Mosses from an old manse

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

BY

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

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Copyright, 1882,
BY HODGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO,

All rights reserved.

F5 1863
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1882-

NUIKJ

CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY NOTB , 7

THE OLD MANSE ... tb*f. .... . 11

»^. THE BIRTHMARK 47

A SELECT PARTY 70

.V-TOUNG GOODMAN BROWN 89

*~ RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER 107

MRS. BULLFROG 149

FIRE WORSHIP 159

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES 170

MONSIEUR DU MIROIB 182

THE HALL OF FANTASY 196

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD 212

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE 235

— FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND 253

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE 279

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT 303

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET 322

DROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE 347

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE 363

^- ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL 381

P.'s CORRESPONDENCE . . 407

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST 430

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK .... 457

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY 476

» THE OLD APPLE DEALER 495

TTHE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL 504

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION < 537

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

AFTER his marriage, in 1842, Hawthorne estab
lished himself at the Manse, the ancient residence of
the parish minister at Concord, Massachusetts. It is
still owned, as it was then, by descendants of Dr. Rip-
ley, one of the early pastors of the place, and an ances
tor of Ralph Waldo Emerson ; having been built in
1765, for the Rev. William Emerson, whose widow
Dr. Ezra Ripley married. There, in a small back
room on the second floor, commanding a view of the
river, the old North Bridge, and the battle-field of
1775, Emerson had written his " Nature," six years
before ; and in the same apartment Hawthorne pre
pared for the press his " Mosses From an Old Manse."
" The study," as he says in his account of the house,
" had three windows set with little, old-fashioned panes
of glass, each with a crack across it ; " and it does not
require much imagination, nor perhaps any violation
of history, to suppose that these are the self-same
panes through which the sun shone at the time of
Concord Fight. The cracks in them may have been
caused by the concussions of musketry on that memo
rable April morning. On the glass of one of the
two western windows, which, in Hawthorne's phrase,
" looked, or rather peeped, between the willow branches,

3775G8

8 INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

down into the orchard," are several informal inscrip
tions, written there with a diamond. Among them
are the following : —

Man's accidents are God's purposes.

Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843

Nath1 Hawthorne
This is his study
1843

And, lower down : —

Inscribed by my husband at

sunset April 3d 1843

In the gold light S. A. H.

The entire wall opposite these windows, except where
it is broken by two small doors, is faced with wooden
paneling from floor to ceiling, concealed, however, un
der a coat of paint.

It is probable that the material for some of these
tales had been matured in his mind previous to his
going to Concord ; and they may have been in part
committed to paper. A former acquaintance of his, at
the date of this memorandum, still living in Salem, re
calls Hawthorne's being occupied with the " Virtuoso's
Collection " while still a bachelor and living in Salem ;
yet that sketch was not incorporated in a volume until
the " Mosses " were issued. It now forms the closing
member of the second series. This " Virtuoso's Col
lection " illustrates a taste which prevailed forty years
ago or more, for imagining impossible curiosities of
the kind described in it. The newspapers abounded in
ingenuities ministering to this fancy, and Hawthorne
amused himself by trying to outdo them and by after
wards bringing his inventions together in an artistic
form. The members of his family and some of his

INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 9

friends, knowing of his scheme, suggested articles for
his collection which he admitted or rejected, as he
chose. One of these, which he included, is said to
have been proposed by Miss Sophia Peabody, after
wards his wife. It was the item, "Some Egyptian
darkness in a blacking jug." From another person
came the following, which he did not use : " The
spur of the moment, from the heel of time." "A
few of the 'words that burn,' in an old match-safe
(very rare)," made still another article, concerning
which the recollection is that he invented it; but it
was not preserved in print. Of course, the sketch as
it stands is his own conception ; but, as it was un
like his other productions, he talked it over with his
friends — something which he scarcely ever permitted
himself to do with regard to his fictions — and in one
instance, as we have seen, adopted a clever hint. The
Note-Books contain a detached memorandum, just be
fore the date August 5, 1842 : " In my museum, all
the ducal rings that have been thrown into the Adri
atic." But this was not acted upon. In the same paper
the hairy ears of Midas are described as being on ex
hibition ; an early forerunner of the interest which
he concentrated upon the mysterious ears of Donatello,
in "The Marble Faun."

" The New Adam and Eve " doubtless grew directly
out of his humorous musings on the life he was lead
ing at the Manse. They were recorded in his Note-
Books, August 5, 1842. " There have been three or
four callers, who preposterously think that the courte
sies of the lower world are to be responded to by peo
ple whose home is in Paradise ... we have so far
improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we
generally furnish forth our feasts with portions oi

10 INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

some delicate calf or lamb." "It is one of the draw
backs upon our Eden that it contains no water fit
either to drink or to bathe in ; " and so on. It was,
in fact, a similitude which both the romancer and his
bride in this first and so idyllic home of theirs de
lighted to keep up — this conception that they were a
sort of new Adam and Eve in an unpretentious Para
dise. " Buds- and Bird- Voices " also shows the traces
of his new surroundings, which he has so fully and
exquisitely described in his introductory chapter that
nothing remains to be added. Other pieces had been
printed in the magazines before he went to the Manse
at all. Those which he wrote there — " The Celestial
Railroad," " Rappaccini's Daughter," and various oth
ers — came out in the " Democratic Review," then
the most important literary magazine in the country,
They represent nearly all that he put 'forward in the
line of original composition from 1842 to 1846 ; but
during that period he edited the " Journal of an Af
rican Cruiser " by his friend Horatio Bridge, of the
United States Navy, and some "Papers of an Old
Dartmoor Prisoner," neither of which has since been
republished. Finally, just at the close of his residence
at the Manse, the " Mosses " were issued in two vol
umes, at New York.

G.P.L,

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

THE OLD MANSE.

THE AUTHOR MAKES THE READER ACQUAINTED WITH HIS
ABODE.

BETWEEN two tall gateposts of rough-hewn stone
(the gate itself having fallen from its hinges at some
unknown epoch) we beheld the gray front of the old
parsonage terminating the vista of an avenue of black
ash-trees. It was now a twelvemonth since the funeral
procession of the venerable clergyman, its last inhabi
tant, had turned from that gateway towards the village
burying-ground. The wheel-track leading to the door,
as well as the whole breadth of the avenue, was almost
overgrown with grass, affording dainty mouthfuls to
two or three vagrant cows and an old white horse who
had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The
glimmering shadows that lay half asleep between the
door of the house and the public highway were a kind
of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice
had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material
world. Certainly it had little in common with those
ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the
road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it
were, into the domestic circle. From these quiet win
dows the figures of passing travellers looked too re
mote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In its

12 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

near retirement and accessible seclusion it was the very
spot for the residence of a clergyman, — a man not
estranged from human life, yet enveloped in the midst
of it with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and
brightness. It was worthy to have been one of the
time-honored parsonages of England in which, through
many generations, a succession of holy occupants pass
from youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance
of sanctity to pervade the house and hover over it as
with an atmosphere.

Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been pro
faned by a lay occupant until that memorable summer
afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had
built it ; a priest had succeeded to it ; other priestly
men from time to time had dwelt in it ; and children
born in its chambers had grown up to assume the
priestly character. It was awful to reflect how many
sermons must have been written there. The latest in
habitant alone — he by whose translation to paradise
the dwelling was left vacant — had penned nearly
three thousand discourses, besides the better, if not
the greater, number that gushed living from his lips.
How often, no doubt, had he paced to and fro along
the avenue, attuning his meditations to the sighs and
gentle murmurs, and deep and solemn peals of the
wind among the lofty tops of the trees ! In that vari
ety of natural utterances he could find something ac
cordant with every passage of his sermon, were it of
tenderness or reverential fear. The boughs over my
head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts as well as
with rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for hav
ing been so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured
to hope that wisdom would descend upon me with the
falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light

THE OLD MANSE. 18

apon an intellectual treasure in the Old . Manse well
worth those hoards of long-hidden gold which people
seek for in moss-grown houses. Profound treatises of
morality ; a layman's unprofessional and therefore un
prejudiced views of religion ; histories (such as Ban
croft might have written had he taken up his abode
here as he once purposed) bright with picture, gleam
ing over a depth of philosophic thought, — these were
the works that might fitly have flowed from such a re
tirement. In the humblest event I resolved at least
to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson
and should possess physical substance enough to stand
alone.

In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me
no pretext for not fulfilling it, there was in the rear of
the house the most delightful little nook of a study
that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a scholar. It
was here that Emerson wrote Nature ; for he was then
an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the
Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moonrise from
the summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the
room its walls were blackened with the smoke of un
numbered years, and made still blacker by the grim
prints of Puritan ministers that hung around. These
worthies looked strangely like bad angels, or at least
like men who had wrestled so continually and so
sternly with the devil that somewhat of his sooty
fierceness had been imparted to their own visages.
They had all vanished now ; a cheerful coat of paint
and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up the small
apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that
swept against the overhanging eaves attempered the
cheery western sunshine. In place of the grim prints
there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raph

14 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ael's Madonnas and two pleasant little pictures of the
Lake of Como. The only other decorations were a
purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and a bronze one
containing graceful ferns. My books (few, and by no
means choice ; for they were chiefly such waifs as
chance had thrown in my way) stood in order about
the room, seldom to be disturbed.

The study had three windows, set with little, old-
fashioned panes of glass, each with a crack across it,
The two on the western side looked, or rather peeped,
between the willow branches down into the orchard,
with glimpses of the river through the trees. The
third, facing northward, commanded a broader view
of the river at a spot where its hitherto obscure waters
gleam forth into the light of history. It was at this
window that the clergyman who then dwelt in the
Manse stood watching the outbreak of a long and
leadly struggle between two nations ; he saw the ir
regular array of his parishioners on the farther side of
the river and the glittering line of the British on the
hither bank. He awaited in an agony of suspense the
rattle of the musketry. It came, and there needed but
a gentle wind to sweep the battle smoke around this
quiet house.

Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering
as my guest in the Old Manse and entitled to all cour
tesy in the way of sight-showing, — perhaps he will
choose to take a'nearer view of the memorable spot.
We stand now on the river's brink. It may well be
called the Concord, the river of peace and quietness ;
for it is certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish
stream that ever loitered imperceptibly towards its
eternity — the sea. Positively, I had lived three weeks
beside it before it grew quite clear to my perception

THE OLD MANSE. 15

which way the current flowed. It never has a viva
cious aspect except when a northwestern breeze is
vexing its surface on a sunshiny day. From the in
curable indolence of its nature, the stream is happily
incapable of becoming the slave of human ingenuity,
as is the fate of so many a wild, free mountain torrent.
While all things else are compelled to subserve some
useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in lazy
liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording
even water-power enough to grind the corn that grows
upon its banks. The torpor of its movement allows it
nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much as a nar
row strip of glistening sand, in any part of its coursec
It slumbers between broad prairies, kissing the long
meadow grass, and bathes the overhanging boughs of
elder bushes and willows or the roots of elms and ash-
trees and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes grow
along its plashy shore ; the yellow water-lily spreads
its broad, flat leaves on the margin ; and the fragrant
white pond-lily abounds, generally selecting a position
just so far from the river's brink that it cannot be
grasped save at the hazard of plunging in.

It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its
loveliness and perfume, springing as it does from the
black mud over which the river sleeps, and where lurk
the slimy eel and speckled frog and the mud turtle,
whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the
very same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks
its obscene life and noisome odor. Thus we see, too,
in the world that some persons assimilate only what is
ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which
supply good and beautiful results — the fragrance of
celestial flowers — to the daily life of others.

The reader must not, from any testimony of mine,

16 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

contract a dislike towards our slumberous stream. IB
the light of a calm and golden sunset it becomes
lovely beyond expression ; the more lovely for the
quietude that so well accords with the hour, when even
the wind, after blustering all day long, usually hushes
itself to rest. Each tree and rock, and every blade of
grass, is distinctly imaged, and, however unsightly in
reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The
minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of the
firmament are pictured equally without effort and
with the same felicity of success. All the sky glows
downward at our feet ; the rich clouds float through
the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly
thoughts through a peaceful heart. We will not, then,
malign our river as gross and impure while it can
glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the heaven
that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny
hue and the muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol
that the earthliest human soul has an infinite spiritual
capacity and may contain the better world within its
depths. But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn
out of any mud puddle in the streets of a city ; and,
being taught us everywhere, it must be true.

Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track
in our walk to the battle-ground. Here we are, at the
point where the river was crossed by the old bridge,
the possession of which -was the immediate object of
the contest. On the hither side grow two or three
elms, throwing a wide circumference of shade, but
which must have been planted at some period within
the threescore years and ten that have passed since
the battle day. On the farther shore, overhung by a
clump of elder bushes, we discern the stone abutment
of the bridge. Looking down into the river, I once

THE OLD MANSE. 17

discovered some heavy fragments of the timbers, all
green with half a century's growth of water moss ; for
during that length of time the tramp of horses and
human footsteps has ceased along this ancient high
way. The stream has here about the breadth of twenty
strokes of a swimmer's arm, — a space not too wide
when the bullets were whistling across. Old people
who dwell hereabouts will point out the very spots on
the western bank where our countrymen fell down and
died ; and on this side of the river an obelisk of
granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized
with British blood. The monument, not more than
twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the inhab
itants of a village to erect in illustration of a matter
of local interest rather than what was suitable to com
memorate an epoch of national history. Still, by the
fathers of the village this famous deed was done ; and
their descendants might rightfully claim the privilege
of building a memorial.

A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interest
ing one than the granite obelisk, may be seen close
under the stone-wall which separates the battle-ground
from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the grave
— marked by a small, mossgrown fragment of stone
at the head and another at the foot — the grave of
two British soldiers who were slain in the skirmish,
and have ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah
Brown and Thomas Davis buried them. Soon was
their warfare ended ; a weary night march from Bos
ton, a rattling volley of musketry across the river,
and then these many years of rest. In the long pro
cession of slain invaders who passed into eternity from
the battle-fields of the revolution, these two nameless
soldiers led the way.

18 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over his
grave, told me a tradition in reference to one of the
inhabitants below. The story has something deeply
impressive, though its circumstances cannot altogether
be reconciled with probability. A youth in the service
of the clergyman happened to be chopping wood, that
April morning, at the back door of the Manse, and
when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the
bridge he hastened across the intervening field to see
what might be going forward. It is rather strange, by
the way, that this lad should have been so diligently at
work when the whole population of town and country
were startled out of their customary business by the
advance of the British troops. Be that as it might,
the tradition says that the lad now left his task and
hurried to the battle-field with the axe still in his
hand. The British had by this time retreated, the
Americans were in pursuit ; and the late scene of strife
was thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay
on the ground — one was a corpse ; but, as the young
New Englander drew nigh, the other Briton raised
himself painfully upon his hands and knees and gave
a ghastly stare into his face. The boy, — it must have
been a nervous impulse, without purpose, without
thought, and betokening a sensitive and impressible
nature rather than a hardened one, — the boy uplifted
his axe and dealt the wounded soldier a fierce and
fatal blow upon the head.

I could wish that the grave might be opened ; for I
would fain know whether either of the skeleton sol
diers has the mark of an axe in his skull. The story
comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an in
tellectual and moral exercise, I have sought to follow
that poor youth through his subsequent career, and

THE OLD MANSE. 19

observe how his soul was tortured by the blood stain,
contracted as it had been before the long custom of
war had robbed human life of its sanctity, and while
it still seemed murderous to slay a brother man. This
one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all
that history tells us of the fight.

Many strangers come in the summer time to view
the battle-ground. For my own part, I have never
found my imagination much excited by this or any
other scene of historic celebrity ; nor would the placid
margin of the river have lost any of its charm for me
had men never fought and died there. There is a
wilder interest in the tract of land — perhaps a him.'
dred yards in breadth — which extends between ths
battle-field and the northern face of our Old Manse,
with its contiguous avenue and orchard. Here, in
some unknown age, before the white man came, stood
an Indian village, convenient to the river, whence its
inhabitants must have drawn so large a part of their
subsistence. The site is identified by the spear and
arrow heads, the chisels, and other implements of war,
labor, and the chase, which the plough turns up from
the soil. You see a splinter of stone, half hidden be
neath a sod ; it looks like nothing worthy of note ;
but, if you have faith enough to pick it up, behold a
relic ! Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding
what the Indians have left behind them, first set me
on the search ; and I afterwards enriched myself with
some very perfect specimens, so rudely wrought that
it seemed almost as if chance had fashioned them.
Their great charm consists in this rudeness and in the
individuality of each article, so different from the pro
ductions of civilized machinery, which shapes every
thing on one pattern. There is exquisite delight, too*

20 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

in picking up for one's self an arrowhead that waa
dropped centuries ago and has never been handled
since, and which we thus receive directly from the
hand of the red hunter, who purposed to shoot it at
his game or at an enemy. Such an incident builds up
again the Indian village and its encircling forest, and
recalls to life the painted chiefs and warriors, the
squaws at their household toil, and the children sport
ing among the wigwams, while the little wind-rocked
pappoose swings from the branch of the tree. It can
hardly be told whether it is a joy or a pain, after such
a momentary vision, to gaze around in the broad day
light of reality and see stone fences, white houses,
potato fields, and men doggedly hoeing in their shirt
sleeves and homespun pantaloons. But this is non
sense. The Old Manse is better than a thousand wig
wams.

The Old Manse ! We had almost forgotten it, but
will return thither through the orchard. This was set
out by the last clergyman, in the decline of his life,
when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed man
for planting trees from which he could have no pros
pect of gathering fruit. Even had that been the case,
there was only so much the better motive for planting
them, in the pure and unselfish hope of benefiting his
successors, — an end so seldom achieved by more am
bitious efforts. But the old minister, before reaching
his patriarchal age of ninety, ate the apples from this
orchard during many years, and added silver and gold
to his annual stipend by disposing of the superfluity
It is pleasant to think of him walking among the trees
in the quiet afternoons of early autumn and picking
up here and there a windfall, while he observes how
heavily the branches are weighed down, and computes

THE OLD MANSE, 21

die number of empty flour barrels that will be filled
by their burden. He loved each tree, doubtless, as ii
it had been his own child. An orchard has a relation
to mankind, and readily connects itself with matters
of the heart. The trees possess a domestic character ;
they have lost the wild nature of their forest kindred,
and have grown humanized by receiving the care of
man as well as by contributing to his wants. There
is so much individuality of character, too, among apple-
trees that it gives them an additional claim to be the
objects of human interest. One is harsh and crabbed
in its manifestations ; another gives us fruit as mild
as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently
grudging the few apples that it bears; another ex
hausts itself in free-hearted benevolence. The variety
of grotesque shapes into which apple-trees contort
themselves has its effect on those who get acquainted
with them: they stretch out their crooked branches,
and take such hold of the imagination that we remem
ber them as humorists and odd-fellows. And what is
more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger
about the spot where once stood a homestead, but
where there is now only a ruined chimney rising out
of a grassy and weed-grown cellar ? They offer their
fruit to every wayfarer, — apples that are bitter sweet
with the moral of Time's vicissitude.

I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in
the world as that of finding myself, with only the two
or three mouths which it was my privilege to feed, the
sole inheritor of the old clergyman's wealth of fruits.
Throughout the summer there w%re cherries and cur
rants ; and then came autumn, with his immense bur
den of apples, dropping them continually from hia
overladen shoulders as he trudged along. In the

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

stillest afternoon, if I listened, the thump of a great
apple was audible, falling without a breath of wind,
from the mere necessity of perfect ripeness. And, be
sides, there were pear-trees, that flung down bushels
upon bushels of heavy pears ; and peach-trees, which,
in a good year, tormented me with peaches, neither to
be eaten nor kept, nor, without labor and perplexity,
to be given away. The idea of an infinite generosity
and exhaustless bounty on the part of our Mother
Nature was well worth obtaining through such cares
as these. That feeling can be enjoyed in perfec
tion only by the natives of summer islands, where the
bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange grow
spontaneously and hold forth the ever-ready meal ; but
likewise almost as well by a man long habituated to
city life, who plunges into such a solitude as that of
the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of trees that
he did not plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox
taste, bear the closest resemblance to those that grew
in Eden. It has been an apothegm these five thou
sand years, that toil sweetens the bread it earns. For
my part (speaking from hard experience, acquired
while belaboring the rugged furrows of Brook Farm),
I relish best the free gifts of Providence.

Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requi
site to cultivate a moderately-sized garden imparts such
zest to kitchen vegetables as is never found in those
of the market gardener. Childless men, if they would
know something of the bliss of paternity, should plant
a seed, — be it squash, bean, Indian corn, or perhaps a
mere flower or worthless weed, — should plant it with
their own hands, and nurse it from infancy to ma
turity altogether by their own care. If there be not
too many of them, each individual plant becomes an

THE OLD MANSE. 23

object of separate interest. My garden, that skirted
the avenue of the Manse, was of precisely the right
extent. An hour or two of morning labor was all that
it required. But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen
times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my
vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share
or conceive of who had never taken part in the pro
cess of creation. It was one of the most bewitching
sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrust
ing aside the soil, or a row of early peas just peeping
forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
Later in the season the humming-birds were attracted
by the blossoms of a peculiar variety of bean ; and
they were a joy to me, those little spiritual visitants,
for deigning to sip airy food out of my nectar cups.
Multitudes of bees used to bury themselves in the yel
low blossoms of the summer squashes. This, too, was
a deep satisfaction; although when they had laden
themselves with sweets' they flew away to some un
known hive, which would give back nothing in re
quital of what my garden had contributed. But I was
glad thus to fling a benefaction upon the passing
breeze with the certainty that somebody must profit
by it, and that there would be a little more honey in
the world to allay the sourness and bitterness which
mankind is always complaining of. Yes, indeed ; my
life was the sweeter for that honey.

Speaking of summer squashes, I must say a word
of their beautiful and varied forms. They pre°
sented an endless diversity of urns and vases, shal
low or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns
which a sculptor would do well to copy, since Art has
never invented anything more graceful. A hundred
Squashes in the garden were worthy, in my eyes at

24 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

least, of being rendered indestructible in marble. If
ever Providence (but I know it never will) should
assign me a superfluity of gold, part of it shall be
expended for a service of plate, or most delicate por
celain, to be wrought into the shapes of summer
squashes gathered from vines which I will plant with
my own hands. As dishes for containing vegetables
they would be peculiarly appropriate.

But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful
was gratified by my toil in the kitchen garden. There
was a hearty enjoyment, likewise, in observing the
growth of the crook-necked winter squashes, from the
first little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to
it, until they lay strewn upon the soil, big, round fel
lows, hiding their heads beneath the leaves, but turn
ing up their great yellow rotundities to the noontide
sun. Gazing at them, I felt that by my agency some
thing worth living for had been done. A new sub
stance was born into the world. They were real and
tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold
of and rejoice in. A cabbage, too, — especially the
early Dutch cabbage, which swells to a monstrous cir
cumference, until its ambitious heart often bursts
asunder, — is a matter to be proud of when we can
claim a share with the earth and sky in producing it.
But, after all, the hugest pleasure is reserved until
these vegetable children of ours are smoking on the
table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them.

What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard
and the garden, the reader begins to despair of find
ing his way back into the Old Manse. But in agree
able weather it is the truest hospitality to keep him
out-of-doors. I never grew quite acquainted with my
habitation till a long spell of sulky rain had confined

THE OLD MANSE. 25

me beneath its roof. There could not be a more som
bre aspect of external Nature than as then seen from
the windows of my study. The great willow-tree had
caught and retained among its leaves a whole cata
ract of water, to be shaken down at intervals by the
frequent gusts of wind. All day long, and for a week
together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping and splash*
splash-splashing from the eaves, and bubbling and
foaming into the tubs beneath the spouts. The old,
unpainted shingles of the house and out-buildings
were black with moisture ; and the mosses of ancient
growth upon the walls looked green and fresh, as if
they were the newest things and afterthought of Time-
The usually mirrored surface of the river was blurred
by an infinity of raindrops ; the whole landscape had
a completely water-soaked appearance, conveying the
impression that the earth was wet through like a
sponge ; while the summit of a wooded hill, about a
mile distant, was enveloped in a dense mist, where the
demon of the tempest seemed to have his abiding-
place and to be plotting still direr inclemencies.

Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a
rain. In the fiercest heat of sunny days she retains
a secret mercy, and welcomes the wayfarer to shady
nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot penetrate ;
but she provides no shelter against her storms. It
makes us shiver to think of those deep, umbrageous
recesses, those overshadowing banks, where we found
such enjoyment during the sultry afternoons. Not
a twig of foliage there but would dash a little shower
into our faces. Looking reproachfully towards the
impenetrable sky, — if sky there be above that dismal
uniformity of cloud, — we are apt to murmur against
the whole system of the universe, since it involves the

26 MOSSED FROM AN OLD MANSE.

extinction of so many summer days in so short a life
by the hissing and spluttering rain. In such spells of
weather — and it is to be supposed such weather came
— Eve's bower in paradise must have been but a cheer-
less and aguish kind of shelter, nowise comparable to
the old parsonage, which had resources of its own to
beguile the week's imprisonment. The idea of sleep
ing on a couch of wet roses !

Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake him
self to a huge garret, stored, like that of the Manse,
with lumber that each generation has left behind it
from a period before the revolution. Our garret was
an arched hall, dimly illuminated through small and
dusty windows , it was but a twilight at the best ; and
there were nooks, or rather caverns, of deep obscurity,
the secrets of which I never learned, being too reverent
of their dust and cobwebs. The beams and rafters,
roughly hewn and with strips of bark still on them,
and the rude masonry of the chimneys, made the gar
ret look wild and uncivilized, — an aspect unlike what
was seen elsewhere in the quiet and decorous old house.
But on one side there was a little whitewashed apart
ment which bore the traditionary title of the Saint's
Chamber, because holy men in their youth had slept
and studied and prayed there. With its elevated re
tirement, its one window, its small fireplace, and its
closet, convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot
where a young man might inspire himself with solemn
enthusiasm and cherish saintly dreams. The occu
pants, at various epochs, had left brief records and
ejaculations inscribed upon the walls. There, toof
hung a tattered and shrivelled roll of canvas, which
on inspection proved to be the forcibly wrought pic-
toe of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown, holding

THE OLD MANSE. 27

ft Bible in his hand. As I turned his face towards the
light he eyed me with an air of authority such as men
of his profession seldom assume in our day£. The
original had been pastor of the parish more than a
century ago, a friend of Whitefield, and almost his
equal in fervid eloquence. I bowed before the effigy
of the dignified divine, and felt as if I had now met
face to face with the ghost by whom, as there was rea
son to apprehend, the Manse was haunted.

Houses of any antiquity in New England are so
invariably possessed with spirits that the matter seems
hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used to heave
deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor, and
sometimes rustled paper, as if he were turning over a
fiermon in the long upper entry, — where nevertheless
he was invisible in spite of the bright moonshine that
fell through the eastern window. Not improbably he
wished me to edit and publish a selection from a chest
full of manuscript discourses that stood in the garret.
Once, while Hillard and other friends sat talking with
us in the twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a
minister's silk gown, sweeping through the very midst
of the company so closely as almost to brush against
the chairs. Still there was nothing visible. A yet
stranger business was that of a ghostly servant maid,
who used to be heard in the kitchen at deepest mid
night, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing, — performing,
in short, all kinds of domestic labor, — although no
traces of anything accomplished could be detected the
next morning. Some neglected duty of her servitude
— some ill-starched ministerial band — disturbed the
poor damsel in her grave and kept her at work with
out any wages.

But to return from this digression. A part of my

28 MO&SES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

predecessor's library was stored in the garret, — na
unfit receptacle indeed for such dreary trash as com
prised the greater number of volumes. The old books
would have been worth nothing at an auction. In this
venerable garret, however, they possessed an interest9
quite apart from their literary value, as heirlooms,
many of which had been transmitted down through a
series of consecrated hands from the days of the mighty
Puritan divines. Autographs of famous names were to
be seen in faded ink on some of their flyleaves ; and
there were marginal observations or interpolated pages
closely covered with manuscript in illegible shorthand,
perhaps concealing matter of profound truth and wis
dom. The world will never be the better for it. A
few of the books were Latin folios, written by Cath
olic authors; others demolished Papistry, as with a
sledge-hammer, in plain English. A dissertation on
the book of Job — which only Job himself could have
had patience to read — filled at least a score of small,
thickset quartos, at the rate of two or three volumes to
a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of divin
ity — too corpulent a body, it might be feared, to com
prehend the spiritual element of religion. Volumes of
this form dated back two hundred years or more, and
were generally bound in black leather, exhibiting pre
cisely such an appearance as we should attribute to
books of enchantment. Others equally antique were
of a size proper to be carried in the large waistcoat
pockets of old times, — diminutive, but as black as
their bulkier brethren, and abundantly interfused with
Greek and Latin quotations. These little old volumes
impressed me as if they had been intended for very
large ones, but had been unfortunately blighted at ail
early stage of their growth.

THE OLD MANSE. 29

The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed
through the dusty garret windows, while I burrowed
among these venerable books in search of any living
thought which should burn like a coal of fire, or glow
like an inextinguishable gem, beneath the dead trump
ery that had long hidden it. But I found no such
treasure ; all was dead alike ; and I could not but
muse deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating
fact that the works of man's intellect decay like those
of his hands. Thought grows mouldy. What was
good and nourishing food for the spirits of one gener
ation affords no sustenance for the next. Books of re
ligion, however, cannot be considered a fair test of the
enduring and vivacious properties of human thought,
because such books so seldom really touch upon their
ostensible subject, and have, therefore, so little busi
ness to be written at all. So long as an unlettered
soul can attain to saving grace, there would seem to be
no deadly error in holding theological libraries to be
accumulations of, for the most part, stupendous imper
tinence.

Many of the books had accrued in the latter years
of the last clergyman's lifetime. These threatened to
'be of even less interest than the elder works, a century
hence, to any curious inquirer who should then rum
mage them as I was doing now. Volumes of the
" Liberal Preacher " and " Christian Examiner," oc
casional sermons, controversial pamphlets, tracts, and
other productions of a like fugitive nature took the
place of the thick and heavy volumes of past time. In
a physical point of view there was much the same dif
ference as between a feather and a lump of lead ; but,
intellectually regarded, the specific gravity of old and
new was about upon a par. Both also were alike

50 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

frigid. The elder books, nevertheless, seemed to have
been earnestly written, and might be conceived to have
possessed warmth at some former period ; although,
with the lapse of time, the heated masses had cooled
down even to the freezing point. The frigidity of the
modern productions, on the other hand, was character
istic and inherent, and evidently had little to do with
the writer's qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of
this whole dusty heap of literature I tossed aside all
the sacred part, and felt myself none the less a Chris
tian for eschewing it. There appeared no hope of
either mounting to the better world on a Gothic stair
case of ancient folios or of flying thither on the wings
of a modern tract.

Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except
what had been written for the passing day and year
without the remotest pretension or idea of permanence.
There were a few old newspapers, and still older alma
nacs, which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs
when they had issued from the press with a distinct
ness that was altogether unaccountable. It was as if
I had found bits of magic looking-glass among the
books, with the images of a vanished century in them.
I turned my eyes towards the tattered picture above
mentioned, and asked of the austere divine wherefore
it was that he and his brethren, after the most painful
rummaging and groping into their minds, had been
able to produce nothing half so real as these news
paper scribblers and almanac makers had thrown off
in the effervescence of a moment. The portrait re
sponded not ; so I sought an answer for myself. It is
the age itself that writes newspapers and almanacs,
which, therefore, have a distinct purpose and meaning
at the time, and a kind of intelligible truth for att

TEE OLD MANSE. 31

times ; whereas most other works — being written by
men who, in the very act, set themselves apart from
their age — are likely to possess little significance
when new, and none at all when old. Genius, indeed,
melts many ages into one, and thus effects something
permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that
of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is
but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a
hundred centuries.

Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there
yet lingers with me a superstitious reverence for liter
ature of all kinds. A bound volume has a charm in
my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess
for the good Mussulman. He imagines that those
wind-wafted records are perhaps hallowed by some
sacred verse ; and I, that every new book or antique
one may contain the " open sesame," — the spell to
disclose treasures hidden in some unsuspected cave of
Truth. Thus it was not without sadness that I turned
away from the library of the Old Manse.

Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the
close of another stormy day, beaming from the edge
of the western horizon ; while the massive firmament
•j>f clouds threw down all the gloom it could, but served
only to kindle the golden light into a more brilliant
glow by the strongly contrasted shadows. Heaven
smiled at the earth, so long unseen, from beneath its
heavy eyelid. To-morrow for the hill-tops and the
wood paths.

Or it might be that Ellery Channing came up the
avenue to join me in a fishing excursion on the river.
Strange and happy times were those when we cast
aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes, and
delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like

32 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the Indians or any less conventional race during one
bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against
the current, between wide meadows, we turned aside
into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this,
for a mile above its junction with the Concord, has
never flowed on earth, — nowhere, indeed, except to
lave the interior regions of a poet's imagination. It
is sheltered from the breeze by woods and a hill-side ;
so that elsewhere there might be a hurricane, and here
scarcely a ripple across the shaded water. The cur
rent lingers along so gently that the mere force of the
boatman's will seems sufficient to propel his craft
against it. It comes flowing softly through the mid
most privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whis
pers it to be quiet ; while the stream whispers back
again from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood
were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river
sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and
of the clustering foliage, amid which fall showers of
broken sunlight, imparting specks of vivid cheerful
ness, in contrast with the quiet depth of the prevailing
tint. Of all this scene, the slumbering river has a
dream picture in its bosom. Which, after all, was the
most real — the picture, or the original? — the objects
palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in
the stream beneath ? Surely the disembodied images
stand in closer relation to the soul. But both the
original and the reflection had here an ideal charm
and, had it been a thought more wild, I could have
fancied that this river had strayed forth out of the
rich scenery of my companion's inner world ; only the
vegetation along its banks should then have had an
Oriental character.

Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tran-

THE OLD MANSE. 33

qoil woods seem hardly satisfied to allow it passage.
The trees are rooted on the very verge of the water,
and dip their pendent branches into it. At one spot
there is a lofty bank, on the slope of which grow
some hemlocks, declining across the stream with out
stretched arms, as if resolute to take the plunge. In
other places the banks are almost on a level with the
water ; so that the quiet congregation of trees set their
feet in the flood, and are fringed with foliage down
to the surface. Cardinal flowers kindle their spiral
flames and illuminate the dark nooks among the
shrubbery. The pond-lily grows abundantly along the
margin — that delicious flower, which, as Thoreau
tells me, opens its virgin bosom to the first sunlight
and perfects its being through the magic of that
genial kiss. He has beheld beds of them unfolding
in due succession as the sunrise stole gradually from
flower to flower — a sight not to be hoped for unless
when a poet adjusts his inward eye to a proper focus
with the outward organ. Grape-vines here and there
twine themselves around shrub and tree and hang
their clusters over the water within reach of the boat
man's hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of alien
race in an inextricable twine, marrying the hemlock
and the maple against their will, and enriching them
with a purple offspring of which neither is the parent.
One of these ambitious parasites has climbed into the
upper branches of a tall, white pine, and is still as-
?ending from bough to bough, unsatisfied till it shall
crown the tree's airy summit with a wreath of its
broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes.

