age were never kindly as well as frosty; as if it had no reverend graces of its own as good in their way as the noisy impertinence of childhood, the elbowing self- conceit of youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle life! As if there were anything discreditable in death, or nobody had ever longed for it! Suppose we grant that Winter is the sleep of the year, what then? I take it upon me to say that. his dreams are finer than the best reality of his waking rivals. “ Sleep, Silence’ child, the father of soft Rest,” is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most of us are bet- ter employed in his company than anywhere else. For my own part, I think Winter a pretty wide-awake old boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more congenial to my mood, and more wholesome for me, A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. ‘27 than any charms of which his rivals are capable. Spring is a fickle mistress, who either does not know her own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether you shall have her or not have her, that one gets tired at last of her pretty miffs and reconciliations. You go to her to be cheered up a bit, and ten to one catch her in the sulks, expecting you to find enough good-humor for both. After she has become Mrs. Summer she grows a little more staid in her demeanor ; and her abundant table, where you are sure to get the earliest fruits and vegetables of the season, is a good foundation for steady friendship ; but she has lost that delicious aroma of maidenhood, and what was delicately rounded grace in the girl gives more than hints of something like redun- dance in thematron. Autumn is the poet of the family. He gets you up a splendor that you would say was made out of real sunset ; but it is nothing more than a few hectic leaves, when all is done. He is but a senti- mentalist, after all; akind of Lamartine whining along the ancestral avenues he has made bare timber of, and begging a contribution of good-spirits from your own savings to keep him in countenance. But Winter has his delicate sensibilities too, only he does not make them as good as indelicate by thrusting them forever in your face. He is a better poet than Autumn, when he has a mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, he brings you down to your bare manhood, and bids you understand him out of that, with no adventitious helps of associa- tion, or he will none of you. He does not touch those melancholy chords on which Autumn is as great a master as Heine. Well, is there no such thing as thrumming on them and maundering over them till they get out of tune, and you wish some manly hand would crash through them and leave them dangling brokenly forever? Take Winter as you find him, and he 28 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow, with no non- sense in him, and tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run. He is not what they call a genial critic ; but bring a real man aloug with you, and you will find there is a crabhed generosity about the old cynic that you would not exchange for all the creamy concessions of Autumn. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” quotha? That ’s just it; Winter soon blows your head clear of fog and makes you see things as they are; I thank him for it! The truth is, between ourselves, I have 4 very good opinion of the whole family, who always welcome me without making me feel as if I were too much of a poor relation. There ought to be some kind of distance, never so little, you know, to give the true relish. They are as good com- pany, the worst of them, as any I know, and I am not a little flattered by a condescension from any one of them; but I happen to hold Winter’s retainer, this time, and, like an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a showing as I can for him, even if it cost a few slurs upon the rest of the household. Moreover, Winter is coming, and one would like to get on the blind side of him. The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror for the moods of the mind, is a modern thing. The flee- ing to her as an escape from man was brought into fashion by Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique horror for the grander aspects of nature. He got once to the top of Mont Ventoux, but it is very plain that he did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so that the search after the picturesque has been a safe em- ployment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where the Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or mediaeval man might be pretty confident that some ruffian would A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 29 try the edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, and leave more precious bones as an offering to the genius of the place. The ancients were certainly more social than we, though that, perhaps, was natural enough, when a good part of the world was still covered with forest. They huddled together in cities as well for safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans had a fondness for country life, but they had fine roads, and Rome was always within easy reach. The author of the Book of Job is the earliest I know of who showed any profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward world; and I think none has approached him since, though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two books of the “ Prelude.” But their feeling is not pre- cisely of the kind I speak of as modern, and which gave rise to what is called descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens his Clerk’s Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its large style, and as well composed as any Claude. “There is right at the west end of Itaille, Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, A lusty plain abundant of vitaille, Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold, That founded were in time of fathers old, And many an other d4lectable sight; And Salucés this noble country hight.” What an airy precision of touch there is here, and what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape ! But the picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt the works of Salvator Rosa and Gaspar Poussin show that there must have been some amateur taste for the grand and terrible in scenery ; but the British poet Thomson (“ sweet-souled ” is Wordsworth’s apt word) was the first to do with words what they had done partially, with colors. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English is like a translation from one of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead ; but he was a man of sincere 30 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. genius, and not only English, but European literature is, largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap amusement for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for the asking. It was his impulse which unconsciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Ruskin, — the great painters of ideal landscape. So long as men had slender means, whether of keep- ing out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially in the coun- try. There he was the bearer of a dettre de cachet, which shut its victims in solitary confinement with few resources but to boose round the fire and repeat ghost- stories, which had lost all their freshness and none of their terror. To go to bed was to lie awake of cold, with an added shudder of fright whenever a loose case- ment or a waving curtain chose to give you the goose- flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows that thought it was their duty to make the wind whistle, not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have been much better in the city, to judge by Ménage’s warning against the dauger of our dressing-gowns taking fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in bed, with his hand through a hole in the blanket ; and we may suspect that it was the warmth quite as much as the company that first drew men together at the coftee-house. Coleridge, in January, 1800, writes to Wedgewood: “I am sitting by a fire in a rug great- GOAL ask a & It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, ean shield yourseif from it only by perpetual imprison- ment.” This thermometrical view of winter is, I grant, a A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 31 depressing one ; for I think there is nothing so demoraliz- ing as cold. I know of a boy who, when his father, a bitter economist, was brought home dead, said only, “ Now we can burn as much wood as we like.” I would not off-hand prophesy the gallows for that boy. I re- member with a shudder a pinch I got from the cold once in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, I found myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed by the freezing vapor of our breath, and plotted the assassi- nation of the conductor every time he opened the door. I felt myself sensibly barbarizing, and would have shared Colonel Jack’s bed in the ash-hole of the glass-furnace with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of winter. It was natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of his exile in Pontus by the number of winters. Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister, Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris: Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I In Pontus was, thrice Euxine’s wave made hard. Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of dcggerel in which Winter and Summer dispute which is the better man. It is not without a kind of rough and inchoate humor, and I like it because old Whitebeard gets toler- ably fair play. The jolly old fellow boasts of his rate of living, with that contempt of poverty which is the weak spot in the burly English nature. Ja Dieu ne place que me avyenge Que ne face plus honour Et plus despenz en un soul jour Que vus en tote vostre vie: Now God forbid it hap to me That I make not more great display, And spend more in a single day Than you can do in all your life. The best touch, perhaps, is Winter’s claim for credit as a mender of the highways, which was not without point 32 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. when every road in Europe was a quagmire during a good part of the year unless it was bottomed on some remains of Roman engineering. Je su, fet-il, seignur et mestre Et a bon droit le dey estre, Quant de la bowe face caucé Par un petit de geelé: Master and lord I am, says he, And of good right so ought to be, Since I make causeys, safely crost, Of mud, with just a pinch of frost. But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out- door company. Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, if ever any, confesses, “ The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, Sings in my ear, my hands are stones, Curdles the blood to the marble bones, Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense, And hems in life with narrowing fence.” Winter was literally “the inverted year,” as Thomson called him; for such entertainments as could be had must be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was in brumal verse was that of Horace’s dissolve frigus ligna super foco large reponens, so pleasantly associated with the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the tone of that poem of Walton’s friend Cotton, which won the praise of Wordsworth :— “Let us home, Our mortal enemy is come: Winter and all his blustering train Have made a voyage o’er the main. “ Fly, fly, the foe advances fast; Into our fortress let us haste. Where all the roarers of the north Can neither storm nor starve us forth. “ There underground a magazine Of sovereign juice is cellared in, Liquor that will the siege maintain Should Phoebus ne'er return again. A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 33 “Whilst we together jovial sit Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, Where, though bleak winds confine us home Our fancies round the world shall roam.” Thomson’s view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile one, though he does justice to his grandeur. “ Thus Winter falls, A heavy gloom oppressive o’er the would, Through Nature shedding influence malign.” He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, though more refined :— “While without The ceaseless winds blow ice. be my retreat Between the groaning forest and the shore Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, A rural, sheltered, solitary scene, Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit And hold high converse with the mighty dead.” Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, follows Thomson. With him, too, ‘“ Winter desolates the year,” and “ How pleasing wears the wintry night Spent with the old illustrious dead ! While by the taper's trembling light I seem those awful scenes to tread Where chiefs or legislators lie,” &c. Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He had the conceptions of a great poet with less faculty than many a little one, and is one of those versifiers of whom it is enough to say that we are always willing to break him off in the middle with an &c., well knowing that what follows is but the coming-round again of what went before, marching in a circle with the cheap numerosity of a stage-army. In truth, it is no wonder that the short days of that cloudy northern climate should have added to winter a gloom borrowed of the mind. We hardly know, till we have experienced the contrast, how sensibly pur winter is alleviated by the longer daylight and the 2% c 34 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. pellucid atmosphere. I once spent a winter in Dresden, a southern climate compared with England, and really almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him grop- ing among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he described his impoverished arcinthesky. The enforced seclusion of the season makes it the time for serious study and occupations that demand fixed incomes of unbroken time. This is why Milton said “that his vein never happily flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the vernal,” though in his twentieth year he had written, on the return of spring, — Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest ? Err I? or do the powers of song return To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice the cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His Harez-reise im Winter gives no hint of it, for that is a diluted reminis- cence of Greek tragic choruses and the Book of Job in nearly equal parts. In one of the singularly interesting and characteristic letters to Frau von Stein, however, written during the journey, he says: “ It is beautiful in- deed ; the mist heaps itself together in light snow-clouds, the sun looks through, and the snow over everything gives back a feeling of gayety.” But T find in Cowper the first recognition of a general amiability in Winter. The gentleness of his temper, and the-wide charity of his sympathies, made it natural for him to find good in everything except the human heart. A dreadful creed distilled from the darkest moments of dyspeptic solitaries compelled him against his will to see in that the one evil thing made by a God whose goodness is over all his works. Cowper's two walks in the morning and noon