The winding course of the stream continually shu
aut the scene behind us, and revealed as calm and
lovely a one before. We glided from depth to depth,

YOL,. II. 3

84 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

and breathed new seclusion at every turn. The shj
kingfisher flew from the withered branch close at hand
to another at a distance, uttering a shrill cry of anger
or alarm. Ducks that had been floating there since
the preceding eve were startled at our approach, and
skimmed along the glassy river, breaking its dark sur
face with a bright streak. The pickerel leaped from
among the lily-pads. The turtle, sunning itself upon
a rock or at the root of a tree, slid suddenly into the
water with a plunge* The painted Indian who pad
dled his canoe along the Assabeth three hundred years
ago could hardly have seen a wilder gentleness dis
played upon its banks and reflected in its bosom than
we did. Nor could the same Indian have prepared
his noontide meal with more simplicity. We drew
up our skiff at some point where the overarching
shade formed a natural bower, and there kindled a
fire with the pine cones and decayed branches that lay
strewn plentifully around. Soon the smoke ascended
among the trees, impregnated with a savory incense,
not heavy, dull, and surfeiting, like the steam of
cookery within doors, but sprightly and piquant. The
smell of our feast was akin to the woodland odors with
which it mingled: there was no sacrilege committed
by our intrusion there: the sacred solitude was hos
pitable, and granted us free leave to cook and eat in
the recess that was at once our kitchen and banquet
ing hall. It is strange what humble offices may be
performed in a beautiful scene without destroying its
poetry. Our fire, red gleaming among the trees, and
we beside it, busied with culinary rites and spread
ing out our meal on a mossgrown log, all seemed
in unison with the river gliding by and the foliage
rustling over us. And, what was strangest, neither

THE OLD MANSE. 35

did our mirth seem to disturb the propriety of the
solemn woods; although the hobgoblins of the old
wilderness and the will-of-the-wisps that glimmered in
the marshy places might have come trooping to share
our table talk, and have added their shrill laughter to
our merriment. It was the very spot in which to ut
ter the extremest nonsense or the profoundest wisdom,
or that ethereal product of the mind which partakes
of both, and may become one or the other, in corre-
«T)ondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.

So amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and
sighing waters, up gushed our talk like the babble of
a fountain. The evanescent spray was Ellery's ; and
his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay glim
mering in the fountain's bed and brightened both our
faces by the reflection. Could he have drawn out that
virgin gold and stamped it with the mint mark that
alone gives currency, the world might have had the
profit, and he the fame. My mind was the richer
merely by the knowledge that it was there. But the
chief profit of those wild days to him and me lay, not
in any definite idea, not in any angular or rounded
truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass of prob
lematical stuff, but in the freedom which we thereby
won from all custom and conventionalism and fetter
ing influences of man on man. We were so free to
day that it was impossible to be slaves again to-mor-
row. When we crossed the threshold of the house or
trod the thronged pavements of a city, still the leaves
of the trees that overhang the Assabeth were whis
pering to us. " Be free ! be free ! " Therefore along
that shady -river-bank there are spots, marked with a
heap of ashes and half-consumed brands, only less
sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of a house-
hold fire.

36 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown
fche golden river at sunset, — how sweet was it to re
turn within the system of human society, not as to
a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice,
whence we could go forth at will into statelier simplic
ity ! How gently, too, did the sight of the Old Manse,
best seen from the river, overshadowed with its willow
and all environed about with the foliage of its orchard
and avenue, — how gently did its gray, homely aspect
rebuke the speculative extravagances of the day ! It
had grown sacred in connection with the artificial life
against which we inveighed ; it had been a home for
many years in spite of all ; it was my home too ; and,
with these thoughts, it seemed to me tha1" all the arti
fice and conventionalism of life was but an impalpable
thinness upon its surface, and that the depth below
was none the worse for it. Once, as we turned our
boat to the bank, there was a cloud, in the shape of an
immensely gigantic figure of a hound, couched above
the house, as if keeping guard over it. Gazing at this
symbol, I prayed that the upper influences might long
protect the institutions that had grown out of the heart
of mankind.

If ever my readers should decide to give up civil
ized life, cities, houses, and whatever moral or mate
rial enormities in addition to these the perverted inge
nuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the early
autumn. Then Nature will love him better than at
any other season, and will take him to her bosom
with a more motherly tenderness. I could scarcely
endure the roof of the old house above me in those
first autumnal days. How early in the summer, too,
the prophecy of autumn comes ! Earlier in some years
than in others ; sometimes even in the first weeks of

THE OLD MANSE. 37

July. There is no other feeling like what is caused
by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception — if it
be not rather a foreboding — of the year's decay, so
blessedly sweet and sad in the same breath.

Did I say that there was no feeling like it ? Ah,
but there is a half-acknowledged melancholy like to
this when we stand in the perfected vigor of our life
and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers,
and that the next work of his never idle fingers must
be to steal them one by one away.

I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be
not as early a token of autumn's approach as any
other, — that song which may be called an audible
stillness ; for though very loud and heard afar, yet
the mind does not take note of it as a sound, so com
pletely is its individual existence merged among the
accompanying characteristics of the season. Alas for
the pleasant summer time ! In August the grass is still
verdant on the hills and in the valleys ; the foliage of
the trees is as dense as ever, and as green ; the flowers
gleam forth in richer abundance along the margin of
the river, and by the stone walls, and deep among the
woods ; the days, too, are as fervid now as they were
a month ago ; and yet in every breath of wind and in
every beam of sunshine we hear the whispered fare
well and behold the parting smile of a dear friend.
There is a coolness amid all the heat, a mildness in the
blazing noon. Not a breeze can stir but it thrills us
with the breath of autumn. A pensive glory is seen
in the far golden gleams, among the shadows of the
trees. The flowers — even the brightest of them, and
they are the most gorgeous of the year — have this
gentle sadness wedded to their pomp, and typify the
character of the delicious time each within itself. The
brilliant cardinal flower has never seemed gay to me.

88 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. '

Still later in the season Nature's tenderness waxes
stronger. It is impossible not to be fond of our mother
now ; for she is so fond of us ! At other periods she
does not make this impression on me, or only at rare
intervals ; but in those genial days of autumn, when
she has perfected her harvests and accomplished every
needful thing that was given her to do, then she over
flows with a blessed superfluity of love. She has
leisure to caress her children now. It is good to be
alive at such times. Thank Heaven for breath — yes,
for mere breath — when it is made up of a heavenly
breeze like this ! It comes with a real kiss upon our
cheeks ; it would linger fondly around us if it might ;
but, since it must be gone, it embraces us with its whole
kindly heart and passes onward to embrace likewise
the next thing that it meets. A blessing is flung abroad
and scattered far and wide over the earth, to be gath
ered up by all who choose. I recline upon the still
unwithered grass and whisper to myself, " O perfect
day ! O beautiful world ! O beneficent God ! " And
it is the promise of a blessed eternity ; for our Creator
would never have made such lovely days and have
given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and be
yond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.
This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It beams
through the gates of paradise and shows us glimpses
far inward.

By and by, in a little time, the outward world puts
on a drear austerity. On some October morning
there is a heavy hoar-frost on the grass and along the
tops of the fences ; and at sunrise the leaves fall from
the trees of our avenue without a breath of wind,
quietly descending by their own weight. All summeJ
long they have murmured like the noise of waters'

THE OLD MANSE. 39

they have roared loudly while the branches were wrest
ling with the thunder gust; they have made music
both glad aud solemn ; they have attuned my thoughts
by their quiet sound as I paced to and fro beneath the
arch of intermingling boughs. Now they can only
rustle under my feet. Henceforth the gray parsonage
begins to assume a larger importance, and draws to its
fireside, — for the abomination of the air-tight stove is
reserved till wintry weather, — draws closer and closer
to its fireside the vagrant impulses that had gone wan
dering about through the summer.

When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse
became as lonely as a hermitage. Not that ever —
in my time at least — it had been thronged with com
pany; but, at no rare intervals, we welcomed some
friend out of the dusty glare and tumult of the world,
and rejoiced to share with him the transparent ob
scurity that was floating over us. In one respect our
precincts were like the Enchanted Ground through
which the pilgrim travelled on his way to the Celestial
City ! The guests, each and all, felt a slumberous in
fluence upon them ; they fell asleep in chairs, or took
a more deliberate siesta on the sofa, or were seen
stretched among the shadows of the orchard, looking
up dreamily through the boughs. They could not
have paid a more acceptable compliment to my abode,
nor to my own qualities as a host. I held it as a proof
that they left their cares behind them as they passed
between the stone gate-posts at the entrance of our
avenue, and that the so powerful opiate was the abun
dance of peace and quiet within and all around us.
Others could give them pleasure and amusement or
instruction — these could be picked up anywhere ; but
\t was for me to give them rest — rest in a life of

40 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

trouble. What better could be done for those weary
and world-worn spirits ? — for him whose career of per
petual action was impeded and harassed by the rarest
of his powers and the richest of his acquirements ? —
for another who had thrown his ardent heart from
earliest youth into the strife of politics, and now, per
chance, began to suspect that one lifetime is too brief
for the accomplishment of any lofty aim ? — for her
on whose feminine nature had been imposed the heavy
gift of intellectual power, such as a strong man might
aave staggered under, and with it the necessity to act
upon the world? — in a word, not to multiply in
stances, what better could be done for anybody who
came within our magic circle than to throw the spell
of a tranquil spirit over him? And when it had
wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with
but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming
of us.

Were I to adopt a pet idea, as so many people do,
and fondle it in my embraces to the exclusion of all
others, it would be, that the great want which man
kind labors under at this present period is sleep. The
world should recline its vast head on the first conven
ient pillow and take an age-long nap. It has gone dis
tracted through a morbid activity, and, while preter-
naturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by
visions that seem real to it now, but would assume
their true aspect and character were all things once
set right by an interval of sound repose. This is the
only method of getting rid of old delusions and avoid
ing new ones ; of regenerating our race, so that it
might in due time awake as an infant out of. dewy
slumber ; of restoring to us the simple perception of
«rhat is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve

THE OLD MANSE. 41

it, both of which have long been lost in consequence
of this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion
of the heart that now afflict the universe. Stimu
lants, the only mode of treatment hitherto attempted,
cannot quell the disease ; they do but heighten the de
lirium.

Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against
the author; for, though tinctured with its modicum
of truth, it is the result and expression of what he
knew, while he was writing, to be but a distorted sur
vey of the state and prospects of mankind. There
were circumstances around me which made it difficult
to view the world precisely as it exists ; for, severe
and sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to
go but a little way beyond its threshold before meet
ing with stranger moral shapes of men than might
have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a
thousand miles.

These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted
thither by the widespreading influence of a great orig
inal thinker, who had his earthly abode at the opposite
extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other
minds of a certain constitution with wonderful mag
netism, and drew many men upon long pilgrimages to
speak with him face to face. Young visionaries — to
whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to
make life all a labyrinth around them — came to seek
the clew that should guide them out of their self-in
volved bewilderment. Grayheaded theorists — whose
systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an
iron frame-work — travelled painfully to his door, not
to ask deliverance, but to invite the free spirit into
their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a new
thought, or a thought that they fancied new, came to

42 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem hastens to
a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value. Uncer
tain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight
of the moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a bea
con burning on a hill-top, and, climbing the difficult
ascent, looked forth into the surrounding obscurity
more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed
objects unseen before, — mountains, gleaming lakes,
glimpses of a creation among the chaos ; but, also, as
was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the
whole host <pf night birds, which flapped their dusky
wings against the gazer's eyes, and sometimes were
mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such delusions
always hover nigh whenever a beacon fire of truth is
kindled.

For myself, there had been epochs of my life when
I, too, might have asked of this prophet the master
word that should solve me the riddle of the universe ;
but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no ques
tion to be put, and therefore admired Emerson as a
poet of deep beauty and austere tenderness, but sought
nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good, nev
ertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths, or sometimes
in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam dif
fused about his presence like the garment of a shining"
one ; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension,
encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive-
more than he could impart. And, in truth, the heart
of many an ordinary man had, perchance, inscriptions
which he could not read. But it was impossible to
dwell in his vicinity without inhaling more or less the
mountain atmosphere of his lofty thought, which, in
the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddi
ness, — new truth being as heady as new wine. Never.

THE OLD MANSE. 43

was a poor little country village infested with such a
variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mor
tals, most of whom took upon themselves to be impor
tant agents of the world's destiny, yet were simply
bores of a very intense water. Such, I imagine, is the
invariable character of persons who crowd so closely
about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered
breath and thus become imbued with a false original
ity. This triteness of novelty is enough to make any
man of common sense blaspheme at all ideas of less
than a century's standing, and pray that the world
may be petrified and rendered immovable in precisely
the worst moral and physical state that it ever yet ar
rived at, rather than be benefited by such schemes of
such philosophers.

And now I begin to feel — and perhaps should have
sooner felt — that we have talked enough of the Old
Manse. Mine honored reader, it may be, will vilify
the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so
many pages about a mossgrown country parsonage,
and his life within its walls and on the river and in
the woods, and the influences that wrought upon him
from all these sources. My conscience, however, does
not reproach me with betraying anything too sacredly
individual to be revealed by a human spirit to its
brother or sister spirit. How narrow — how shallow
and scanty too — is the stream of thought that has
been flowing from my pen, compared with the broad
tide of dim emotions, ideas, and associations which
swell around me from that portion of my existence !
How little have I told ! and of that little, how almost
nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes
it exclusively my own ! Has the reader gone wander- _,
ing, hand in hand with me, through the inner passages

/*'

44 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

of my being ? and have we groped together into all its
chambers and examined their treasures or their rub-
bish ? Not so. We have been standing on the green
sward, but just within the cavern's mouth, where the
common sunshine is free to penetrate, and where every
footstep is therefore free to come. I have appealed to
no sentiment or sensibilities save such as are diffused
among us all. So far as I am a man of really individ
ual attributes I veil my face ; nor am I, nor have I
ever been, one of those supremely hospitable people
who serve up their own hearts, delicately fried, with
brain sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.

Glancing back over what I have written, it seems
but the scattered reminiscences of a single summer.
In fairyland there is no measurement of time ; and, in
a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life's ocean,
three years hastened away with a noiseless flight, aa
the breezy sunshine chases the cloud shadows across
the depths of a still valley. Now came hints, growing
more and more distinct, that the owner of the old
house was pining for his native air. Carpenters next
appeared, making a tremendous racket among the out
buildings, strewing the green grass with pine shavings
and chips of chestnut joists, and vexing the whole an
tiquity of the place with their discordant renovations.
Soon, moreover, they divested our abode of the veil of
woodbine which had crept over a large portion of its
southern face. All the aged mosses were cleared un
sparingly away ; and there were horrible whispers
about brushing up the external walls with a coat of
paint — a purpose as little to my taste as might be
that of rouging the venerable cheeks of one's grand'
mother. But the hand that renovates is always more
sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we

THE OLD MANSE. 43

gathered up our household goods, drank a farewell
cup of tea in our pleasant little breakfast room, — del
icately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one of
the many angel gifts that had fallen like dew upon us,
—and passed forth between the tall stone gateposts as
uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our tent
might next be pitched. Providence took me by the
hand, and — an oddity of dispensation which, I trust,
there is no irreverence in smiling at — has led me, as
the newspapers announce while I am writing, from the
Old Manse into a custom house. As a story teller, I
have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my imag
inary personages, but none like this.

The treasure of intellectual good which I hoped to
und in our secluded dwelling had never come to light.
No profound treatise of ethics, no philosophic history,
no novel even, that could stand unsupported on its
*}dges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters,
were these few tales and essays, which had blossomed
out like flowers in the calm summer of my heart and
mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of my
friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done
nothing else. With these idle weeds and withering
blossoms I have intermixed some that were produced
long ago, — old, faded things, reminding me of flowers
pressed between the leaves of a book, — and now offer
the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it may please.
These fitful sketches, with so little of external life
about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose, —
so reserved, even while they sometimes seem so frank,
— often but half in earnest, and never, even when
most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which
they profess to image, — such trifles, I truly feel, af
ford no solid basis for a literary reputation. Never

46 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

theless, the public — if my limited number of readers,
whom I venture to regard rather as a circle of friends,
may be termed a public — will receive them the more
kindly, as the last offering, the last collection, of this
nature which it is my purpose ever to put forth. Un
less I could do better, I have done enough in this kind.
For myself the book will always retain one charm —
as reminding me of the river, with its delightful soli
tudes, and of the avenue, the garden, and the orchard,
and especially the dear old Manse, with the little study
on its western side, and the sunshine glimmering
through the willow branches while I wrote.

Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, im
agine himself my guest, and that, having seen what
ever may be worthy of notice within and about the
Old Manse, he has finally been ushered into my study.
There, after seating him in an antique elbow chair, an
heirloom of the house, I take forth a roll of manu
script and entreat his attention to the following tales
— an act of personal inhospitality, however, which I
never was guilty of, nor ever will be, even to my worst
enemy.

THE BIRTHMARK.

IN the latter part of the last century there lived a
man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch
of natural philosophy, who not long before our story
opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more
attractive than any chemical one. He had left his
laboratory to the care of an assistant, cleared his fine
countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the stain
of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful
woman to become his wife. In those days when the
comparatively recent discovery of electricity and other
kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths
into the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the
love of science to rival the love of woman in its depth
and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the im
agination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find
their congenial aliment in pursuits which, as some of
their ardent votaries believed, would ascend from one
step of powerful intelligence to another, until the phi
losopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative
force and perhaps make new worlds for himself. We
know not whether Aylmer possessed this degree of
faith in man's ultimate control over Nature. He had
devoted himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific
studies ever to be weaned from them by any second
passion. His love for his young wife might prove the
stronger of the two ; but it could only be by intertwin
ing itself with his love of science, and uniting the
strength of the latter to his own.

48 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Such a union accordingly took place, and was at
tended with truly remarkable consequences and a
deeply impressive moral. One day, very soon after
their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a
trouble in his countenance that grew stronger until he
spoke.

"Georgiana," said he, "has it never occurred to
you that the mark upon your cheek might be re
moved ? "

" No, indeed," said she, smiling ; but perceiving
the seriousness of his manner, she blushed deeply.
" To tell you the truth it has been so often called a
charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might
be so."

" Ah, upon another face perhaps it might," replied
her husband ; " but never on yours. No, dearest
Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the hand
of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we
hesitate whether to term a defect or a beauty, shocks
me, as being the visible mark of earthly imperfec
tion."

" Shocks you, my husband ! " cried Georgiana,
deeply hurt; at first reddening with momentary an
ger, but then bursting into tears. " Then why did
you take me from my mother's side ? You cannot
love what shocks you ! "

To explain this conversation it must be mentioned
that in the centre of Georgiana' s left cheek there was
a singular mark, deeply interwoven, as it were, with
the texture and substance of her face. In the usual
state of her complexion — a healthy though delicate
bloom — the mark wore a tint of deeper crimson,
which imperfectly defined its shape amid the sur
rounding rosiness. When she blushed it gradually

THE BIRTHMARK. 49

became more indistinct, and finally vanished amid the
triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek
with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion
caused her to turn pale there was the mark again, a
crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer some
times deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape
bore not a little similarity to the human hand, though
of the smallest pygmy size. Georgiana's lovers were
wont to say that some fairy at her birth hour had laid
her tiny hand upon the infant's cheek, and left this
impress there in token of the magic endowments that
were to give her such sway over all hearts. Many a
desperate swain would have risked life for the privi
lege of pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. It
must not be concealed, however, that the impression
wrought by this fairy sign manual varied exceedingly,
according to the difference of temperament in the be
holders. Some fastidious persons — but they were
exclusively of her own sex — affirmed that the bloody
hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect
of Georgiana's beauty, and rendered her countenance
even hideous. But it would be as reasonable to say
that one of those small blue stains which sometimes
occur in the purest statuary marble would convert the
Eve of Powers to a monster. Masculine observers,
if the birthmark did not heighten their admiration,
contented themselves with wishing it away, that the
world might possess one living specimen of ideal love
liness without the semblance of a flaw. After his mar
riage, — for he thought little or nothing of the matter
before, — Aylmer discovered that this was the case
with himself.

Had she been less beautiful, — if Envy's self could
have found aught else to sneer at, — he might have

50 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

felt his affection heightened by the prettiness of this
mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now
stealing forth again and glimmering to and fro with
every pulse of emotion that throbbed within her heart ;
but seeing her otherwise so perfect, he found this one
defect grow more and more intolerable with every mo-

y ment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of
humanity which Nature, in one shape or another,
stamps ineffaceably on all her productions, either to
imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their
perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The
crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which
mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly
mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest,
and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible
frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as

. the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay,
and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long
in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing
him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana's
beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given him de
light.

At all the seasons which should have been their hap
piest, he invariably and without intending it, nay, in
spite of a purpose to the contrary, reverted to this one
disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first appeared, it so
connected itself with innumerable trains of thought
and modes of feeling that it became the central point
of all. With the morning twilight Aylmer opened
his eyes upon his wife's face and recognized the sym
bol of imperfection ; and when they sat together at
the evening hearth his eyes wandered stealthily to
her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of
the wood fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality

THE BIRTHMARK. 51

where he would fain have worshipped. Georgiana
Boon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a
glance with the peculiar expression that his face often
wore to change the roses of her cheek into a death
like paleness, amid which the crimson hand was
brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on
the whitest marble.

Late one night when the lights were growing dim,
so as hardly to betray the stain on the poor wife's
cheek, she herself, for the first time, voluntarily took
up the subject.

" Do you remember, my dear Ay liner," said she,
with a feeble attempt at a smile, " have you any rec
ollection of a dream last night about this odious
hand?"

" None ! none whatever ! " replied Aylmer, starting ;
but then he added, in a dry, cold tone, affected for the
sake of concealing the real depth of his emotion, " I
might well dream of it ; for before I fell asleep it had
taken a pretty firm hold of my fancy."

" And you did dream of it? " continued Georgiana,
hastily ; for she dreaded lest a gush of tears should
interrupt what she had to say. " A terrible dream !
I wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible to for
get this one expression ? — ' It is in her heart now ;
we must have it out ! ' Eeflect, my husband ; for by
all means I would have you recall that dream."

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-
involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim
region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth,
affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance
belong to a deeper one. Aylmer now remembered
his dream. He had fancied himself with his servant
Aminadab, attempting an operation for the removal of

52 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the
deeper sank the hand, until at length its tiny grasp
appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana' s heart ;
whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved
to cut or wrench it away.

When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his
memory, Aylmer sat in his wife's presence with a
guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the mind
close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with
uncompromising directness of matters in regard to
which we practise an unconscious self-deception dur
ing our waking moments. Until now he had not been
aware of the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea
over his mind, and of the lengths which he might find
in his heart to go for the sake of giving himself peace*

" Aylmer," resumed Georgiana, solemnly, " I know
not what may be the cost to both of us to rid me of
this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal may cause
cureless deformity ; or it may be the stain goes as deep
as life itself. Again : do we know that there is a pos
sibility, on any terms, of unclasping the firm gripe of
this little hand which was laid upon me before I came
into the world?"

"Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought
upon the subject," hastily interrupted Aylmer. " I am
convinced of the perfect practicability of its removal."

" If there be the remotest possibility of it," con
tinued Georgiana, " let the attempt be made at what
ever risk. Danger is nothing to me ; for life, while
this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror
and disgust, — life is a burden which I would fling
down with joy. Either remove this dreadful hand, or
take my wretched life ! You have deep science. All
the world bears witness of it. You have achieved

THE BIRTHMARK. 53

great wonders. Cannot you remove this little, little
mark, which I cover with the tips of two small fingers?
Is this beyond your power, for the sake of your own
peace, and to save your poor wife from madness ? "

"Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife," cried Aylmer,
rapturously, "doubt not my power. I have already
given this matter the deepest thought — thought which
might almost have enlightened me to create a being
less perfect than yourself. Georgiana, you have led
me deeper than ever into the heart of science. I feel
myself fully competent to render this dear cheek as
faultless as its fellow ; and then, most beloved, what <
will be my triumph when I shall have corrected what j
Nature left imperfect in her fairest work ! Even Pyg-
malion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt
noj greater ecstasy than mine will be."

" It is resolved, then," said Georgiana, faintly smil
ing. " And, Aylmer, spare me not, though you should
find the birthmark take refuge in my heart at last."

Her husband tenderly kissed her cheek — her right
cheek — not that which bore the impress of the crim
son hand.

The next day Aylmer apprised his wife of a plan
that he had formed whereby he might have oppor
tunity for the intense thought and constant watchful
ness which the proposed operation would require;
while Georgiana, likewise, would enjoy the perfect
repose essential to its success. They were to seclude
themselves in the extensive apartments occupied by
Aylmer as a laboratory, and where, during his toil
some youth, he had made discoveries in the elemental
powers of Nature that had roused the admiration of
all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in
this laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated

54 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the secrets of the highest cloud region and of the pro-
foundest mines ; he had satisfied himself of the causes
that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano ;
and had explained the mystery of fountains, and how
it is that they gush forth, some so bright and pure,
and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the
dark bosom of the earth. Here, too, at an earlier pe
riod, he had studied the wonders of the human frame,
and attempted to fathom the very process by which
Nature assimilates all her precious influences from
earth and air, and from the spiritual world, to create
and foster man, her masterpiece. The latter pursuit,
however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling
recognition of the truth — against which all seekers
sooner or later stumble — that our great creative
Mother, while she amuses us with apparently work
ing in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful* to
keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended
openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits
us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a
jealous patentee, on no account to make. Now, how
ever, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten investiga
tions ; not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as
first suggested them ; but because they involved much
physiological truth and lay in the path of his proposed
scheme for the treatment of Georgiana.

As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory,
Georgiana was cold and tremulous. Aylmer looked
cheerfully into her face, with intent to reassure her,
but was so startled with the intense glow of the birth
mark upon the whiteness of her cheek that he could
not restrain a strong convidsive shudder. His wife
fainted.

"Aminadab! Aminadab!" shouted Aylmer, stamp
ing violently on the floor.

THE BIRTHMARK. 55

Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a
man of low stature, but bulky frame, with shaggy
hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed with
the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been
Aylmer's underworker during his whole scientific ca
reer, and was admirably fitted for that office by his
great mechanical readiness, and the skill with which,
while incapable of comprehending a single principle,
he executed all the details of his master's experiments.
With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky
aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted
him, he seemed to represent man's physical nature ; \
while Aylmer's slender figure, and pale, intellectual
face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.

" Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab,"
said Aylmer, " and burn a pastil."

" Yes, master," answered Aminadab, looking in-
tently at the lifeless form of Georgiana ; and then he
muttered to himself, " If she were my wife, I 'd never
part with that birthmark."

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found
herself breathing an atmosphere of penetrating fra
grance, the gentle potency of which had recalled her
from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her
looked like enchantment. Aylmer had converted those
smoky, dingy, sombre rooms, where he had spent his
brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of
beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode
of a lovely woman. The walls were hung with gor
geous curtains, which imparted the combination of
grandeur and grace that no other species of adorn
ment can achieve ; and as they fell from the ceiling to
the floor, their rich and ponderous folds, concealing all
angles and straight lines, appeared to shut in the scene

66 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it
might be a pavilion among the clouds. And Aylmer,
excluding the sunshine, which would have interfered
with his chemical processes, had supplied its place
with perfumed lamps, emitting flames of various hue,
but all uniting in a soft, impurpled radiance. He
now knelt by his wife's side, watching her earnestly,
but without alarm ; for he was confident in his science,
and felt that he could draw a magic circle round her
within which no evil might intrude.

" Where am I ? Ah, I remember," said Georgiana,
faintly ; and she placed her hand over her cheek to
hide the terrible mark from her husband's eyes.

" Fear not, dearest ! " exclaimed he. " Do not
shrink from me ! Believe me, Georgiana, I even re
joice in this single imperfection, since it will be such
a rapture to remove it."

" Oh, spare me ! " sadly replied his wife. " Pray do
not look at it again. I never can forget that convul
sive shudder."

In order to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to re
lease her mind from the burden of actual things, Ayl
mer now put in practice some of the light and playful
secrets which science had taught him among its pro-
founder lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas,
and forms of unsubstantial beauty came and danced
before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps on
beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea
of the method of these optical phenomena, still the illu
sion was almost perfect enough to warrant the belief
that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual
world. Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth
from her seclusion, immediately, as if her thoughts
were answered, the procession of external existence

THE BIRTHMARK. 57

flitted across a screen. The scenery and the figures
of actual life were perfectly represented, but with that
bewitching, yet indescribable difference which always
makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much more
attractive than the original. When wearied of this,
Aylmer bade her cast her eyes upon a vessel contain
ing a quantity of earth. She did so, with little interest
at first ; but was soon startled to perceive the germ of
a plant shooting upward from the soil. Then came
the slender stalk ; the leaves gradually unfolded them
selves ; and amid them was a perfect and lovely flower.

" It is magical ! " cried Georgiana. " I dare not
touch it."

" Nay, pluck it," answered Aylmer, — " pluck it, and
inhale its brief perfume while you may. The flower
will wither in a few moments and leave nothing save
its brown seed vessels ; but thence may be perpetuated
a race as ephemeral as itself."

But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower
than the whole plant suffered a blight, its leaves turn
ing coal-black as if by the agency of fire.

" There was too powerful a stimulus," said Aylmer,
thoughtfully.

To make up for this abortive experiment, he pro
posed to take her portrait by a scientific process of his
own invention. It was to be effected by rays of light
striking upon a polished plate of metal. Georgiana
assented ; but, on looking at the result, was affrighted
to find the features of the portrait blurred and inde
finable ; while the minute figure of a hand appeared
where the cheek should have been. Aylmer snatched
the metallic plate and threw it into a jar of corrosive
ftcid.

Soon, however, he forgot these mortifying failures

58 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

In the intervals of study and chemical experiment he
came to her flushed and exhausted, but seemed invigor
ated by her presence, and spoke in glowing language
of the resources of his art. He gave a history of the
long dynasty of the alchemists, who spent so many
ages in quest of the universal solvent by which the
golden principle might be elicited from all things vile
and base. Aylmer appeared to believe that, by the
plainest scientific logic, it was altogether within the
limits of possibility to discover this long-sought me
dium ; " but," he added, " a philosopher who should
go deep enough to acquire the power would attain too
lofty a wisdom to stoop to the exercise of it." Not
less singular were his opinions in regard to the elixir
vitse. He more than intimated that it was at his op
tion to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for
years, perhaps interminably ; but that it would pro
duce a discord in Nature which all the world, and
chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would
find cause to curse.

" Aylmer, are you in earnest ? " asked Georgiana,
looking at him with amazement and fear. "It is ter
rible to possess such power, or even to dream of pos
sessing it."

" Oh, do not tremble, my love," said her husband.
" I would not wrong either you or myself by working
such inharmonious effects upon our lives ; but I would
have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is the
skill requisite to remove this little hand."

At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as
usual, shrank as if a redhot iron had touched her
cheek.

Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She
tould hear his voice in the distant furnace room giv

THE BIRTHMARK. 59

ing directions to Aminadab, whose harsh, uncouth,
misshapen tones were audible in response, more like
the grunt or growl of a brute than human speech. Af
ter hours of absence, Aylmer reappeared and proposed
that she should now examine his cabinet of chemical
products and natural treasures of the earth. Among
the former he showed her a small vial, in which, he
remarked, was contained a gentle yet most powerful
fragrance, capable of impregnating all the breezes that
blow across a kingdom. They were of inestimable
value, the contents of that little vial ; and, as he said
so, he threw some of the perfume into the air and filled
the room with piercing and invigorating delight.

"And what is this?" asked Georgiana, pointing to
a small crystal globe containing a gold-colored liquid.
" It is so beautiful to the eye that I could imagine it
the elixir of life."

" In one sense it is," replied Aylmer ; " or, rather,
the elixir of immortality. It is the* most precious poi
son that ever was concocted in this world. By its aid
I could apportion the lifetime of any mortal at whom
you might point your finger. The strength of the dose
would determine whether he were to linger out years,
or drop dead in the midst of a breath. No king on
his guarded throne could keep his life if I, in my pri
vate station, should deem that the welfare of millions
justified me in depriving him of it."

"Why do you keep such a terrific drug ? " inquired
Georgiana in horror.

" Do not mistrust me, dearest," said her husband,
smiling ; " its virtuous potency is yet greater than its
harmful one. But see ! here is a powerful cosmetic.
With a few drops of this in a vase of water, freckles
may be washed away as easily as the hands are cleansed.

60 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

A stronger infusion would take the blood out of the
cheek, and leave the rosiest beauty a pale ghost."

" Is it with this lotion that you intend to bathe my
cheek?" asked Georgiana, anxiously.

" Oh, no," hastily replied her husband ; " this is
merely superficial. Your case demands a remedy that
shall go deeper."

In his interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally
made minute inquiries as to her sensations and whether
the confinement of the rooms and the temperature of
the atmosphere agreed with her. These questions had
such a particular drift that Georgiana began to conjec
ture that she was already subjected to certain physical
influences, either breathed in with the fragrant air or
taken with her food. She fancied likewise, but it
might be altogether fancy, that there was a stirring up
of her system — a strange, indefinite sensation creep
ing through her veins, and tingling, half painfully, half
pleasurably, at her "heart. Still, whenever she dared to
look into the mirror, there she beheld herself pale as a
white rose and with the crimson birthmark stamped
upon her cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so
much as she.

To dispel the tedium of the hours which her hus
band found it necessary to devote to the processes of
combination and analysis, Georgiana turned over the
volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old
tomes she met with chapters full of romance and
poetry. They were the works of the philosophers of
the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus, Cornelius
Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created
the prophetic Brazen Head. All these antique natu
ralists stood in advance of their centuries, yet were im
bued with some of their credulity, and therefore were

THE BIRTHMARK. 61

believed, and perhaps imagined themselves to have
acquired from the investigation of Nature a power
above Nature, and from physics a sway over the spir
itual world. Hardly less curious and imaginative were
the early volumes of the Transactions of the Royal
Society, in which the members, knowing little of the
limits of natural possibility, were continually record
ing wonders or proposing methods whereby wonders
might be wrought.