of a winter's day are delightful, so long as he contrives to let himself be happy in the graciousness of the landscape, A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 35 Your muscles grow springy, and your lungs dilate with the crisp air as you walk along with him. You laugh with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. But Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden-walk to those ‘ robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the depressing influence of the darkened year. In December, 1780, he writes : “ At this season of the year, and in this gloomy uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner of a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and to fix it upon such as may administer to its amusement.” Or was it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton ? Perhaps his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual feeling, for it is only there that poets disenthral them- selves of their reserve and become fully possessed of their greatest charm, — the power of being franker than other men. In the Third Book of the Task he boldly affirms his preference of the country to the city even in winter :— “ But are not wholesome airs, though unperfumed By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt, And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure From clamor, and whose very silence charms, To be preferred to smoke ?.... They would be, were not madness in the head And folly in the heart ; were England now What England was, plain, hospitable kind, And undebauched.” The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking mainly of fireside delights, not of the blusterous com- panionship of nature. This appears even more clearly in the Fourth Book :— “ © Winter, ruler of the inverted year”’ ; but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant it always is to track poets through the gardens of their 36 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. predecessors and find out their likings by a flower snapped off here and there to garnish their own nosegays. Cowper had been reading Thomson, and ‘‘the inverted year” pleased his fancy with its suggestion of that starry wheel of the zodiac moving round through its spaces infi- nite. He could not help loving a handy Latinism (espe- cially with elision beauty added), any more than Gray, any more than Wordsworth,—on the sly. But the member for Olney has the floor : — “ O Winter, ruler of the inverted year, Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled, Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks Fringed with a beard made white with other snows Than those cf age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds, A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne A sliding car, indebted to no wheels, But urged by storms along its slippery way, T love thee all unlovely as thou seem’st, And dreaded as thou art! Thou hold’st the sun A prisoner in the yet undawning east, Shortening his Journey between morn and noon, And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, Down to the rosy west, but kindly still Compensating his loss with added hours Of social converse and instructive ease, And gathering at short notice, in one group, The family dispersed, and fixing thought, Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. J crown thee king of intimate delights, Fireside enjovments, homeborn happiness, And all the comforts that the lowly roof Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours Of long uninterrupted evening know.” I call this a good human bit of writing, imaginative, too, — not so flushed, not so.... highfaluting (let me dare the odious word !) as the modern style since poets have got hold of a theory that imagination is common- sense turned inside ont, and not common-sense sublimed, — but wholesome, masculine, and strong in the simplicity of a mind wholly occupied with its theme. To me Cow A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 37 per is still the best of our descriptive poets for every-day wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has! How he heightens, for example, your sense of winter-evening se clusion, by the twanging horn of the postman on the bridge! That horn has rung in my ears ever since I first heard it, durin’ the consulate of the second Adams. Wordsworth strikes a deeper note ; but does it not some- times come over one (just the least in the world) that one would give anything for a bit of nature pure and simple, without quite so strong a flavor of W. W.1 W. W. is, of course, sublime and all that — but! For my part, I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can’t look at a mountain without fancying the late laureate’s gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and it, and think- ing of Dean Swift’s profane version of Romanos rerum dominos into Roman nose! a rare un! dom your nose ! But do I judge verses, then, by the impression made on me by the man who wrote them? Not so fast, my good friend, but, for good or evil, the character and its intel- lectual product are inextricably interfused. If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in his magnificent skating-scene in the ‘‘ Prelude”) has not much to say for winter out of doors. I cannot recall any picture by him of a snow-storm. The reason may possibly be that in the Lake Country even the winter storms bring rain rather than snow. He was thankful for the Christmas visits of Crabb Robinson, because they “helped him through the winter.” His only hearty praise of winter is when, as Général Février, he defeats the French :— “ Humanity, delighting to behold A fond reflection of her own decay, Hath painted Winter like a traveller old, Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day, In hooded mantle, limping o'er the plain As though his weakness were disturbed by pain: 38 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. Or, if ajuster fancy should allow An undisputed symbol of command, The chosen sceptre is a withered bough Infirmly grasped within a withered hand. These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn; But mighty Winter the device shall scorn.” The Scottish poet Grahame, in his “Sabbath,” says manfully :— “ Now is the time To visit Nature in her grand attire”; and he has one little picture which no other poet has surpassed : — “ High-ridged the whirléd drift has almost reached The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch: Mute hangs the hooded bell; the tombs lie buried.” Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his win- ter face as long and as brightly as in central Italy, the seduction of the chimney-corner is apt to predominate in the mind over the severer satisfactions of muffled fields arid penitential woods. The very title of Whittier’s de- lightful “ Snow-Bound ” shows what he was thinking of, though he does vapor a little about digging out paths. The verses of Emerson, perfect as a Greek fragment (despite the archaism of a dissyllabic fire), which he has chosen for his epigraph, tell us, too, how the ‘“ Housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of storm.” They are all in atale. It is always the éristis Hiems of Virgil. Catch one of them having a kind word for old Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines through some cranny, like a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while they toast their slippered toes. J grant there is a keen relish of contrast about the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or kindles the gloomy gold of volumes scarce less friendly, especially when a tempest is blundering round the A GOOD WURD FOR WINTER. 39 house. Wordsworth has a fine touch that brings home to us the comfortable contrast of without and within, during a storm at night, and the passage is highly characteristic of a poet whose inspiration always has an undertone of bourgeois ; — “ How touching, when, at midnight, sweep Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark, To hear, — and sink again to sleep!” J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tarnish their bright fancies by publication, always insists on a snow-storm as essential to the true atmosphere of whist. Mrs. Battles, in her famous rule for the game, implies winter, and would doubtless have.added tempest, if it could be had for the asking. For a good solid read also, into the small hours, there is nothing like that sense of safety against having your evening laid waste, which Euroclydon brings, as he bellows down the chimney, makiug your fire gasp, or rustles snow-flakes against the pane with a sound more soothing than silence. Emer- son, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail on the head, but drove it home, in that last phrase of. the “tumultuous privacy.” But I would exchange this, and give something to boot, for the privilege of walking out into the vast blur of a north-northeast snow-storm, and getting a strong draught on the furnace within, by drawing the first fur- rows through its sandy drifts. I love those “ Noontide twilights which snow makes With tempest of the blinding flakes.” If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the heavy snow that gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs of your evergreens, and traces a skeleton of your elms in white; but you must have plenty of north in your gale if you want those driving nettles of frost that sting the cheeks to a crimson manlier than that of fire. During 40 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. the great storm of two winters ago, the most robustious periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded and floun- dered a couple of miles through the whispering night, and brought home that feeling of expansion we have after being in good company. “Great things doeth He which we cannot comprehend ; for he saith to the snow, ‘Be thou on the earth.’ ” There is admirable snow scenery in Judd’s “ Marga- ret,” but some one has confiscated my copy of that ad- mirable book, and, perhaps, Homer's picture of a snow- storm is the best yet in its large simplicity :— “ And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp javelins throws Amongst us mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows, The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest prominents, Hill-tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most contents The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, and every place, But floods, that fair snow’s tender flakes, as their own brood, em- brace.”” Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with him, comes nearer Homer than anybody else. There is nothing in the original of that fair snow’s tender flakes, but neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their heads the Psalmist’s tender phrase, ‘“ He giveth his snow like wool,” for which also Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of ‘dissolving fleeces,” and Cowper of a “fleecy mantle.” But David is nobly simple, while Pope is simply nonsensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must have prettiness, Martial would have supplied them with it in his : Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum, which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased Dr. Donne. Eustathius of Thessalonica calls snow t8ep épiwdes, woolly water, which a poor old French poet, Godeau, has amplified into this : — Lorsque la froidure inhumaine De leur verd ornement depouille Jes foréts Sous une neige épaisse il couvre les guérets, Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine. A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 41 In this, as in Pope’s version of the passage in Homer, there is, at least,a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in the blinding drift of words. But, on the whole, if one would know what snow is, I should advise him not to hunt up what the poets have said about it, but to look at the sweet miracle itself. The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of Spring. In a gray December day, when, as the farmers say, it is too cold to snow, his numbed fingers will let fall doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the snow-drops and anemones that harbinger his more assured reign. Now, and now only, may be seen, heaped on the hori- zon’s eastern edge, those “blue clouds” from forth which Shakespeare says that Mars “doth pluck the masoned turrets.” Sometimes also, when the sun is low, you will see a single cloud trailing a flurry of snow along the southern hills in’a wavering fringe of purple. And when at last the real snow-storm comes, it leaves the earth with a virginal look on it that no other of the seasons can rival, — compared with which, indeed, they seem soiled and vulgar. And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next morning after such confusion of the elements? Night has no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries of noise are spiked. We see the movement of life as a deaf man sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous exist- ence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is bare. The earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. Every wound of the landscape is healed ; whatever was stiff has been sweetly rounded as the breasts of Aphro- dite ; what was unsightly has been covered gently with a soft splendor, as if, Cowley would have said, Nature had cleverly Jet fall her handkerchief to hide it. If the Virgin (Wétre Dame de la neige) were to come back, here is an earth that would not bruise her foot nor stain it. 42 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. It is “ The fanned snow That ’s bolted by the northern blasts twice o’er,”” — Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds, — packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if every one of them had been swept by that inspired thumb of Phidias’s journeyman ! Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water with a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the aerial deluge has left plain marks. of its course; and in gullies through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye finds its bed irregularly scooped like that of a brook in hard beach-sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with outlines like those left by the sliding edges of the surf upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an infinitely thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall have to drink when the state does her whole duty as a moral reformer. Nor is the wind the only thing whose trail you will notice on this sensitive surface. You will find that you have more neighbors and night visitors than you dreamed of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat ; here a dog has looked in on you like an amateur watch- man to see if all is right, slumping clumsily about in the mealy treachery. And look! before you were up in the morning, though you were a punctual courtier at the sun’s levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging to and fro like a hound gathering the scent, and some tiny bird searching for unimaginable food, — perhaps for the tinier creature, whatever it is, that drew this slender continu- ous trail like those made on the wet beach by light borderers of the sea. The earliest autographs were as frail as these. Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds made their mark, on preadamite sea-margins; and the A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 43 thunder-gust left the tear-stains of its sudden passion there ; nay, we have the signatures of delicatest fern- leaves on the soft ooze of’ zons that dozed away their dreamless leisure before consciousness came upon the earth with man. Some whim of nature locked them fast in stone for us after-thoughts of creation. Which of us shall leave a footprint as imperishable as that of the ornithorhyncus, or much more so than that of these Bedouins of the snow-desert? Perhaps it was only be- cause the ripple and the rain-drop and the bird were not thinking of themselves, that they had such luck. The chances of immortality depend very much on that. How often have we not seen poor mortals, dupes of a season’s notoriety, carving their names on seeming-solid rock of merest beach-sand, whose feeble hold on memory shall be washed away by the next wave of fickle opinion! Well, well, honest Jacques, there are better uhinge to be found in the snow than sermons. The snow that falls damp comes commonly in larger flakes from windless skies, and is the prettiest of all to watch from under cover. This is the kind Homer had in mind ; and Dante, who had never read him, compares the dilatate falde, the flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to those of snow among the mountains without wind. This sort of snowfall has no fight in it, and does not challenge you to a wrestle like that which drives well from the northward, with all moisture thoroughly winnowed out of it by the frosty wind. Burns, who was more out of doors than most poets, and whose barefoot Muse got the color in her cheeks by vigorous exercise in all weathers, was thinking of this drier deluge, when he speaks of the “whirling drift,” and tells how “ Chanticleer Shook off the powthery snaw.”’ But the damper and more deliberate falls have a choice 44 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. knack ac draping the trees; and about eaves or stone: walls, wherever, indeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it finds a chance to cling, it will build itself out in curves of wonderful beauty. I have seen one of these dumb waves, thus caught in the act of breaking, curl four feet beyond the edge of my roof and hang there for days, as if Nature were too well pleased with her work to let it crumble from its exquisite pause. After such a storm, if you are lucky enough to have even a sluggish ditch for a neighbor, be sure to pay it a visit. You will find its banks corniced with what seems precipitated light, and the dark current down below gleams as if with an Snward lustre. Dull of motion as it is, you never saw water that seemed alive before. It has a brightness, \ike that of the eyes of some smaller animals, which gives assurance of life, but of a life foreign and unintel- pigible. A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the northwest so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crys- tal before it has swept the sky clear of its last cobweb of cloud. Ambrose Philips, in a poetical epistle from Copenhagen to the Earl of Dorset, describes this strange confectionery of Nature, — for such, I am half ashamed to say, it always seems to me, recalling the “glorified sugae-candy ” of Lamb’s first night at the theatre. It has an artificial air, altogether beneath the grand artist of the atmosphere, and besides does too much mischief to the trees for a philodendrist to take unmixed pleasure in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet like Philips, who really loved Nature and yet liked her to be mighty fine, as Pepys would say, with a heightening of powder and rouge :— “ And yet but lately have I seen e’en here The winter in a lovely dress appear. A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 45 Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow, Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow, At evening a keen eastern breeze arose, And the descending rain unsullied froze. Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view The face of Nature in a rich disguise, And brightened every object to my eyes; For every shrub, and every blade of grass, And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass; In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, And through the ice the crimson berries glow; The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield, Seem polished lances in a hostile field; The stag in limpid currents with surprise Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise; The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine, Glazed over in the freezing ether shine; The frighted birds the rattling branches shun, Which wave and glitter in the distant sun, When, if a sudden gust of wind arise, The brittle forest into atoms flies, The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends And in a spangled shower the prospect ends.” Tt is not uninstructive to see how tolerable Ambrose is, so long as he sticks manfully to what he really saw. The moment he undertakes to improve on Nature he: sinks into the mere court poet, and we surrender him to the jealousy of Pope without a sigh. His ‘rattling branches” and “crackling forest” are good, as truth al- ways is after a fashion; but what shall we say of that dreadful stag which, there is little doubt, “he valued above all the rest, because it was purely his own ! The damper snow tempts the amateur architect and sculptor. His Pentelicus has been brought to his very door, and if there are boys to be had (whose company beats all other revipes for prolonging life) a middle-aged Master of the Works will knock the years off his ac count and make the family Bible seem a dealer in foolish fables, by a few hours given heartily to this business. First comes the Sisyphean toil of rolling the clammy 46 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. balls till they refuse to budge farther. Then, if you would play the statuary, they are piled one upon the other to the proper height ; or if your aim be masonry, whether of house or fort, they must be squared and beaten solid with the shovel. The material is capable of very pretty effects, and your young companions mean- while are unconsciously learning lessons in esthetics. From the feeling of satisfaction with which one squats on the damp floor of his extemporized dwelling, I have been led to think that the backwoodsman must get a sweeter savor of self-reliance from the house his own hands have built than Bramante or Sansovino could ever give. Perhaps the fort is the best thing, for it calls out more masculine qualities and adds the cheer of battle with that dumb artillery which gives pain enough to test pluck without risk of serious hurt. Already, as I write, it is twenty-odd years ago. The balls fly thick and fast. The uncle defends the waist-high ramparts against a storm of nephews, his breast plastered with decorations like another Radetsky’s. How well I recall the indomitable good-humor under fire of him who fell in the front at Ball's Bluff, the silent pertinacity of the gentle scholar who got his last hurt at Fair Oaks, the ardor in the charge of the gallant gentleman who, with the death-wound in his side, headed his brigade at Cedar Creek! How it all comes back, and they never come ! I cannot again be the Vauban of fortresses in the inno- cent snow, but I shall never see children moulding their clumsy giants in it without longing to help. It was a pretty fancy of the young Vermont sculptor to make his first essay in this evanescent material. Was it a figure of Youth, I wonder? Would it not be well if all artists could begin in stuff as perishable, to melt away when the sun of prosperity began to shine, and leave nothing be- hind but the gain of practised hands? It is pleasant - A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 47 to fancy that Shakespeare served his apprenticeship at this trade, and owed to it that most pathetic of despair: ing wishes, — “O, that I were a mockery-king of snow, Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, To melt myself away in water-drops!” I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snow sur. faces. Not less rare are the tints of which they are capable, — the faint blue of the hollows, for the shadows in snow are always blue, and the tender rose of higher points, as you stand with your back to the setting sun and look upward across the soft rondure of a hillside. I have seen within a mile of home effects of color as lovely as any iridescence of the Silberhorn after sun- down. Charles II., who never said a foolish thing, gave the English climate the highest praise when he said that it allowed you more hours out of doors than any other, and I think our winter may fairly make the same boast as compared with the rest of the year. Its still morn- ings, with the thermometer near zero, put a premium on walking. There is more sentiment in turf, perhaps, and it is more elastic to the foot ; its silence, too, is wellnigh as congenial with meditation as that of fallen pine-tassel ; but for exhilaration there is nothing like a stiff snow- crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and com- municates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you drink is frappé, all its grosser particles precipitated, and the dregs of your blood with them. A purer current mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is nothing left to breed an exhalation of ill-humor or despondency. They say that this rarefied atmosphere has lessened the capacity of our lungs. Beitso. Quart- pots are for muddier liquor than nectar. To me, the city in winter is infinitely dreary, — the sharp street- 48 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. corners have such a chill in them, and tbe snow so soon loses its maidenhood to become a mere drab, — “ doing shameful things,” as Steele says of politicians, ‘‘ without being ashamed.” I pine for the Quaker purity of my country landscape. I am speaking, of course, of those winters that are not niggardly of snow, as ours too often are, giving us a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be unsightlier than those piebald fields where the coarse brown hide of Earth shows through the holes of her ragged ermine. But even when there is abundance of snow, I find as I grow older that there are not so many good crusts as there used to be. When I first observed this, I rashly set it to the account of that general. degeneracy in nature (keeping pace with the same melancholy phenomenon in man) which forces itself up- on the attention and into the philosophy of middle life. But happening once to be weighed, it occurred to me that an arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly be blamed for giving way under more than three times the weight. I have sometimes thought that if theologians would remember this in their arguments, and consider that the man may slump through, with no fault of his own, where the boy would have skimmed the surface in safety, it would be better for all parties. However, when you do get a crust that will bear, and know any brooklet that runs down a hillside, be sure to go and take a look at him, especially if your crust is due, as it commonly is, to a cold snap following eagerly on a thaw. You will never find him so cheerful. As he shrank away after the last thaw, he built for himself the most exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if not “‘measure- less to man” like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those for their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is ‘Frost! The rarest workmanship of Delhi or Genoa A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 49 copies him but clumsily, as if the fingers of all other artists were thumbs. Fernwork and lacework and fila- gree in endless variety, and under it all the water tinkles like a distant guitar, or drums like a tambourine, or gurgles like the Tokay of an anchorite’s dream. Be- yond doubt there is a fairy procession marching along those frail arcades and translucent corridors. “ Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill, The hemlock small blow clear.” And hark ! is that the ringing of Titania’s bridle, or the bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on Oberon’s wrist 1 This wonder of Frost’s handiwork may be had every winter, but he can do better than this, though I have seen it but once in my life. There had been a thaw without wind or rain, making the air fat with gray vapor. Towards sundown came that chill, the avant-courier of a northwesterly gale. Then, though there was no per- ceptible current in the atmosphere, the fog began to attach itself in frosty roots and filaments to the southern side of every twig and grass-stem. The very posts had poems traced upon them by this dumb minstrel. Wherever the moist seeds found lodgement grew an inch-deep moss fine as cobweb, a slender coral-reef, argentine, delicate, as of some silent sea in the moon, such as Agassiz dredges when he dreams. The frost, too, can wield a delicate graver, and in fancy leaves Piranesi far behind. He covers your window-pane with Alpine etchings, as if in memory of that sanctuary where he finds shelter even in midsummer. Now look down from your hillside across the valley. The trees are leafless, but this is the season to study their anatomy, and did yon ever notice before how much color there is in the twigs of many of them? And the smoke from those chimneys is ‘so blue it seems like a feeder of the sky into which it flows. Winter refines it 3 D 50 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. and gives it agreeable associations. In summer it sug: gests cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, but now your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the dreary usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the fireside and the brightened faces of children. Thoreau is the only poet who has fitly sung it. The wood-cutter rises before day and “ First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad His early scout, his emissary, smoke, The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof, To feel the frosty air;.... And, while he crouches still beside the hearth, Nor musters courage to unbar the door, It has gone down the glen with the light wind And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath, Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, And warmed the pinions of the early bird ; And now, perchance, high in the crispy air, Has caught sight of the day o’er the earth’s edge, And greets its master’s eye at his low door As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky.” Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. He had been reading Wordsworth, or he would not have made ¢ree-tops an iambus. In the Moretwm of Virgil (or, if not his, better than most of his) is a pretty picture of a peasant kindling his winter-morning fire. He rises before dawn, Sollicitaqne manu tenebras explorat inertes Vestigatque focum lesus quem denique sensit. Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite fumus, Et cinis obducte celabat lumina prune. Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam, Et producit acu stupas humore carentes, Excitat et crebris languentem flatibus iznem : Tandem concepto tenebre fulgore recedunt, Oppositaque manu lumen defendit ab aura. With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark, Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong. In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained, And raked-up ashes hid the cinders’ eyes; Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears, A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER . 51 And, with a needle loosenin i ; ig the dry wick. With frequent breath excites the ianweie flame. Before the gathering glow the shades recede, And his bent hand the new-caught light defends. Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch :— Ipse genu poito flammas exsuscitat aura. Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames. If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a robin or a blue-bird among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch scaling deviously the trunk of some hardwood tree with an eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging for the pot-au-feu of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills cah cah in his corvine trebles, or a chickadee “ Shows feats of his gymnastic play, Head downward, clinging to the spray.” But both him and the snow-bird I love better to see, tiny fluffs of feathered life, as they scurry about in a driving mist of snow, than in this serene air. Coleridge has put into verse one of the most beautiful phenomena of a winter walk : — “ The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a halo round its head.” But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have noticed it often in a summer morning, when the grass was heavy with dew, and even later in the day, when the dewless grass was still fresh enough to have a gleam of its own. For my own part I prefer a winter walk that takes in the nightfall and the intense silence that erelong follows it. The evening lamps looks yellower by contrast with the snow, and give the windows that hearty look of which our secretive fires have almost robbed them. Tha stars seem 52 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. To hang, like twinkling winter lamps, Ameng the branches of the leafless trees,” or, if you are on a hill-top (whence it is sweet to watch the home-lights gleam out one by one), they look nearer than in summer, and appear to take a conscious part in the cold. Especially in one of those stand-stills of the air that forebode a change of weather, the sky is dusted with motes of fire of which the summer-watcher never dreamed. Winter, too, is, on the whole, the triumphant season of the moon, a moon devoid of sentiment, if you choose, but with the refreshment of a purer intellectual light, —the cooler orb of middle life. Who ever saw anything to match that gleam, rather divined than seen, which runs before her over the snow, a breath of light, as she rises on the infinite silence of winter night? High in the heavens, also she seems to bring out some intenser property of cold with her chilly polish. The poets have instinctively noted this. When Goody Blake imprecates a curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, she has “ The cold, cold moon above her head ”; and Coleridge speaks of “ The silent icicles, Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon.” As you walk homeward, — for it is time that we should end our ramble, — you may perchance hear the most impressive sound in nature, uniess it be the fall of a tree in the forest during the hush of summer noon. It is the stifled shriek of the lake yonder as the frost throttles it. Wordsworth has described it (too much, I fear, in the style of Dr. Armstrong) : — “ And, interrupting oft that eager game, From under Esthwaite’s splitting fields of ice, The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves Howling in troops along the Bothnic main.” A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER, 53 Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different dia- lect from ours) calls it admirably well a ‘‘ whoop.” But it is a noise like none other, as if Demogorgon were moaning inarticulately from under the earth. Let us get within doors, lest we hear it again, for there is some- thing bodeful and uncanny in it. ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. —— ALKING one day toward the Village, as we used to call it in the good old days when almost every dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoying that delicious sense of disenthralment from the actual which the deepening twilight brings with it, giving as it does a sort of obscure novelty to things familiar. The coolness, the hush, broken only by the distant bleat of some belated goat, querulous to be disburthened of her milky load, the few faint stars, more guessed as yet than seen, the sense that the coming dark would so soon fold me in the secure privacy of its disguise,—all things combined in a result as near absolute peace as can be hoped for by a man who knows that there is a writ out against him in the hands of the printer’s devil. For the moment, I was enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking without being called on to stand and deliver what I thought to the small public who are good enough to take any interest therein. I love old ways, and the path I was walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for al- most fifty years. How many fleeting impressions it had shared with me! How many times I had lingered to study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon the turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs etched with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same unconscious artist on the smooth page of snow! If I turned round, thruugh dusky tree-gaps came the first twinkle of even- ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 55 ing lamps in the dear old homestead. On Corey’s hill I could see these tiny pharoses of love and home and sweet domestic thoughts flash out one by one across the black- ening salt-meadow between. How much has not kerosene added to the cheerfulness of our evening landscape! A pair of night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the hidden river. The war was ended. I might walk town- ward without that aching dread of bulletins that had darkened the July sunshine and twite made the scarlet leaves of October seem stained with blood. I remem- bered with a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how, so many years ago, I had walked over the same path and felt round my finger the soft pressure of a little hand that was one day to harden with faithful grip of sabre. On how many paths, leading to how many homes where proud Memory does all she can to fill up the fireside gaps with shining shapes, must not men be walking in just such pensive mood as I? Ah, young heroes, safe in immortal youth as those of Homer, you at least carried your ideal hence untarnished! It is locked for you beyond moth or rust in the treasure-chamber of Death. Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as they in it, that could give such as they a brave joy in dying for it, worth something, then? And as I felt more and more the soothing magic of evening’s cool palm upon my temples, as my fancy came home from its revery, and my senses, with reawakened curiosity, ran to the front win- dows again from the viewless closet of abstraction, and felt a strange charm in finding the old tree and shabby fence still there under the travesty of falling night, nay, were conscious of an unsuspected newness in familiar stars and the fading outlines of hills my earliest horizon, I was conscious of an immortal soul, and could not but rejoice in the unwaning goodliness of the world into which I had been born without any merit of my own. I thought 56 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. of dear Henry Vaughan’s rainbow, “Still young and fine!” I remembered people who had to go over to the Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow was, who must run to Italy before they were conscious of the mir- acle wrought every day under their very noses by the sunset, who must call upon the Berkshire hills to teach them what a painter autumn was, while close at hand the Fresh Pond meadows made all oriels cheap with hues that showed as if a sunset-cloud had been wrecked among their maples. One might be worse off than even in America, I thought. There are some things so elastic that even the heavy roller of democracy cannot flatten them altogether down. The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a hermit anywhere. A country without traditions, with- out ennobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through poli- tics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself? I con- fess, it did not seem so to me there in that illimitable quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where Collins might have brooded his “Ode to Evening,” or where those verses on Solitude in Dodsley’s Collection, that Hawthorne liked so much, might have been composed. Traditions? Granting that we had none, all that is worth having in them is the common property of the soul, — an estate in gavelkind for all the sons of Adam, — and, moreover, if a man cannot stand on his two feet (the prime quality of whoever has left any tradition behind him), were it not better for him to be honest about it at once, and go down on all fours? And for associations, if one have not the wit to make them for himself out of his native earth, no ready-made ones of other men will avail him much. Lexington is none the worse to me for not being in Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not Marathon. “Blessed old fields,” I was just exclaiming ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 to myself, like one of Mrs. Radcliffe’s heroes, “ dear acres, innocently secure from history, which these eyes first be- held, may you be also those to which they shall at last slowly darken!” when I was interrupted by a voice which asked me in German whether I was the Herr Pro- fessor, Doctor, So-and-so? The “ Doctor” was by brevet or vaticination, to make the grade easier to my pocket. One feels so intimately assured that he is made up, in part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part of the interpolations of other people, that an honest man would be slow in saying yes to such a question. But “my name is So-and-so” is a safe answer, and I gave it. While I had been romancing with myself, the street- lamps had been lighted, and it was under one of these detectives that have robbed the Old Road of its privilege of sanctuary after nightfall that I was ambushed by my foe. The inexorable villain had taken my description, it appears, that I might have the less chance to escape him. Dr. Holmes tells us that we change our substance, not every seven years, aS was once believed, but with every breath we draw. Why had I not the wit to avail myself of the subterfuge, and, like Peter, to renounce my identity, especially, as in certain moods of mind, I have often more than doubted of it myself? When a man is, as it were, his own front-door, and is thus knocked at, why may he not assume the right of that sacred wood to make every house a castle, by denying himself to all visitations? I was truly not at home when the question was put to me, but had to recall my- self from all out-of-doors, and to piece my self-conscious- ness hastily together as well as I could before I an- swered it. I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is seldom that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people under gas-lamps in order to force money upon them, so far as J 3 * 58 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. have seen or heard. I was also aware, from considerable experience, that every foreigner is persuaded that, by doing this country the favor ot coming to it, he has laid every native thereof under an obligation, pecuniary or other, as the case may be, whose discharge he is entitled- to on demand duly made in person or by letter. Too much learning (of this kind) had made me mad in the provincial sense of the word. I had begun life with the theory of giving something to every beggar that came along, though sure of never finding a native-born coun- tryman among them. In a small way, I was resolved to emulate Hatem Tai’s tent, with its three hundred and sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the year, — TI know not whether he was astronomer enough to add another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind of German-silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure, but better than nothing. Where everybody was over- worked, they supplied the comfortable equipoise of absolute leisure, so sesthetically needful. Besides, I was but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself, which too often thrilled me in my solitary walks with the temp- tation to wander on into infinite space, and by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate myself from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and the regular course of things. This prompting has been at times my familiar demon, and I could not but feel a kind of respectful sympathy for men who had dared what I had only sketched out to myself as a splendid possibility. For seven years I helped maintain one heroic man on an imaginary journey to Portland, —as fine an example as I have ever known of hopeless loyalty to an ideal. I assisted another so long in a fruitless attempt to reach Mecklenburg-Schwerin, that at last we grinned in each other’s faces when we met, like a couple of augurs. He was possessed by this harmless mania ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 as some are by the North Pole, and I shall never forget his look of regretful compassion (as for one who was sacrificing his higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when IT at last advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the D , whither the road was so much travelled that he could not miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for the honor of his country, would confer on the Secretary of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a stroke of the pen annihilating the single poetic element in our humdrum life. Alas! not everybody has the genius to be a Bobbin-Boy, or doubtless all these also would have chosen that more prosperous line of life! But moralists, sociologists, political economists, and taxes have slowly convinced me that my beggarly sympathies were a sin against society. Especially was the Buckle doctrine of averages (so flattering to our free-will) persuasive with me ; for as there must be in every year a certain num- ber who would bestow an alms on these abridged edi- tions of the Wandering Jew, the withdrawal of my quota could make no possible difference, since some destined proxy must always step forward to fill my gap. Just so many misdirected letters every year and no more! Would it were as easy to reckon up the number of men on whose backs fate has written the wrong address, so that they arrive by mistake in Congress and other places where they do not belong! May not these wanderers of whom I speak have been sent into the world without any proper address at all? Where is our Dead-Letter Office for such? And if wiser social arrangements should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy (horrible thought!) how many a workingman’s friend (a kind of industry in which the labor is light and the wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called for in the office where he at present lies ! 