But to Georgiana the most engrossing volume was a
large folio from her husband's own hand, in which he
had recorded every experiment of his scientific career,
its original aim, the methods adopted for its develop
ment, and its final success or failure, with the circum
stances to which either event was attributable. The
book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his
a-rdent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and labo
rious life. He handled physical details as if there
were nothing beyond them ; yet spiritualized them all,
and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong
and eager aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp
the veriest clod of earth assumed a soul. Georgiana,
as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more
profoundly than ever, but with a less entire depend
ence on his judgment than heretofore. Much as he
had accomplished, she could not but observe that his
most splendid successes were almost invariably fail-
ures, if compared with the ideal at which he aimed.
His brightest diamonds were the merest pebbles, and
felt to be so by himself, in comparison with the inesti
mable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The
volume, rich with achievements that had won renown
for its author, was yet as melancholy a record as evei
mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession

62 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

and continual exemplification of the shortcomings of
the composite man, the spirit burdened with clay and
working in matter, and of the despair that assails the
higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted
by the earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius in
whatever sphere might recognize the image of his own
experience in Aylmer's journal.

So deeply did these reflections affect Georgiana that
she laid her face upon the open volume and burst into
tears. In this situation she was found by her hus
band.

"It is dangerous to read in a sorcerer's books,"
said he with a smile, though his countenance was un^
easy and displeased. " Georgiana, there are pages in
that volume which I can scarcely glance over and keep
my senses. Take heed lest it prove as detrimental to
you."

" It has made me worship you more than ever," said
she.

" Ah, wait for this one success," rejoined he, " then
worship me if you will. I shall deem myself hardly
unworthy of it. But come, I have sought you for the
luxury of your voice. Sing to me, dearest."

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to
quench the thirst of his spirit. He then took his leave
with a boyish exuberance of gayety, assuring her that
her seclusion would endure but a little longer, and
that the result was already certain. Scarcely had he
departed when Georgiana felt irresistibly impelled to
follow him. She had forgotten to inform Aylmer of
a symptom which for two or three hours past had be
gun to excite her attention. It was a sensation in the
fatal birthmark, not painful, but which induced a rest
lessness throughout her system. Hastening after hei

THE BIRTHMARK. 63

husband, she intruded for the first time into the lab
oratory.

The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace,
that hot and feverish worker, with the intense glow of
its fire, which by the quantities of soot clustered above
it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was
a distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the
room were retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other
apparatus of chemical research. An electrical machine
stood ready for immediate use. The atmosphere felt
oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous odors
which had been tormented forth by the processes of
science. The severe and homely simplicity of the
apartment, with its naked walls and brick pavement,
looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become
to the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what
chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was
the aspect of Aylmer himself.

He was pale as death, anxious and absorbed, and
hung over the furnace as if it depended upon his ut
most watchfulness whether the liquid which it was dis
tilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or
misery. How different from the sanguine and joyous
mien that he had assumed for Georgiana's encourage
ment !

" Carefully now, Aminadab ; carefully, thou human
machine ; carefully, ' thou man of clay ! " muttered
Aylmer, more to himself than his assistant. " Now,
if there be a thought too much or too little, it is all
over."

" Ho ! ho ! " mumbled Aminadab. " Look, master !
look!"

Aylmer raised his eyes hastily, and at first red
dened, then grew paler than ever, on beholding Geor

64 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

giana. He rushed towards her and seized her arm
with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it.

" Why do you come hither ? Have you no trust in
your husband?" cried he, impetuously. " Would you
throw the blight of that fatal birthmark over my la
bors ? It is not well done. Go, prying woman, go ! "

" Nay, Aylmer," said Georgiana with the firmness
of which she possessed no stinted endowment, " it is
not you that have a right to complain. You mistrust
your wife ; you have concealed the anxiety with which
-you watch the development of this experiment. Think
not so unworthily of me, my husband. Tell me all
the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink ; for
my share in it is far less than your own."

" No, no, Georgiana ! " said Aylmer, impatiently ;
" it must not be."

" I submit," replied she calmly. " And, Aylmer, I
shall quaff whatever draught you bring me ; but it will
be on the same principle that would induce me to take
a dose of poison if offered by your hand."

" My noble wife," said Aylmer, deeply moved, " I
knew not the height and depth of your nature until
now. Nothing shall be concealed. Know, then, that
this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched
its grasp into your being with a strength of which I
had no previous conception. I have already adminis
tered agents powerful enough te do aught except to
change your entire physical system. Only one thing
remains to be tried. If that fail us we are ruined."

" Why did you hesitate to tell me this ? " asked she.

" Because, Georgiana," said Aylmer, in a low voice,
w there is danger."

"Danger? There is but one danger — that this
terrible stigma shall be left upon my cheek ! " cried

THE BIRTHMARK. 65

Georgiana. " Kemove it, remove it, whatever be the
cost, or we shall both go mad ! "

" Heaven knows your words are too true," said Ayl
mer, sadly. "And now, dearest, return to your bou
doir. In a little while all will be tested."

He conducted her back and took leave of her with
a solemn tenderness which spoke far more than his
words how much was now at stake. After his de
parture Georgiana became rapt in musings. She con
sidered the character of Aylmer, and did it completer
justice than at any previous moment. Her heart ex
ulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love — so
pure and lofty that it would accept nothing less than
perfection nor miserably make itself contented with an
earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. She felt
how much more precious was such a sentiment than
that meaner kind which would have borne with the
imperfection for her sake, and have been guilty of
treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to
the level of the actual ; and with her whole spirit she
prayed that, for a single moment, she might satisfy his
highest and deepest conception. Longer than one mo
ment she well knew it could not be ; for his spirit was
ever on the march, ever ascending, and each instant
required something that was beyond the scope of the
kistant before.

The sound of her husband's footsteps aroused her.
He bore a crystal goblet containing a liquor colorless
as water, but bright enough to be the draught of im
mortality. Aylmer was pale ; but it seemed rather
the consequence of a highly- wrought state of mind and
tension of spirit than of fear or doubt.

" The concoction of the draught has been perfect,"

VOL. n. 5

66 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

said he, in answer to Georgiana's look. " Unless all
my science have deceived me, it cannot fail."

" Save on your account, my dearest Aylmer," ob
served his wife, " I might wish to put off this birth
mark of mortality by relinquishing mortality itself in
preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad pos
session to those who have attained precisely the degree
of moral advancement at which I stand. Were I
weaker and blinder it might be happiness. Were I
stronger, it might be endured hopefully. But, being
what I find myself, methinks I am of all mortals the
most fit to die."

" You are fit for heaven without tasting death ! " re
plied her husband. " But why do we speak of dying?
The draught cannot fail. Behold its effect upon this
plant."

On the window seat there stood a geranium diseased
with yellow blotches, which had overspread all its
leaves. Aylmer poured a small quantity of the liquid
upon the soil in which it grew. In a little time, when
the roots of the plant had taken up the moisture, the
unsightly blotches began to be extinguished in a living
verdure.

" There needed no proof," said Georgiana, quietly.
" Give me the goblet. I joyfully stake all upon your
word."

" Drink, then, thou lofty creature ! " exclaimed Ayl
mer, with fervid admiration. " There is no taint of
imperfection on thy spirit. Thy sensible frame, too,
shall soon be all perfect."

She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to
his hand.

" It is grateful," said she with a placid smile. " Me
thinks it is like water from a heavenly fountain ; for it

THE BIRTHMARK. 67

contains 1 know not what of unobtrusive fragrance
and deliciousness. It allays a feverish thirst that had
parched me for many days. Now, dearest, let me
sleep. My earthly senses are closing over my spirit
like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset."

She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance,
as if it required almost more energy than she could
command to pronounce the faint and lingering sylla
bles. Sr ircely had they loitered through her lips ere
she was lost in slumber. Aylmer sat by her side,
watching her aspect with the emotions proper to a man
the whole value of whose existence was involved in the
process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood,
however, was the philosophic investigation characteris
tic of the man of science. Not the minutest symptom
escaped him. A heightened flush of the cheek, a
slight irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid, a
hardly perceptible tremor through the frame, — such
were the details which, as the moments passed, he
wrote down in his folio volume. Intense thought had
set its stamp upon every previous page of that volume,
but the thoughts of years were all concentrated upon
the last.

While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at
the fatal hand, and not without a shudder. Yet once, \
by a strange and unaccountable impulse, he pressed it /
with his lips. His spirit recoiled, however, in the very
act ; and Georgiana, out of the midst of her deep sleep,
moved uneasily and murmured as if in remonstrance0
Again Aylmer resumed his watch. Nor was it without
avail. The crimson hand, which at first had been
strongly visible upon the marble paleness of Georgi
ana' s cheek, now grew more faintly outlined. She re
mained not less pale than ever ; but the birthmark,

68 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

with every breath that came and went, lost somewhat
of its former distinctness. Its presence had been aw
ful ; its departure was more awful still. Watch the
stain of the rainbow fading out of the sky, and you
will know how that mysterious symbol passed away.

" By Heaven ! it is well-nigh gone ! " said Aylmer
to himself, in almost irrepressible ecstasy. " I can
scarcely trace it now. Success ! success ! And now
it is like the faintest rose color. The lightest flush of
blood across her cheek would overcome it. But she is
so pale ! "

He drew aside the window curtain and suffered the
light of natural day to fall into the room and rest
upon her cheek. At the same tune he heard a gross,
hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his ser
vant Aminadab's expression of delight.

" Ah, clod ! ah, earthly mass ! " cried Aylmer,
laughing in a sort of frenzy, "you have served me
well ! Matter and spirit — earth and heaven — have
both done their part in this ! Laugh, thing of the
senses ! You have earned the right to laugh."

These exclamations broke Georgiana's sleep. She
slowly unclosed her eyes and gazed into the mirror
which her husband had arranged for that purpose. A
faint smile flitted over her lips when she recognized
how barely perceptible was now that crimson hand
which had once blazed forth with such disastrous
brilliancy as to scare away all their happiness. But
then her eyes sought Aylmer 's face with a trouble and
anxiety that he could by no means account for.

" My poor Aylmer ! " murmured she.

" Poor ? Nay, richest, happiest, most favored ! "
exclaimed he. " My peerless bride, it is successful I
You are perfect ! "

THE BIRTHMARK. 69

" My poor Aylmer," she repeated, with a more
than human tenderness, " you have aimed loftily ; you
have done nobly. Do not repent that jvith . s_o. .high and
pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth
could offer. Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying ! "

Alas ! it was too true ! The fatal hand had grap
pled with the mystery of life, and was the bond by
which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a
mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birth
mark — that sole token of human imperfection —
faded from her cheek, the parting breath of the now
perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her
soul, lingering a moment near her husband, took its
heavenward flight. Then a hoarse, chuckling laugh
was heard again ! Thus ever does the gross fatality
of earth exult in its invariable triumph over the im
mortal essence which, in this dim sphere of half devel
opment, demands the completeness of a higher state.
]fet, had Aylmer reached a prof ounder wisdom, he v
need not thus have flung away the happiness which
would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame text
ure with the celestial. The momentary circumstance
was too strong for him ; he failed to look beyond the
shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eteiv
nity, to find the perfect future in the present.

A SELECT PARTY.

A MAN OF FANCY made an entertainment at one of
his castles in the air, and invited a select number of
distinguished personages to favor him with their pres
ence. The mansion, though less splendid than many
that have been situated in the same region, was never
theless of a magnificence such as is seldom witnessed
by those acquainted only with terrestrial architecture.
Its strong foundations and massive walls were quarried
out of a ledge of heavy and sombre clouds which had
hung brooding over the earth, apparently as dense and
ponderous as its own granite, throughout a whole
autumnal day. Perceiving that the general effect was
gloomy, — so that the airy castle looked like a feudal
fortress, or a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a state-
prison of our own times, rather than the home of
pleasure and repose which he intended it to be, — the
owner, regardless of expense, resolved to gild the ex
terior from top to bottom. Fortunately, there was just
then a flood of evening sunshine in the air. This being
gathered up and poured abundantly upon the roof and
walls, imbued them with a kind of solemn cheerful
ness ; while the cupolas and pinnacles were made to
glitter with the purest gold; and all the hundred win
dows gleamed with a glad light, as if the edifice itself
were rejoicing in its heart. And now, if the people of
the lower world chanced to be looking upward out of
the turmoil of their petty perplexities, they probably
mistook the castle in the air for a heap of sunset

A SELECT PARTY. 71

clouds to which the magic of light and shade had im
parted the aspect of a fantastically constructed man
sion. To such beholders it was unreal, because they
lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy
to pass within its portal, they would have recognized
the truth, that the dominions which the spirit con
quers for itself, among unrealities become a thousand
times more real than the earth whereon they stamp
their feet, saying, " This is solid and substantial ; this
may be called a fact."

At the appointed hour, the host stood in his great
saloon to receive the company. It was a vast and
noble room, the vaulted ceiling of which was supported
by double rows of gigantic pillars that had been hewn
entire out of masses of variegated clouds. So bril
liantly were they polished, and so exquisitely wrought
by the sculptor's skill, as to resemble the finest speci
mens of emerald, porphyry, opal, and chrysolite, thus
producing a delicate richness of effect which their im
mense size rendered not incompatible with grandeur.
To each of these pillars a meteor was suspended.
Thousands of these ethereal lustres are continually
wandering about the firmament, burning out to waste,
yet capable of imparting a useful radiance to any per
son who has the art of converting them to domestic
purposes. As managed in the saloon, they are far
more economical than ordinary lamplight. Such,
however, was the intensity of their blaze that it had
been found expedient to cover each meteor with a
globe of evening mist, thereby muffling the too potent
glow and soothing it into a mild and comfortable
splendor. It was like the brilliancy of a powerful yet
chastened imagination — a light which seemed to hide
whatever was unworthy to be noticed and give effect

72 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

to every beautiful and noble attribute. The guests,
therefore, as they advanced up the centre of the sa
loon appeared to better advantage than ever before in
their lives.

The first that entered, with old-fashioned punctual
ity, was a venerable figure in the costume of by-gone
days, with his white hair flowing down over his shoul
ders and a reverend beard upon his breast. He leaned
upon a staff, the tremulous stroke of which, as he set it
carefully upon the floor, reechoed through the saloon
at every footstep. Recognizing at once this celebrated
personage, whom it had cost him a vast deal of trouble
and research to discover, the host advanced nearly
three fourths of the distance down between the pillars
to meet and welcome him.

" Venerable sir," said the Man of Fancy, bending
to the floor, " the honor of this visit would never be
forgotten were my term of existence to be as happily
prolonged as your own."

The old gentleman received the compliment with
gracious condescension. He then thrust up his spec
tacles over his forehead and appeared to take a critical
survey of the saloon.

" Never within my recollection," observed he, " have
I entered a more spacious and noble hall. But are
you sure that it is built of solid materials and that the
structure will be permanent ? "

" Oh, never fear, my venerable friend," replied the
host. " In reference to a lifetime like your own, it is
true, my castle may well be called a temporary edifice.
But it will endure long enough to answer all the pur
poses for which it was erected."

But we forget that the reader has not yet been made
acquainted with the guest. It was no other than that

A SELECT PARTY. 73

universally accredited character so constantly referred
to in all seasons of intense cold or heat ; he that re
members the hot Sunday and the cold Friday; the
witness of a past age, whose negative reminiscences
find their way into every newspaper, yet whose anti
quated and dusky abode is so overshadowed by accu
mulated years and crowded back by modern edifices
that none but the Man of Fancy could have discovered
it; it was, in short, that twin brother of Time, and
great-grandsire of mankind, and hand-and-glove asso
ciate of all forgotten men and things — the Oldest In
habitant. The host would willingly have drawn him
into conversation, but succeeded only in eliciting a few
remarks as to the oppressive atmosphere of this present
summer evening compared with one which the guest
had experienced about fourscore years ago. The old
gentleman, in fact, was a good deal overcome by his
journey among the clouds, which, to a frame so earth-
incrusted by long continuance in a lower region, was
unavoidably more fatiguing than to younger spirits.
He was therefore conducted to an easy-chair, well
cushioned and stuffed with vaporous softness, and left
to take a little repose.

The Man of Fancy now discerned another guest,
who stood so quietly in the shadow of one of the pil
lars that he might easily have been overlooked.

" My dear sir," exclaimed the host, grasping him
warmly by the hand, " allow me to greet you as the
hero of the evening. Pray do not take it as an empty
compliment; for if there were not another guest in
my castle, it would be entirely pervaded with your
presence."

" I thank you," answered the unpretending stranger ;
* but, though you happened to overlook me, I have not

74 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

just arrived. I came very early ; and, with your per
mission, shall remain after the rest of the company
have retired."

And who does the reader imagine was this unobtru
sive guest ? It was the famous performer of acknowl
edged impossibilities — a character of superhuman
capacity and virtue, and, if his enemies are to be cred
ited, of no less remarkable weaknesses and defects.
With a generosity with which he alone sets us an ex
ample, we will glance merely at his nobler attributes.
He it is, then, who prefers the interests of others to
his own, and a humble station to an exalted one.
Careless of fashion, custom, the opinions of men, and
the influence of the press, he assimilates his life to the
standard of ideal rectitude, and thus proves himself
the one independent citizen of our free country. In
point of ability, many people declare him to be the
only mathematician capable of squaring the circle ; the
only mechanic acquainted with the principle of perpet
ual motion; the only scientific philosopher who can
compel water to run up hill ; the only writer of the
age whose genius is equal to the production of an epic
poem ; and finally, so various are his accomplishments,
the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded in
jumping down his own throat. With all these talents,
however, he is so far from being considered a member
of good society that it is the severest censure of any
fashionable assemblage to affirm that this remarkable
individual was present. Public orators, lecturers and
theatrical performers particularly eschew his company.
For especial reasons we are not at liberty to disclose
his name, and shall mention only one other trait, — a
most singular phenomenon in natural philosophy, —
that, when he happens to cast his eyes upon a looking
glass, he beholds Nobody reflected there 1

A SELECT PARTY. 75

Several other guests now made their appearance ;
and among them, chattering with immense volubility,
a brisk little gentleman of universal vogue in private
society, and not unknown in the public journals under
the title of Monsieur On-Dit. The name would seem
to indicate a Frenchman ; but, whatever be his coun
try, he is thoroughly versed in all the languages of the
day, and can express himself quite as much to the pur
pose in English as in any other tongue. No sooner
were the ceremonies of salutation over than this talka
tive little person put his mouth to the host's ear and
whispered three secrets of state, an important piece of
commercial intelligence, and a rich item of fashionable
scandal. He then assured the Man of Fancy that he
would not fail to circulate in the society of the lower
world a minute description of this magnificent castle in
the air and of the festivities at which he had the honor
to be a guest. So saying, Monsieur On-Dit made his
bow and hurried from one to another of the company,
with all of whom he seemed to be acquainted and to
possess some topic of interest or amusement for every
individual. Coming at last to the Oldest Inhabitant,
who was slumbering comfortably in the easy-chair, he
applied his mouth to that venerable ear.

" What do you say ? " cried the old gentleman,
starting from his nap and putting up his hand to
serve the purpose of an ear trumpet.

Monsieur On-Dit bent forward again and repeated
his communication.

" Never within my memory," exclaimed the Oldest
Inhabitant, lifting his hands in astonishment, " has so
remarkable an incident been heard of."

Now came in the Clerk of the Weather, who had
been invited out of deference to his official station,

76 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

although the host was well aware that his conversation
was likely to contribute but little to the general enjoy
ment. He soon, indeed, got into a corner with his
acquaintance of long ago, the Oldest Inhabitant, and
began to compare notes with him in reference to the
great storms, gales of wind, and other atmospherical
facts that had occurred during a century past. It re
joiced the Man of Fancy that his venerable and much-
respected guest had met with so congenial an associate.
Entreating them both to make themselves perfectly
at home, he now turned to receive the Wandering
Jew. This personage, however, had latterly grown so
common by mingling in all sorts of society and appear
ing at the beck of every entertainer, that he could
hardly be deemed a proper guest in a very exclusive
circle. Besides, being covered with dust from his con
tinual wanderings along the highways of the world,
he really looked out of place in a dress party; so that
the host felt relieved of an incommodity when the rest
less individual in question, after a brief stay, took his
departure on a ramble towards Oregon.

The portal was now thronged by a crowd of shad*
owy people with whom the Man of Fancy had been ac
quainted in his visionary youth. He had invited them
hither for the sake of observing how they would com
pare, whether advantageously or otherwise, with the
real characters to whom his maturer life had intro
duced him. They were beings of crude imagination,
such as glide before a young man's eye and pretend to
be actual inhabitants of the earth ; the wise and witty
with whom he would hereafter hold intercourse ; the
generous and heroic friends whose devotion would be
requited with his own ; the beautiful dream woman
who would become the helpmate of his human toils

A SELECT PARTY. 77

and sorrows, and at once the source and partaker pi
his happiness. Alas ! it is not good for the f ullgrown
man to look too closely at these old acquaintances, but
rather to reverence them at a distance through the
medium of years that have gathered duskily between*
There was something laughably untrue in their pomp
ous stride and exaggerated sentiment ; they were nei
ther human nor tolerable likenesses of humanity, but
fantastic maskers, rendering heroism and nature alike
ridiculous by the grave absurdity of their pretensions
to such attributes ; and as for the peerless dream lady,
behold ! there advanced up the saloon, with a move
ment like a jointed doll, a sort of wax figure of an
angel, a creature as cold as moonshine, an artifice in
petticoats, with an intellect of pretty phrases and only
the semblance of a heart, yet in all these particulars
the true type of a young man's imaginary mistress.
Hardly could the host's punctilious courtesy restrain a
smile as he paid his respects to this unreality, and met
the sentimental glance with which the Dream sought
to remind him of their former love passages.

" No, no, fair lady," murmured he betwixt sighing
and smiling, " my taste is changed ; I have learned to
love what Nature makes better than my own creations
in the guise of womanhood."

" Ah, false one," shrieked the dream lady, pretend
ing to faint, but dissolving into thin air, out of which
came the deplorable murmur of her voice, " your in
constancy has annihilated me."

" So be it," said the cruel Man of Fancy to him
self ; " and a good riddance too."

Together with these shadows, and from the same
region, there came an uninvited multitude of shapes
whicL at any time during his life had tormented the

T8 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Man of Fancy in his moods of morbid melancholy 01
had haunted him in the delirium of fever. The walls
of his castle in the air were not dense enough to keep
them out, nor would the strongest of earthly architect
ure have availed to their exclusion. Here were those
forms of dim terror which had beset him at the en
trance of life, waging warfare with his hopes ; here
were strange uglinesses of earlier date, such as haunt
children in the night-time. He was particularly star
tled by the vision of a deformed old black woman
whom he imagined as lurking in the garret of his
native home, and who, when he was an infant, had
once come to his bedside and grinned at him in the
crisis of a scarlet fever. This same black shadow,
with others almost as hideous, now glided among the
pillars of the magnificent saloon, grinning recognition,
until the man shuddered anew at the forgotten terrors
of his childhood. It amused him, however, to ob
serve the black woman, with the mischievous caprice
peculiar to such beings, steal up to the chair of the
Oldest Inhabitant and peep into his half-dreamy
mind.

" Never within my memory," muttered that venera
ble personage, aghast, " did I see such a face."

Almost immediately after the unrealities just de*
scribed, arrived a number of guests whom incredulous
readers may be inclined to rank equally among crea
tures of imagination. The most noteworthy were an
incorruptible Patriot ; a Scholar without pedantry ; a
Priest without worldly ambition ; and a Beautiful
Woman without pride or coquetry ; a Married Pail
whose life had never been disturbed by incongruity of
feeling ; a Reformer untrammelled by his theory ; and
ft Poet who felt no jealousy towards other votaries of

A SELECT PARTY. 79

the lyre. In truth, however, the host was not one of
the cynics who consider these patterns of excellence,
without the fatal flaw, such rarities in the world ; and
he had invited them to his select party chiefly out of
humble deference to the judgment of society, which
pronounces them almost impossible to be met with.

" In my younger days," observed the Oldest Inhab
itant, " such characters might be seen at the corner of
every street."

Be that as it might, these specimens of perfection
proved to be not half so entertaining companions as
people with the ordinary allowance of faults.

But now appeared a stranger, whom the host had no
sooner recognized than, with an abundance of courtesy
unlavished on any other, he hastened down the whole
length of the saloon* in order to pay him emphatic
honor. Yet he was a young man in poor attire, with
no insignia of rank or acknowledged eminence, nor
anything to distinguish him among the crowd except a
high, white forehead, beneath which a pair of deepest
eyes were glowing with warm light. It was such a
Jight as never illuminates the earth save when a great
heart burns as the household fire of a grand intellect.
And who was he ? — who but the Master Genius for
whom our country is looking anxiously into the mist of
Time, as destined to fulfil the great mission of creat
ing an American literature, hewing it, as it were, out
of the unwrought granite of our intellectual quar
ries ? From him, whether moulded in the form of an
epic poem or assuming a guise altogether new as the
spirit itself may determine, we are to receive our first
great original work, which shall do all that remains to
be achieved for our glory among the nations. How
ihis child of a mighty destiny had been discovered b^

80 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE,

the Man of Fancy it is of little consequence to men*
tion. Suffice it that he dwells as yet unhonored among
men, unrecognized by those who have known him from
his cradle ; the noble countenance which should be dis
tinguished by a halo diffused around it passes daily
amid the throng of people toiling and troubling them
selves about the trifles of a moment, and none pay
reverence to the worker of immortality. Nor does it
matter much to him, in his triumph over all the ages,
though a generation or two of his own times shall do
themselves the wrong to disregard him.

By this time Monsieur On-Dit had caught up the
stranger's name and destiny, and was busily whisper
ing the intelligence among the other guests.

" Pshaw ! " said one. " There can never be an
American genius."

" Pish ! " cried another. " We have already as
good poets as any in the world. For my part I desire
to see no better."

And the Oldest Inhabitant, when it was proposed to
introduce him to the Master Genius, begged to be ex
cused, observing that a man who had been honored
with the acquaintance of Dwight, and Freneau, and
Joel Barlow, might be allowed a little austerity of
taste.

The saloon was now fast filling up by the arrival of
other remarkable characters, among whom were no
ticed Davy Jones, the distinguished nautical person
age, and a rude, carelessly-dressed, harum-scarum sort
of elderly fellow, known by the nickname of Old
Harry. The latter, however, after being shown to a
dressing-room, reappeared with his gray hair nicely
combed, his clothes brushed, a clean dicky on his neck,
and altogether so changed in aspect as to merit the

A SELECT PARTY. 81

more respectful appellation of Venerable Henry. John
Doe and Richard Roe came arm in arm, accompanied
by a Man of Straw, a fictitious indorser, and several
persons who had no existence except as voters in
closely-contested elections. The celebrated Sealsfield,
who now entered, was at first supposed to belong to
the same brotherhood, until he made it apparent that
he was a real man of flesh and blood and had his
earthly domicile in Germany. Among the latest com
ers, as might reasonably be expected, arrived a guest
from the far future.

" Do you know him ? do you know him ? " whis
pered Monsieur On-Dit, who seemed to be acquainted
with everybody. " He is the representative of Poster
ity, — the man of an age to come."

" And how came he here ? " asked a figure who was
evidently the prototype of the fashion plate in a mag
azine, and might be taken to represent the vanities oi
the passing moment. " The fellow infringes upon oui
rights by coming before his time."

" But you forget where we are," answered the Man
of Fancy, who overheard the remark. " The lower
earth, it is true, will be forbidden ground to him for
many long years hence ; but a castle in the air is a
sort of no man's land, where Posterity may make ac
quaintance with us on equal terms."

No sooner was his identity known than a throng of
guests gathered about Posterity, all expressing the
most generous interest in his welfare, and many boast
ing of the sacrifices which they had made, or were
willing to make, in his behalf. Some, with as much
secrecy as possible, desired his judgment upon certain
copies of verses or great manuscript rolls of prose;
others accosted him with the familiarity of old friends,

82 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

taking it for granted that he was perfectly cognizant
of their names and characters. At length, finding
nimself thus beset, Posterity was put quite beside his
patience.

" Gentlemen, my good friends," cried he, breaking
loose from a misty poet who strove to hold him by the
button, " I pray you to attend to your own business,
and leave me to take care of mine ! I expect to owe
you nothing, unless it be certain national debts, and
other encumbrances and impediments, physical and
moral, which I shall find it troublesome enough to re
move from my path. As to your verses, pray read
them to your contemporaries. Your names are as
strange to me as your faces ; and even were it other
wise, — let me whisper you a secret, — the cold, icy
memory which one generation may retain of another
is but a poor recompense to barter life for. Yet, if
your heart is set on being known to me, the surest, the
only method is to live truly and wisely for your own
age, whereby, if the native force be in you, you may
likewise live for posterity."

" It is nonsense," murmured the Oldest Inhabitant,
who, as a man of the past, felt jealous that all notice
should be withdrawn from himself to be lavished on
the future, " sheer nonsense to waste so much thought
on what only is to be."

To divert the minds of his guests, who were con
siderably abashed by this little incident, the Man of
Fancy led them through several apartments of the
castle, receiving their compliments upon the taste and
varied magnificence that were displayed in each. One
of these rooms was filled with moonlight, which did
not enter through the window, but was the aggregate
of all the moonshine that is scattered around the earth

A SELECT PARTY. 83

on a summer night while no eyes are awake to enjoj
its beauty. Airy spirits had gathered it up, wherevel
they found it gleaming on the broad bosom of a lake,
or silvering the meanders of a stream, or glimmering
among the wind-stirred boughs of a wood, and had
garnered it in this one spacious hall. Along the walls,
illuminated by the mild intensity of the moonshine,
stood a multitude of ideal statues, the original concep
tions of the great works of ancient or modern art,
which the sculptors did but imperfectly succeed in put
ting into marble ; for it is not to be supposed that the
pure idea of an immortal creation ceases to exist ; it is
only necessary to know where they are deposited in
order to obtain possession of them. In the alcoves of
another vast apartment was arranged a splendid li
brary, the volumes of which were inestimable, because
they consisted not of actual performances, but of the
works which the authors only planned, without ever
finding the happy season to achieve them. To take
familiar instances, here were the untold tales of Chau
cer's Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of
the Fairy Queen ; the conclusion of Coleridge's Chris-
tabel ; and the whole of Dryden's projected epic on the
subject of King Arthur. The shelves were crowded ;
for it would not be too much to affirm that every
author has imagined and shaped out in his thought
more and far better works than those which actually
proceeded from his pen. And here, likewise, were the
unrealized conceptions of youthful poets who died of
the very strength of their own genius before the world
had caught one inspired murmur from their lips.

When the peculiarities of the library and statue
gallery were explained to the Oldest Inhabitant, he ap
peared infinitely perplexed, and exclaimed, with more

84 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

energy than usual, that he had never heard of such a
thing within his memory, and, moreover, did not at all
understand how it could be.

" But my brain, I think," said the good old gentle
man, " is getting not so clear as it used to be. You
young folks, I suppose, can see your way through these
strange matters. For my part, I give it up."

" And so do I," muttered the Old Harry. " It is
enough to puzzle the — Ahem ! "

Making as little reply as possible to these observa
tions, the Man of Fancy preceded the company to
another noble saloon, the pillars of which were solid
golden sunbeams taken out of the sky in the first hour
in the morning. Thus, as they retained all their liv
ing lustre, the room was filled with the most cheerful
radiance imaginable, yet not too dazzling to be borne
with comfort and delight. The windows were beauti
fully adorned with curtains made of the many-colored
clouds of sunrise, all imbued with virgin light, and
hanging in magnificent festoons from the ceiling to the
floor. Moreover, there were fragments of rainbows
scattered through the room ; so that the guests, aston
ished at one another, reciprocally saw their heads
made glorious by the seven primary hues ; or, if they
chose, — as who would not ? — they could grasp a
rainbow in the air and convert it to their own apparel
and adornment. But the morning light and scattered
rainbows were only a type and symbol of the real won
ders of the apartment. By an influence akin to magic,
yet perfectly natural, whatever means and opportuni
ties of joy are neglected in the lower world had been
carefully gathered up and deposited in the saloon of
morning sunshine. As may well be conceived, there
.fore, there was material enough to supply, not merely

A SELECT PARTY. 85

a joyous evening, but also a happy lifetime, to more
than as many people as that spacious apartment could
contain. The company seemed to renew their youth ;
while that pattern and proverbial standard of inno
cence, the Child Unborn, frolicked to and fro among
them, communicating his own unwrinkled gayety to aU
who had the good fortune to witness his gambols.

" My honored friends," said the Man of Fancy, after
they had enjoyed themselves a while, " I am now to
request your presence in the banqueting hall, where a
slight collation is awaiting you."

" Ah, well said ! " ejaculated a cadaverous figure,
who had been invited for no other reason than that he
was pretty constantly in the habit of dining with Duke
Humphrey. " I was beginning to wonder whether a
castle in the air were provided with a kitchen."

It was curious, in truth, to see how instantaneously
the guests were diverted from the high moral enjoy
ments which they had been tasting with so much ap
parent zest by a suggestion of the more solid as well
as liquid delights of the festive board. They thronged
eagerly in the rear of the host, who now ushered them
into a lofty and extensive hall, from end to end of
which was arranged a table, glittering all over with in
numerable dishes and drinking vessels of gold. It is
an uncertain point whether these rich articles of plate
were made for the occasion out of molten sunbeams,
or recovered from the wrecks of Spanish galleons that
had lain for ages at the bottom of the sea. The upper
end of the table was overshadowed by a canopy, be
neath which was placed a chair of elaborate magnifi
eence, which the host himself declined to occupy, and
besought his guests to assign it to the worthiest among
them. As a suitable homage to his incalculable an-

86 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

tiquity and eminent distinction, the post of honor wag
at first tendered to the Oldest Inhabitant. He, how
ever, eschewed it, and requested the favor of a bowl of
gruel at a side table, where he could refresh himself
with a quiet nap. There was some little hesitation as
to the next candidate, until Posterity took the Master
Genius of our country by the hand and led him to the
chair of state beneath the princely canopy. When
once they beheld him in his true place, the company
acknowledged the justice of the selection by a long
thunder roll of vehement applause.

Then was served up a banquet, combining, if not all
the delicacies of the season, yet all the rarities which
careful purveyors had met with in the flesh, fish, and
vegetable markets of the land of Nowhere. The bill
of fare being unfortunately lost, we can only mention
a pho3nix, roasted in its own flames, cold potted birds
of paradise, ice-creams from the Milky Way, and whip
syllabubs and flummery from the Paradise of Fools,
whereof there was a very grea^t consumption. As for
drinkables, the temperance people contented them
selves with water as usual ; but it was the water of the
Fountain of Youth ; the ladies sipped Nepenthe ; the
lovelorn, the careworn, and the sorrow-stricken were
supplied with brimming goblets of Lethe ; and it was
shrewdly conjectured that a certain golden vase, from
which only the more distinguished guests were invited
to partake, contained nectar that had been mellowing
ever since the days of classical mythology. The cloth
being removed, the company, as usual, grew eloquent
over their liquor, and delivered themselves of a suc
cession of brilliant speeches, — the task of reporting
which we resign to the more adequate ability of Coun
sellor Gill, whose indispensable cooperation the Man
of Fancy had taken the precaution to secure.

A SELECT PARTY. 87

When the festivity of the banquet was at its most
Ithereal point, the Clerk of the Weather was observed
to steal from the table and thrust his head between
the purple and golden curtains of one of the windows.

" My fellow-guests," he remarked aloud, after care
fully noting the signs of the night, " I advise such of
you as live at a distance to be going as soon as possi
ble ; for a thunder storm is certainly at hand."

" Mercy on me ! " cried Mother Carey, who had left
her brood of chickens and come hither in gossamer
drapery, with pink silk stockings. " How shall I ever
get home?"

All now was confusion and hasty departure, with
but little superfluous leave-taking. The Oldest Inhab
itant, however, true to the rule of those long-past days
in which his courtesy had been studied, paused on the
threshold of the meteor-lighted hall to express his vast
satisfaction at the entertainment.

" Never, within my memory," observed the gracious
old gentleman, " has it been my good fortune to spend
a pleasanter evening or in more select society."

The wind here took his breath away, whirled his
three-cornered hat into infinite space, and drowned
what further compliments it had been his purpose to
bestow. Many of the company had bespoken will-o'-
the-wisps to convoy them home ; and the host, in his
general beneficence, had engaged the Man in the
Moon, with an immense horn lantern, to be the guide
of such desolate spinsters as could do no better for
themselves. But a blast of the rising tempest blew
cut all their lights in the twinkling of an eye. How,
in the darkness that ensued, the guests contrived to
get back to earth, or whether the greater part of them
Contrived to get back at all, or are still wandering

88 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

among clouds, mists, and puffs of tempestuous wind,
bruised by the beams and rafters of the overthrown
castle in the air, and deluded by all sorts of unreali
ties, are points that concern themselves mud?, more
than the writer or the public. People should tkuik of
these matters before they thrust themselves on A oleas-
ure party into the realm of Nowhere.

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN.

YOUNG Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into
the street at Salem village ; but put his head back,
after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting
kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was
aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the
street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of
her cap while she called to Goodman Brown.

"Dearest heart/' whispered she, softly and rather
sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, "prithee put
off your journey until sunrise and sleep in your own
bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such
dreams and such thoughts that she 's afeard of herself
sometimes. Pray tarry with me this night, dear hus
band, of all nights in the year."

" My love and my Faith," replied young Goodman
Brown, " of all nights in the year, this one night must
I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest
it, forth and back again, must needs be done 'twixt
now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost
thou doubt me already, and we but three months mar
ried?"

"Then God bless you!" said Faith, with the pink
ribbons ; " and may you find all well when you come
back."

" Amen ! " cried Goodman Brown. " Say thy
prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no
harm will come to thee."

So they parted; and the young man pursued his

90 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

way until, being about to turn the corner by the meet,
ing-house, he looked back and saw the head of Faith
still peeping after him with a melancholy air, in spite
of her pink ribbons.

"Poor little Faith!" thought he, for his heart
smote him. " What a wretch am I to leave her on
such an errand ! She talks of dreams, too. Methought
as she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a
dream had warned her what work is to be done to
night. But no, no ; 't would kill her to think it.
Well, she 's a blessed angel on earth ; and after this
one night I '11 cling to her skirts and follow her to
heaven."

With this excellent resolve for the future, Good
man Brown felt himself justified in making more haste
on his present evil purpose. He had taken a dreary
road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest,
which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep
through, and closed immediately behind. It was all
as lonely as could be ; and there is this peculiarity in
such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may
be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick
boughs overhead ; so that with lonely footsteps he may
yet be passing through an unseen multitude.

"There may be a devilish Indian behind every
tree," said Goodman Brown to himself; and he
glanced fearfully behind him as he added, " What if
the devil himself should be at my very elbow 1 "

His head being turned back, he passed a crook of
the road, and, looking forward again, beheld the figure
of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated at the foot
of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown's ap
proach and walked onward side by side with him.

" You are late, Goodman Brown," said he. " Tha

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN. 91

clock of the Old South was striking as I came through
Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes agone."

" Faith kept me back a while," replied the young
man, with a tremor in his voice, caused by the sudden
appearance of his companion, though not wholly unex
pected.

It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in
that part of it where these two were journeying. As
nearly as could be discerned, the second traveller was
about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank of
life as Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable
resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expres
sion than features. Still they might have been taken
for father and son. And yet, though the elder per
son was as simply clad as the younger, and as simple
in manner too, he had an indescribable air of one who
knew the world, and who would not have felt abashed
at the governor's dinner table or in King William's
court, were it possible that his affairs should call him
thither. But the only thing about him that could be
fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the
likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought
that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself
like a living serpent. This, of course, must have been
an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.

" Come, Goodman Brown," cried his fellow-travel
ler, " this is a dull pace for the beginning of a jour
ney. Take my staff, if you are so soon weary."

" Friend," said the other, exchanging his slow pace
for a full stop, " having kept covenant by meeting thee
here, it is my purpose now to return whence I came.
I have scruples touching the matter thou wot'st of."

" Sayest thou so ? " replied he of the serpent, smiling
apart. "Let us walk on, nevertheless, reasoning as

92 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

we go ; and if I convince thee not thou shalt turn
back. We are but a little way in the forest yet."

" Too far ! too far ! " exclaimed the goodman, un
consciously resuming his walk. "My father never
went into the woods on such an errand, nor his father
before him. We have been a race of honest men and
good Christians since the days of the martyrs ; and
shall I be the first of the name of Brown that ever
took this path and kept " —

" Such company, thou wouldst say," observed the
elder person, interpreting his pause. " Well said,
Goodman Brown! I have been as well acquainted
with your family as with ever a one among the Puri
tans ; and that 's no trifle to say. I helped your
grandfather, the constable, when he lashed the Quaker
woman so smartly through the streets of Salem ; and
it was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot,
kindled at my own hearth, to set fire to an Indian vil
lage, in King Philip's war. They were my good
friends, both ; and many a pleasant walk have we had
along this path, and returned merrily after midnight.
I would fain be friends with you for their sake."

" If it be as thou sayest," replied Goodman Brown,
" I marvel they never spoke of these matters ; or, ver
ily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of the
sort would have driven them from New England. We
are a people of prayer, and good works to boot, and
abide no such wickedness."

" Wickedness or not," said the traveller with the
twisted staff, " I have a very general acquaintance
here in New England. The deacons of many a church
have drunk the communion wine with me ; the select
men of divers towns make me their chairman ; and a
majority of the Great and General Court are firm sup

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN. 93

porters of my interest. The governor and I, too —
But these are state secrets."

" Can this be so ? " cried Goodman Brown, with a
stare of amazement at his undisturbed companion.
" Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the governor and
council ; they have their own ways, and are no rule for
a simple husbandman like me. But, were I to go on
with thee, how should I meet the eye of that good old
man, our minister, at Salem village ? Oh, his voice
would make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture
day."

Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due
gravity ; but now burst into a fit of irrepressible mirth,
shaking himself so violently that his snake-like staff
actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.

"Ha ! ha ! ha ! " shouted he again and again ; then
composing himself, " Well, go on, Goodman Brown,
go on ; but, prithee, don't kill me with laughing."

" Well, then, to end the matter at once," said Good
man Brown, considerably nettled, " there is my wife,
Faith. It would break her dear little heart ; and I 'd
Bather break my own."

" Nay, if that be the case," answered the other,
" e'en go thy ways, Goodman Brown. I would not for
twenty old women like the one hobbling before us that
Faith should come to any harm."

As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure
on the path, in whom Goodman Brown recognized a
very pious and exemplary dame, who had taught him
his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and
spiritual adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon
Grookin.

" A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so
iar in the wilderness at nightfall," said he. "But

94 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through the
woods until we have left this Christian woman behind.
Being a stranger to you, she might ask whom I was
consorting with and whither I was going."

" Be it so," said his fellow-traveller. " Betake you
to the woods, and let me keep the path."

Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took
care to watch his companion, who advanced softly
along the road until he had come within a staff's
length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making
the best of her way, with singular speed for so aged
a woman, and mumbling some indistinct words — a
prayer, doubtless — as she went. The traveller put
forth his staff and touched her withered neck with
what seemed the serpent's tail.

" The devil ! " screamed the pious old lady.

" Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend ?" ob
served the traveller, confronting her and leaning on
his writhing stick.

"Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?'*
cried the good dame. "Yea, truly is it, and in the
very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown, the
grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. But —
would your worship believe it ? — my broomstick
hath strangely disappeared, stolen, as I suspect, by
that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when
I was all anointed with the juice of smallage, and
cinquefoil, and wolf's bane " —

" Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born
babe," said the shape of old Goodman Brown.

" Ah, your worship knows the recipe," cried the old
lady, cackling aloud. " So, as I was saying, being all
ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride on, I made
tip my mind to foot it ; for they tell me there is a nice

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN. 95

young man to be taken into communion to-night. But
now your good worship will lend me your arm, and
we shall be there in a twinkling.

"That can hardly be," answered her friendo "I
may not spare you my arm, Goody Cloyse ; but here
is my staff, if you will."

So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, per
haps, it assumed life, being one of the rods which its
owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian magi. Of
this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take
cognizance. He had cast up his eyes in astonishment,
and, looking down again, beheld neither Goody Cloyse
nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone,
who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had hap
pened.

" That old woman taught me my catechism," said
the young man ; and there was a world of meaning in
this simple comment.

They continued to walk onward, while the elder
traveller exhorted his companion to make good speed
and persevere in the path, discoursing so aptly that
his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom
of his auditor than to be suggested by himself. As
they went, he plucked a branch of maple to serve for
a walking stick, and began to strip it of the twigs
and little boughs, which were wet with evening dew.
The moment his fingers touched them they became
strangely withered and dried up as with a week's
sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free
pace, until suddenly, in a gloomy hollow of the road,
Goodman Brown sat himself down on the stump of a
tree and refused to go any farther.

"Friend," said he, stubbornly, "my mind is made
up. Not another step will I budge on this errand

96 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

What if a wretched old woman do choose to go to the
devil when I thought she was going to heaven : is that
any reason why I should quit my dear Faith and go
after her?"

" You will think better of this by and by," said his
acquaintance, composedly. " Sit here and rest your
self a while; and when you feel like moving again,
there is my staff to help you along."

Without more words, he threw his companion the
maple stick, and was as speedily out of sight as if he
had vanished into the deepening gloom. The young
man sat a few moments by the roadside, applauding
himself greatly, and thinking with how clear a con
science he should meet the minister in his morning
walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon
Gookin. And what calm sleep would be his that very
night, which was to have been spent so wickedly, but
so purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith!
Amidst these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations,
Goodman Brown heard the tramp of horses along
the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself
within the verge of the forest, conscious of the guilty
purpose that had brought him thither, though now so
happily turned from it.

On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the rid
ers, two grave old voices, conversing soberly as they
drew near. These mingled sounds appeared to pass
along the road, within a few yards of the young man's
hiding-place ; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the
gloom at that particular spot, neither the travellers
nor their steeds were visible. Though their figures
brushed the small boughs by the wayside, it could not
be seen that they intercepted, even for a moment, tho
faint gleam from the strip of bright sky athwart

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN. 97

which they must have passed. Goodman Brown alter
nately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pulling aside the
branches and thrusting forth his head as far as he
durst without discerning so much as a shadow. It
vexed him the more, because he could have sworn,
were such a thing possible, that he recognized the
voices of the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging
along quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to
some ordination or ecclesiastical council. While yet
within hearing, one of the riders stopped to pluck a
switch.

" Of the two, reverend sir," said the voice like the
deacon's, "I had rather miss an ordination dinner
than to-night's meeting. They tell me that some of
our community are to be here from Falmouth and be
yond, and others from Connecticut and Rhode Island,
besides several of the Indian powwows, who, after
their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the
best of us. Moreover, there is a goodly young woman
to be taken into communion."

" Mighty well, Deacon Gookin ! " replied the solemn
old tones of the minister. " Spur up, or we shall be
late. Nothing can be done, you know, until I get on
the ground."

The hoofs clattered again ; and the voices, talking
so strangely in the empty air, passed on through the
forest, where no church had ever been gathered or sol
itary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could these
*ioly men be journeying so deep into the heathen wil
derness ? Young Goodman Brown caught hold of a
tree for support, being ready to sink down on the
ground, faint and overburdened with the heavy sick
ness of his heart. He looked up to the sky, doubt
ing whether there really was a heaven above him. Yet

VOL. II. 7

98 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

there was the blue arch, and the stars brightening
in it.

" With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet
stand firm against the devil ! " cried Goodman Brown.

While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of
the firmament and had lifted his hands to pray, a
cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the
zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky
was still visible, except directly overhead, where this
black mass of cloud was sweeping swiftly northward.
Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud,
came a confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once
the listener fancied that he could distinguish the ac
cents of towns-people of his own, men and women,
both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met
at the communion table, and had seen others rioting
at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct were
the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught
but the murmur of the old forest, whispering without
a wind. Then came a stronger swell of those famil
iar tones, heard daily in the sunshine at Salem village,
but never until now from a cloud of night. There
was one voice, of a young woman, uttering lamenta
tions, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for
some favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to ob
tain ; and all the unseen multitude, both saints and
sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

" Faith I " shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of
agony and desperation ; and the echoes of the forest
mocked him, crying, " Faith ! Faith ! " as if bewil
dered wretches were seeking her all through the wil
derness.

The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing
the night, when the unhappy husband held his breath

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN. 99

for a response. There was a scream, drowned imme
diately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-
off laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the
clear and silent sky above Goodman Brown. But
something fluttered lightly down through the air and
caught on the branch of a tree.' The young man
seized it, and beheld a pink ribbon.

" My Faith is gone ! " cried he, after one stupefied
moment. " There is no good on earth ; and sin is but
a name. Come, devil ; for to thee is this world given."

And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed
loud and long, did Goodman Brown grasp his staff
and set forth again, at such a rate that he seemed to
ily along the forest path rather than to walk or run.
The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly
traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart
of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the
instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole
forest was peopled with frightful sounds — the creak
ing of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the
yell of Indians ; while sometimes the wind tolled like
a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar
around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing
him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of
the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

" Ha ! ha ! ha ! " roared Goodman Brown when the
wind laughed at him. " Let us hear which will laugh
loudest. Think not to frighten me with your deviltry.
Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come
devil himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You
may as well fear him as he fear you."

In truth, all through the haunted forest there could
be nothing more frightful than the figure of Goodman
Brown, On he flew among the black pines, brandish

100 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to
an inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting
forth such laughter as set all the echoes of the forest
laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his
' own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the
breast of man. Thus sped the demoniac on his course,
until, quivering among the trees, he saw a red light
before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of
a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their
lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight.
He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him
onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn,
rolling solemnly from a distance with the weight of
many voices. He knew the tune ; it was a familiar
one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The
verse died heavily away, and was lengthened by a cho
rus, not of human voices, but of all the sounds of the
benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony to
gether. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was
lost to his own ear by its unison with the cry of the
desert.

In the interval of silence he stole forward until the
light glared full upon his eyes. At one extremity of
an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of the
forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resem
blance either to an altar or a pulpit, and surrounded
by four blazing pines, their tops aflame, their stems
untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The
mass of foliage that had overgrown the summit of the
rock was all on fire, blazing high into the night and
fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent
twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red
light arose and fell, a numerous congregation alter
nately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow, and

YOUNG GOODMAN -BROWN,: 101.

again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling
the heart of the solitary woods at once.

"A grave and dark-clad company," quoth Good- "
man Brown.

In truth they were such. Among them, quivering
to and fro between gloom and splendor, appeared faces
that would be seen next day at the council board of
the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath,
looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the
crowded pews, from the holiest pulpits in the land.
Some affirm that the lady of the governor was there.
At least there were high dames well known to her, and
wives of honored husbands, and widows, a great multi
tude, and ancient maidens, all of excellent repute, and
fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers should
espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing
over the obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or
he recognized a score of the church members of Salem
village famous for their especial sanctity. Good old
Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of
that venerable saint, his revered pastor. But, irrever
ently consorting with these grave, reputable, and pious
people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames
and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives
and women of spotted fame, wretches given over to
all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even of horrid
crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank*
not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by
the saints. Scattered also among their pale-faced ene
mies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had
often scared their native forest with more hideous in
cantations than any known to English witchcraft.

" But where is Faith ? " thought Goodman Brown \
and, as hope came into his heart, he trembled.

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mourn,
^ful strain, such as the pious love, but joined to words
which expressed all that our nature can conceive of sin,
and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to mere
mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was
sung ; and still the chorus of the desert swelled be
tween like the deepest tone of a mighty organ ; and
with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there came
a sound, as if the roaring wind, the rushing streams,
the howling beasts, and every other voice of the un-
concerted wilderness were mingling and according with
the voice of guilty man in homage to the prince of all.
The four blazing pines threw up a loftier flame, and
obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on
the smoke wreaths above the impious assembly. Afc
the same moment the fire on the rock shot redly forth
and formed a glowing arch above its base, where now
appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the
figure bore no slight similitude, both in garb and
manner, to some grave divine of the New England
churches.

" Bring forth the converts ! " cried a voice that
echoed through the field and rolled into the forest.

At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from
the shadow of the trees and approached the congrega
tion, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood by the
sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He
could have well-nigh sworn that the shape of his own
dead father beckoned him to advance, looking down
ward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim
features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him
back. Was it his mother ? But he had no power to
retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought, when
the minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN.

arms and led him to the blazing rock. Thither came
also the slender form of a veiled female, led between
Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism,
and Martha Carrier, who had received the devil's
promise to be queen of hell. A rampant hag was
she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the can
opy of fire.

" Welcome, my children," said the dark figure, " to
the communion of your race. Ye have found thus
young your nature and your destiny. My children,
look behind you ! "

They turned ; and flashing forth, as it were, in a
sheet of flame, the fiend worshippers were seen ; the
smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.

" There," resumed the sable form, " are all whom
ye have reverenced from youth. Ye deemed them
holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own sin,,
contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and
prayerful aspirations heavenward. Yet here are they
all in my worshipping assembly. This night it shall
be granted you to know their secret deeds : how hoary-
bearded elders of the church have whispered wanton
words to the young maids of their households ; how
many a woman, eager for widows' weeds, has given
her husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his
last sleep in her bosom ; how beardless youths have
made haste to inherit their fathers' wealth ; and how
fair damsels — blush not, sweet ones — have dug little
graves in the garden, and bidden me, the sole guest,
to an infant's funeral. By the sympathy of your
human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places
• — whether in church, bed-chamber, street, field, or
forest — where crime has been committed, and shall
exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one

104 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be
yours to penetrate, in every bosom, the deep mystery
of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and which in
exhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human
power — than my power at its utmost — can make
manifest in deeds. And now, my children, look upon
each other."

They did so ; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled
torches, th6 wretched man beheld his Faith, and the
wife her husband, trembling before that unhallowed
altar.

" Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure,
in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despair
ing awf ulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet
mourn for our miserable race. " Depending upon one
another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not
all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the
nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happi
ness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion
of your race."

" Welcome," repeated the fiend worshippers, in one
cry of despair and triumph.

And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed,
who were yet hesitating on the verge of wickedness in
this dark world. A basin was hollowed, naturally, in
the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid
light ? or was it blood ? or, perchance, a liquid flame ?
Herein did the shape of evil dip his hand and prepare
to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that
they might be partakers of the mystery of sin, more
conscious of the secret guilt of others, both in deed
and thought, than they could now be of their own.
The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith
at him. What polluted wretches would the next

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN. 105

glance show them to each other, shuddering alike at
what they disclosed and what they saw !

" Faith ! Faith ! " cried the husband, " look up to
heaven, and resist the wicked one."

Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had
he spoken when he found himself amid calm night
and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which
died heavily away through the forest. He staggered
against the rock, and felt it chill and damp ; while a
hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled
his cheek with the coldest dew.

The next morning young Goodman Brown came
slowly into the street of Salem village, staring around
him like a bewildered man. The good old minister
was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an ap
petite for breakfast and meditate his sermon, and be
stowed a blessing, as he passed, on Goodman Brown.
He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an
anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic wor
ship, and the holy words of his prayer were heard
through the open window. " What God doth the wiz^
ard pray to ? " quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse,
that excellent old Christian, stood in the early sun
shine at her own lattice, catechizing a little girl who
had brought her a pint of morning's milk. Goodman
Brown snatched away the child as from the grasp of
the fiend himself. Turning the corner by the meeting
house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink rib
bons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such
joy at sight of him that she skipped along the street
and almost kissed her husband before the whole vil
lage. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly
into her face, and passed on without a greeting.

Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest
and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting ?

106 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Be it so if you will ; but, alas ! it was a dream of
evil omen for young Goodman Brown. A stern, a sad,
a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate
man did he become from the night of that fearful
dream. On the Sabbath day, when the congregation
were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen because
an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and
drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister
spoke from the pulpit with power and fervid elo
quence, and, with his hand on the open Bible, of the
sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives
and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery
unutterable, then did Goodman Brown turn pale,
dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the
gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking
suddenly at midnight, he shrank from the bosom of
Faith ; and at morning or eventide, when the family
knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to him
self, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away.
And when he had lived long, and was borne to his
grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged
woman, and children and grandchildren, a goodly pro
cession, besides neighbors not a few, they carved no
hopeful verse upon his tombstone, for his dying hour
was gloom.

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER.

[FROM THE WRITINGS OP AUB£PINE.]

WE do not remember to have seen any translated
specimens of the productions of M. de 1' Aubepine — a
fact the less to be wondered at, as his very name is
unknown to many of his own countrymen as well as
to the student of foreign literature. As a writer, he
seems to occupy an unfortunate position between the
Transcendentalists (who, under one name or another,
have their share in all the current literature of the
world) and the great body of pen-and-ink men who
address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude.
If not too refined, at all events too remote, too shad
owy, and unsubstantial in his modes of development
to suit the taste of the latter class, and yet too popular
to satisfy the spiritual or metaphysical requisitions of
the former, he must necessarily find himself without
an audience, except here and there an individual or
possibly an isolated clique. His writings, to do them
justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and orig
inality ; they might have won him greater reputation
but for an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to
invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scen
ery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the
human warmth out of his conceptions. His fictions
are sometimes historical, sometimes of the present day,
and sometimes, so far as can be discovered, have little
wr no reference either to time or space. In any case,

108 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

he generally contents himself with a very slight em
broidery of outward manners, — the faintest possible
counterfeit of real life, — and endeavors to create an
interest by some less obvious peculiarity of the sub
ject. Occasionally a breath of Nature, a raindrop of
pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor, will find
its way into the midst of his fantastic imagery, and
make us feel as if, after all, we were yet within the
limits of our native earth. We will only add to this
very cursory notice that M. de 1'Aubepine's produc
tions, if the reader chance to take them in precisely
the proper point of view, may amuse a leisure hour as
well as those of a brighter man ; if otherwise, they
can hardly fail to look excessively like nonsense.

Our author is voluminous ; he continues to write
and publish with as much praiseworthy and indefati
gable prolixity as if his efforts were crowned with the
brilliant success that so justly attends those of Eugene
Sue. His first appearance was by a collection of sto
ries in a long series of volumes entitled " Contes deux
fois raconte*es." The titles of some of his more recent
works (we quote from memory) are as follows : " Le
Voyage Cdleste a Chemin de Fer," 3 torn., 1838 ; "Le
nouveau Pere Adam et la nouvelle M£re Eve," 2 torn.,
1839 ; " Roderic ; ou le Serpent a 1'estomac," 2 torn.,
1840 ; " Le Culte du Feu," a folio volume of ponder
ous research into the religion and ritual of the old
Persian Ghebers, published in 1841 ; " La Soire*e du
Chateau en Espagne," 1 torn., 8vo, 1842 ; and " L' Ar
tiste du Beau; ou le Papillon Mecanique," 5 torn.,
4to, 1843. Our somewhat wearisome perusal of this
startling catalogue of volumes has left behind it a cer
tain personal affection and sympathy, though by no
means admiration, for M. de l'Aube*pine; and we

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 109

would fain do the little in our power towards introduc
ing him favorably to the American public. The ensu
ing tale is a translation of his " Beatrice ; ou la Belle
Empoisonneuse," recently published in "La Eevue
Anti-Aristocratique." This journal, edited by the
Comte de Bearhaven, has for some years past led the
defence of liberal principles and popular rights with a
faithfulness and ability worthy of all praise.

A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came,
very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy,
to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. Gio
vanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in
his pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy cham
ber of an old edifice which looked not unworthy to
have been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which,
in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial
bearings of a family long since extinct. The young
stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of
his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of
this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very
mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of
the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminis
cences and associations, together with the tendency to
heartbreak natural to a young man for the first time
out of his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heav
ily as he looked around the desolate and ill-furnished
apartment.

" Holy Virgin, signor ! " cried old Dame Lisabetta,
who, won by the youth's remarkable beauty of person,
was kindly endeavoring to give the chamber a habita
ble air, " what a sigh was that to come out of a young
man's heart ! Do you find this old mansion gloomy ?
For the love of Heaven, then, put your head out of

110 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the window, and you will see as bright sunshine as you
have left in Naples."

Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman ad
vised, but could not quite agree with her that the Pad-
uan sunshine was as cheerful as that of southern Italy.
Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden beneath
the window and expended its fostering influences on a
variety of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated
with exceeding care.

"Does this garden belong to the house?" asked
Giovanni.

" Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of
better pot herbs than any that grow there now," an
swered old Lisabetta. " No ; that garden is cultivated
by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the
famous doctor, who, I warrant him, has been heard of
as far as Naples. It is said that he distils these plants
into medicines that are as potent as a charm. Often
times you may see the signor doctor at work, and per
chance the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the
strange flowers that grow in the garden."

The old woman had now done what she could for
the aspect of the chamber; and, commending the
young man to the protection of the saints, took her
departure.

Giovanni still found no better occupation than to
look down into the garden beneath his window. From
its appearance, he judged it to be one of those botanic
gardens which were of earlier date in Padua than else
where in Italy or in the world. Or, not improba
bly, it might once have been the pleasure-place of an
opulent family ; for there was the ruin of a marble
fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but sc
wofully shattered that it was impossible to trafle the

RAPPACCINPS DAUGHTER. 111

original design from the chaos of remaining frag
ments. The water, however, continued to gush and
sparkle into the sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A
little gurgling sound ascended to the young man's
window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an
immortal spirit that sung its song unceasingly and
without heeding the vicissitudes around it, while one
century imbodied it in marble and another scattered
the perishable garniture on the soil. All about the
pool into which the water subsided grew various
plants, that seemed to require a plentiful supply of
moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and,
in some instances, flowers gorgeously magnificent.
There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble
vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion of
purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and
richness of a gem; and the whole together made a
show so resplendent that it seemed enough to illu
minate the garden, even had there been no sunshine.
Every portion' of the soil was peopled with plants and
herbs, which, if less beautiful, still bore tokens of as
siduous care, as if all had their individual virtues,
known to the scientific mind that fostered them.
Some were placed in urns, rich with old carving, and
others in common garden pots ; some crept serpent-
like along the ground or climbed on high, using what
ever means of ascent was offered them. One plant
had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus,
which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a dra
pery of hanging foliage, so happily arranged that it
might have served a sculptor for a study.

While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a
rustling behind a screen of leaves, and became aware
that a person was at work in the garden. His figur«

112 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that
of no common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow,
and sickly-looking man, dressed in a scholar's garb of
black. He was beyond the middle term of life, with
gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly
marked with intellect and cultivation, but which could
never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed
much warmth of heart.

Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this
scientific gardener examined every shrub which grew
in his path : it seemed as if he was looking into their
inmost nature, making observations in regard to their
creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in
this shape and another in that, and wherefore such
and such flowers differed among themselves in hue
and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of this deep in
telligence on his part, there was no approach to inti
macy between himself and these vegetable existences.
On the contrary, he avoided their actual touch or the
direct inhaling of their odors with a caution that im
pressed Giovanni most disagreeably ; for the man's
demeanor was that of one walking among malignant
influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly snakes, or
evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment
of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatal
ity. It was strangely frightful to the young man's
imagination to see this air of insecurity in a person
cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of
human toils, and which had been alike the joy and
labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this
garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And
this man, with such a perception of harm in what his
own hands caused to grow, — was he the Adam ?

The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the

RAPPACCINrS DAUGHTER. 113

dead leaves or pruning the too luxuriant growth of the
shrubs, defended his hands with a pair of thick gloves.
Nor were these his only armor. When, in his walk
through the garden, he came to the magnificent plant
that hung its purple gems beside the marble fountain,
he placed a kind of mask over his mouth and nostrils,
as if all this beauty did but conceal a deadlier malice ;
but, finding his task still too dangerous, he drew back,
removed the mask, and called loudly, but in the infirm
voice of a person affected with inward disease, —

"Beatrice! Beatrice!"

" Here am I, my father. What would you ? " cried
a rich and youthful voice from the window of the op
posite house — a voice as rich as a tropical sunset, and
which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think
of deep hues of purple or crimson and of perfumes
heavily delectable. " Are you in the garden? "

"Yes, Beatrice," answered the gardener, "and I
need your help."

Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal
the figure of a young girl, arrayed with as much rich
ness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beau
tiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid
that one shade more would have been too much. She
looked redundant with life, health, and energy ; all of
which attributes were bound down and compressed, as
it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by
her virgin zone. Yet Giovanni's fancy must have
grown morbid while he looked down into the garden ;
for the impression which the fair stranger made upon
him was as if here were another flower, the human
sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they,
more beautiful than the richest of them, but still to be
touched only with a glove, nor to be approached with-

114 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

out a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path,
it was observable that she handled and inhaled the
odor of several of the plants which her father had
most sedulously avoided.

" Here, Beatrice," said the latter, " see how many
needful offices require to be done to our chief treas
ure. Yet, shattered as I am, my life might pay the
penalty of approaching it so closely as circumstances
demand. Henceforth, I fear, this plant must be con
signed to your sole charge."

" And gladly will I undertake it," cried again the
rich tones of the young lady, as she bent towards th$
magnificent plant and opened her arms as if to em
brace it. " Yes, my sister, my splendor, it shall be
Beatrice's task to nurse and serve thee ; and thou shalt
reward her with thy kisses and perfumed breath, which
to her is as the breath of life."

Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that
was so strikingly expressed in her words, she busied
herself with such attentions as the plant seemed to re
quire ; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his
eyes and almost doubted whether it were a girl tend
ing her favorite flower, or one sister performing the
duties of affection to another. The scene soon ter
minated. Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his
labors in the garden, or that his watchful eye had
caught the stranger's face, he now took his daughter's
arm and retired. Night was already closing in ; op
pressive exhalations seemed to proceed from the plants
and steal upward past the open window ; and Gio
vanni, closing the lattice, went to his couch and
dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful girl. Flower
and maiden were different, and yet the same, and
fraught with some strange peril in either shape.

RAPPACCINTS DAUGHTER. 115

But there is an influence in the light of morning
that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even
of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun's
decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the
less wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni's first
movement, on starting from sleep, was to throw open
the window and gaze down into the garden which his
dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was sur
prised and a little ashamed to find how real and mat
ter-of-fact an affair it proved to be, in the first rays of
the sun which gilded the dew-drops that hung upon
leaf and blossom, and, while giving a brighter beauty
to each rare flower, brought everything within the
limits of ordinary experience. The young man re
joiced that, in the heart of the barren city, he had the
privilege of overlooking this spot of lovely and luxu
riant vegetation. It would serve, he said to himself,
as a symbolic language to keep him in communion
with Nature. Neither the sickly and thoughtworn
Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is true, nor his brilliant
daughter, were now visible ; so that Giovanni could
not determine how much of the singularity which he
attributed to both was due to their own qualities and
how much to his wonder-working fancy ; but he was
inclined to take a most rational view of the whole
matter.

In the course of the day he paid his respects to
Signer Pietro Baglioni, professor of medicine in the
university, a physician of eminent repute, to whom
Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction. The
professor was an elderly personage, apparently of
genial nature, and habits that might almost be called
jovial. He kept the young man to dinner, and made
kimself very agreeable by the freedom and liveliness of

116 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

his conversation, especially when warmed by a flask 01
two of Tuscan wine. Giovanni, conceiving that men
of science, inhabitants of the same city, must needs be
on familiar terms with one another, took an opportu
nity to mention the name of Dr. Kappaccini. But the
professor did not respond with so much cordiality as
he had anticipated.

" 111 would it become a teacher of the divine art of
medicine," said Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer
to a question of Giovanni, " to withhold due and well-
considered praise of a physician so eminently skilled
as Rappaccini ; but, on the other hand, I should an
swer it but scantily to my conscience were I to permit
a worthy youth like yourself, Signor Giovanni, the son
of an ancient friend, to imbibe erroneous ideas respect
ing a man who might hereafter chance to hold your
life and death in his hands. The truth is, our wor
shipful Dr. Rappaccini has as much science as any
member of the faculty — with perhaps one single ex
ception — in Padua, or all Italy ; but there are certain
grave objections to his professional character."

" And what are they ? " asked the young man.

" Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or
heart, that he is so inquisitive about physicians ? " said
the professor, with a smile. " But as for Rappaccini,
it is said of him — and I, who know the man well,
can answer for its truth — that he cares infinitely more
for science than for mankind. His patients are inter
esting to him only as subjects for some new experi
ment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among
the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the
sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard seed to
the great heap of his accumulated knowledge."