60 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long under the lamp-post. The same Gano which had betrayed me to him revealed to me a well-set young man of about half my own age, as well dressed, so far as I could see, as I was, and with every natural qualification for getting his own livelihood as good, if not better, than my own. He had been reduced to the painful necessity of calling upon me by a series of crosses beginning with the Baden Revolution (for which, I own, he seemed rather young, —but perhaps he referred to a kind of revolution prac- tised every season at Baden-Baden), continued by re- peated failures in business, for amounts which must convince me of his entire respectability, and ending with our Civil War. During the latter, he had served with distinction as a soldier, taking a main part in every im- portant battle, with a rapid list of which he favored me, and no doubt would have admitted that, impartial as Jonathan Wild’s great ancestor, he had been on both sides, had I baited him with a few hints of conservative opinions on a subject so distressing to a gentleman wish- ing to profit by one’s sympathy and unhappily doubtful as to which way it might lean. For all these reasons, and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in consenting to be born in Germany, he considered himself my natural creditor to the extent of five dollars, which he would handsomely consent to accept in greenbacks, though he preferred specie. The offer was certainly a generous one, and the claim presented with an assurance that carried conviction. But, unhappily, I had been led to remark a curious natural phenomenon. If I was ever weak enough to give anything to a petitioner of what- ever nationality, it always rained decayed compatriots of his for a month after. Post hoc ergo propter hoc may not be always safe logic, but here | seemed to perceive a natural connection of cause and effect. Now, a few days ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 61 before I had been so tickled with a paper (professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman) certifying - that the bearer, a hard-working German, had long “sofered with rheumatic paimts in his limps,” that, after copying the passage into my note-book, I thought it but fair to pay a trifling honorarium to the author. I had pulled the string of the shower-bath! It had been run- ning shipwrecked sailors for some time, but forthwith it began to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. I could not help associating the apparition of my new friend with this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. I accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impecu- niosity to the full as strong as his own. He took a high tone with me at once, such as an honest man would haturally take with a confessed repudiator. He even brought down his proud stomach so far as to join him- self to me for the rest of my townward walk, that he might give me his views of the American people, and thus inclusively of myself. I know not whether it is because I am pigeon-livered and lack gall, or whether it is from an overmastering sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit to such bast- ings with a patience which afterwards surprises me, being not without my share of warmth in the blood. Perhaps it is because I so often meet with young per- sons who know vastly more than I do, and especially with so many foreigners whose knowledge of this country is superior to my own. However it may be, I listened for some time with tolerable composure as my self-appointed lecturer gave me in detail his opinions of my country and its people. America, he informed me, was without arts, science, literature, culture, or any native hope of: supplying them. We were a people wholly given to money-getting, and who, having got it, knew no other 62 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. use for it than to hold it fast. I am fain to confess that I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that my fingers closed with such a grip as he had just informed me was one of the effects of our unhappy climate. But happen- ing just then to be where I could avoid temptation by dodging down a by-street, I hastily left him to finish his diatribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better than I. That young man will never know how near he came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman of middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might have knocked me down, and then? The capacity of indignation makes an essential part of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined to doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself to act upon its first hints. It should be rather, I suspect, a latent heat in the blood, which makes itself felt in character, a steady reserve for the brain, warming the ovum of thought to life, rather than cooking it by a too hasty enthusiasm in reaching the boiling-point. As my pulse gradually fell back to its normal beat, I reflected that I had been uncomfortably near making a fool of myself, —a handy salve of euphuism for our vanity, though it does not always make a just allowance to Nature for her share in the business. What possible claim had my Teutonic friend to rob me of my compo- sure? I am not, I think, specially thin-skinned as to other people’s opinions of myself, having, as I conceive, later and fuller intelligence on that point than anybody else can give me. Life is continually weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us pre- cisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust. Whoever at fifty does not rate himself quite as low as most of his acquaintance would be likely to put him, ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 63 must be either a fool or a great man, and I humbly dis- claim being either. But if I was not smarting in per- son from any scattering shot of my late companion’s commination, why should I grow hot at any implication of my country therein? Surely der shoulders are broad enough, if yours or mine are not, to bear up under a considerable avalanche of this kind. It is the bit of truth in every slander, the hint of likeness in every caricature, that makes us smart. ‘Art thou there, old Truepenny?” How did your blade know its way so well to that one loose rivet in our armor? I wondered whether Americans were over-sensitive in this respect, whether they were more touchy than other folks. On the whole, [ thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least had studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could not stomach something Herodotus had said of Beotia, and devoted an essay to showing up the delightful old traveller’s malice and ill-breeding. French editors leave out of Montaigne’s “ Travels” some remarks of his about France, for reasons best known to themselves. Pachy- dermatous Deutschland, covered with trophies from every field of letters, still winces under that question which Pére Bouhours put two centuries ago, St un Alle- mand peut étre bel-esprit? John Bull grew apoplectic with angry amazement at the audacious persiflage of Piickler-Muskau. To be sure, he was a prince, — but that was not all of it, for a chance phrase of gentle Hawthorne sent a spasm throngh all the journals of England. Then this tenderness is not peculiar to us ? Console yourself, dear man and brother, whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality, or the world would be at a sad pass shortly. The sur- prising thing is that men have such a taste for this 64 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. somewhat musty flavor, that an Englishman, for exam- ple, should feel himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he comes over here and finds a people speaking what he admits to be something like English, and yet so very different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thank- fulness when I meet an Englishman who is noé like every other, or, I may add, an American of the same odd turn. Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as about his sweetheart, and who ever heard even the friendliest appreciation of that unexpressive she that did not seem to fall infinitely short? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold every one an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes. It seems to be the common opinion of foreigners that Americans are too tender upon this point. Per- haps we are; and if so, there must be a reason for it. Have we had fair play? Could the eyes of what is called Good Society (though it is so seldom true either to the adjective or noun) look upon a nation of democrats with any chance of receiving an undistorted image? Were not those, moreover, who found in the old order of things an earthly paradise, paying them quarterly dividends for the wisdom of their ancestors, with the punctuality of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to mis- understand if not to misrepresent us? Whether at war or at peace, there we were, a standing menace to all earthly paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the very credit on which the dividends were based, all the more hateful and terrible that our destructive agency was so insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it seemed, active while they slept, and coming upon them in the darkness like an armed man. Could Laius have the proper feelings of a father towards CEdipus, announced ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 65 as his destined destroyer by infallible oracles, and felt to be such by every conscious fibre of his soul? For more than a century the Dutch were the laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butter-firkins, swillers of beer and schnaps, and their vrowws from whom Holbein painted the all-but loveliest of Madonnas, Rembrandt the grace- ful girl who sits immortal on his knee in Dregden, and Rubens his abounding goddesses, were the synonymes of clumsy vulgarity. Even so late as Irving the ships of the greatest navigators in the world were represented as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aristo- cratic Venetians should have “Riveted with gigantic piles Thorough the centre their new-catchéd miles,” was heroic. But the far more marvellous achievement of the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous even to re- publican Marvell. Meanwhile, during that very century of scorn, they were the best artists, sailors, merchants, bankers, printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen in Europe, and the genius of Motley has revealed them to us, earning a right to themselves by the most heroic struggle in human annals. But, alas! they were not merely simple burghers who had fairly made themselves High Mightinesses, and could treat on equal terms with anointed kings, but their commonwealth carried in its bosom the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled, at least after dark, that dreadful mastiff, the Press, whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves in sheep’s clothing and for certain other animals in lions’ skins. They made fun of Sacred Majesty, and, what was worse, managed uncommonly well without it. In- an age when periwigs made so large a part of the natural dignity of man, people with such a turn of mind were dangerous. How could they seem other than vulgar and hateful ? z 66 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. In the natural course of things we succeeded to this unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that we could at least contrive to worry along. And we certainly did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors in office? We had nothing to boast of in arts or letters, and were given to bragging overmuch of our merely ma- terial prosperity, due quite as much to the virtue of our continent as to our own. There was some truth in Car- lyle’s sneer, after all. Till we had succeeded in some higher way than this, we had only the success of physical growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia, was greatness on the map, — barbarian mass only ; but had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin’s point on the chart of memory, compared with those ideal spaces occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that material must make ready the foundation for ideal tri- umphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a great deal in our shortcoming. The Edinburgh Review never would have thought of asking, “Who reads a Russian book ?” and England was satisfied with iron from Sweden without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters and statuaries. Was it that they expected too much from the mere miracle of Freedom? Is it not the highest art of a Republic to make men of flesh and blood, and not the marble ideals of such? It may be fairly doubted whether we have produced this higher type of man yet. Perhaps it is the collective, not the individual, humanity that is to have a chance of nobler development among us. We shall see. We havea vast amount of imported ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made knowl. ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 67 edge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such a consummation can be arranged. We have got to learn that statesmanship is the most complicated of all arts, and to come back to the apprenticeship-system too hastily abandoned. At present, we trust a man with making constitutions on less proof of competence than we should demand before we gave him our shoe to patch. We have nearly reached the limit of the reaction from the old notion, which paid too much regard to birth and station as qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme point in the opposite direction, putting the highest of human functions up at auction to be bid for by any creature capable of going upright on two legs. In some places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society is no longer possible, and already another reaction has begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards fit. ness either from natural aptitude or special training. But will it always be safe to let evils work their own cure by beceming unendurable? Every one of them leaves its taint in the constitution of the body-politic, each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet all together powerful for evil. But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be continually reminded that, though we should boast that we were the Great West till we were black in the face, it. did not bring us an inch nearer to the world’s West-End. That sacred enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy Alliance did not inscribe us on its visiting-list. The Old World of wigs and orders and liveries would shop with us, but we must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to awaken the more august clamors of the knocker. Our manners, it must be granted, had none of those graces that stamp the caste of Vere de Vere, in whatever mu- seum of British antiquities they may be hidden. In short, we were vulgar 68 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. This was one of those horribly vague accusations, the victim of which has no defence. An umbrella is of no avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it pene- trates at every pore, it wets you through without seem- ing to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin, added to the list in these latter days, and worse than all the others put together, since it perils your salvation in this world, — far the more important of the two in the minds of most men. It profits nothing to draw nice dis- tinctions between essential and conventional, for the con- vention in this case is the essence, and you may break every command of the decalogue with perfect good-breed- ing, nay, if you are adroit, without losing caste. We, indeed, had it not to lose, for we had never gained it. “ How am I vulgar?” asks the culprit, shudderingly. “‘ Because thou art not like unto Us,” answers Lucifer, Son of the Morning, and there is no more to be said. The god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has us there! We were as clean, — so far as my observation goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically, than the English, and therefore, of course, than every- body else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong ow as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, following therein the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s ; and we did not stammer as they had learned to do from the courtiers, who in this way flattered the Hanoverian king, a foreigner among the people he had come to reign over. Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas and the finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them through that organ by which men are led rather than leaders, though some physiologists would persuade us that Nature furnishes her captains with a fine handle to their faces that Opportunity may get a good purchase on them for dragging them to the front. ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 69 This state of things was so painful that excellent people were not wanting who gave their whole genius to reproducing here the original Bull, whether by gaiters, the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their tone, or by an accent that was forever tripping and fall- ing flat over the tangled roots of our common tongue. Martyrs to a false ideal, it never occurred to them that nothing is more hateful to gods and men than a second- rate Englishman, and for the very reason that this planet never produced a more splendid creature than the first- rate one, witness Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. Witness that truly sublime self-abnegation of those pris- oners lately among the bandits of Greece, where average men gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all the stoicism of antiquity can show no match. If we could contrive to be not too unobtrusively our simple selves, we should be the most delightful of human be- ings, and the most original ; whereas, when the plating of Anglicism rubs off, as it always will in points that come to much wear, we are liable to very unpleasing conjectures about the quality of the metal underneath. Perhaps one reason why the average Briton spreads him- self here with such an easy air of superiority may be owing to the fact that he meets with so many bad imi- tations as to conclude himself the only real thing in a wilderness of shams. He fancies himself moving through an endless Bloomsbury, where his mere apparition con- fers honor as an avatar of the court-end of the universe. Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa upon his back. This is the sort of fellow whose patron- age is so divertingly insufferable. Thank Heaven he is not the only specimen of cater-cousinship from the dear old Mother Island that is shown to us! Among genuine things, I know nothing more genuine than the better men whose limbs were made in England. So manly- 70 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. tender, so brave, so true, so warranted to wear, they make us proud to feel that blood is thicker than water. But it is not merely the Englishman ; every European candidly admits in himself some right of primogeniture in respect to us, and pats this shaggy continent on the back with a lively sense of generous unbending. The German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded con- tempt, which he is not always nice in concealing, for a country so few of whose children ever take that noble instrument between their knees. His cousin, the Ph. D. from Gottingen, cannot help despising a people who do not grow loud and red over Aryans and Turaunians, and are indifferent about their descent from either. The Frenchman feels an easy mastery in speaking his mother tongue, and attributes it to some native superiority of parts that lifts him high above us barbarians of the West. The Italian prima donna sweeps a courtesy of careless pity to the over-facile pit which unsexes her with the bravo / innocently meant to show a familiarity with foreign usage. But all without exception make no secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in return for their cackle. Such men as Agassiz, Guyot, and Goldwin Smith come with gifts in their hands; but since it is commonly European failures who bring hither their remarkable gifts and acquirements, this view of the case is sometimes just the least bit in the world provoking. To think what a delicious seclusion of contempt we enjoyed till Califor- nia and our own ostentatious parvenus, flinging gold away in Europe that might have endowed libraries at home, gave us the ill repute of riches! What a shabby downfall from the Arcadia which the French officers of our Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through Rousseau-tinted spectacles! Something of Arcadia there really was, something of the Old Age; and that divine ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 71 provincialism were cheaply repurchased could we have it back again in exchange for the tawdry upholstery that has taken its place. For some reason or other, the European has rarely been able to see America except in caricature. Would the first Review of the world have printed the niaiseries of Mr. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in any civil- ized country? Mr. Sand, to be sure, has inherited nothing of his famous mother’s literary outfit, except the pseudonyme. But since the conductors of the Revue could not have published his story because it was clever, they must have thought it valuable for its truth. As true as the last-century Englishman’s picture of Jean Crapaud! We do not ask to be sprinkled with rosewater, but may perhaps fairly protest against being drenched with the rinsings of an unclean imagination. The next time the Revue allows such ill-bred persons to throw their slops out of its first-floor windows, let it honestly preface the discharge with a gare de Peau / that we may run from under in season. And Mr. Duvergier d’Hauranne, who knows how to be entertaining! I know le Francais est plutit indiscret que confiant, and the pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so much a page ; but should we not have been tant-soit-pew more cautious had we been writing about people on the other side of the Channel? But then it is a fact in the natural history of the American long familiar to Euro- peans, that he abhors privacy, knows not the meaning of reserve, lives in hotels because of their greater pub- licity, and is never so pleased as when his domestic affairs (if he may be said to have any) are paraded in the newspapers. Barnum, it is well known, represents perfectly the average national sentiment in this respect. However it be, we are not treated like other people, or perhaps I should say like people who are ever likely to be met with in society. 72 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. Is it in the climate? Either I have a false notion of European manners, or else the atmosphere affects them strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they suffer from the sea-voyage like some of the more delicate wines. During our Civil War an English gentleman of the highest description was kind enough to call upon me, mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how entirely he sympathized with the Confederates, and how sure he felt that we could never subdue them, —“ they were the gentlemen of. the country, you know.” Another, the first greetings hardly over, asked me hcw I accounted for the universal meagreness of my countrymen. Toa thinner man than I, or from a stouter man than he, the question might have been offensive. The Marquis of Hartington * wore a secession badge at a public ball in New York. Ina civilized country he might have been roughly handled ; but here, where the beenséances are not so well understood, of course nobody minded it. A French traveller told me he had been a good deal in the British colonies, and had been astonished to see how soon the people became Americanized. He added, with delightful bonhomie, and as if he were sure it would charm me, that “they even began to talk through their noses, just like you!” I was naturally ravished with this testimony to the assimilating power of democracy, and could only reply that I hoped they would never adopt our democratic patent-method of seeming to settle one’s honest debts, for they would find it paying through the nose in the long-run. I am a man of the New * One of Mr. Lincoln’s neatest strokes of humor was his treatment of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be pre- sented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breed- ing could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous. ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 73 World, and do not know precisely the present fashion of May-Fair, but I have a kind of feeling that if an Ameri- can (mutato nomine, de te is always frightfully possible) were to do this kind of thing under a European roof, it would induce some disagreeable reflections as to the ethical results of democracy. I read the other day in print the remark of a British tourist who had eaten large quantities of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has not the European savor), that the Americans were hospitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of their dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation. What shall we do? Shall we close our doors? Not I, for one, if I should so have forfeited the friendship of L. S., most lovable of men. He somehow seems to find us human, at least, and so did Clough, whose poetry will one of these days, perhaps, be found to have been the best utterance in verse of this generation. And T. H. the mere grasp of whose manly hand carries with it the pledge of frankness and friendship, of an abiding sim- plicity of nature as affecting as it is rare! The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not hard to bear. There was something even refreshing in it, as in a northeaster to a hardy temperament. When a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland while the slash of our separation was still raw, after prophesying a glorious future for an island that continued to dry its fish under the egis of Saint George, glances disdainfully over his spectacles in parting at th U.S. A., and fore- bodes for them a “speedy relapse into barbarism,” now that they have madly cut themselves off from the humanizing influences of Britain, I smile with barbarian self-conceit. But this kind of thing became by degrees an unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young giant was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in “4 74 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. his clothes, was obliged to let in a gore here and there in Texas, in California, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and had the scissors and needle and thread ready for Can- ada when the time came. His shadow loomed like a Brocken-spectre over against Europe, —the shadow of what they were coming to, that was the unpleasant part of it. Even in such misty image as they had of him, it was painfully evident that his clothes were not of any cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond Street tailor, — and this in an age, too, when everything depends upon clothes, when, if we do not keep up ap- pearances, the seeming-solid frame of this universe, nay, your very God, would slump into himself, like a mockery king of snow, being nothing, after all, but a prevailing mode. From this moment the young giant assumed the respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of if possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of human study as the glacial period or the silurian what-d’ye-call- ems. If the man of the primeval drift-heaps is so ab- sorbingly interesting, why not the man of the drift that is just beginning, of the drift into whose irresistible cur- rent we are just being sucked whether we will orno? If I were in their place, I confess I should not be fright- ened. Man has survived so much, and contrived to be comfortable on this planet after surviving so much! I am something of a protestant in matters of government also, and am willing to get rid of vestments and cere- monies and to come down to bare benches, if only faith in God take the place of a general agreement to profess confidence in ritual and sham. Every mortal man of us holds stock in the only public debt that is absolutely sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker of this Universe to the Universe he has made. I have no notion of selling out my stock in a panic. It was something to have advanced even to the dignity ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 75 of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the rela- tion of the individual American to the individual Euro- pean was bettered by it ; and that, after all, must adjust itself comfortably before there can be a right under- standing between the two. We had been a desert, we became a museum. People came hither for scientific and not social ends. The very cockney could not com- plete his education without taking a vacant stare at us in passing. But the sociologists (I think they call them- selves so) were the hardest to bear. There was no es- cape. I have even known a professor of this fearful science to come disguised in petticoats. We were cross- examined as a chemist cross-examines a new substance. Human ? yes, all the elements are present, though ab- normally combined. Civilized? Hm! that needs a stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more friendly interest in a strange bug. After a few such ex- periences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being of these explorers: I was a curiosity; I was a specimen. Hath not an American organs, dimensions, senses, affec- tions, passions even as a European hath? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh 1 I will not keep on with Shylock to his next question but one. Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the head of any foreignar, especially of any Englishman, that an American had what could be called a country, except as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to strike them suddenly. ‘By Jove, you know, fellahs don’t fight like that for a shop-till!” No, I rather think not. “To Americans America is something more than a promise and an expectation. It has a past and tradi- tions of its own. A descent from men who sacrificed 76 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. everything and came hither, not to better their fortunes, but to plant their idea in virgin soil, should be a good pedigree. There was never colony save this that went forth, not to seek gold, but God. Is it not as well to have sprung from such as these as from some burly beggar who came over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, un- less, indeed, a line grow better as it runs farther away from stalwart ancestors? And for history, it is dry enough, no doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a kind that tells in the blood. I have admitted that Car- lyle’s sneer had a show of truth in it. But what does he himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzol- lerns? First of all, that they were canny, a thrifty, forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fight from generation to generation with the chaos around them. That is precisely the battle which the English race on this continent has been carrying doughtily on for two centuries and a half. Doughtily and silently, for you cannot hear in Europe “that crash, the death-song of the perfect tree,” that has been going on here from sturdy father to sturdy son, and making this continent habitable for the weaker Old World breed that has swarmed to it during the last half-century. If ever men did a good stroke of work on this planet, it was the fore- fathers of those whom you are wondering whether it would not be prudent to acknowledge as far-off cousins. Alas, man of genius, to whom we owe so much, could you see nothing more than the burning of a foul chim- ney in that clash of Michael and Satan which flamed up under your very eyes 1 Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of adventurers and shop-keepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it well enough when he said that he could never think of America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all along the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 77 commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become respect- able also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice to a needle in Sir John Hawkwood’s presence, after that doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more dangerouag tool of the same metal. Democracy had been hitherto only a ludicrous effort to reverse the lawsof nature by thrusting Cleon into the place of Pericles. But ademoc- racy that could fight for an abstraction, whose members held life and goods cheap compared with that larger life which we call country, was not merely unheard-of, but portentous. It was the nightmare of the Old World taking upon itself flesh and blood, turning out to be substance and not dream. Since the Norman crusader clanged down upon the throne of the porphyro-genite, carefully-draped appearances had never received such a shock, had never been so rudely called on to produce their titles to the empire of the world. Authority has had its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere man- hood. The world of the Saurians might be in some respects more picturesque, but the march of events is inexorable, and it is bygone. The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes. He had become the enfant terrible of the human house- hold. It was not and will not be easy for the world (especially for our British cousins) to look upon us as grown up. The youngest of nations, its people must also be young and to. be treated accordingly, was the syl- logism, —as if libraries did not make all nations equally old in all those respects, at least, where age is an ad- vantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has its good qualities, as people feel who are losng it, but boyishness is another thing. We had been somewhat boyish as a 78 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. nation, a little loud, a little pushing, a little braggart. But might it not partly have been because we felt that we had certain claims to respect that were not admitted? The war which established our position as a vigorous nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man, cannot look death in the eye for four years, without some strange reflections, without arriving at some clearer con- sciousness of the stuff it is made of, without some great moral change. Such a change, or the beginning of it, no observant person can fail to see here. Our thought and our politics, our bearing as a people, are assuming a -manlier tone. We have been compelled to see what was weak in democracy as well as what was strong. We have begun obscurely to recognize that things do not go of themselves, and that popular government is not in itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as well as the privileges of the function. Above all, it looks as if we were on the way to be persuaded that no government can be carried on by declamation. It is noticeable also that facility of communication has made the best Eng- lish and French thought far more directly operative here than ever before. Without being Europeanized, our discussion of important questions in statesmanship, political economy, in esthetics, is taking a broader scope and a higher tone. It had certainly been provincial, one might almost say local, to a very unpleasant extent. Perhaps our experience in soldiership has tanght us to value training more than we have been popularly wont. We may possibly come to the conclusion, one of these days, that self-made men may not be always equally skilful in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be divinely commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities of opinion on all possible topics of human interest, ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 79 So long as we continue to be the most common- schooled and the least cultivated people in the world, I suppose we must consent to endure this condescending manner of foreigners toward us. The more friendly they mean to be the more ludicrously prominent it be- comes. They can never appreciate the immense amount of silent work that has been done here, making this continent slowly fit for the abode of man, and which will demonstrate itself, let us hope, in the character of the people. Outsiders can only be expected to judge a nation by the amount it has contributed to the civiliza- tion of the world ; the amount, that is, that can be seen and handled. A great place in history can only be achieved by competitive examinations, nay, by a long course of them. How much new thought have we con- tributed to the common stock? Till: that question can be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must continue to be simply interesting as an experiment, to be studied as a problem, and not respected as an at- tained result or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as I have hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the fair result of their failing to see here anything more than a poor imitation, a plaster-cast. of Europe. And are they not partly right? If the tone of the uncultivated American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian, is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic ? Tn the America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the sincere human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes u> from what our orators call “the effete civilization of the Old World”? Is there a politician among us daring enough (except a Dana here and there) to risk his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the exactness of super- stitious communities like England? Is it certain that 80 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy of honor, if we can only keep the letter of our bond? I hope we shall be able to answer all these questions with a frank yes. At any rate, we would advise our visitors that we are not merely curious creatures, but belong to the family of man, and that, as individuals, we are not to be al- ways subjected to the competitive examination above mentioned, even if we acknowledged their competence as an examining board. Above all, we beg them to re- member that America is not to us, as to them, a mere object of external interest to be discussed and analyzed, but zz us, part of our very marrow. Let them not sup- pose that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the graces and amenities of an older date than we, though very much at home in a state of things not yet all it might be or should be, but which we mean to make so, and which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men (though perhaps not for dilettantz) to live in. “The full tide of human existence” may be felt here as keenly as Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a larger sense. I know one person who is singular enough to think Cambridge the very best spot on the habitable globe. “ Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless he never did.” It will take England a great while to get over her airs of patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal them. She cannot help confounding the people with the country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles. She hasa conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing ex- cept so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism. She is especially condescending just now, and lavishes sugar-plums on us as if we had not outgrown them. I am no believer in sudden conversions, especially in sud- den conversions to a favorable opinion of people wha ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 81 have just proved you to be mistaken in judgment and therefore unwise in policy. I never blamed her for not wishing well to democracy, —how should she ?— but Alabamas are not wishes. Let her not be too hasty in believing Mr. Reverdy Johnson’s pleasant words. Though there is no thoughtful man in America who would not consider a war with England the greatest of calamities, yet the feeling towards her here is very far from cordial, whatever our Minister may say in the effusion that comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, with his famous “My Lord, this means war,” perfectly represented his country. Justly or not, we have a feeling that we have been wronged, not merely insulted. The only sure way of bringing about a healthy relation between the two countries is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the notion that we are always to be treated as a kind of inferior and deported Englishman whose nature they perfectly understand, and whose back they accordingly stroke the wrong way of the fur with amazing persever- ance. Let them learn to treat us naturally on our merits as human beings, as they would a German or a Frenchman, and not as if we were a kind of counterfeit Briton whose crime appeared in every shade of difference, and before ‘long there would come that right feeling which we naturally call a good understanding. The common blood, and still more the common language, are fatal instruments of misapprehension. Let them give up trying to understand us, still more thinking that they do, and acting in various absurd ways as the necessary consequence, for they will never arrive at that devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, till they learn to look at us as we are and not as they suppose us to be. Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many years since we parted. Since 1660, when you married again, you have been a step-mother to us. Put on your 82 ON a CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and changed likewise. You would not let us darken your doors, if you could help it. We know that perfectly well. But pray, when we look to be treated as men, don’t shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us any longer. Do, child, go to it grandam, child; Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig!” A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.* T is the misfortune of American biography that it must needs be more or less provincial, and that, contrary to what might have been predicted, this qual- ity in it predominates in proportion as the country grows larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged centre of national life and thought, our expansion has hitherto been rather aggregation than growth ; reputa- tions must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a surface, and the substance of most hardly holds out to the boundaries of a single State. Our very history wants unity, and down to the Revolution the attention is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred ona single clew. A sense of remoteness and seclusion comes over us as we read, and we cannot help asking ourselves, “‘ Were not these things done in a corner?” Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but fame demands for its evidence a more distant and pro- longed reverberation. To the world at large we were but a short column of figures in the corner of a blue- book, New England exporting so much salt-fish, timber, and Medford rum, Virginia so many hogsheads of tobac- co, and buying with the proceeds a certain amount of English manufactures. The story of our early coloniza- tion had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of * The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son. 84 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. Mexico or Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of our nation, are bare of those foregone and far-reaching associations with names, the divining-rods of fancy, which the soldiers and civilians of the Old World get for nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace in saying, “ Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante Trita solo’; but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece and Rome behind him, and can begin his poem with in- voking a goddess from whom legend derived the planter of his race. His eyes looked out on a landscape setu- rated with glorious recollections ; he had seen Cesar, and heard Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus or Cato Four Corners, — with Israel Putnam or Return Jonathan Meigs? We have been transplanted, and for us the long hierarchical succession of history is broken. The Past has not laid its venerable hands upon us in consecration, conveying to us that mysterious influence whose force is in its continuity. We are to Europe as the Church of England to her of Rome. The latter old lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with ten horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers that vast spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet every- where, whose: revenues are none the less fruitful for being levied on the imagination. We may claim that England’s history is also ours, but itis a de jure, and not a de facto property that we have in it, — something that may be proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satis- faction, and does not savor of the realty. Have we not A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 85 seen the mockery crown and sceptre of the exiled Stuarts in St. Peter’s? the medal struck so lately as 1784 with its legend, Hew IX Mae Brit er H1s Rex, whose con- tractions but faintly typify the scantness of the fact ? As the novelist complains that our society wants that