" Methinks he is an awful man indeed," remarked

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. lit

Guasconti, mentally recalling the cold and purely in
tellectual aspect of Eappaccini. " And yet, worship
ful professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there
many men capable of so spiritual a love of science ? "

" God forbid," answered the professor, somewhat
testily ; " at least, unless they take sounder views of
the healing art than those adopted by Rappaccini. It
is his theory that all medicinal virtues are comprised
within those substances which we term vegetable poi
sons. These he cultivates with his own hands, and is
said even to have produced new varieties of poison,
more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the
assistance of this learned person, would ever have
plagued the world withal. That the signor doctor does
less mischief than might be expected with such danger
ous substances is undeniable. Now and then, it must
be owned, he has effected, or seemed to effect, a mar
vellous cure ; but, to tell you my private mind, Signor
Giovanni, he should receive little credit for such in
stances of success, — they being probably the work of
chance, — but should be held strictly accountable for
his failures, which may justly be considered his own
work."

The youth might have taken Baglioni's opinions
with many grains of allowance had he known that
there was a professional warfare of long continuance
between him and Dr. Rappaccini, in which the latter
was generally thought to have gained the advantage.
If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we re
fer him to certain black-letter tracts on both sides,
preserved in the medical department of the University
of Padua.

a I know not, most learned professor," returned
Giovanni, after musing on what had been said of Rap

118 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

paccini's exclusive zeal for science, — "I know not how
dearly this physician may love his art ; but surely
there is one object more dear to him. He has a
daughter."

" Aha ! " cried the professor, with a laugh. " So
now our friend Giovanni's secret is out. You have
heard of this daughter, whom all the young men in
Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have
ever had the good hap to see her face. I know little
of the Signora Beatrice save that Rappaccini is said
to have instructed her deeply in his science, and that,
young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already
qualified to fill a professor's chair. Perchance her
father destines her for mine ! Other absurd rumors
there be, not worth talking about or listening to. So
now, Signer Giovanni, drink off your glass of lach-
ryma."

Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated
with the wine he had quaffed, and which caused his
brain to swim with strange fantasies in reference to
Dr. Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his
way, happening to pass by a florist's, he bought a fresh
bouquet of flowers.

Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near
the window, but within the shadow thrown by the
depth of the wall, so that he could look down into the
garden with little risk of being discovered. All be
neath his eye was a solitude. The strange plants were
basking in the sunshine, and now and then nodding
gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment of
sympathy and kindred. In the midst, by the shat
tered fountain, grew the magnificent shrub, with its
purple gems clustering all over it ; they glowed in the
air, and gleamed back again out of the depths of the

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 119

pool, which thus seemed to overflow with colored radi
ance from the rich reflection that was steeped in it.
At first, as we have said, the garden was a solitude.
Soon, however, — as Giovanni had half hoped, half
feared, would be the case, — a figure appeared beneath
the antique sculptured portal, and came down between
the rows of plants, inhaling their various perfumes as
if she were one of those beings of old classic fable that
lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding Beatrice,
the young man was even startled to perceive how
much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it; so
brilliant, so vivid, was its character, that she glowed
amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to him-
self, positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals
of the garden path. Her face being now more re
vealed than on the former occasion, he was struck by
its expression of simplicity and sweetness, — qualities
that had not entered into his idea of her character, and
which made him ask anew what manner of mortal she
might be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or imag
ine, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gor
geous shrub that hung its gemlike flowers over the
fountain, — a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to
have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening, both
by the arrangement of her dress and the selection of
its hues.

Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as
with a passionate ardor, and drew its branches into an
intimate embrace — so intimate that her features were
hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets
all intermingled with the flowers.

"Give me thy breath, my sister," exclaimed Bea
trice ; " for I am faint with common air. And give
me this flower of thine, which I separate with gentlest

120 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

fingers from the stem and place it close beside my
heart."

With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappao
cini plucked one of the richest blossoms of the shrub,
and was about to fasten it in her bosom. But now,
unless Giovanni's draughts of wine had bewildered his
senses, a singular incident occurred. A small orange-
colored reptile, of the lizard or chameleon species,
chanced to be creeping along the path, just at the feet
of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni, — but, at the
distance from which he gazed, he could scarcely have
seen anything so minute, — it appeared to him, how
ever, that a drop or two of moisture from the broken
stem of the flower descended upon the lizard's head.
For an instant the reptile contorted itself violently,
and then lay motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice ob
served this remarkable phenomenon, and crossed her
self, sadly, but without surprise; nor did she there
fore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in her bosom.
There it blushed, and almost glimmered with the daz
zling effect of a precious stone, adding to her dress and
aspect the one appropriate charm which nothing else
in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, out
of the shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank
back, and murmured and trembled.

" Am I awake ? Have I my senses ? " said he to
himself. "What is this being? Beautiful shall I
call her, or inexpressibly terrible ? "

Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden,
approaching closer beneath Giovanni's window, so that
he was compelled to thrust his head quite out of its
concealment in order to gratify the intense and pain
ful curiosity which she excited. At this moment there
tame a beautiful insect over the garden wall ; it had,

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 121

perhaps, wandered through the city, and found no
flowers or verdure among those antique haunts of men
until the heavy perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini's shrubs
had lured it from afar. Without alighting on the
flowers, this winged brightness seemed to be attracted
by Beatrice, and lingered in the air and fluttered about
her head. Now, here it could not be but that Giovanni
Guasconti's eyes deceived him. Be that as it might,
he fancied that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect
with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet ;
its bright wings shivered ; it was dead — from no cause
that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere of
her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed
heavily as she bent over the dead insect.

An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes
to the window. There she beheld the beautiful head
of the young man — rather a Grecian than an Italian
head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of
gold among his ringlets — gazing down upon her like
a being that hovered in mid air. Scarcely knowing
what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet which
he had hitherto held in his hand.

" Signora," said he, " there are pure and healthful
flowers. Wear them for the sake of Giovanni Guas-
conti."

" Thanks, signor," replied Beatrice, with her rich
voice, that came forth as it were like a gush of music,
and with a mirthful expression half childish and half
woman-like. " I accept your gift, and would fain
recompense it with this precious purple flower ; but if
I toss it into the air it will not reach you. So Signor
Guasconti must even content himself with my thanks."

She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then,
as if inwardly ashamed at having stepped aside from

122 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

her maidenly reserve to respond to a stranger's greet*
ing, passed swiftly homeward through the garden.
But few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni,
when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the
sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was al
ready beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an
idle thought ; there could be no possibility of distin
guishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so great a
distance.

For many days after this incident the young man
avoided the window that looked into Dr. Rappaccini's
garden, as if something ugly and monstrous would
have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a
glance. He felt conscious of having put himself, to
a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligi
ble power by the communication which he had opened
with Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if
his heart were in any real danger, to quit his lodgings
and Padua itself at once ; the next wiser, to have ac
customed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar
and daylight view of Beatrice — thus bringing her
rigidly and systematically within the limits of ordinary
experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight,
ought Giovanni to have remained so near this extraor
dinary being that the proximity and possibility even
of intercourse should give a kind of substance and
reality to the wild vagaries which his imagination ran
riot continually in producing. Guasconti had not a
deep heart — or, at all events, its depths were not
sounded now ; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent
southern temperament, which rose every instant to a
higher fever pitch. Whether or no Beatrice possessed
those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, the affinity
with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were

KAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 128

indicated by what Giovanni had witnessed, she had
at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison into his sys
tem. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a
madness to him ; nor horror, even while he fancied her
spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that
seemed to pervade her physical frame ; but a wild off
spring of both love and horror that had each parent
in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other.
Giovanni knew not what to dread ; still less did he
know what to hope ; yet hope and dread kept a con
tinual warfare in his breast, alternately vanquishing
one another and starting up afresh to renew the con
test. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or
bright ! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that
produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.

Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of
his spirit by a rapid walk through the streets of Padua
or beyond its gates : his footsteps kept time with the
throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to
accelerate itself to a race. One day he found him
self arrested ; his arm was seized by a portly person
age, who had turned back on recognizing the young
man and expended much breath in overtaking him.

" Signor Giovanni ! Stay, my young friend ! " cried
he. " Have you forgotten me ? That might well be
the case if I were as much altered as yourself."

It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever
since their first meeting, from a doubt that the pro
fessor's sagacity would look too deeply into his secrets.
Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared forth wildly
from his inner world into the outer one and spoke like
a man in a dream.

" Yes ; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Pro1
fessor Pietro Baglioni. Now let me pass ! "

124 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,''
said the professor, smiling, but at the same time scru
tinizing the youth with an earnest glance. " What !
did I grow up side by side with your father? and
shall his son pass me like a stranger in these old
streets of Padua ? Stand still, Signor Giovanni ; for
we must have a word or two before we part."

" Speedily, then, most worshipful professor, speed
ily," said Giovanni, with feverish impatience. " Does
not your worship see that I am in haste ? "

Now, while he was speaking there came a man in
black along the street, stooping and moving feebly like
a person in inferior health. His face was all over
spread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so
pervaded with an expression of piercing and active in
tellect that an observer might easily have overlooked
the merely physical attributes and have seen only this
wonderful energy. As he passed, this person ex
changed a cold and distant salutation with Baglioni,
but fixed his eyes upon Giovanni with an intentness
that seemed to bring out whatever was within him
worthy of notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar
quietness in the look, as if taking merely a specula
tive, not a human, interest in the young man.

"It is Dr. Rappaccini!" whispered the professor
when the stranger had passed. " Has he ever seen
your face before ? "

" Not that I know," answered Giovanni, starting at
the name.

" He has seen you! he must have seen you ! " said
Baglioni, hastily. " For some purpose or other, this
man of science is making a study of you. I know
that look of his ! It is the same that coldly illumi
nates his face as he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a

RAPPACCINI1 S DAUGHTER. 125

butterfly, which, in pursuance of some experiment, he
has killed by the perfume of a flower ; a look as deep
as Nature itself, but without Nature's warmth of love.
Signor (riovanni, I will stake my life upon it, you are
the subject of one of Rappaccini's experiments ! "

"Will you make a fool of me?" cried Giovanni,
passionately. " That, signer professor, were an un
toward experiment."

" Patience ! patience ! " replied the imperturbable
professor. " I tell thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rap-
paccini has a scientific interest in thee. Thou hast
fallen into fearful hands ! And the Signora Beatrice,
— what part does she act in this mystery ? "

But Guasconti, finding Baglioni's pertinacity intol
erable, here broke away, and was gone before the pro
fessor could again seize his arm. He looked after the
young man intently and shook his head.

"This must not be," said Baglioni to himself.
" The youth is the son of my old friend, and shall not
come to any harm from which the arcana of medical
science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insuffer
able an impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to snatch
the lad out of my own hands, as I may say, and make
use of him for his infernal experiments. This daugh
ter of his ! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most
learned Rappaccini, I may foil you where you little
dream of it ! "

Meanwhile Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route,
and at length found himself at the door of his lodg
ings. As he crossed the threshold he was met by old
Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently
desirous to attract his attention ; vainly, however, as
the ebullition of his feelings had momentarily subsided
into a cold and dull vacuity. He turned his eyes full

126 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

upon the withered face that was puckering itself into
a smile, but seemed to behold it not. The old dame,
therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak.

"Signor ! signor ! " whispered she, still with a smile
over the whole breadth of her visage, so that it looked
not unlike a grotesque carving in wood, darkened by
centuries. " Listen, signor ! There is a private en
trance into the garden ! "

" What do you say ? " exclaimed Giovanni, turning
quickly about, as if an inanimate thing should start
into feverish life. " A private entrance into Dr. Rap-
paccini's garden ? "

" Hush ! hush ! not so loud ! " whispered Lisabetta,
putting her hand over his mouth. "Yes; into the
worshipful doctor's garden, where you may see all his
fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would
give gold to be admitted among those flowers."

Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.

" Show me the way," said he.

A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with
Baglioni, crossed his mind, that this interposition of
old Lisabetta might perchance be connected with the
intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the pro
fessor seemed to suppose that Dr. Rappaccini was
involving him. But such a suspicion, though it dis
turbed Giovanni, was inadequate to restrain him. The
instant that he was aware of the possibility of ap
proaching Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of
his existence to do so. It mattered not whether she
were angel or demon ; he was irrevocably within her
sphere, and must obey the law that whirled him on
ward, in ever-lessening circles, towards a result which
he did not attempt to foreshadow ; and yet, strange to
say, there came across him a sudden doubt whether

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 12?

fchis intense interest on his part were not delusory;
whether it were really of so deep and positive a nature
as to justify him in now thrusting himself into an in
calculable position ; whether it were not merely the
fantasy of a young man's brain, only slightly or not at
all connected with his heart.

He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again
went on. His withered guide led him along several
obscure passages, and finally undid a door, through
which, as it was opened, there came the sight and
sound of rustling leaves, with the broken sunshine
glimmering among them. Giovanni stepped forth,
and, forcing himself through the entanglement of a
shrub that wreathed its tendrils over the hidden en
trance, stood beneath his own window in the open area
of Dr. Rappaccini's garden.

How often is it the case that, when impossibilities
have come to pass and dreams have condensed their
misty substance into tangible realities, we find our
selves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid cir
cumstances which it would have been a delirium of
joy or agony to anticipate ! Fate delights to thwart
us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush
upon the scene, and lingers sluggishly behind when an
appropriate adjustment of events would seem to sum
mon his appearance. So was it now with Giovanni.
Day after day his pulses had throbbed with feverish
blood at the improbable idea of an interview with Be
atrice, and of standing with her, face to face, in this
very garden, basking in the Oriental sunshine of her
beauty, and snatching from her full gaze the mystery
which he deemed the riddle of his own existence. But
now there was a singular and untimely equanimity
within his breast. He threw a glance around the

128 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

garden to discover if Beatrice or her father were pres.
ent, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical
observation of the plants.

The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him ;
their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even
unnatural. There was hardly an individual shrub
which a wanderer, straying by himself through a for
est, would not have been startled to find growing wild,
as if an unearthly face had glared at him out of the
thicket. Several also would have shocked a delicate
instinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating
that there had been such commixture, and, as it were,
adultery, of various vegetable species, that the produc
tion was no longer of God's making, but the mon
strous offspring of man's depraved fancy, glowing with
only an evil mockery of beauty. They were probably
the result of experiment, which in one or two cases
had succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely
into a compound possessing the questionable and omi
nous character that distinguished the whole growth of
the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized but two or
three plants in the collection, and those of a kind that
he well knew to be poisonous. While busy with these
contemplations he heard the rustling of a silken gar
ment, and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from
beneath the sculptured portal.

Giovanni had not considered with himself what
should be his deportment; whether he should apolo
gize for his intrusion into the garden, or assume that
he was there with the privity at least, if not by the de
sire, of Dr. Rappaccini or his daughter ; but Beatrice's
manner placed him at his ease, though leaving him
fctill in doubt by what agency he had gained admit
tance. She came lightly along the path and met him

RAPPACCINTS DAUGHTER. 129

near the broken fountain. There was surprise in her
face, but brightened by a simple and kind expression
of pleasure.

"You are a connoisseur in flowers, signer," said Bea
trice, with a smile, alluding to the bouquet which he
had flung her from the window. "It is no marvel,
therefore, if the sight of my father's rare collection has
tempted you to take a nearer view. If he were here,
he could tell you many strange and interesting facts
as to the nature and habits of these shrubs ; for he
has spent a lifetime in such studies, and this garden
is his world."

" And yourself, lady," observed Giovanni, " if fame
says true, — you likewise are deeply skilled in the vir
tues indicated by these rich blossoms and these spicy
perfumes. Would you deign to be my instructress, I
should prove an apter scholar than if taught by Sig
nor Rappaccini himself."

" Are there such idle rumors ? " asked Beatrice,
with the music of a pleasant laugh. " Do people say
that I am skilled in my father's science of plants ?
What a jest is there ! No ; though I have grown up
among these flowers, I know no more of them than
their hues and perfume ; and sometimes methinks I
. would fain rid myself of even that small knowledge.
There are many flowers here, and those not the least
brilliant, that shock and offend me when they meet my
eye. But pray, signor, do not believe these stories
about my science. Believe nothing of me save what
you see with your own eyes."

" And must I believe all that I have seen with my
own eyes ? " asked Giovanni, pointedly, while the rec
ollection of former scenes made him shrink. "No,

VOL. II. 9

130 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

signora; you demand too little of me. Bid me be*
lieve nothing save what comes from your own lips."

It would appear that Beatrice understood him.
There came a deep flush to her cheek ; but she looked
full into Giovanni's eyes, and responded to his gaze of
uneasy suspicion with a queenlike haughtiness.

" I do so bid you, signor," she replied. " Forget
whatever you may have fancied in regard to me. If
true to the outward senses, still it may be false in its
essence ; but the words of Beatrice Rappaccini's lips
are true from the depths of the heart outward. Those
you may believe."

A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed
upon Giovanni's consciousness like the light of truth
itself ; but while she spoke there was a fragrance in
the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful, though
evanescent, yet which the young man, from an indefin
able reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs.
It might be the odor of the flowers. Could it be Bea
trice's breath which thus embalmed her words with a
strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart ?
A faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni and
flitted away ; he seemed to gaze through the beautiful
girl's eyes into her transparent soul, and felt no more
doubt or fear.

The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice's
manner vanished ; she became gay, and appeared to
derive a pure delight from her communion with the
youth not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island
might have felt conversing with a voyager from the
civilized world. Evidently her experience of life had
been confined within the limits of that garden. She
talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or
summer clouds, and now asked questions in reference

RAPPACCINPS DAUGHTER. 131

to the city, or Giovanni's distant home, his friends, his
mother, and his sisters — questions indicating such se-
elusion, and such lack of familiarity with modes and
forms, that Giovanni responded as if to an infant.
Her spirit gushed out before him like a fresh rill that
was just catching its first glimpse of the sunlight and
wondering at the reflections of earth and sky which
were flung into its bosom. There came thoughts, too,
from a deep source, and fantasies of a gemlike brill
iancy, as if diamonds and rubies sparkled upward
among the bubbles of the fountain. Ever and anon
there gleamed across the young man's mind a sense of
wonder that he should be walking side by side with
the being who had so wrought upon his imagination,
whom he had idealized in such hues of terror, in whom
he had positively witnessed such manifestations of
dreadful attributes, — that he should be conversing with
Beatrice like a brother, and should find her so hu
man and so maidenlike. But such reflections were
only momentary ; the effect of her character was too
real not to make itself familiar at once.

In this free intercourse they had strayed thrqugh the
garden, and now, after many turns among its avenues,
were come to the shattered fountain, beside which grew
the magnificent shrub, with its treasury of glowing
blossoms. A fragrance was diffused from it which
Giovanni recognized as identical with that which he
had attributed to Beatrice's breath, but incomparably
more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it, Giovanni
beheld her press her hand to her bosom as if her heart
were throbbing suddenly and painfully.

" For the first time in my life," murmured she, ad
dressing the shrub, " I had forgotten thee."

" I remember, signora," said Giovanni, " that you

132 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

once promised to reward me with one of these living
gems for the bouquet which I had the happy boldness
to fling to your feet. Permit me now to pluck it as a
memorial of this interview."

He made a step towards the shrub with extended
hand ; but Beatrice darted forward, vitering a shriek
that went through his heart like a dagger. She caught
his hand and drew it back with the whole force of
her slender figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling
through his fibres.

" Touch it not ! " exclaimed she, in a voice of agony.
" Not for thy life ! It is fatal ! "

Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and van
ished beneath the sculptured portal. As Giovanni
followed her with his eyes, he beheld the emaciated
figure and pale intelligence of Dr. Rappaccini, who
had been watching the scene, he knew not how long,
within the shadow of the entrance.

No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than
the image of Beatrice came back to his passionate
musings, invested with all the witchery that had been
gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of her,
and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of
girlish womanhood. She was human ; her nature was
endowed with all gentle and feminine qualities ; she was
worthiest to be worshipped ; she was capable, surely,
on her part, of the height and heroism of love. ( Those
tokens which he had hitherto considered as proofs of a
frightful peculiarity in her physical and moral system
were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle sophistry of
passion transmitted into a golden crown of enchant
ment, rendering Beatrice the more admirable by so
much as she was the more unique. Whatever had
looked ugly was now beautiful ; or, if incapable of

RAPPACCINl'S DAUGHTER. 133

such a change, it stole away and hid itself among those
shapeless half ideas which throng the dim region be
yond the daylight of our perfect consciousness. Thus
did he spend the night, nor fell asleep until the dawn
had begun to awake the slumbering flowers in Dr.
Rappaccini's garden, whither Giovanni's dreams doubt
less led him. Up rose the sun in his due season, and,
flinging his beams upon the young man's eyelids,
awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly
aroused, he became sensible of a burning and tingling
agony in his hand — in his right hand — the very hand
which Beatrice had grasped in her own when he was
on the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers.
On the back of that hand there was now a purple print
like that of four small fingers, and the likeness of a
slender thumb upon his wrist.

Oh, how stubbornly does love, — or even that cun
ning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagi
nation, but strikes no depth of root into the heart, —
how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment
comes when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist !
Giovanni wrapped a handkerchief about his hand and
wondered what evil thing had stung him, and soon
forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice.

After the first interview, a second was in the inevi
table course of what we call fate. A third ; a fourth ;
and a meeting with Beatrice in the garden was no
longer an incident in Giovanni's daily life, but the
whole space in which he might be said to live ; for the
anticipation and memory of that ecstatic hour made up
the remainder. Nor was it otherwise with the daugh
ter of Rappaccini. She watched for the youth's ap
pearance, and flew to his side with confidence as unre*
served as if they had been playmates from early

134 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

infancy — as if they were such playmates still. If,
by any unwonted chance, he failed to come at the ap
pointed moment, she stood beneath the window and
sent up the rich sweetness of her tones to float around
him in his chamber and echo and reverberate through
out his heart : " Giovanni ! Giovanni ! Why tarriest
thou ? Come down ! " And down he hastened into
that Eden of poisonous flowers.

But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still
a reserve in Beatrice's demeanor, so rigidly and inva
riably sustained that the idea of infringing it scarcely
occurred to his imagination. By all appreciable signs,
they loved ; they had looked love with eyes that con
veyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into
the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be
whispered by the way ; they had even spoken love in
those gushes of passion when their spirits darted forth
in articulated breath like tongues of long-hidden flame ;
and yet there had been no seal of lips, no clasp of
hands, nor any slightest caress such as love claims and
hallows. He had never touched one of the gleaming
ringlets of her hair ; her garment — so marked was
the physical barrier between them — had never been
waved against him by a breeze. On the few occasions
when Giovanni had seemed tempted to overstep the
limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal wore
such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself,
that not a spoken word was requisite to repel him. At
such times he was startled at the horrible suspicions
that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart
and stared him in the face ; his love grew thin and
faint as the morning mist , his doubts alone had sub
stance. But, when Beatrice's face brightened again
after the momentary shadow, she was transformed at

RAPPACCINrS DAUGHTER. 135

once from the mysterious, questionable being whom he
had watched with so much awe and horror ; she was
now the beautiful and unsophisticated girl whom he
felt that his spirit knew with a certainty beyond all
other knowledge.

A considerable time had now passed since Giovan
ni's last meeting with Baglioni. One morning, how
ever, he was disagreeably surprised by a visit from the
professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole
weeks, and would willingly have forgotten still longer.
Given up as he had long been to a pervading excite
ment, he could tolerate no companions except upon
condition of their perfect sympathy with his present
state of feeling. Such sympathy was not to be ex
pected from Professor Baglioni.

The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments
about the gossip of the city and the university, and
then took up another topic.

" I have been reading an old classic author lately,"
said he, "and met with a story that strangely inter
ested me. Possibly you may remember it. It is of an
Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a pres
ent to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the
dawn and gorgeous as the sunset ; but what especially
distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her
breath — richer than a garden of Persian roses. Al
exander, as was natural to a youthful conqueror, fell
in love at first sight with this magnificent stranger ;
but a certain sage physician, happening to be present,
discovered a terrible secret in regard to her."

"And what was that?" asked Giovanni, turning
his eyes down-ward to avoid those of the professor.

" That this lovely woman," continued Baglioni, with
emphasis, " had been nourished with poisons from hei

136 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

birth upward, until her whole nature was so imbued
with them that she herself had become the deadliest
poison in existence. Poison was her element of life.
With that rich perfume of her breath she blasted the
very air. Her love would have been poison — her em
brace death. Is not this a marvellous tale ? "

"A childish fable," answered Giovanni, nervously
starting from his chair. " I marvel how your worship
finds time to read such nonsense among your graver
studies."

" By the by," said the professor, looking uneasily
about him, " what singular fragrance is this in your
apartment ? Is it the perfume of your gloves ? It is
faint, but delicious ; and yet, after all, by no means
agreeable. Were I to breathe it long, methinks it
would make me ill. It is like the breath of a flower ;
but I see no flowers in the chamber."

"Nor are there any," replied Giovanni, who had
turned pale as the professor spoke ; " nor, I think, is
there any fragrance except in your worship's imagina
tion. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the
sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this
manner. The recollection of a perfume, the bare idea
of it, may easily be mistaken for a present reality."

" Ay ; but my sober imagination does not often play
such tricks," said Baglioni ; " and, were I to fancy
any kind of odor, it would be that of some vile apothe
cary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to
be imbued. Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as
I have heard, tinctures his medicaments with odors
richer than those of Araby. Doubtless, likewise, the
fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to
tier patients with draughts as sweet as a maiden's
breath ; but woe to him that sips them I "

RAPPACCINl'S DAUGHTER. 137

Giovanni's face evinced many contending emotions.
The tone in which the professor alluded to the pure
and lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a torture to
his soul ; and yet the intimation of a view of her char
acter, opposite to his own, gave instantaneous distinct
ness to a thousand dim suspicions, which now grinned
at him like so many demons. But he strove hard to
quell them and to respond to Baglioni with a true
lover's perfect faith.

" Signer professor," said he, " you were my father's
friend; perchance, too, it is your purpose to act a
friendly part towards his son. I would fain feel
nothing towards you save respect and deference ; but
I pray you to observe, signor, that there is one subject
on which we must not speak. You know not the Sig-
nora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore, estimate the
wrong — the blasphemy, I may even say — that is
offered to her character by a light or injurious word."

" Giovanni ! my poor Giovanni ! " answered the pro
fessor, with a calm expression of pity, " I know this
wretched girl far better than yourself. You shall
hear the truth in respect to the poisoner Rappaccini
and his poisonous daughter ; yes, poisonous as she is
beautiful. Listen ; for, even should you do violence to
my gray hairs, it shall not silence me. That old fable
of the Indian woman has become a truth by the deep
and deadly science of Rappaccini and in the person of
the lovely Beatrice."

Giovanni groaned and hid his face.

" Her father," continued Baglioni, " was not re
strained by natural affection from offering up his child
in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane zeal
for science ; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a
\nan of science as ever distilled his own heart in an

138 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

alembic. What, then, will be your fate ? Beyond a
doubt you are selected as the material of some new
experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; per
haps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what
he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will
hesitate at nothing."

" It is a dream," muttered Giovanni to himself ;
" surely it is a dream."

" But," resumed the professor, " be of good cheer,
son of my friend. It is not yet too late for the rescue.
Possibly we may even succeed in bringing back this
miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature,
from which her father's madness has estranged her.
Behold this little silver vase ! It was wrought by the
hands of the renowned Benvenuto Cellini, and is well
worthy to be a love gift to the fairest dame in
Italy. But its contents are invaluable. One little
sip of this antidote would have rendered the most
virulent poisons of the Borgias innocuous. Doubt not
that it will be as efficacious against those of Rappac-
ciiii. Bestow the vase, and the precious liquid within
it, on your Beatrice, and hopefully await the result."

Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver
vial on the table and withdrew, leaving what he had
said to produce its effect upon the young man's mind.

" We will thwart Rappaccini yet," thought he,
chuckling to himself, as he descended the stairs;
" but, let us confess the truth of him, he is a wonder
ful man — a wonderful man indeed ; a vile empiric,
however, in his practice, and therefore not to be tol
erated by those who respect the good old rules of the
medical profession."

Throughout Giovanni's whole acquaintance with
Beatrice, he had occasionally, as we have said, been

RAPPACCINPS DAUGHTER. 139

haunted by dark surmises as to her character ; yet so
thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a
simple, natural, most affectionate, and guileless crea-
hire, that the image now held up by Professor Baglioni
looked as strange and incredible as if it were hot in
accordance with his own original conception. True,
there were ugly recollections connected with his first
glimpses of the beautiful girl ; he could not quite for
get the bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the
insect that perished amid the sunny air, by no osten
sible agency save the fragrance of her breath. These
incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her
character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were
acknowledged as mistaken fantasies, by whatever testi
mony of the senses they might appear to be substan
tiated. There is something truer and more real than
what we can see with the eyes and touch with the
finger. On such better evidence had Giovanni founded
his confidence in Beatrice, though rather by the neces
sary force of her high attributes than by any deep and
generous faith on his part. But now his spirit was
incapable of sustaining itself at the height to which
the early enthusiasm of passion had exalted it ; he fell
down, grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled
therewith the pure whiteness of Beatrice's image. Not
that he gave her up ; he did but distrust. He resolved
to institute some decisive test that should satisfy him,
once for all, whether there were those dreadful pe
culiarities in her physical nature which could not be
supposed to exist without some corresponding mon
strosity of soul. His eyes, gazing down afar, might
have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, and the
flowers ; but if he could witness, at the distance of
a few paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and health-

140 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ful flower in Beatrice's hand, there would be room for
no further question. With this idea he hastened to the
florist's and purchased a bouquet that was still gemmed
with the morning dew-drops.

It was now the customary hour of his daily inter
view with Beatrice. Before descending into the gar
den, Giovanni failed not to look at his figure in the
mirror, — a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young
man, yet, as displaying itself at that troubled and
feverish moment, the token of a certain shallowness of
feeling and insincerity of character. He did gaze,
however, and said to himself that his features had
never before possessed so rich a grace, nor his eyes
such vivacity, nor his cheeks so warm a hue of super
abundant life.

" At least," thought he, " her poison has not yet
insinuated itself into my system. I am no flower to
perish in her grasp."

With that thought he turned his eyes on the
bouquet, which he had never once laid aside from his
hand. A thrill of indefinable horror shot through his
frame on perceiving that those dewy flowers were al
ready beginning to droop ; they wore the aspect of
things that had been fresh and lovely yesterday. Gio
vanni grew white as marble, and stood motionless be
fore the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as
at the likeness of something frightful. He remem
bered Baglioni's remark about the fragrance that
seemed to pervade fche chamber. It must have been
the poison in his breath ! Then he shuddered — shud
dered at himself. Recovering from his stupor, he
began to watch with curious eye a spider that was
busily at work hanging its web from the antique cor
nice of the apartment, crossing and recrossing the

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 141

artful system of interwoven lines — as vigorous and
active a spider as ever dangled from an old ceiling.
Giovanni bent towards the insect, and emitted a deep,
long breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil ; the
web vibrated with a tremor originating in the body
of the small artisan. Again Giovanni sent forth a
breath, deeper, longer, and imbued with a venomous
feeling out of his heart: he knew not whether he
were wicked, or only desperate. The spider made a
convulsive gripe with his limbs and hung dead across
the window.

" Accursed ! accursed ! " muttered Giovanni, ad
dressing himself. " Hast thou grown so poisonous
that tliis deadly insect perishes by thy breath ? "

At that moment a rich, sweet voice came floating
up from the garden.

" Giovanni ! Giovanni ! It is past the hour ! Why
tarriest thou ? Come down ! "

" Yes," muttered Giovanni again. " She is the only
being whom my breath may not slay ! Would that it
might!"

He rushed down, and in an instant was standing be
fore the bright and loving eyes of Beatrice. A mo
ment ago his wrath and despair had been so fierce that
he could have desired nothing so much as to wither
her by a glance ; but with her actual presence there
came influences which had too real an existence to be
at once shaken off : recollections of the delicate and
benign power of her feminine nature, which had so
often enveloped him in a religious calm ; recollections
of many a holy and passionate outgush of her heart,
when the pure fountain had been unsealed from its
depths and made visible in its transparency to his
mental eye ; recollections which, had Giovanni known

142 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

how to estimate them, would have assured him that all
this ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and
that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gath
ered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel.
Incapable as he was of such high faith, still her pres
ence had not utterly lost its magic. Giovanni's rage
was quelled into an aspect of sullen insensibility.
Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immediately
felt that there was a gulf of blackness between them
which neither he nor she could pass. They walked on
together, sad and silent, and came thus to the marble
fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, in the
midst of which grew the shrub that bore gem-like
blossoms. Giovanni was affrighted at the eager en-
'joyment — the appetite, as it were — with which he
found himself inhaling the fragrance of the flowers.

" Beatrice," asked he, abruptly, " whence came this
shrub?"

"My father created it," answered she, with sim
plicity.

" Created it ! created it ! " repeated Giovanni.
" What mean you, Beatrice ? "

" He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets
of Nature," replied Beatrice ; " and, at the hour when
I first drew breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the
offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was
but his earthly child. Approach it not ! " continued
she, observing with terror that Giovanni was drawing
nearer to the shrub. " It has qualities that you little
dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni, — I grew up and
blossomed with the plant and was nourished with its
breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human
affection ; for, alas ! — hast thou not suspected it ? — *
there was an awful doom."

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 143

Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that
Beatrice paused and trembled. But her faith in his
tenderness reassured her, and made her blush that she
had doubted for an instant.

" There was an awful doom," she continued, " the
effect of my father's fatal love of science, which es
tranged me from all society of my kind. Until
Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, oh, how lonely
was thy poor Beatrice ! "

" Was it a hard doom ? " asked Giovanni, fixing his
eyes upon her.

" Only of late have I known how hard it was," an
swered she, tenderly. " Oh, yes ; but my heart was
torpid, and therefore quiet."

Giovanni's rage broke forth from his sullen gloom
like a lightning flash out of a dark cloud.

" Accursed one ! " cried he, with venomous scorn
and anger. "And, finding thy solitude wearisome,
thou hast severed me likewise from all the warmth of
life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable
horror ! "

" Giovanni ! " exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large
•bright eyes upon his face. The force of his words had
not found its way into her mind ; she was merely thun
derstruck.

" Yes, poisonous thing ! " repeated Giovanni, beside
himself with passion. "Thou hast done it! Thou
hast blasted me ! Thou hast filled my veins with poi
son ! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loath
some and deadly a creature as thyself — a world's
wonder of hideous monstrosity ! Now, if our breath
be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us
join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so
die!"

144 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" What has befallen me ? " murmured Beatrice, witlb
a low moan out of her heart. " Holy Virgin, pity me,
a poor heart-broken child ! "

" Thou, — dost thou pray ? " cried Giovanni, still
with the same fiendish scorn. " Thy very prayers, as
they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with
death. Yes, yes ; let us pray ! Let us to church and
dip our fingers in the holy water at the portal ! They
that come after us will perish as by a pestilence ! Let
us sign crosses in the air ! It will be scattering curses
abroad in the likeness of holy symbols ! "

" Giovanni," said Beatrice, calmly, for her grief
was beyond passion, " why dost thou join thyself with
me thus in those terrible words ? I, it is true, am the
horrible thing thou namest me. But thou, — what hast
thou to do, save with one other shudder at my hideous
misery to go forth out of the garden and mingle with
thy race, and forget that there ever crawled on earth
such a monster as poor Beatrice ? "

"Dost thou pretend ignorance?" asked Giovanni,
scowling upon her. "Behold! this power have I
gained from the pure daughter of Rappaccini."

There was a swarm of summer insects flitting
through the air in search of the food promised by the
flower odors of the fatal garden. They circled round
Giovanni's head, and were evidently attracted towards
him by the same influence which had drawn them for
an instant within the sphere of several of the shrubs.
He sent forth a breath among them, and smiled bit
terly at Beatrice as at least a score of the insects fell
dead upon the ground.

" I see it ! I see it ! " shrieked Beatrice. " It is my
father's fatal science ! No, no, Giovanni ; it was not 1 1
Never ! never I I dreamed only to love thee and be

RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER. 145

with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away,
leaving but thine image in mine heart ; for, Giovanni,
believe it, though my body be nourished with poison,
my spirit is God's creature, and craves love as its daily
food. But my father, — he has united us in this fear
ful sympathy. Yes; spurn me, tread upon me, kill
me ! Oh, what is death after such words as thine ?
But it was not I. Not for a world of bliss would I
have done it."

Giovanni's passion had exhausted itself in its out
burst from his lips. There now came across him a
sense, mournful, and not without tenderness, of the
intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice
and himself. They stood, as it were, in an utter soli
tude, which would be made none the less solitary by
the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then,
the desert of humanity around them to press this in
sulated pair closer together ? If they should be cruel
to one another, who was there to be kind to them ?
Besides, thought Giovanni, might there not still be a
hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary
nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice,
by the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy
spirit, that could dream of an earthly union and
earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love had
been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice's love by Gio
vanni's blighting words ! No, no ; there could be no
such hope. She must pass heavily, with that broken
heart, across the borders of Time — she must bathe
her hurts in some fount of paradise, and forget her
grief in the light of immortality, and there be well.

But Giovanni did not know it.

"Dear Beatrice," said he, approaching her, while
she shrank away as always at his approach, but no*

VOL. II- 10

146 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

with a different impulse, " dearest Beatrice, our fate is
not yet so desperate. Behold! there is a medicine,
potent, as a wise physician has assured me, and almost
divine in its efficacy. It is composed of ingredients
the most opposite to those by which thy awful father
has brought this calamity upon thee and me. It is
distilled of blessed herbs. Shall we not quaff it to
gether, and thus be purified from evil?"

" Give it me ! " said Beatrice, extending her hand
to receive the little silver vial which Giovanni toot
from his bosom. She added, with a peculiar empha
sis, " I will drink ; but do thou await the result."

She put Baglioni's antidote to her lips ; and, at the
same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from
the portal and came slowly towards the marble fount
ain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed
to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful
youth and maiden, as might an artist who should spend
his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary
and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused ;
his bent form grew erect with conscious power; he
spread out his hands over them in the attitude of a
father imploring a blessing upon his children; but
those were the same hands that had thrown poison
into the stream of their lives. Giovanni trembled.
Beatrice shuddered nervously, and pressed her hand
upon her heart.

"My daughter," said Rappaccini, "thou art no
longer lonely in the world. Pluck one of those pre
cious gems from thy sister shrub and bid thy bride
groom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him
now. My science and the sympathy between thee and
him have so wrought within his system that he no\?
stands apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter

EAPPACCINPS DAUGHTER. 147

tf my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass
on, then, through the world, most dear to one another
and dreadful to all besides ! "

" My father," said Beatrice, feebly, — and still as
she spoke she kept her hand upon her heart,—
"wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom
upon thy child?"

" Miserable ! " exclaimed Rappaccini. " What mean
you, foolish girl ? Dost thou deem it misery to be en
dowed with marvellous gifts against which no power
nor strength could avail an enemy — misery, to be
able to quell the mightiest with a breath — misery, tc
be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou,
then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman,
exposed to all evil and capable of none ? "

" I would fain have been loved, not feared,"* mur
mured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. " But
now it matters not. I am going, father, where the evil
which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will
pass away like a dream — like the fragrance of these
poisonous flowers, which will no longer taint my breath
among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni ! Thy
words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but
they, too, will fall away as I ascend. Oh, was there
not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in
mine ? "

To Beatrice, — so radically had her earthly part
been wrought upon by Rappacciiii's skill, — as poison
had been life, so the powerful antidote was death;
and thus the poor victim of- man's ingenuity and of
thwarted nature, and of the fatality that attends all
Buch efforts of perverted wisdom, perished there, at
the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that mo-

148

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ment Professor Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the
window, and called loudly, in a tone of triumph mixed
with horror, to the thunderstricken man of science, —
" Rappaccini ! Rappaccini ! and is this the upshot
of your experiment 1"

MRS. BULLFROG

IT makes me melancholy to see how like fools some
very sensible people act in the matter of choosing
wives. They perplex their judgments by a most undue
attention to little niceties of personal appearance, hab
its, disposition, and other trifles which concern nobody
but the lady herself. An unhappy gentleman, resolv
ing to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart
and hand till both get so old and withered that no tol
erable woman will accent them. Now this is the very
height of absurdity. /A kind Providence has so skil
fully adapted sex to sex and the mass of individuals
to each other, that, with certain obvious exceptions,
any male and female may be moderately happy in the
married state. The true rule is to ascertain that the
match is fundamentally a good one, and then to take
it for granted that all minor objections, should there
be such, will vanish, if you let them alone. Only put
yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matri
monial bliss, and it is scarcely to be imagined what
miracles, in the way of recognizing smaller incongrui
ties, connubjaLlove will effect.^

For my own part I freely"confess that, in my bach
elorship, I was precisely such an over-curiojasL^imple-
toii as I now advise the reader not to be. j My early
habits had gifted me witn a feminine sensiBiIity and
too exquisite refinement. I was the accomplished
graduate of a dry goods store, where, by dint of min
istering to the whims of fine ladies, and suiting silken

150 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

hose to delicate limbs, and handling satins, ribbons,
chintzes, calicoes, tapes, gauze, and cambric needles, I
grew up a very ladylike sort of a gentleman. It is
not assuming too much to affirm that the ladies them
selves were hardly so ladylike as Thomas Bullfrog. So
painfully acute was my sense of female imperfection,
and such varied excellence did I require in the woman
whom I could love, that there was an awful risk of my
getting no wife at all, or of being driven to perpetrate
matrimony with my own image in the looking-gl
Besides the fundamental principle already hinted al
I demanded the fresh bloom of youth, ^pearly
glossy ringlets, and the whole list of lovely items, with
the utmost delicacy of habits and sentiments, a silken
texture of mind, and, above all, a virgin heart, f^a
word, if a young angel just from paradise, yet dressed
in earthly fashion, had come and offered me her hand,
it is by no means certain that I should have takenUT"
There was every chance of my becoming a most mts^
erable old bachelor, when, by the best luck in the
world, I made a journey into another state, and was
smitten by, and smote again, and wooed, won, and
married, the present Mrs. Bullfrog, all in the space of
a fortnight. Owing to these extempore measures, I
not only gave my bride credit for certain perfections
which have not as yet come to light, but also over
looked a few trifling defects, which, however, glim
mered on my inception long before the close of the
honeymoon.. iTet, as there was no mistake about the
fundamental principle aforesaKLjIjigon learned, as will
beseen,toestimate Mrs^RnTTTrng's deficiencies and
superfluities at exactly their proper value.

The same morning that Mrs. Bullfrog and I came
together as a unit, we took two seats in the stage-coaeb

MRS. BULLFROG. 151

find began our journey towards my place of business.
There being no other passengers, we were as much
"alone aUd~Tt$-£ree to give vent to our raptures as if I
had hired a hack for .the matrimonial jaunt. My bride
looked charmingly in a" green silk calash and riding
\iabit of pelisse cloth ; and whenever her red lips
parted with a smile, each tooth appeared like an ines-
^tiinable pearl. Such was my passionate warmth tha
— we had rattled out of the village, gentle reader,
were lonely as Adam and Eve in paradise — I plead
guilty to no less freedom than a kiss. The gentle eye
of Mrs. Bullfrog scarcely rebuked me for the profana
tion. Emboldened by her indulgence, I threw back
the calash from her polished brow, and suffered my
fingers, white and delicate as her own, to stray among
those dark and glossy curls which realized my day
dreams of rich hair.

" My love," said Mrs. Bullfrog, tenderly, " you will
disarrange my curls."

" Oh, no, my sweet Laura ! " replied I, still playing
with the glossy ringlet. " Even your fair hand could
not manage a curl more delicately than mine. I pro
pose myself the pleasure of doing up your hair in
papers every evening at the same time with my own."

" Mr. Bullfrog," repeated she, " you must not dis
arrange my curls."

This was spoken in a more decided tone than I had
happened to hear, until then, from my gentlest of all
gentle brides. At the same time she put up her hand
and took mine prisoner ; but merely drew it away from
the forbidden ringlet, and then immediately released
it. Now, I am a fidgety little man, and always love to
have something in my fingers ; so that, Being^debarred
from my wife's curls, I looked about me for any othei

152 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

plaything! On the front seat of the coach there wag
one of tnose small baskets in which travelling ladies
who are too delicate to appear at a public table gen
erally carry a supply of gingerbread, biscuits and
cheese, cold ham, and other light refreshments, merely
to sustain nature to the journey's end. \^uch airy diet
will sometimes keep them in pretty goocl flesh for a
week together^ Laying hold of this same little basket,
I thrust my hand under the newspaper with which it
was carefully covered.

"What's this, my dear?" cried I; for the black
neck of a bottle had popped out of the basket.

" A bottle of Kalydor, Mr. Bullfrog," s*iftNtu#^ife,
coolly taking the basket from my hands and replacing
itjMi the front seat.

VTiiere^was no possibility of doubting my wife's
word ; but I never knew genuine Kalydor, such as I use
for my own complexion, to smell so much like cherry
brandy. I was about to express my fears that the
lotion would injure her skin, when an accident oc
curred which threatened more than a skin-deep injury.
Our Jehu had carelessly driven over a heap of gravel
and fairly capsized the coach, with the wheels in the
air and our heels where our heads should have been.
What became of my wits I cannot imagine ; they have
always had a perverse trick of deserting me" just when
they were most needed ; but so it chanced, that in the
confusion of our overthrow} I quite forgot that there
was a Mrs. Bullfrog in tBe world. ; Like many men's
wives,the good lady served her husband as a stepping-
stoneT/ I had scrambled out of the coach and was in
stinctively settling my cravat, when somebody brushed
roughly by me, and I heard a smart thwack upon the
coachman's ear.

MRS. BULLFROG. 153

" Take that, you villain ! " cried a strange, hoarse
Foice. " You have ruined me, you blackguard ! I
shall never be the woman I have been ! "

And then came a second thwack, aimed at the dri
ver's other ear ; but which missed it, and hit him on
the nose, causing a terrible effusion of blood. Now,
who or what fearful apparition was inflicting this pun
ishment on the poor^ fellow remained an impenetrable
mystery to me. jThe blows were given by a person of
grisly aspect, wi!h"*a head almost bald, and sunken
cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though
hardly to be classed in the gentler sex. There being
no teeth to modulate the voice, it had a mumbled
fierceness, not passionate, but stern, which absolutely
made rne quiver like calfs-foot jelly. Who could the
phantom Jje? /The most awful circumstance of the
affair is yet Iro be told : for this ogre, or whatever it
was, had a riding habit like Mrs. Bullfrog's,; and also
a green s.ilk Calash dangling down her back by the
strings. / In my terror and turmoil of mind I could
imagine nothing less than that the Old Nick, at the
moment of our overturn, had annihilated my wife and
jumped into her petticoats. This idea seemed the
more probable, since I could nowhere perceive Mrs.
Bullfrog alive, nor, though I looked very sharply about
the coach, could I detect any traces of that beloved
woman's dead body. There would have been a com
fort in giving her Christian burial.

" Come, sir, bestir yourself iTlelp this rascal to set
up the coach," said the hobgoblin to me ; then, with
a terrific screech to three countrymen at a distance,
"Here, you fellows, ain't you ashamed to stand off
tfhen a poor woman is in distress ? "

The countrymen, instead of fleeing for their lives,

154 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

came running jit full speed, and laid hold of the topsy
turvy coach. /I^also, though a small-sized man, went
to work like ascm of Anak. The coachman, too, with
the blood still streaming from his nose, tugged and
toiled most manfully, dreading, doubtless, that the
next blow might break his head. And yet, bemauled
as the poor fellow had been, he seemed to glance at
me with an eye of pity, as if my case were more de
plorable than his. fJBut I cherished a hope that all
would turn out a dreSm, and seized the opportunity,
as we raised the coach, to jam two of my fingers j
the wheel, trusting that the pain would awaken

"Why, here we are, all to rights again ! " exclaimed
a sweet voice behind. "Thank you for your assist
ance, gentlemen. My dear Mr. Bullfrog, how you
perspire ! Do let me wipe your face. Don't take this
little accident too much to heart, good driver. V?Ve
ought to be thankful that none of our necks are
broken.^/

" We might have spared one neck out of the three,"
muttered the driverfrubbing his ear and pulling his
nose, to ascertain whether he had been cuffed or not.
yWhy, the woman 's a witchTJ

I fear that the reader will not believe, yet ft is posi
tively a fact, that there stood Mrs. Bullfrog^' with her
glossy ringlets curling on her brow, and two rows of
orient pearls gleaming bet^en her parted lips, which
wore a most angelic smiLe^She had regained her rid
ing habit and calash fromlRe*'^isly phantom, and was,
in all respects, the lovely woman who had been sitting
by my side at the instant of our overturn. How she
had happened to disappear, and who had supplied her
place, and whence she did now return, were problems
too knotty for me to solve. There stood my wifo \j

MRS. BULLFROG. 155

Hiat was the one thing certain among a heap of mys
teries. Nothing remained but to help her^into the
coach, and plod on, through the journey of the day and
the journey of life, as comfortably as we could. As
the driver closed the door upon us, I heard him whis
per to the three countrymen, —

" How do you suppose a fellow feels shut up in the
cage TYTthji fihft %QT> ? "-

Of course this query could have no reference to my
situation. Yet, unreasonable as it may appear, I con
fess that my feelings were not altogether so ecstatic as
when I first called Mrs. Bullfrog mine. ^True, she was
a sweet woman and an angel of a wife ; but what if a
Gorgon should return, amid the transports of our con
nubial bliss, and take the angel's place. I recollected
the tale of a fairy, who half the time was a beautiful
woman and half the time a hideous monster. Had I
taken that very fairy to be the wife of my bosom ?
While such whims and chimeras were flitting across
my fancy I began to look askance at Mrs. Bullfrog,
almost expecting that the transformation would be
wrought before my eyes.

To divert my mind, I took up the newspaper which
had covered the little basket of refreshmentsfancl which
now lay at the bottom of the coach, blushing with a
deep-red stain and emitting a potent spirituous fume
from the contents of the broken bottle of Kalydor7\
The paper was two or three years old, but containea
an article of several columns, in which I soon grew
wonderfully interested. It was the report of a trial for
breach of promise of marriage, giving the testimony
in full, with fervid extracts from both the gentleman's
and lady's amatory correspondence. The deserted
damsel had personally appeared in court, and had

156 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

borne energetic evidence to her lover's perfidy and the
strength of her blighted affections. On the defend
ant's part there had been an attempt, though insuffi
ciently sustained, to blast the plaintiff's character, and
a plea, in mitigation of damages, on account of her
unamiable temper. A horrible idea was suggested by
the lady's name.

" Madam," said I, holding the newspaper before
Mrs. Bullfrog's eyes, — and, though a small, delicate,
and thin-visaged man, I feel assured that I looked
very terrific, — " madam," repeated I, through my
shut teeth, " were you the plaintiff in this cause ? "

" Oh, my dear Mr. Bullfrog," replied my wife,
sweetly, " I thought all the world knew that ! "

" Horror ! horror ! " exclaimed I, sinking back on

^Covering my face with both hands, I emitted a deep
anct deathlike groan, as if my tormented soul were
rending me asunder — I, the most exquisitely fastid
ious of men, and whose wife was to have been the
most delicate and refined of women, with all the
fresh dew-drops glittering on her virgin rosebud of
a heart !

I thought of the glossy ringlets and pearly teeth ; I
thought of the Kalydor ; I thought of the coachman's
bruised ear and bloody nose ; I thought of the tender
love secrets which she had whispered to the judge and
jury and a thousand tittering auditors, — and gave
another groan !>

" Mr. Buflfrbg," said my wife.

As I made no reply, she gently took my hands
within her own, removed them from my face, and fixed
her eyes steadfastly 011 mine.

"Mr. Bullfrog," said she, not unkindly, yet with all

MRS. BULLFROG. 157

the decision of her strong character, "let me advise
you to overcome this foolish weakness, and prove your
self, to the best of your ability, as good a husband ji£
I will be a wife. You have discovered, perhaps, some
little imperfections in your bride. Well, what did
you expect? Women are not angels. If they were,
they would go to heaven for husbands ; or, at least, be
more difficult in their choice on earth."

" But why conceal those imperfections ? " interposed
I, ta^mulously.

^Now, my love, are not you a most unreasonable
littlejman ? " said Mrs. Bullfrog, patting me on the
cheekj " Ought a woman to disclose her frailties ear
lier than the wedding day ? Few husbands, I assure
you, make the discovery in such good season, and still
fewer complain that these trifles are concealed too
long. s^ell, what a strange man you are ! Poh I yon
are joking;^

" But line suit for breach of promise ! " groaned I.

" Ah, and is that the rub ? " exclaimed my wife.
" Is it possible that you view that affair in an objec
tionable light? *Mr. Bullfrog, I never could have
dreamed it! Ts^tFan objection that I have trium
phantly defended myself against slander and vindicated
my purity in a court of justice ? Orylo you complain
because your wife has shown the*"proper spirit of a
woman, and punished the villain who trifled with her
jtions?"

But," persisted I, shrinking into a corner of the
coacn7 however, — for I did not know precisely how
much contradiction the proper spirit of a woman
wxmld endure, |— " but, my love, would it not have
been more digmfied to treat the villain with the silent
contempt he merited ? "

158 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" That is all very well, Mr. Bullfrog," said my wife,
slyly ; " but, in that case, where would have been the
five thousand dollars which are to stock your dry
goods store?"

"Mrs. Bullfrog, upon your honor," demanded I, as
if my life hung upon her words, " is there no mistake
about those five thousand dollars ? "

" Upon my word and honor there is none," replied
she. " The jury gave me every cent the rascal had ;
and I have kept it all for my dear Bullfrog."

" Then, thou dear woman," cried- 4^-with an over
whelming gush of tenderness, " let me fold thee to
my heart. ^The basis of matrimonial bliss is secure*
and all thy little defects and frailties are forgiven*
Nay, since the result has been so fortunate, I rejoice
at the wrongs which drove theje to this blessed law-
suit. Happy Bullfrog that I am !'*?

FIRE WORSHIP.

IT is a great revolution in social and domestic life,
and no less so in the life of a secluded student, this
almost universal exchange of the open fireplace for
the cheerless and ungenial stove. On such a morning
as now lowers around our old gray parsonage I miss
the bright face of my ancient friend, who was wont to
dance upon the hearth and play the part of more
familiar sunshine. It is sad to turn from the cloudy
sky and sombre landscape ; from yonder hill, with its
crown of rusty, black pines, the foliage of which is so
dismal in the absence of the sun ; that bleak pasture
land, and the broken surface of the potato field, with
the brown clods partly concealed by the snow fall of
last night ; the swollen and sluggish river, with ice-
incrusted borders, dragging its bluish-gray stream
along the verge of our orchard like a snake half tor
pid with the cold, — it is sad to turn from an outward
scene of so little comfort and find the same sullen in
fluences brooding within the precincts of my study.
Where is that brilliant guest, that quick and subtle
spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize
mankind and cheer them in their wintry desolation —
that comfortable inmate, whose smile, during eight
months of the year, was our sufficient consolation for
summer's lingering advance and early flight ? Alas !
blindly inhospitable, grudging the food that kept him
cheery and mercurial, we have thrust him into an iron
prison, and compel him to smoulder away his life on a

160 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

daily pittance which once would have been too scanty
for his breakfast. Without a metaphor, we now make
our fire in an air-tight stove, and supply it with some
half a dozen sticks of wood between dawn and night
fall.

I never shall be reconciled to this enormity. Truly
may it be said that the world looks darker for it. In
one way or another, here and there and all around us,
the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the pict
uresque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human
life. The domestic fire was a type of all these attri
butes, and seemed to bring might and majesty, and
wild Nature and a spiritual essence into our inmost
home, and yet to dwell with us in such friendliness
that its mysteries and marvels excited no dismay. The
same mild companion that smiled so placidly in our
faces was he that comes roaring out of .ZEtna and
rushes madly up the sky like a fiend breaking loose
from torment and fighting for a place among the upper
angels. He it is, too, that leaps from cloud to cloud
amid the crashing thunder storm. It was he whom
the Gheber worshipped with no unnatural idolatry •,
and it was he who devoured London and Moscow and
many another famous city ; and who loves to riot
through our own dark forests and sweep across our
prairies, and to whose ravenous maw, it is said, the
universe shall one day be given as a final feast. Mean
while he is the great artisan and laborer by whose aid
men are enabled to build a world within a world, or,
at least, to smooth down the rough creation which
Nature flung to us. He forges the mighty anchor and
every lesser instrument ; he drives the steamboat and
drags the rail-car ; and it was he — this creature of
terrible might, and so many-sided utility and all-comr

FIRE WORSHIP. 161

prehensive destructiveness — that used to be the cheer-
ful, homely friend of our wintry days, and whom we
have made the prisoner of this iron cage.

How kindly he was ! and, though the tremendous
agent of change, yet bearing himself with such gentle
ness, so rendering himself a part of all lifelong and
age-coeval associations, that it seemed as if he were
the great conservative of Nature. While a man was
true to the fireside, so long would he be true to country
and law, to the God whom his fathers worshipped, to
the wife of his youth, and to all things else which in
stinct or religion has taught us to consider sacred.
With how sweet humility did this elemental spirit per
form all needful offices for the household in which he
was domesticated ! He was equal to the concoction of
a grand dinner, yet scorned not to roast a potato or
toast a bit of cheese. How humanely did he cherish
the school-boy's icy fingers, and thaw the old man's
joints with a genial warmth which almost equalled the
glow of youth ! And how carefully did he dry the
cow-hide boots that had trudged through mud and
snow, and the shaggy outside garment stiff with frozen
sleet ! taking heed, likewise, to the comfort of the
faithful dog who had followed his master through the
storm. When did he refuse a coal to light a pipe, or
even a part of his own substance to kindle a neighbor's
fire ? And then at twilight, when laborer, or scholar,
or mortal of whatever age, sex, or degree, drew a chair
beside him and looked into his glowing face, how
acute, how profound, how comprehensive was his sym
pathy with the mood of each and all ! He pictured
forth their very thoughts. To the youthful he showed
the scenes of the adventurous life before them ; to the
aged the shadows of departed love and hope ; and if

VOL. II. 11

162 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

all earthly things had grown distasteful, he could glad:
den the fireside muser with golden glimpses of a better
world. And, amid this varied communion with the
human soul, how busily would the sympathizer, the
deep moralist, the painter of magic pictures be caus
ing the teakettle to boil !

Nor did it lessen the charm of his soft, familiar
courtesy and helpfulness that the mighty spirit, were
opportunity offered him, would run riot through the
peaceful house, wrap its inmates in his terrible em
brace, and leave nothing of them save their whitened
bones. This possibility of mad destruction only made
his domestic kindness the more beautiful and touch
ing. It was so sweet of him, being endowed with such
power, to dwell day after day, and one long lonesome
night after another, on the dusky hearth, only now and
then betraying his wild nature by thrusting his red
tongue out of the chimney top ! True, he had done
much mischief in the world, and was pretty certain to
do more ; but his warm heart atoned for all. He was
kindly to the race of man; and they pardoned his
characteristic imperfections.

The good old clergyman, my predecessor in this
mansion, was well acquainted with the comforts of the
fireside. His yearly allowance of wood, according to
the terms of his settlement, was no less than sixty
cords. Almost an annual forest was converted from
sound oak logs into ashes, in the kitchen, the parlor,
and this little study, where now an unworthy successor,
not in the pastoral office, but merely in his earthly
abode, sits scribbling beside an air-tight stove. I love
to fancy one of those fireside days while the good manf
a contemporary of the Kevolution, was in his early
prime, some five and sixty years ago. Before sunrise

FIRE WORSHIP. 163

doubtless, the blaze hovered upon the gray skirts of
night and dissolved the frostwork that had gathered
like a curtain over the small window panes. There is
something peculiar in the aspect of the morning fire
side : a fresher, brisker glare ; the absence of that
mellowness which can be produced only by half -con
sumed logs, and shapeless brands with the white ashes
on them, and mighty coals, the remnant of tree trunks
that the hungry elements have gnawed for hours. The
morning hearth, too, is newly swept, and the brazen
andirons well brightened, so that the cheerful fire may
see its face in them. Surely it was happiness, when
the pastor, fortified with a substantial breakfast, sat
down in his arm-chair and slippers and opened the
Whole Body of Divinity, or the Commentary on Job,
or whichever of his old folios or quartos might fall
within the range of his weekly sermons. It must have
been his own fault if the warmth and glow of this
abundant hearth did not permeate the discourse and
keep his audience comfortable in spite of the bitterest
northern blast that ever wrestled with the church stee
ple. He reads while the heat warps the stiff covers of
the volume ; he writes without numbness either in his
heart or fingers ; and, with unstinted hand, he throws
fresh sticks of wood upon the fire.

A parishioner comes in. With what warmth of be
nevolence — how should he be otherwise than warm in
any of his attributes? — does the minister bid him
welcome, and set a chair for him in so close proximity
to the hearth that soon the guest finds it needful to
rub his scorched shins with his great red hands ! The
melted snow drips from his steaming boots and bub
bles upon the hearth. His puckered forehead unravels
its entanglement of criss-cross wrinkles. We lose much

164 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

of the enjoyment of fireside heat without such an op
portunity of marking its genial effect upon those who
have been looking the inclement weather in the face.
In the course of the day our clergyman himself strides
forth, perchance to pay a round of pastoral visits ; or,
it may be, to visit his mountain of a wood-pile and
cleave the monstrous logs into billets suitable for the
fire. He returns with fresher life to his beloved hearth.
During the short afternoon the western sunshine comes
into the study and strives to stare the ruddy blaze out
of countenance, but with only a brief triumph, soon to
be succeeded by brighter glories of its rival. Beauti
ful it is to see the strengthening gleam, the deepening
light that gradually casts distinct shadows of the hu
man figure, the table, and the high-backed chairs upon
the opposite wall, and at length, as twilight comes on,
replenishes the room with living radiance and makes
life all rose color. Afar the wayfarer discerns the
flickering flame as it dances upon the windows, and
hails it as a beacon light of humanity, reminding him,
in his cold and lonely path, that the world is not all
snow and solitude and desolation. At eventide, prob
ably, the study was peopled with the clergyman's wife
and family, and children tumbled themselves upon the
hearth rug, and grave puss sat with her back to the
fire, or gazed, with a semblance of human meditation,
into its fervid depths. Seasonably the plenteous ashes
of the day were raked over the mouldering brands, and
from the heap came jets of flame, and an incense of
nightlong smoke creeping quietly up the chimney.

Heaven forgive the old clergyman! In his later
life, when for almost ninety winters he had been glad
dened by the firelight, — when it had gleamed upon
him from infancy to extreme age, and never without

FIRE WORSHIP. 165

brightening his spirits as well as his visage, and per
haps keeping him alive so long, — he had the heart to
brick up his chimney-place and bid farewell to the face
of his old friend forever, why did he not take an eter
nal leave of the sunshine too ? His sixty cords of wood
had probably dwindled to a far less ample supply in
modern times ; and it is certain that the parsonage
had grown crazy with time and tempest and pervious
to the cold ; but still it was one of the saddest tokens
of the decline and fall of open fireplaces that the gray
patriarch should have deigned to warm himself at an
air-tight stove.

And I, likewise, — who have found a home in this
•ancient owl's nest since its former occupant took his
heavenward flight, — I, to my shame, have put up
stoves in kitchen and parlor and chamber. Wander
where you will about the house, not a glimpse of the
earth-born, heaven-aspiring fiend of ^Etna, — him that
sports in the thunder storm, the idol of the Ghebers,
the devourer of cities, the forest rioter and prairie
sweeper, the future destroyer of our earth, the old
chimney-corner companion who mingled himself so
sociably with household joys and sorrows, — not a
glimpse of this mighty and kindly one will greet your
eyes. He is now an invisible presence. There is his
iron cage. Touch it and he scorches your fingers. He
delights to singe a garment or perpetrate any other lit
tle unworthy mischief ; for his temper is ruined by the
ingratitude of mankind, for whom he cherished such
warmth of feeling, and to whom he taught all their
arts, even that of making his own prison house. Ii>
his fits of rage he puffs volumes of smoke and noisome
gas through the crevices of the door, and shakes the
iron walls of his dungeon so as to overthrow the orna-

166 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

mental urn upon its summit. We tremble lest he
should break forth amongst us. Much of his time is
spent in sighs, burdened with unutterable grief, and
long drawn through the funnel. He amuses himself,
too, with repeating all the whispers, the moans, and
the louder utterances or tempestuous howls of the
wind ; so that the stove becomes a microcosm of the
aerial world. Occasionally there are strange combi
nations of sounds, — voices talking almost articulately
within the hollow chest of iron, — insomuch that f anc}r
beguiles me with the idea that my firewood must have
grown in that infernal forest of lamentable trees which
breathed their complaints to Dante. When the list
ener is half asleep he may readily take these voices
for the conversation of spirits and assign them an in
telligible meaning. Anon there is a pattering noise,
— drip, drip, drip, — as if a summer shower were fall
ing within the narrow circumference of the stove.

These barren and tedious eccentricities are all that
the air-tight stove can bestow in exchange for the in
valuable moral influences which we have lost by our
desertion of the open fireplace. Alas ! is this world
so very bright that we can afford to choke up such a
domestic fountain of gladsomeness, and sit down by
its darkened source without being conscious of a
gloom ?

It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long
continue what it has been, now that we have sub
tracted from it so important and vivifying an element
as firelight. The effects will be more perceptible on
our children and the generations that shall succeed
them than on ourselves, the mechanism of whose life
may remain unchanged, though its spirit be far other
than it was. The sacred trust of the household fire

FIRE WORSHIP. 167

has been transmitted in unbroken succession from the
earliest ages and faithfully cherished in spite of ever^
discouragement, such as the curfew law of the Norman
conquerors, until in these evil days physical science
has nearly succeeded in extinguishing it. But we at
least have our youthful recollections tinged with the
glow of the hearth, and our lifelong habits and asso
ciations arranged on the principle of a mutual bond
in the domestic fire. Therefore, though the sociable
friend be forever departed, yet in a degree he will be
spiritually present with us ; and still more will the
empty forms which were once full of his rejoicing
presence continue to rule our manners. We shall
draw our chairs together as we and our forefathers
have been wont for thousands of years back, and sit
around some blank and empty corner of the room,
babbling with unreal cheerfulness of topics suitable to
the homely fireside. A warmth from the past — from
the ashes of by-gone years and the raked-up embers
of long ago — will sometimes thaw the ice about our
hearts ; but it must be otherwise with our successors.
On the most favorable supposition, they will be ac
quainted with the fireside in no better shape than that
of the sullen stove ; and more probably they will have
grown up amid furnace heat in houses which might be
fancied to have their foundation over the infernal pit,
whence sulphurous steams and unbreathable exhala
tions ascend through the apertures of the floor. There
will be nothing to attract these poor children to one
centre. They will never behold one another through
fchat peculiar medium of vision — the ruddy gleam of
blazing wood or bituminous coal — which gives the
human spirit so deep an insight into its fellows and
melts all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts

168 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will
seek its separate corners, and never gather itself into
groups. The easy gossip ; the merry yet unambitious
jest ; the lifelike, practical discussion of real matters
in a casual way ; the soul of truth which is so often
incarnated in a simple fireside word, — will disappear
from earth. Conversation will contract the air of de
bate and all mortal intercourse be chilled with a fatal
frost.

In classic tunes, the exhortation to fight " pro aris
et focis," for the altars and the hearths, was consid
ered the strongest appeal that could be made to patri
otism. And it seemed an immortal utterance ; for all
subsequent ages and people have acknowledged its
•force and responded to it with the full portion of man
hood that Nature had assigned to each. Wisely were
the altar and the hearth conjoined in one mighty sen
tence ; for the hearth, too, had its kindred sanctity.
Religion sat down beside it, not in the priestly robes
which decorated and perhaps disguised her at the
altar, but arrayed in a simple matron's garb, and ut
tering her lessons with the tenderness of a mother's
voice and heart. The holy hearth! If any earthly
and material thing, or rather a divine idea embodied
in brick and mortar, might be supposed to possess the
permanence of moral truth, it was this. All revered
it. The man who did not put off his shoes upon this
holy ground would have deemed it pastime to trample
upon the altar. It has been our task to uproot the
hearth. What further reform is left for our children
to achieve, unless they overthrow the altar too ? And
by what appeal hereafter, when the breath of hostile
armies may mingle with the poor, cold breezes of otu
Country, shall we attempt to rouse up native valor?

FIRE WORSHIP. 169

Fight for your hearths ? There will be none through
out the land. FIGHT FOR YOUR STOVES ! Not I, in
faith. If in such a cause I strike a blow, it shall be
on the invader's part ; and Heaven grant that it may
shatter the abomination all to pieces.

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES.