sharp contrast of character and costume which comes of caste, so in the narrative of our historians we miss what may be called background and perspective, as if the events and the actors in them failed of that cumulative interest which only a long historical entail can give. Rel- atively, the crusade of Sir William Pepperell was of more consequence than that of St. Louis, and yet forgive us, injured shade of the second American baronet, if we find the narrative of Joinville more interesting than your de- spatches to Governor Shirley. Relatively, the insurrec- tion of that Daniel whose Irish patronymic Shea was euphonized into Shays, as a set-off for the debasing of French chaise into shay, was more dangerous than that of Charles Edward ; but for some reason or other (as vice sometimes has the advantage of virtue) the latter is more enticing to the imagination, and the least authentic relic of it in song or story has a relish denied to the painful industry of Minot. Our events seem to fall short of that colossal proportion which befits the monumental style. Look grave as we will, there is something ludicrous in Counsellor Keane’s pig being the pivot of a revolution. We are of yesterday, and it is to no purpose that our political augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that to-morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-haik hereafter. Things do really gain in greatness by being acted on a great and cosmopolitan stage, because there is inspiration in the thronged audience, and the nearer match that puts men on their mettle. Webster was more largely endowed by nature than Fox, and Fisher Ames not much below Burke as a talker; but what a 86 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. difference in the intellectual training, in the literary cul- ture and associations, in the whole social outfit, of the men who were their antagonists and companions! It should seem that, if it be collision with other minds and with events that strikes or draws the fire from a man, then the quality of those might have something to do with the quality of the fire, — whether it shall be culinary or electric. We have never known the varied stimulus, the inexorable criticism, the many-sided opportunity of a great metropolis, the inspiring reinforcement of an un- divided national consciousness. In everything but trade we have missed the invigoration of foreign rivalry. We may prove that we are this and that and the other, — our Fourth-of-July orators have proved it time and again, — the census has proved it ; but the Muses are women, and have no great fancy for statistics, though easily silenced by them. We are great, we are rich, we are all kinds of good things ; but did it never occur to you that somehow we are not interesting, except as a phenomenon 4 It may safely be affirmed that for one cultivated man in this country who studies American, there are fifty who study European history, ancient or modern. Till within a year or two we have been as distant and obscure to the eyes of Europe as Ecuador to our own. Every day brings us nearer, enables us to see the Old World more clearly, and by inevitable comparison to judge ourselves with some closer approach to our real value. This has its advantage so long as our culture is, as for a long time it must be, European ; for we shall be little better than apes and parrots till we are forced to measure our muscle with the trained and practised cham- pions of that elder civilization. We have at length es- tablished our claim to the noblesse of the sword, the first step still of every nation that would make its entry inta the best society of history. To maintain ourselves there, A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 87 we must achieve an equality in the more exclusive circle of culture, and to that end must submit ourselves to the European standard of intellectual weights and measures- That we have made the hitherto biggest gun might ex- cite apprehension (were there a dearth of iron), but can never exact respect. That our pianos and patent reapers have won medals does but confirm us in our mechanic and material measure of merit. We must contribute something more than mere contrivances for the saving of labor, which we have been only too ready to misapply in the domain of thought and the higher kinds of inven- tion. In those Olympic games where nations contend for truly immortal wreaths, it may well be questioned whether a mowing-machine would stand much chance in the chariot-races, — whether a piano, though made by a chev alier, could compete successfully for the prize of music. We shall have to be content for a good while yet with our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it. Tn it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all, the prime condition of all thorough-bred greatness of character. To this choicest fruit of a healthy life, well rooted in native soil, and drawing prosperous juices thence, nationality gives the keenest flavor. Mr. Lincoln was an original man, and in so far a great man; yet it was the Americanism of his every thought, word, and act which not only made his influence equally at home in East and West, but drew the eyes of the outside world, and was the pedestal that lifted him where he could be seen by them. Lincoln showed that native force may transcend local boundaries, but the growth of such nationality is hindered and hampered by our division into so many half-independent communities, each with its objects of county ambition, and its public men great to the borders of their district. In this way our standard of greatness is insensibly debased. To receive any na- 88 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER, tional appointment, a man must have gone through pre cisely the worst training for it; he must have so far narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to be acceptable at home. In this way a man may become chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, because he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus County, or be sent ambassador to Barataria, because he has drunk bad whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should we ever attain to a conscious nationality, it will have the advantage of lessening the number of our great men, and widening our appreciation to the larger scale of the two or three that are left, —if there should be so many. Meanwhile we offer a premium to the production of great men in a small way, by inviting each State to set up the statues of two of its immortals in the Capitol. What a niggardly percentage! Already we are embarrassed, not to find the two, but to choose among the crowd of candi- dates. Well, seventy-odd heroes in about as many years is pretty well for a young nation. We do not envy most of them their eternal martyrdom in marble, their pillory of indiscrimination. We fancy even native tourists paus- ing before the greater part of the effigies, and, after reading the names, asking desperately, ‘‘ Who was he?” Nay, if they should say, ‘‘ Who the devil was he?” it were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as the Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among such pal- pable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of the Uffizj at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities ; but Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli, — shall the inventor of the sewing-machine, even with the button- holing improvement, let us say, match with these, or with far lesser than these? Perhaps he was more prac- tically useful than any one of these, or all of them to- gether, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference some- where. These also were citizens of a provincial capital ; A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 89 so were the greater part of Plutarch’s heroes. Did they have a better chance than we moderns, —than- we Americans? At any rate they have the start of us, and we must confess that “ By bed and table they lord it o’er us, Our elder brothers, but one in blood.” Yes, one in blood ; that is the hardest part of it. Is our provincialism then in some great measure due to our absorption in the practical, as we politely call it, meaning the material,—to our habit of estimating greatness by the square mile and the hundred weight ? Even during our war, in the midst of that almost unri- valled stress of soul, were not our speakers and newspa- pers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten times of the thousands of square miles it covered with armed men, for once that they alluded to the motive that gave it all its meaning and its splendor? Perhaps it was as well that they did not exploit that passion of patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum or Perham. ‘I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, but when I’m mad I weigh two ton,” said the Ken- tuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdupois. That ideal kind of weight is wonderfully increased by a na- tional feeling, whereby one man is conscious that thirty millions of men go into the balance with him. The Roman in ancient, and the Englishman in modern times, have been most conscious of this representative solidity, and wherever one of them went. there stood Rome or England in his shoes. We have made some advance in the right direction. Our civil war, by the breadth of its proportions and the implacability of its demands, forced us to admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own despite, great soldiers and sailors, allowed for such by all the world. The harder problems it has left behind may in time compel us to have great statesmen, with views 90 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. capable of reaching beyond the next election. The criticism of Europe alone can rescue us from the provin- cialism of an over or false estimate of ourselves. Let us be thankful, and not angry, that we must accept it as our touchstone. Our stamp has so often been impressed upon base metal, that we cannot expect it to be taken on trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be equally persuasive the world over. Real manhood and honest achievement are nowhere provincial, but enter the select society of all time on an even footing. Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look into. Those Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolu- tion while the powder lasts, and sure to burn the fingers of whoever attempts intervention, have also their great men, as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous Europe. The following passage from the life of Don Simon Bolivar might allay many motus animorum, if rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, was travelling in Italy, and his biographer tells us that “near Castiglione he was present at the grand review made by Napoleon of the columns defiling into the plain large enough to ccn- tain sixty thousand men. The throne was situated on an eminence that overlooked the plain, and Napoleon on several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and his companions, who were at the base of the hill, The hero Caesar could not imagine that he beheld the libera- tor of the world of Columbus!” And small blame to him, one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the only foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to take for granted. The great Genoese did not, as we supposed, draw that first star-guided furrow across the vague of waters with a single eye to the future greatness of the United States. And have we not sometimes, like the enthusiastic biographer, fancied the Old World staring through all its telescopes at, us, and wondered that it did A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 91 not recognize in us what we were fully persuaded we were going to be and do? Our American life is dreadfully barren of those ele- ments of the social picturesque which give piquancy to anecdote. And without anecdote, what is biography, or even history, which is only biography on a larger scale? Clio, though she take airs on herself, and pretend to be ‘* philosophy teaching by example,” is, after all, but a gossip who has borrowed Fame’s speaking-trumpet, and should be figured with a tea-cup instead of a scroll in her hand. How much has she not owed of late to the tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia? In what gut- ters has not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with which he has put together his admirable mosaic picture of England under the last two Stuarts? Even Mommsen himself, who dislikes Plutarch’s method as much as Montaigne loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of ancient Rome, without running to the comic poets and the anecdote-mongers. He gives us the very beef-tea of history, nourishing and even palatable enough, excel- lently portable for a memory that must carry her own packs, and can afford little luggage; but for our own part, we prefer a full, old-fashioned meal, with its side- dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish, the Stilton of scandal, so it be not too high. One volume of con- temporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies, (for lies to be good for anything must have a potential prob- ability, must even be true so far as their moral and social setting is corcerned,) will throw more light into the dark backward of time than the gravest Camden or Thuanus. If St. Simon is not accurate, is he any the less essentially true? No history gives us so clear an understanding of the moral condition of average men after the restoration of the Stuarts as the unconscious blabbings of the Puritan tailor’s son, with his two con- 92 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. sciences, as it were, — an inward, still sensitive in spots, though mostly toughened to India-rubber, and good rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining them, and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs. Pepys. But we can have no St. Simons or Pepyses till we have a Paris or London to delocalize our gossip and give it historic breadth. All our capitals are frac- tional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men, centres of business rather than of action or influence. Each contains so many souls, but is not, as the word “capital” implies, the true head of a community and seat of its common soul. Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic than it once was? As the clearing away of the woods scants the streams, may not our civilization have dried up some feeders that helped to swell the current of individual and personal force? We have sometimes thought that the stricter definition and consequent seclusion from each other of the different callings in modern times, as it narrowed the chance of developing and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided by so impassable a barrier as now. There was hardly such a thing as a pékin. Ceesar gets up from writing his Latin Grammar to conquer Gaul, change the course of history, and make so many things possible, — among the rest our English language and Shakespeare. Horace had been a colonel ; and from Aischylus, who fought at Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low Countries, the list of martial civilians is along one. A man’s education seems more complete who has smelt hostile powder from a less