BALMY Spring — weeks later than we expected and
months later than we longed for her — comes at last
to revive the moss on the roof and walls of our old
mansion. She peeps brightly into my study window,
inviting me to throw it open and create a summer at
mosphere by the intermixture of her genial breath
with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove. As
the casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the
innumerable forms of thought or fancy that have kept
me company in the retirement of this little chamber
during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather ; visions,
gay, grotesque, and sad ; pictures of real life, tinted
with Nature's homely gray and russet ; scenes in dream
land bedizened with rainbow hues which faded before
they were well laid on, all these may vanish now, and
leave me to mould a fresh existence out of sunshine.
Brooding Meditation may flap her dusky wings and
take her owl-like flight, blinking amid the cheerful
ness of noontide. Such companions befit the season
of frosted window panes and crackling fires, when the
blast howls through the black ash-trees of our avenue
and the drifting snow-storm chokes up the woodpaths
and fills the highway from stone-wall to stone-wall,
In the spring and summer time all sombre thoughts
should follow the winter northward with the sombre
and thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal economy
of life is again in force ; we live, not to think or to
labor, but for the simple end of being happy. Noth-

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES. 171

mg for the present hour is worthy of man's infinite
capacity save to imbibe the warm smile of heaven and
Bvmpathize with the reviving earth.

The present Spring comes onward with fleeter foot
steps, because Winter lingered so unconscionably long
that with her best diligence she can hardly retrieve
half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a fort
night since I stood on the brink of our swollen river
and beheld the accumulated ice of four frozen months
go down the stream. Except in streaks here and
there upon the hill-sides, the whole visible universe was
then covered with deep snow, the nethermost layer of
which had been deposited by an early December storm.
It was a sight to make the beholder torpid, in the im
possibility of imagining how this vast white napkin was
to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world
in less time than had been required to spread it there.
But who can estimate the power of gentle influences,
whether amid material desolation or the moral winter
of man's heart? There have been no tempestuous
vains, even no sultry days, but a constant breath of
southern winds, with now a day of kindly sunshine and
now a no less kindly mist, or a soft descent of showers,
in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have been
steeped. The snow has vanished as if by magic ;
whatever heaps may be hidden in the woods and deep
gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks remain
in the landscape ; and those I shall almost regret to
miss when to-morrow I look for them in vain. Never*
before, methinks, has spring pressed so closely on the
footsteps of retreating winter. Along the roadside the
green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge
of the snow-drifts. The pastures and mowing fields
$iave not yet assumed a general aspect of verdure ; but

172 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

neither have they the cheerless brown tint which they
wear in latter autumn when vegetation has entirely
ceased ; there is now a faint shadow of life, gradually
brightening into the warm reality. Some tracts in
a happy exposure, — as, for instance, yonder south
western slope of an orchard, in front of that old red
farm-house beyond the river, — such patches of land
already wear a beautiful and tender green, to which no
future luxuriance can add a charm. It looks unreal ;
a prophecy, a hope, a transitory effect of some peculiar
light, which will vanish with the slightest motion of
the eye. But beauty is never a delusion ; not these
verdant tracts, but the dark and barren landscape all
around them, is a shadow and a dream. Each moment
wins some portion of the earth from death to life ; a
sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny
slope of a bank which an instant ago was brown and
bare. You look again, and behold an apparition of
green grass !

The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet
naked, but already appear full of life and vegetable
blood. It seems as if by one magic touch they might
instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the
wind which now sighs through their naked branches
might make sudden music amid innumerable leaves.
The mossgrown willow-tree, which for forty years
past has overshadowed these western windows, will
be among the first to put on its green attire. There
are some objections to the willow ; it is not a dry and
cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder with an asso
ciation of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly
agreeable as companions unless they have glossy
leaves, dry bark, and a firm and hard texture of trunk
and branches. But the willow is almost the earliest to

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES. 173

gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty in
its graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scat
ter its yellow, yet scarcely withered, leaves, upon the
ground. All through the winter, too, its yellow twigs
give it a sunny aspect, which is not without a cheer
ing influence, even in the grayest and gloomiest day.
Beneath a clouded sky it faithfully remembers the sun
shine. Our old house would lose a charm were the
willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over the
snow-covered roof and its heap of summer verdure.

The lilac shrubs under my study window are like
wise almost in leaf: in two or three days more I may
put forth my hand and pluck the topmost bough in its
freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have
lost the luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart,
or the judgment, or the moral sense, or the taste is
dissatisfied with their present aspect. Old age is not
venerable when it embodies itself in lilacs, rose bushes,
or any other ornamental shrub ; it seems as if such
plants, as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish
always in immortal youth, or, at least, to die before
their sad decrepitude. Trees of beauty are trees of
paradise, and therefore not subject to decay by their
original nature, though they have lost that precious
birthright by being transplanted to an earthly soil.
There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a
time-stricken and grandf atherly lilac bush. The anal
ogy holds good in human life. Persons who can only
be graceful and ornamental — who can give the world
nothing but flowers — should die young, and never be
seen with gray hair and wrinkles, any more than the
flower shrubs with mossy bark and blighted foliage,
like the lilacs under my window. Not that beauty is
worthy of less than immortality; no, the beautiful

174 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

should live forever — and thence, perhaps, the sense of
impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time.
Apple-trees, on the other hand, grow old without re
proach. Let them live as long as they may, and con
tort themselves into whatever perversity of shape they
please, and deck their withered limbs with a spring
time gaudiness of pink blossoms ; still they are re
spectable, even if they afford us only an apple or two
in a season. Those few apples — or, at all events, the
remembrance of apples in by-gone years — are the
atonement which utilitarianism inexorably demands
for the privilege of lengthened life. Human flower
shrubs, if they will grow old on earth, should, besides
their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of fruit that will
satisfy earthly appetites, else neither man nor the de
corum of Nature will deem it fit that the moss should
gather on them.

One of the first things that strikes the attention
when the white sheet of winter is withdrawn is the
neglect and disarray that lay hidden beneath it. Nat
ure is not cleanly, according to our prejudices. The
beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown
and blighted deformity, obstructs the brightening love
liness of the present hour, Our avenue is strewn with
the whole crop of autumn's withered leaves. There
are quantities of decayed branches which one tempest
after another has flung down, black and rotten, and
one or two with the ruin of a bird's nest clinging to
them. In the garden are the dried bean vines, the
brown stalks of the asparagus bed, and melancholy
old cabbages which were frozen into the soil before
their unthrifty cultivator could find time to gather
them. How invariably, throughout all the forms of
life, do we find these intermingled memorials of death I

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES. 175

On the soil of thought and in the garden of the heart,
as well as in the sensual world, lie withered leaves — •
the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There
is no wind strong enough to sweep them away ; infi
nite space will not garner them from our sight. What
mean they ? Why may we not be permitted to live
and enjoy, as if this were the first life and our own
the primal enjoyment, instead of treading always on
these dry bones and mouldering relics, from the aged
accumulation of which springs all that now appears so
young and new? Sweet must have been the spring
time of Eden, when no earlier year had strewn its
decay upon the virgin turf and no former experience
had ripened into summer and faded into autumn in
the hearts of its inhabitants ! That was a world worth
living in. O thou murmurer, it is out of the very
wantonness of such a life that thou feignest these idle
lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul
is the first-created inhabitant of its own Eden. We
dwell in an old moss-covered mansion, and tread in
the worn footprints of the past, and have a gray clergy
man's ghost for our daily and nightly inmate ; yet all
these outward circumstances are made less than vision
ary by the renewing power of the spirit. Should the
spirit ever lose this power, — should the withered
leaves, and the rotten branches, and the moss-covered
house, and the ghost of the gray past ever become its
realities, and the verdure and the freshness merely its
faint dream, — then let it pray to be released from
earth. It will need the air of heaven to revive its
pristine energies.

What an unlooked-for flight was this from our shad
owy avenue of black ash and balm of Gilead trees into
the infinite ! Now we have our feet again upon the

176 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so industri
ously as in this homely yard, along the base of the
stone wall, and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings,
and especially around the southern doorstep — a local
ity which seems particularly favorable to its growth,
for it is already tall enough to bend over and wave in
the wind. I observe that several weeds — and most
frequently a plant that stains the fingers with its yel
low juice — have survived and retained their freshness
and sap throughout the winter. One knows not how
they have deserved such an exception from the com
mon lot of their race. They are now the patriarchs
of the departed year, and may preach mortality to the
present generation of flowers and weeds.

Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to
forget the birds ? Even the crows were welcome a»
the sable harbingers of a brighter and livelier race.
They visited us before the snow was off, but seem
mostly to have betaken themselves to remote depths of
the woods, which they haunt all summer long. Many
a time shall I disturb them there, and feel as if I had
intruded among a company of silent worshippers, as
they sit in Sabbath stillness among the tree-tops.
Their voices, when they speak, are in admirable ac
cordance with the tranquil solitude of a summer after
noon ; and, resounding so far above the head, their
loud clamor increases the religious quiet of the scene
/" instead of breaking it. A crow, however, has no real
) pretensions to religion, in spite of his gravity of mien
/ and black attire ; he is certainly a thief, and probably
( an infidel. The gulls are far more respectable, in a
v-smoral point of view. These denizens of sea-beaten
rocks and haunters of the lonely beach come up our
mland river at this season, and soar high overhead,

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES. 177

flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine.
They are among the most picturesque of birds, be
cause they so float and rest upon the air as to become
almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imag
ination has time to grow acquainted with them ; they
have not flitted away in a moment. You go up among
the clouds and greet these lofty-flighted gulls, and re
pose confidently with them upon the sustaining atmos
phere. Ducks have their haunts along the solitary
places of the river, and alight in flocks upon the broad
bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their flight is too
rapid and determined for the eye to catch enjoyment
from it, although it never fails to stir up the heart
with the sportsman's ineradicable instinct. They have
now gone farther northward, but will visit us again
in autumn.

The smaller birds, — the little songsters of the
woods, and those that haunt man's dwellings and
claim human friendship by building their nests under
the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees — •
these require a touch more delicate and a gentler heart
than mine to do them justice. Their outburst of meL
ody is like a brook let loose from wintry chains. We
need not deem it a too high and solemn word to call
it a hymn of praise to the Creator ; since Nature, who
pictures the reviving year in so many sights of beauty,
has expressed the sentiment of renewed life in no other
sound save the notes of these blessed birds. Their
music, however, just now, seems to be incidental, and
not the result of a set purpose. They are discussing
the economy of life and love and the site and architect
ure of their summer residences, and have no time to
Bit on a twig and pour forth solemn hymns, or over-
lures, operas, symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious ques<

VOL. IL 12

178 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

tions are asked ; grave subjects are settled in quick
and animated debate ; and only by occasional acci
dent, as from pure ecstasy, does a rich warble roll its
tiny waves of golden sound through the atmosphere.
Their little bodies are as busy as their voices ; they are
in a constant flutter and restlessness. Even when two
or three retreat to a tree-top to hold council, they wag
their tails and heads all the time with the irrepressible
activity of their nature, which perhaps renders their
brief span of life in reality as long as the patriarchal
age of sluggish man. The blackbirds, three species
of which consort together, are the noisiest of all our
feathered citizens. Great companies of them — more
than the famous " four and twenty " whom Mother
Goose has immortalized — congregate in contiguous
tree-tops and vociferate with all the clamor and con
fusion of a turbulent political meeting. Politics, cer
tainly, must be the occasion of such tumultuous de
bates ; but still, unlike all other politicians, they instil
melody into their individual utterances and produce
harmony as a general effect. Of all bird voices, none
are more sweet and cheerful to my ear than those of
swallows, in the dim, sun-streaked interior of a lofty
barn ; they address the heart with even a closer sym
pathy than robin redbreast. But, indeed, all these
winged people, that dwell in the vicinity of home
steads, seem to partake of human nature, and possess
the germ, if not the development, of immortal souls.
We hear them saying their melodious prayers at morn
ing's blush and eventide. A little while ago, in the
deep of night, there came the lively thrill of a bird's
note from a neighboring tree — a real song, such as
greets the purple dawn or mingles with the yellow sun
shine. What could the little bird mean by pouring it

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES. 179

forth at midnight? Probably the music gushed out of
the midst of a dream in which he fancied himself in
paradise with his mate, but suddenly awoke on a cold,
leafless bough, with a New England mist penetrating
through his feathers. That was a sad exchange of
imagination for reality.

Insects are among the earliest births of spring.
Multitudes of I know not what species appeared long
ago on the surface of the snow. Clouds of them, al
most too minute for sight, hover in a beam of sunshine,
and vanish, as if annihilated, when they pass into the
shade. A mosquito has already been heard to sound
the small horror of his bugle horn. Wasps infest the
sunny windows of the house. A bee entered one of
the chambers with a prophecy of flowers. Rare but
terflies came before the snow was off, flaunting in the
chill breeze, and looking forlorn and all 'astray, in
spite of the magnificence of their dark, velvet cloaks,
with golden borders.

The fields and woodpaths have as yet few charms to
entice the wanderer. In a walk, the other day, I found
no violets, nor anemones, nor anything in the likeness
of a flower. It was worth while, however, to ascend
our opposite hill for the sake of gaining a general idea
of the advance of spring, which I had hitherto been
studying in its minute developments. The river lay
around me in a semicircle, overflowing all the mead
ows which give it its Indian name, and offering a
noble breadth to sparkle in the sunbeams. Along the
hither shore a row of trees stood up to their knees in
water ; and afar off, on the surface of the stream, tufts
of bushes thrust up their heads, as it were, to breathe.
The most striking objects were great solitary trees here
and there, with a mile wide waste of water all around

180 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

them. The curtailment of the trunk, by its immersion
in the river, quite destroys the fair proportions of the
tree, and thus makes us sensible of a regularity and
propriety in the usual forms of Nature. The flood of
the present season — though it never amounts to a
freshet on our quiet stream — has encroached farther
upon the land than any previous one for at least a
score of years. It has overflowed stone fences, and
even rendered a portion of the highway navigable for
boats. The waters, however, are now gradually sub
siding; islands become annexed to the main land;
and other islands emerge, like new creations, from the
watery waste. The scene supplies an admirable image
of the receding of the Nile, except that there is no
deposit of black slime ; or of Noah's flood, only that
there is a freshness and novelty in these recovered
portions of the continent which give the impression of
a world just made rather than of one so polluted that
a deluge had been requisite to purify it. These up-
springing islands are the greenest spots in the land
scape ; the first gleam of sunlight suffices to cover
them with verdure.

Thank Providence for spring ! The earth — and
man himself, by sympathy with his birthplace — would
be far other than we find them if life toiled wearily
onward without this periodical infusion of the primal
spirit. Will the world ever be so decayed that spring
may not renew its greenness ? Can man be so dismally
age-stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth
may revisit him once a year ? It is impossible. The
moss on our timeworn mansion brightens into beauty ;
the good old pastor who once dwelt here renewed his
prime, regained his boyhood, in the genial breezes of
bis ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES. 181

Soul if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its
privilege of spring-time sprightliness ! From such a
soul the world must hope no reformation of its evil,
no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant struggles
of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works
in the present, and thinks not of the future ; autumn
is a rich conservative ; winter has utterly lost its faith,
and clings tremulously to the remembrance of what
has been ; but spring, with its outgushing life, is the
true type of the movement.

MONSIEUR DU MIROIR.

THAN the gentleman above named, there is nobody,
in the whole circle of my acquaintance, whom I have
more attentively studied, yet of whom I have less real
knowledge, beneath the surface which it pleases him
to present. Being anxious to discover who and what
he really is, and how connected with me, and what
are to be the results to him and to myself of the joint
interest which, without any choice on my part, seems
to be permanently established between us, — and in
cited, furthermore, by the propensities of a student of
human nature, though doubtful whether Monsieur du
Miroir have aught of humanity but the figure, — I
have determined to place a few of his remarkable
points before the public, hoping to be favored with
some clew to the explanation of his character. Nor
let the reader condemn any part of the narrative as
frivolous, since a subject of such grave reflection dif
fuses its importance through the minutest particulars ;
and there is no judging beforehand what odd little
circumstance may do the office of a blind man's dog
among the perplexities of this dark investigation ; and
however extraordinary, marvellous, preternatural, and
utterly incredible some of the meditated disclosures
may appear, I pledge my honor to maintain as sacred
a regard to fact as if my testimony were given on oath
and involved the dearest interests of the personage in
question. Not that there is matter for a criminal ac
cusation against Monsieur du Miroir, nor am I the

MONSIEUR DU M1ROIR. 183

to bring it forward if there were. The chief that
I complain of is his impenetrable mystery, which is no
better than nonsense if it conceal anything good, and
much worse in the contrary case.

But if undue partialities could be supposed to influ
ence me, Monsieur du Miroir might hope to profit
rather than to suffer by them, for in the whole of our
long intercourse we have seldom had the slightest dis
agreement ; and, moreover, there are reasons for sup
posing him a near relative of mine, and consequently
entitled to the best word that I can give him. He
bears undisputably a strong personal resemblance to
myself, and generally puts on mourning at the funerals
of the family. On the other hand, his name would in
dicate a French descent ; in which case, infinitely pre
ferring that my blood should flow from a bold British
and pure Puritan source, I beg leave to disclaim all
kindred with Monsieur du Miroir. Some genealo
gists trace his origin to Spain, and dub him a knight
of the order of the CABALLEROS DE LOS ESPEJOZ,
one of whom was overthrown by Don Quixote. But
what says Monsieur du Miroir himself of his pater
nity and his fatherland ? Not a word did he ever say
about the matter ; and herein, perhaps, lies one of his
most especial reasons for maintaining such a vexatious
mystery, that he lacks the faculty of speech to ex
pound it. His lips are sometimes seen to move ; his
eyes and countenance are alive with shifting expres
sion, as if corresponding by visible hieroglyphics to
his modulated breath ; and anon he will seem to pause
with as satisfied an air as if he had been talking ex
cellent sense. Good sense or bad, Monsieur du Miroir
is the sole judge of his own conversational powers,
uever having whispered so much as a syllable that

184 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

reached the ears of any other auditor. Is he really
dumb ? or is all the world deaf ? or is it merely a piece
of my friend's waggery, meant for nothing but to make
fools of us ? If so he has the joke all to himself.

This dumb devil which possesses Monsieur du Miron
is, I am persuaded, the sole reason that he does not
make me the most flattering protestations of friend
ship. In many particulars — indeed, as to all hi?
cognizable and not preternatural points, except that,
once in a great while, I speak a word or two — there
exists the greatest apparent sympathy between us.
Such is his confidence in my taste that he goes astray
from the general fashion and copies all his dresses
after mine. I never try on a new garment without
expecting to meet Monsieur du Miroir in one of the
same pattern. He has duplicates of all my waistcoats
and cravats, shirt bosoms of precisely a similar plait,
and an old coat for private wear, manufactured, I sus
pect, by a Chinese tailor, in exact imitation of a be
loved old coat of mine, with a facsimile, stitch by stitch,
of a patch upon the elbow. In truth, the singular and
minute coincidences that occur, both in the accidents
of the passing day and the serious events of our lives,
remind me of those doubtful legends of lovers, or twin
children, twins of fate, who have lived, enjoyed, suf
fered, and died in unison, each faithfully repeating
the last tremor of the other's breath, though sepa
rated by vast tracts of sea and land. Strange to say,
my incommodities belong equally to my companion,
though the burden is nowise alleviated by his partici
pation. The other morning, after a night of torment
from the toothache, I met Monsieur du Miroir with
such a swollen anguish in his cheek that my own
pangs were redoubled, as were also his, if I might

MONSIEUR DU MIROIR. 185

Judge by a fresh contortion of his visage. All the in
equalities of my spirits are communicated to him, caus
ing the unfortunate Monsieur du Miroir to mope and
scowl through a whole summer's day, or to laugh as
long, for no better reason than the gay or gloomy
crotchets of my brain. Once we were joint suffer-
ers of a three months' sickness, and met like mutual
ghosts in the first days of convalescence. Whenever
I have been in love, Monsieur du Miroir has looked
passionate and tender ; and never did my mistress dis
card me but this too susceptible gentleman grew lack
adaisical. His temper, also, rises to blood heat, fever
heat, or boiling water heat, according to the measure
of any wrong which might seem to have fallen entirely
on myself. I have sometimes been calmed down by
the sight of my own inordinate wrath depicted on his
frowning brow. Yet, however prompt in taking up
my quarrels, I cannot call to mind that he ever struck
a downright blow in my behalf ; nor, in fact, do I per
ceive that any real and tangible good has resulted
from his constant interference in my affairs ; so that,
in my distrustful moods, I am apt to suspect Monsieur
du Miroir' s sjnnpathy to be mere outward show, not a
whit better nor worse than other people's sympathy.
Nevertheless, as mortal man must have something in
the guise of sympathy, — and whether the true metal
or merely copperwashed, is of less moment, — I choose
rather to content myself with Monsieur du Miroir's
such as it is than to seek the sterling coin, and per
haps miss even the counterfeit.

In my age of vanities I have often seen him in the
ball room, and might again were I to seek him there.
We have encountered each other at the Tremont Thea
tre, where, however, he took his seat neither in the

186 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

dress circle, pit, nor upper regions, nor threw a single
glance at the stage, though the brightest star, even
Fanny Kemble herself, might be culminating there?
No ; this whimsical friend of mine chose to linger in
the saloon, near one of the large looking-glasses which
throw back their pictures of the illuminated room.
He is so full of these unaccountable eccentricities that
I never like to notice Monsieur du Miroir, nor to ac
knowledge the slightest connection with him, in places
of public resort. He, however, has no scruple about
claiming my acquaintance, even when his common
sense, if he had any, might teach him that I would as
willingly exchange a nod with the Old Nick. It was
but the other day that he got into a large brass kettle
at the entrance of a hardware store, and thrust his
head, the moment afterwards, into a bright, new warm
ing pan, whence he gave me a most merciless look of
recognition. He smiled, and so did I ; but these child
ish tricks make decent people rather shy of Monsieur
du Miroir, and subject him to more dead cuts than
any other gentleman in town.

One of this singular person's most remarkable pe
culiarities is his fondness for water, wherein he excels
any temperance man whatever. His pleasure, it must
be owned, is not so much to drink it (in which respect
a very moderate quantity will answer his occasions) as
to souse himself over head and ears wherever he may
meet with it. Perhaps he is a merman, or born of a
mermaid's marriage with a mortal, and thus amphib
ious by hereditary right, like the children which the
old river deities, or nymphs of fountains, gave to
earthly love. When no cleaner bathing-place hap
pened to be at hand, I have seen the foolish fellow in
» horse pond. Sometimes he refreshes himself in the

MONSIEUR DU MIROIR. 187

trough of a town pump, without caring what the peo
ple think about him. Often, while carefully picking
my way along the street after a heavy shower, I have
been scandalized to see Monsieur du Miroir, in full
dress, paddling from one mud puddle to another, and
plunging into the filthy depths of each. Seldom have
I peeped into a well without discerning this ridicu
lous gentleman at the bottom, whence he gazes up, as
through a long telescopic tube, and probably makes
discoveries among the stars by daylight. Wandering
along lonesome paths or in pathless forests, when I
have come to virgin fountains, of which it would have
been pleasant to deem myself the first discoverer, I
have started to find Monsieur du Miroir there before
me. The solitude seemed lonelier for his presence.
I have leaned from a precipice that frowns over Lake
George, which the French call Nature's font of sacra
mental water, and used it in their log churches here
and their cathedrals beyond the sea, and seen him far
below in that pure element. At Niagara, too, where
I would gladly have forgotten both myself and him, I
could not help observing my companion in the smooth
water on the very verge of the cataract just above the
Table Rock. Were I to reach the sources of the Nile,
I should expect to meet him there. Unless he be an
other Ladurlad, whose garments the depths of ocean
could not moisten, it is difficult to conceive how he
keeps himself in any decent pickle ; though I am
bound to confess that his clothes seem always as dry
and comfortable as my own. But, as a friend, I could
wish that he would not so often expose himself in
liquor.

All that I have hitherto related may be classed
&mong those little personal oddities which agreeably

188 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

diversify the surface of society, and, though they may
sometimes annoy us, yet keep our daily intercourse
fresher and livelier than if they were done away. By
an occasional hint, however, I have endeavored to pave
the way for stranger things to come, which, had they
been disclosed at once, Monsieur du Miroir might have
been deemed a shadow, and myself a person of no ve
racity, and this truthful history a fabulous legend.
But, now that the reader knows me worthy of his con
fidence, I will begin to make him stare.

To speak frankly, then, I could bring the most as
tounding proofs that Monsieur du Miroir is at least a
conjurer, if not one of that unearthly tribe with whom
conjurers deal. He has inscrutable methods of con
veying himself from place to place with the rapidity
of the swiftest steamboat or rail car. Brick walls and
oaken doors and iron bolts are no impediment to his
passage. Here in my chamber, for instance, as the
evening deepens into night, I sit alone — the key turned
and withdrawn from the lock, the keyhole stuffed with
paper to keep out a peevish little blast of wind. Yet,
lonely as I seem, were I to lift one of the lamps and
step five paces eastward, Monsieur du Miroir would
be sure to meet me with a lamp also in his hand ; and
were I to take the stage-coach to-morrow, without giv
ing him the least hint of my design, and post onward
till the week's end, at whatever hotel I might find my
self I should expect to share my private apartment
with this inevitable Monsieur du Miroir. Or, out of a
mere wayward fantasy, were I to go by moonlight and
stand beside the stone font of the Shaker Spring at
Canterbury, Monsieur du Miroir would set forth on
the same fool's errand, and would not fail to meet me
there. Shall I heighten the reader's wonder? While

MONSIEUR DU MIROIR. 189

writing these latter sentences, I happened to glance
towards the large, round globe of one of the brass and
irons, and lo ! a miniature apparition of Monsieur du
Miroir, with his face widened and grotesquely con
torted, as if he were making fun of my amazement !
But he has played so many of these jokes that they be
gin to lose their effect. Once, presumptuous that he
was, he stole into the heaven of a young lady's eyes ;
so that, while I gazed rnd was dreaming only of her
self, I found him also in my dream. Years have so
changed him since that he need never hope to enter
those heavenly orbs again.

From these veritable statements it will be readily
concluded that, had Monsieur du Miroir played such
pranks in old witch times, matters might have gone
hard with him ; at least, if the constable and posse
£omitatus could have executed a warrant, or the jailev
had been cunning enough to keep him. But it has
often occurred to me as a very singular circumstance^
and as betokening either a temperament morbidly sus-
picious or some weighty cause of apprehension, that
he never trusts himself within the grasp even of his
most intimate friend. If you step forward to meet
him, he readily advances ; if you offer him your hand,
he extends his own with an air of the utmost frank
ness ; but, though you calculate upon a hearty shake,
you do not get hold of his little finger. Ah, this Mon
sieur du Miroir is a slippery fellow !

These truly are matters of special admiration. After
vainly endeavoring, by the strenuous exertion of my
own wits, to gain a satisfactory insight into the char
acter of Monsieur du Miroir, I had recourse to certain
wise men, and also to books of abstruse philosophy,
seeking who it was that haunted me, and why. I heard

190 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

long lectures, and read huge volumes with little profit
beyond the knowledge that many former instances are
recorded, in successive ages, of similar connections be
tween ordinary mortals and beings possessing the at
tributes of Monsieur du Miroir. Some now alive, per
haps, besides myself have such attendants. Would
that Monsieur du Miroir could be persuaded to trans-
fer his attachment to one of those, and allow some
other of his race to assume the situation that he now
holds in regard to me ! If I must needs have so in
trusive an intimate, who stares me in the face in my
closest privacy and follows me even to my bed cham
ber, I should prefer — scandal apart — the laughing
bloom of a young girl to the dark and bearded gravity
of my present companion. But such desires are never
to be gratified^ . Though the members of Monsieur du
Miroir's family have been accused, perhaps justly, of
visiting their friends often in splendid halls, and sel
dom in darksome dungeons, yet they exhibit a rare
constancy to the objects of their first attachment, how
ever unlovely in person or unamiable in disposition —
however unfortunate, or even infamous, and deserted
by all the world besides. So will it be with my asso
ciate. Our fates appear inseparably blended. It is
my belief, as I find him mingling with my earliest rec
ollections, that we came into existence together, as my
shadow follows me into the sunshine, and that here
after, as heretofore, the brightness or gloom of my for
tunes will shine upon or darken the face of Monsieur
du Miroir. As we have been young together, and as
it is now near the summer noon with both of us, so, if
long life be granted, shall each count his own wrinkles
on the other's brow and his white hairs on the other's
head. And when the coffin lid shall have closed over

MONSIEUR DU MIR01R. 191

me, and that face and form, which, more truly than the
lover swears it to his beloved, are the sole light of his
existence, • — when they shall be laid in that dark cham
ber, whither his swift and secret footsteps cannot bring
him, — then what is to become of poor Monsieur du
Miroir ? Will he have the fortitude, with my other
friends, to take a last look at my pale countenance ?
Will he walk foremost in the funeral train ? Will he
come often and haunt around my grave, and weed
away the nettles, and plant flowers amid the 'verdure,
and scrape the moss out of the letters of my burial
stone ? Will he linger where I have lived, to remind
the neglectful world of one who staked much to win a
name, but will not then care whether he lost or won ?

Not thus will he prove his deep fidelity. Oh, what
terror, if this friend of mine, after our last farewell,
should step into the crowded street, or roam along our
old frequented path by the still waters, or sit down in
the domestic circle where our faces are most familiar
and beloved ! No ; but when the rays of heaven shall
bless me no more, nor the thoughtful lamplight gleam
'upon my studies, nor the cheerful fireside gladden the
meditative man, then, his task fulfilled, shall this mys
terious being vanish from the earth forever. He will
pass to the dark realm of nothingness, but will not
find me there.

There is something fearful in bearing such a rela
tion to a creature so imperfectly known, and in the
idea that, to a certain extent, all which concerns my
self will be reflected in its consequences upon him.
When we feel that another is to share the selfsame
fortune with ourselves, we judge more severely of our
prospects, and withhold our confidence from that de
lusive magic which appears to shed an infallibility of

192 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

happiness over our own pathway. Of late years, in*
deed, there has been much to sadden my intercourse
with Monsieur du Miroir. Had not our union been
a necessary condition of our life, we must have been
estranged ere now. In early youth, when my affec
tions were warm and free, I loved him well, and could
always spend a pleasant hour in his society, chiefly
because it gave me an excellent opinion of myself.
Speechless as he was, Monsieur du Miroir had then
a most agreeable way of calling me a handsome fel
low ; and I, of course, returned the compliment ; so
that, the more we kept each other's company, the
greater coxcombs we mutually grew. But neither of
us need apprehend any such misfortune now. When
we chance to meet, — for it is chance of tener than de
sign, — each glances sadly at the other's forehead,
dreading wrinkles there ; and at our temples, whence
the hair is thinning away too early ; and at the sunken
eyes, which no longer shed a gladsome light over the
whole face. I involuntarily peruse him as a record of
my heavy youth, which has been wasted in sluggish
ness for lack of hope and impulse, or equally thrown
away in toil that had no wise motive and has accom
plished no good end. I perceive that the tranquil
gloom of a disappointed soul has darkened through
his countenance, where the blackness of the future
seems to mingle with the shadows of the past, giv
ing him the aspect of a fated man. Is it too wild a
thought that my fate may have assumed this image of
myself, and therefore haunts me with such inevitable
pertinacity, originating every act which it appears to
imitate, while it deludes me by pretending to share
the events of which it is merely the emblem and the
prophecy ? I must banish this idea, or it will throw

MONSIEUR DU MIR 01 R. 193

too deep an awe round my companion. At our next
meeting, especially if it be at midnight or in solitude,
I fear that I shall glance aside and shudder; in which
case, as 'Monsieur du Miroir is extremely sensitive to
ill treatment, he also will avert his eyes and express
horror or disgust.

But no ; this is unworthy of me. As of old I sought
his society for the bewitching dreams of woman's love
which he inspired and because I fancied a bright for
tune in his aspect, so now will I hold daily and long
communion with him for the sake of the stern lessons
that he will teacL my manhood. With folded arms
we will sit face to face, and lengthen out our silent
converse till a wiser cheerfulness shall have been
wrought from the very texture of despondency. lie
will say, perhaps indignantly, that it befits only him ]
to mourn for the decay of outward grace, which, while
he possessed it, was his all. But have not you, he will
ask, a treasure in reserve, to which every year may^
add far more value than age or death itself can snatch
from that miserable clay ? He will tell me that though
the bloom of life has been nipped with a frost, yet the
soul must not sit shivering in its cell, but bestir itself
manfully, and kindle a genial warmth from its own
exercise against the autumnal and the wintry atmos
phere. And I, in return, will bid him be of good
cheer, nor take it amiss that I must blanch his locks
and wrinkle him up like a wilted apple, since it shall
be my endeavor so to beautify his face with intellect
and mild benevolence that he shall profit immensely
by the change. But here a smile will glimmer some
what sadly over Monsieur du Miroir's visage.

When this subject shall have been sufficiently dis.
sussed we may take up others as important. Reflect

VOL. II. 13

194 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ing upon his power of following me to the remotest
regions and into the deepest privacy, I will compare
the attempt to escape him to the hopeless race that
men sometimes run with memory, or their own hearts,
or their moral selves, which, though burdened with
cares enough to crush an elephant, will never be one
step behind. I will be self -contemplative, as Nature
bids me, and make him the picture or visible type of
what I muse upon, that my mind may not wander so
vaguely as heretofore, chasing its own shadow through
a chaos and catching only the monsters that abide
there. Then we will turn our thoughts to the spiritual
world, of the reality of which my companions shall
furnish me an illustration, if not an argument ; for, as
we have only the testimony of the reye to Monsieur du
Miroir's existence, while all the other "senses would
fail to inform us that such a figure stands within arm's
length, wherefore should there not be beings innumer
able close beside us, and filling heaven and earth with
their multitude, yet of whom no corporeal perception
can take cognizance ? A blind man might as reason
ably deny that Monsieur du Miroir exists as we, be
cause the Creator has hitherto withheld the spiritual
perception, can therefore contend that there are no
spirits. Oh, there are ! And, at this moment, when
the subject of which I write has grown strong within
me and surrounded itself with those solemn and awful
associations which might have seemed most alien to it,
I could fancy that Monsieur du Miroir himself is a

f wanderer from the spiritual world, with nothing hu
man except his delusive garment of visibility. Me-

\ thinks I should tremble now were his wizard power of
gliding through all impediments in search of me ta
place him suddenly before my eyes.

MONSIEUR DU MIROIR. 195

Ha ! What is yonder ? Shape of mystery, did the
tremor of my heartstrings vibrate to thine own, and
call thee from thy home among the dancers of the
northern lights, and shadows flung from departed sun
shine, and giant spectres that appear on clouds at day
break and affright the climber of the Alps ? In truth
it startled me, as I threw a wary glance eastward across
the chamber, to discern an unbidden guest with his
eyes bent on mine. The identical MONSIEUR DU
MIROIR ! Still there he sits and returns my gaze
with as much of awe and curiosity as if he, too, had
spent a solitary evening in fantastic musings and made
me his theme. So inimitably does he counterfeit
that I could almost doubt which of us is the visionary
form, or whether each be not the other's mystery, and
both twin brethren of one fate in mutually reflected
spheres. O friend, canst thou not hear and answer
me ? Break down the barrier between us ! Grasp
my hand ! Speak ! Listen ! A few words, perhaps,
might satisfy the feverish yearning of my soul for some
master thought that should guide me through this lab-"
yrinth of life, teaching wherefore I was born, and how
to do my task on earth, and what is death. Alas!
Even that unreal image should forget to ape me and
smile at these vain questions. Thus do mortals deify,
as it were, a mere shadow of themselves, a spectre of.
human reason, and ask of that to unveil the mysteries
which Divine Intelligence has revealed so far as need
ful to our guidance, and hid the rest.

Farewell, Monsieur du Miroir. Of you, perhaps, as
of many men, it may be doubted whether you are the
wiser, though your whole business is REFLECTION.

THE HALL OF FANTASY.

IT has happened to me, on various occasions, to find
myself in a certain edifice which would appear to have
some of the characteristics of a public exchange. Its
interior is a spacious hall, with a pavement of white
marble. Overhead is a lofty dome, supported by long
rows of pillars of fantastic architecture, the idea of
which was probably taken from the Moorish ruins of
the Alhambra, or perhaps from some enchanted edifice
in the Arabian tales. The windows of this hall have
a breadth and grandeur of design and an elaborateness
of workmanship that have nowhere been equalled ex
cept in the Gothic cathedrals of the old world. Like
their prototypes, too, they admit the light of heaven
only through stained and pictured glass, thus filling the
hall with many-colored radiance and painting its mar
ble floor with beautiful or grotesque designs ; so that
its inmates breathe, as it were, a visionary atmosphere,
and tread upon the fantasies of poetic minds. These
peculiarities, combining a wilder mixture of styles than
even an American architect usually recognizes as al
lowable, — Grecian, Gothic, Oriental, and nondescript,
— cause the whole edifice to give the impression of a
dream, which might be dissipated and shattered to
fragments by merely stamping the foot upon the pave
ment. Yet, with such modifications and repairs as
successive ages demand, the Hall of Fantasy is likely
to endure longer than the most substantial structure
that ever cumbered the earth.

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 197

It is not at all times that one can gain admittance
into this edifice, although most persons enter it at some
period or other of their lives ; if not in their waking
moments, then by the universal passport of a dream.
At my last visit I wandered thither unawares while
my mind was busy with an idle tale, and was startled
by the throng of people who seemed suddenly to rise
up around me.

" Bless me ! Where am I ? " cried I, with but a
dim recognition of the place.

" You are in a spot," said a friend who chanced to
be near at hand, " which occupies in the world of fancy
the same position which the Bourse, the Rialto, and
the Exchange do in the commercial world. All who
have affairs in that mystic region, which lies above,
below, or beyond the actual, may here meet and talk
over the business of their dreams."

" It is a noble hall," observed I.

"Yes," he replied. "Yet we see but a small por
tion of the edifice. In its upper stories are said to
be apartments where the inhabitants of earth may
hold converse with those of the moon ; and beneath
our feet are gloomy cells, which communicate with the
infernal regions, and where monsters and chimeras
are kept in confinement and fed with all unwhole-
someness."

In niches and on pedestals around about the hall
stood the statues or busts of men who in every age
have been rulers and demigods in the realms of im
agination and its kindred regions. The grand old
countenance of Homer; the shrunken and decrepit
form but vivid face of ^sop ; the dark presence of
Dante ; the wild Ariosto •, Rabelais' smile of deep-
wrought mirth ; the profound, pathetic humor of Cer*

198 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

vantes ; the all-glorious Shakespeare ; Spenser, meet
guest for an allegoric structure; the severe divinity
of Milton ; and Bunyan, moulded of homeliest clay,
but instinct with celestial fire, — were those that
chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and
Scott occupied conspicuous pedestals. In an obscure
and shadowy niche was deposited the bust of our
countryman, the author of Arthur Mervyn.

" Besides these indestructible memorials of real
genius," remarked my companion, " each century has
erected statues of its own ephemeral favorites in
wood."

" I observe a few crumbling relics of such," said I.
" But ever and anon, I suppose, Oblivion comes with
her huge broom and sweeps them all from the marble
floor. But such will never be the fate of this fine
statue of Goethe."

" Nor of that next to it — Emanuel Swedenborg,"
said he. " Were ever two men of transcendent im
agination more unlike ? "

In the centre of the hall springs an ornamental
fountain, the water of which continually throws itself
into new shapes and snatches the most diversified hues
from the stained atmosphere around. It is impossible
to conceive what a strange vivacity is imparted to the
scene by the magic dance of this fountain, with its
endless transformations, in which the imaginative be
holder may discern what form he will. The water is
supposed by some to flow from the same source as the
Castaliaii spring, and is extolled by others as uniting
the virtues of the Fountain of Youth with those of
many other enchanted wells long celebrated in tale
and song. Having never tasted it, I can bear no tes
timony to its quality.

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 199

" Did you ever drink this water ? " I inquired of
ny friend.

" A few sips now and then," answered he. " But
there are men here who make it their constant bever
age — or, at least, have the credit of doing so. In
some instances it is known to have intoxicating quali
ties."

"Pray let us look at these water drinkers," said I.

So we passed among the fantastic pillars till we
came to a spot where a number of persons were clus
tered together in the light of one of the great stained
windows, which seemed to glorify the whole group as
well as the marble that they trod on. Most of them
were men of broad foreheads, meditative countenances,
and thoughtful, inward eyes ; yet it required but a
trifle to summon up mirth, peeping out from the very
midst of grave and lofty musings. Some strode about,
or leaned against the pillars of the hall, alone and in
silence ; their faces wore a rapt expression, as if sweet
music were in the air around them or as if their in
most souls were about to float away in song. One or
two, perhaps, stole a glance at the by-standers, to watch
if their poetic absorption were observed. Others stood
talking in groups, with a liveliness of expression, a
ready smile, and a light, intellectual laughter, which
showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were glancing to
and fro among them.

A few held higher converse, which caused their
calm and melancholy souls to beam moonlight from
their eyes. As I lingered near them, — for I felt an
Inward attraction towards these men, as if the sym
pathy of feeling, if not of genius, had united me to
their order, — my friend mentioned several of their
. The world has likewise heard those names;

200 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

with some it has been familiar for years ; and othera
are daily making their way deeper into the universal
heart.

" Thank Heaven," observed I to my companion, as
we passed to another part of the hall, " we have done
with this techy, wayward, shy, proud, unreasonable
set of laurel gatherers. I love them in their works,
but have little desire to meet them elsewhere."

44 You have adopted an old prejudice, I see," replied
my friend, who was familiar with most of these wor
thies, being himself a student of poetry, and not with
out the poetic flame. 4t But, so far as my experience
goes, men of genius are fairly gifted with the social
qualities ; and in this age there appears to be a fellow-
feeling among them which had not heretofore been
developed. As men, they ask nothing better than to
be on equal terms with their fellow-men; and as
authors, they have thrown aside their proverbial jeal
ousy, and acknowledge a generous brotherhood."

44 The world does not think so," answered I. " An
author is received in general society pretty much as
we honest citizens are in the Hall of Fantasy. We
gaze at him as if he had no business among us, and
question whether he is fit for any of our pursuits."

44 Then it is a very foolish question," said he. 44 Now
here are a class of men whom we may daily meet on
Change. Yet what poet in the hall is more a fool of
fancy than the sagest of them ? "

He pointed to a number of persons, who, manifest
as the fact was, would have deemed it an insult to be
told that they stood in the Hall of Fantasy. Their
visages were traced into wrinkles and furrows, each of
which seemed the record of some actual experience in
life. Their eyes had the shrewd, calculating glance

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 201

which detects so quickly and so surely all that it con
cerns a man of business to know about the characters
and purposes of his fellow-men. Judging them as
they stood, they might be honored and trusted mem
bers of the Chamber of Commerce, who had found
the genuine secret of wealth, and whose sagacity gave
them the command of fortune. There was a charac
ter of detail and matter of fact in their talk which
concealed the extravagance of its purport, insomuch
that the wildest schemes had the aspect of every-day
realities. Thus the listener was not startled at the
idea of cities to be built, as if by magic, in the heart
of pathless forests ; and of streets to be laid out where
now the sea was tossing ; and of mighty rivers to be
stayed in their courses in order to turn the machin
ery of a cotton mill. It was only by an effort, and
scarcely then, that the mind convinced itself that such
speculations were as much matter of fantasy as the
old dream of Eldorado, or as Mammon's Cave, or any
other vision of gold ever conjured up by the imagina
tion of needy poet or romantic adventurer.

" Upon my word," said I, " it is dangerous to listen
to such dreamers as these. Their madness is conta
gious."

" Yes," said my friend, " because they mistake the
Hall of Fantasy for actual brick and mortar, and its
purple atmosphere for unsophisticated sunshine. But
the poet knows his whereabout, and therefore is less
likely to make a fool of himself in real life."

" Here again," observed I, as we advanced a little
farther, "we see another order of dreamers, peculiarly
characteristic, too, of the genius of our country."

These were the inventors of fantastic machines.
Models of their contrivances were placed against some

202 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

of the pillars of the hall, and afforded good emblems
of the result generally to be anticipated from an at
tempt to reduce daydreams to practice. The analogy
may hold in morals as well as physics ; for instance,
here was the model of a railroad through the air and
a tunnel under the sea. Here was a machine — stolen,
I believe — for the distillation of heat from moon-
shine ; and another for the condensation of morning
mist into square blocks of granite, wherewith it was
proposed to rebuild the entire Hall of Fantasy. One
man exhibited a sort of lens whereby he had suc
ceeded in making sunshine out of a lady's smile ; and
it was his purpose wholly to irradiate the earth by
means of this wonderful invention.

" It is nothing new," said I ; " for most of our sun
shine comes from woman's smile already."

" True," answered the inventor ; " but my machine
will secure a constant supply for domestic use ; whereas
hitherto it has been very precarious."

Another person had a scheme for fixing the reflec
tions of objects in a pool of water, and thus taking
the most lifelike portraits imaginable ; and the same
gentleman demonstrated the practicability of giving
a permanent dye to ladies' dresses, in the gorgeous
clouds of sunset. There were at least fifty kinds of
perpetual motion, one of which was applicable to the
wits of newspaper editors and writers of every descrip
tion. Professor Espy was here, with a tremendous
storm in a gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate many
more of these Utopian inventions ; but, after all, a
more imaginative collection is to be found in the pat>
ent office at Washington.

Turning from the inventors we took a more general
survey of the inmates of the hall. Many persons were

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 208

present whose right of entrance appeared to consist in
some crotchet of the brain, which, so long as it might
operate, produced a change in their relation to the act
ual world. It is singular how very few there are who
do not occasionally gain admittance on such a score,
either in abstracted musings, or momentary thoughts,
or bright anticipations, or vivid remembrances ; for
even the actual becomes ideal, whether in hope or
memory, and beguiles the dreamer into the Hall of
Fantasy. Some unfortunates make their whole abode
and business here, and contract habits which unfit
them for all the real employments of life. Others —
but these are few — possess the faculty, in their oc
casional visits, of discovering a purer truth than the
world can impart among the lights and shadows of
these pictured windows.

And with all its dangerous influences, we have rea
son to thank God that there is such a place of refuge f
from the gloom and dullness of actual life. Hither
may come the prisoner, escaping from his dark and
narrow cell and cankerous chain, to breathe free air
in this enchanted atmosphere. The sick man leaves
his weary pillow, and finds strength to wander hither,
though his wasted limbs might not support him even
to the threshold of his chamber. The exile passes
through the Hall of Fantasy to revisit his native soil.
The burden of years rolls down from the old man's
shoulders the moment that the door uncloses. Mourn
ers leave their heavy sorrows at the entrance, and here
vejoin the lost ones whose faces would else be seen no
more, until thought shall have become the only fact.
It may be said, in truth, that there is but half a life — (
the meaner and earthlier half — for those who never \
£nd their way into the hall. Nor must I fail to men?

204 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

tion that in the observatory of the edifice is kept that
wonderful perspective glass, through which the shep
herds of the Delectable Mountains showed Christian
the far-off gleam of the Celestial City. The eye of
Faith still loves to gaze through it.

"I observe some men here," said I to my friend,
"who might set up a strong claim to be reckoned
among the most real personages of the day."

" Certainly," he replied. . "If a man be in advance
of his age, he must be content to make his abode in
this hall until the lingering generations of his fellow-
men come up with him. He can find no other shelter
in the universe. But the fantasies of one day are the
deepest realities of a future one."

" It is difficult to distinguish them apart amid the
gorgeous and bewildering light of this hall," rejoined
I. " The white sunshine of actual life is necessary in
order to test them. I am rather apt to doubt both
men and their reasonings till I meet them in that
truthful medium."

"Perhaps your faith in the ideal is deeper than you
are aware," said my friend. " You are at least a dem
ocrat ; and methinks no scanty share of such faith is
essential to the adoption of that creed."

Among the characters who had elicited these re
marks were most of the noted reformers of the day,
whether in physics, politics, morals, or religion. There
is no surer method of arriving at the Hall of Fantasy
than to throw one's self into the current of a theory ;
for, whatever landmarks of fact may be set up along
the stream, there is a law of nature that impels it
thither. And let it be so ; for here the wise head and
capacious heart may do their work ; and what is good
and true becomes gradually hardened into fact, whilfl

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 205

error melts away and vanishes among the shadows of
the hall. Therefore may none who believe and rejoice
in the progress of mankind be angry with me because
I recognized their apostles and leaders amid the fan
tastic radiance of those pictured windows. I love and
honor such men as well as they.

It would be endless to describe the herd of real or
self-styled reformers that peopled this place of refuge.
They were the representatives of an unquiet period,
when mankind is seeking to cast off the whole tissue
of ancient custom like a tattered garment. Many of
them had got possession of some crystal fragment of
truth, the brightness of which so dazzled them that
they could see nothing else in the wide universe. Here
were men whose faith had embodied itself in the form
of a potato ; and others whose long beards had a
deep spiritual significance. Here was the abolitionist,)
brandishing his one idea like an iron flail. In a word,
there were a thousand shapes of good and evil, faith
and infidelity, wisdom and nonsense — a most incon
gruous throng.

Yet, withal, the heart of the stanchest conservative,
unless he abjured his fellowship with man, could
hardly have helped throbbing in sympathy with the
spirit that pervaded these innumerable theorists. It
was good for the man of unquickened heart to listen
even to their folly. Far down beyond the fathom of \
the intellect the soul acknowledged that all these vary
ing and conflicting developments of humanity were
united in one sentiment. Be the individual theory as
wild as fancy could make it, still the wiser spirit would
recognize the struggle of the race after a better and
purer life than had yet been realized on earth. My
faith revived even while I rejected all their schemes

206 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

It could not be that the world should continue forever
what it has been ; a soil where Happiness is so rare a
flower and Virtue so often a blighted fruit ; a battle
field where the good principle, with its shield flung
above its head, can hardly save itself amid the rush
of adverse influences. In the enthusiasm of such
thoughts I gazed through one of the pictured win
dows, and, behold ! the whole external world was
tinged with the dimly glorious aspect that is peculiar
to the Hall of Fantasy, insomuch that it seemed prac
ticable at that very instant to realize some plan for
the perfection of mankind. But, alas! if reformers
would understand the sphere in which their lot is cast
they must cease to look through pictured windows.
Yet they not only use this medium, but mistake it for
the whitest sunshine.

" Come," said I to my friend, starting from a deep
reverie, " let us hasten hence or I shall be tempted to
make a theory, after which there is little hope of any
man."

" Come hither, then," answered he. " Here is one
theory that swallows up and annihilates all others."

He led me to a distant part of the hall where a
crowd of deeply attentive auditors were assembled
round an elderly man of plain, honest, trustworthy
aspect. With an earnestness that betokened the sin-
cerest faith in his own doctrine, he announced that the
destruction of the world was close at hand.

" It is Father Miller himself ! " exclaimed I.

" No less a man," said my friend ; " and observe
how picturesque a contrast between his dogma and
those of the reformers whom we have just glanced at.
They look for the earthly perfection of mankind, and
«,re forming schemes which imply that the immortal

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 207

spirit will be connected with a physical nature for in»
numerable ages of futurity. On the other hand, here
comes good Father Miller, and with one puff of his
relentless theory scatters all their dreams like so many
withered leaves upon the blast."

" It is, perhaps, the only method of getting man
kind out of the various perplexities into which they
have fallen," I replied. " Yet I could wish that the
world might be permitted to endure until some great
moral shall have been evolved. A riddle is pro
pounded. Where is the solution? The sphinx did
not slay herself until her riddle had been guessed.
Will it not be so with the world ? Now, if it should
be burned to-morrow morning, I am at a loss to know
what purpose will have been accomplished, or how the
universe will be wiser or better for our existence and
destruction."

" We cannot tell what mighty truths may have been
embodied in act through the existence of the globe and
its inhabitants," rejoined my companion. " Perhaps
it may be revealed to us after the fall of the curtain
over our catastrophe; or not impossibly, the whole
drama, in which we are involuntary actors, may have
been performed for the instruction of another set of
spectators. I cannot perceive that our own compre
hension of it is at all essential to the matter. At any
rate, while our view is so ridiculously narrow and su
perficial it would be absurd to argue the continuance
of the world from the fact that it seems to have ex
isted hitherto in vain."

"The poor old earth," murmured I. "She has
faults enough, in all conscience, but I cannot bear to
have her perish."

"It is no great matter," said my friend. "Thg

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

happiest of us has been weary of her many a time and
oft."

"I doubt it," answered I, pertinaciously ; " the root
of human nature strikes down deep into this earthly
soil, and it is but reluctantly that we submit to be
transplanted, even for a higher cultivation in heaven.
I query whether the destruction of the earth would
gratify any one individual, except perhaps some em
barrassed man of business whose notes fall due a day
after the day of doom."

Then methought I heard the expostulating cry of
a multitude against the consummation prophesied by
Father Miller. The lover wrestled with Providence
for his foreshadowed bliss. Parents entreated that
the earth's span of endurance might be prolonged by
some seventy years, so that their new-born infant
should not be defrauded of his lifetime. A youthful
poet murmured because there would be no posterity to
recognize the inspiration of his song. The reformers,
one and all, demanded a few thousand years to test
their theories, after which the universe might go to
wreck. A mechanician, who was busied with an im
provement of the steam-engine, asked merely time to
perfect his model. A miser insisted that the world's
destruction would be a personal wrong to himself, un
less he should first be permitted to add a specified sum
to his enormous heap of gold. A little boy made dol
orous inquiry whether the last day would come before
Christmas, and thus deprive him of his anticipated
dainties. In short, nobody seemed satisfied that this
mortal scene of things should have its close just now.
5Tet, it must be confessed, the motives of the crowd for
desiring its continuance were mostly so absurd that
unless infinite Wisdom had been aware of much bet

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 209

ter reasons, the solid earth must have melted away at
once.

For my own part, not to speak of a few private and
personal ends, I really desired our old mother's pro
longed existence for her own dear sake.

" The poor old earth ! " I repeated. " What I should
chiefly regret in her destruction would be that very
earthliness which no other sphere or state of existence
can renew or compensate. The fragrance of flowers
and of new-mown hay ; the genial warmth of sunshine
and the beauty of a sunset among clouds ; the comfort
and cheerful glow of the fireside ; the deliciousness
of fruits and of all good cheer ; the magnificence of
mountains and seas and cataracts, and the softer
charm of rural scenery ; even the fast falling snow and
the gray atmosphere through which it descends, — all
these and innumerable other enjoyable things of earth
must perish with her. Then the country frolics ; the
homely humor ; the broad, open-mouthed roar of
laughter, in which body and soul conjoin so heartily !
I fear that no other world can show us anything just
like this. As for purely moral enjoyments, the good
will find them in every state of being. But where the
material and the moral exist together, what is to hap
pen then ? And then our mute four-footed friends and
the winged songsters of our woods ! Might it not be
lawful to regret them, even in the hallowed groves of
paradise ? "

"You speak like the very spirit of earth, imbued
with a scent of freshly turned soil," exclaimed my
Mend.

" It is not that I so much object to giving up these
enjoyments on my own account," continued I, " but I

voj, n. 14

210 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

hate to think that they will have been eternally an
nihilated from the list of joys."

" Nor need they be," he replied. " I see no real
force in what you say. Standing in this Hall of Fan
tasy, we perceive what even the earth-clogged intellect
of man can do in creating circumstances which, though
we call them shadowy and visionary, are scarcely more
so than those that surround us in actual life. Doubt
not then that man's disembodied spirit may recreate
time and the world for itself, with all their peculiar
enjoyments, should there still be human yearnings
amid life eternal and infinite. But I doubt whether
we shall be inclined to play such a poor scene over
again."

" Oh, you are ungrateful to our mother earth ! " re
joined I. " Come what may, I never will forget her !
Neither will it satisfy me to have her exist merely in
idea. I want her great, round, solid self to endure
interminably, and still to be peopled with the kindly
race of man, whom I uphold to be much better than he
thinks himself. Nevertheless, I confide the whole mat
ter to Providence, and shall endeavor so to live that
the world may come to an end at any moment without-
leaving me at a loss to find foothold somewhere else."

"It is an excellent resolve," said my companion,
looking at his watch. " But come ; it is the dinner
hour. Will you partake of my vegetable diet ? "

A thing so matter-of-fact as an invitation to dinner,
even when the fare was to be nothing more substantial
than vegetables and fruit, compelled us forthwith to
remove from the Hall of Fantasy. As we passed out
of the portal we met the spirits of several persons who
had been sent thither in magnetic sleep. I looked
back among the sculptured pillars and at the transfer-

THE HALL OF FANTASY. 211

mations of the gleaming fountain, and almost desired
that the whole of life might be spent in that visionary
scene where the actual world, with its hard angles,
should never rub against me, and only be viewed
through the medium of pictured windows. But for.
those who waste all their days in the Hall of Fantasy, ]
good Father Miller's prophecy is already accomplished, I
and the solid earth has come to an untimely end. Let
us be content, therefore, with merely an occasional
visit, for the sake of spiritualizing the grossness of this
actual life, and prefiguring to ourselves a state in
which the Idea shall be all in all.

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD.

NOT a great while ago, passing through the gate of
dreams, I visited that region of the earth in which lies
the famous City of Destruction. It interested me much
to learn that by the public spirit of some of the inhab
itants a railroad has recently been established between
this populous and flourishing town and the Celestial
City. Having a little time upon my hands, I resolved
to gratify a liberal curiosity by making a trip thither.
Accordingly, one fine morning after paying my bill at
the hotel, and directing the porter to stow my luggage
behind a coach, I took my seat in the vehicle and set
out for the station-house. It was my good fortune to
enjoy the company of a gentleman — one Mr. Smooth-
it-away — who, though he had never actually visited
the Celestial City, yet seemed as well acquainted with
its laws, customs, policy, and statistics, as with those
of the City of Destruction, of which he was a native
townsman. Being, moreover, a director of the railroad
corporation and one of its largest stockholders, he had
it in his power to give me all desirable information re
specting that praiseworthy enterprise.

Our coach rattled out of the city, and at a short dis
tance from its outskirts passed over a bridge of elegant
construction, but somewhat too slight, as I imagined,
to sustain any considerable weight. On both sides lay
an extensive quagmire, which could not have been
more disagreeable, either to sight or smell, had all' the
kennels of the earth emptied their pollution there.

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 213

" This," remarked Mr. Smooth-it-away, " is the fa
mous Slough of Despond — a disgrace to all the neigh
borhood ; and the greater that it might so easily be
converted into firm ground."

" I have understood," said I, " that efforts have been
made for that purpose from time immemorial. Bun-
yan mentions that above twenty thousand cartloads of
wholesome instructions had been thrown in here with
out effect."

" Very probably ! And what effect could be
anticipated from such unsubstantial stuff ? " cried
Mr. Smooth-it-away. " You observe this convenient
bridge. We obtained a sufficient foundation for it by
throwing into the slough some editions of books of
morality ; volumes of French philosophy and German
rationalism ; tracts, sermons, and essays of modern
clergymen ; extracts from Plato, Confucius, and vari
ous Hindoo sages, together with a few ingenious com
mentaries upon texts of Scripture, — all of which by
some scientific process, have been converted into a
mass like granite. The whole bog might be filled up
with similar matter."

It really seemed to me, however, that the bridge vi
brated and heaved up and down in a very formidable
manner ; and, spite of Mr. Smooth-it-away's testimony
to the solidity of its foundation, I should be loath to
cross it in a crowded omnibus, especially if each pas
senger were encumbered with as heavy luggage as that
gentleman and myself. Nevertheless we got over with
out accident, and soon found ourselves at the station-
house. This very neat and spacious edifice is erected
on the site of the little wicket gate, which formerly, as
all old pilgrims will recollect, stood directly across the
highway, and, by its inconvenient narrowness, was a

214 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MArNSE.

great obstruction to the traveller of liberal mind and
expansive stomach. The reader of John Bunyan will
be glad to know that Christian's old friend Evangel
ist, who was accustomed to supply each pilgrim with a
mystic roll, now presides at the ticket office. Some
malicious persons it is true deny the identity of this
reputable character with the Evangelist of old times,
and even pretend to bring competent evidence of an
imposture. Without involving myself in a dispute I
shall merely observe that, so far as my experience
goes, the square pieces of pasteboard now delivered to
passengers are much more convenient and useful along
the road than the antique roll of parchment. Whether
they will be as readily received at the gate of the Ce
lestial City I decline giving an opinion.

A large number of passengers were already at the
station-house awaiting the departure of the cars. By
the aspect and demeanor of these persons it was easy
to judge that the feelings of the community had under
gone a very favorable change in reference to the celes
tial pilgrimage. It would have done Bunyan's heart
good to see it. Instead of a lonely and ragged man
with a huge burden on his back, plodding along sor
rowfully on foot while the whole city hooted after him,
here were parties of the first gentry and most respect
able people in the neighborhood setting forth towards
the Celestial City as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage
were merely a summer tour. Among the gentlemen
were characters of deserved eminence — magistrates,
politicians, and men of wealth, by whose example re
ligion could not but be greatly recommended to their
meaner brethren. In the ladies' apartment, too, I re*
joiced to distinguish some of those flowers of fashion
able society who are so well fitted to adorn the most

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 215

elevated circles of the Celestial City. There was
much pleasant conversation about the news of the day,
topics of business and politics, or the lighter matters
of amusement ; while religion, though indubitably the
main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the
background. Even an infidel would have heard little
or nothing to shock his sensibility.

One great convenience of the new method of going
on pilgrimage I must not forget to mention. Our
enormous burdens, instead of being carried on our
shoulders as had been the custom of old, were all
snugly deposited in the baggage car, and, as I was as
sured, would be delivered to their respective owners at
the journey's end. Another thing, likewise, the be
nevolent reader will be delighted to understand. It
may be remembered that there was an ancient feud be
tween Prince Beelzebub and the keeper of the wicket
gate, and that the adherents of the former distinguished
personage were accustomed to shoot deadly arrows at
honest pilgrims while knocking at the door. This dis
pute, much to the credit as well of the illustrious po
tentate above mentioned as of the worthy and enlight
ened directors of the railroad, has been pacifically
arranged on the principle of mutual compromise. The
prince's subjects are now pretty numerously employed
about the station-house, some in taking care of the bag
gage, others in collecting fuel, feeding the engines, and
such congenial occupations ; and I can conscientiously
affirm that persons more attentive to their business,
more willing to accommodate, or more generally agree
able to the passengers, are not to be found on any rail
road. Every good heart must surely exult at so satis
factory an arrangement of an immemorial difficulty.

" Where is Mr. Greatheart ? " inquired I. " Beyond

216 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

a doubt the directors have engaged that famous old
champion to be chief conductor on the railroad ? "

"Why, no," said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a dry
cough. " He was offered the situation of brakeman ;
but, to tell you the truth, our friend Greatheart has
grown preposterously stiff and narrow in his old age.
He has so often guided pilgrims over the road on foot
that he considers it a sin to travel in any other fashion.
Besides, the old fellow had entered so heartily into the
ancient feud with Prince Beelzebub that he would have
been perpetually at blows or ill language with some of
the prince's subjects, and thus have embroiled us anew.
So, on the whole, we were not sorry when honest Great-
heart went off to the Celestial City in a huff and left
us at liberty to choose a more suitable and accommo
dating man. Yonder comes the engineer of the train.
You will probably recognize him at once."

The engine at this moment took its station in ad
vance of the cars, looking, I must confess, much more
like a sort of mechanical demon that would hurry us
to the infernal regions than a laudable contrivance
for smoothing our way to the Celestial City. On its
top sat a personage almost enveloped in smoke and
flame, which, not to startle the reader, appeared to
gush from his own mouth and stomach as well as from
the engine's brazen abdomen.

" Do my eyes deceive me ? " cried I. " What on
earth is this ! A living creature ? If so, he is own
brother to the engine he rides upon ! "

" Poh, poh, you are obtuse ! " said Mr. Smooth-it-
away, with a hearty laugh. " Don't you know Apol-
lyon, Christian's old enemy, with whom he fought so
fierce a battle in the Valley of Humiliation ? He was
the very fellow to manage the engine ; and so we hava

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 217

reconciled him to the custom of going on pilgrimage,
and engaged him as chief engineer."

" Bravo, bravo ! " exclaimed I, with irrepressible en
thusiasm ; " this shows the liberality of the age ; this
proves, if anything can, that all musty prejudices are
in a fair way to be obliterated. And how will Chris
tian rejoice to hear of this happy transformation of his
old antagonist! I promise myself great pleasure in
informing him of it when we reach the Celestial
City."

The passengers being all comfortably seated, we now
rattled away merrily, accomplishing a greater distance
in ten minutes than Christian probably trudged over
in a day. It was laughable, while we glanced along,
fts it were, at the tail of a thunderbolt, to observe
two dusty foot travellers in the old pilgrim guise, with
cockle shell and staff, their mystic rolls of parchment
in their hands and their intolerable burdens on their
backs. The preposterous obstinacy of these honest
people in persisting to groan and stumble along the
difficult pathway rather than take advantage of mod
ern improvements, excited great mirth among our
wiser brotherhood. We greeted the two pilgrims
with many pleasant gibes and a roar of laughter;
whereupon they gazed at us with such woful and ab
surdly compassionate visages that our merriment grew
tenfold more obstreperous. Apollyon also entered
heartily into the fun, and contrived to flirt the smoke
and flame of the engine, or of his own breath, into their
faces, and envelop them in an atmosphere of scalding
steam. These little practical jokes amused us might
ily, and doubtless afforded the pilgrims the gratifica
tion of considering themselves martyrs.

At some distance from the railroad Mr. Smooth-it-

218 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

away pointed to a large, antique edifice, which, he oK
served, was a tavern of long standing, and had for
merly been a noted stopping-place for pilgrims. In
Bunyan's road-book it is mentioned as the Interpret
er's House.

" I have long had a curiosity to visit that old man
sion," remarked I.

" It is not one of our stations, as you perceive," said
my companion. " The keeper was violently opposed
to the railroad ; and well he might be, as the track left
his house of entertainment on one side, and thus was
pretty certain to deprive him of all his reputable cus
tomers. But the footpath still passes his door , and
the old gentleman now and then receives a call from
some simple traveller, and entertains him with fare as
old-fashioned as himself."

Before our talk on this subject came to a conclusion
we were rushing by the place where Christian's burden
fell from his shoulders at the sight of the Cross. This
served as a theme for Mr. Smooth-it-away, Mr. Live-
for-the-world, Mr. Hide-sin-in-the-heart, Mr. Scaly-
conscience, and a knot of gentlemen 'from the town
of Shun-repentance, to descant upon the inestimable
advantages resulting from the safety of our baggage.
Myself, and all the passengers indeed, joined with
great unanimity in this view of the matter ; for our
burdens were rich in many things esteemed precious
throughout the world ; and, especially, we each of us
possessed a great variety of favorite Habits, which we
trusted would not be out of fashion even in the polite
circles of the Celestial City. It would have been a
sad spectacle to see such an assortment of valuable
articles tumbling into the sepulchre. Thus pleasantly
conversing on the favorable circumstances of our posi

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 219

tion as compared with those of past pilgrims and of
narrow-minded ones at the present day, we soon found
ourselves at the foot of the Hill Difficulty. Through
the very heart of this rocky mountain a tunnel has been
constructed of most admirable architecture, with a lofty
arch and a spacious double track ; so that, unless the
earth and rocks should chance to crumble down, it will
remain an eternal monument of the builder's skill and
enterprise. It is a great though incidental advantage
that the materials from the heart of the Hill Difficulty
have been employed in filling up the Valley of Humil
iation, thus obviating the necessity of descending into
that disagreeable and unwholesome hollow.

" This is a wonderful improvement, indeed," said I.
" Yet I should have been glad of an opportunity to
visit the Palace Beautiful and be introduced to the
charming young ladies — Miss Prudence, Miss Piety,
Miss Charity, and the rest — who have the kindness to
entertain pilgrims there."

" Young ladies ! " cried Mr. Smooth-it-away, as soon
as he could speak for laughing. "And charming
young ladies ! Why, my dear fellow, they are old
maids, every soul of them — prim, starched, dry, and
angular ; and not one of them, I will venture to say,
has altered so much as the fashion of her gown since
the days of Christian's pilgrimage."

" Ah, well," said I, much comforted, " then I can
very readily dispense with their acquaintance."

The respectable Apollyon was now putting on the
steam at a prodigious rate, anxious, perhaps, to get rid
of the unpleasant reminiscences connected with the
spot where he had so disastrously encountered Christ
ian. Consulting Mr. Bunyan's road-book, I perceived
that we must now be within a few miles of the Vallev

220 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

of the Shadow of Death, into which doleful region, at
our present speed, we should plunge much sooner than
seemed at all desirable. In truth, I expected nothing
better than to find myself in the ditch on one side or
the quag on the other ; but on communicating my ap
prehensions to Mr. Smooth-it-away, he assured me that
the difficulties of this passage, even in its worst condi
tion, had been vastly exaggerated, and that, in its pres
ent state of improvement, I might consider myself as
safe as on any railroad in Christendom.

Even while we were speaking the train shot into
the entrance of this dreaded Valley. Though I plead
guilty to some foolish palpitations of the heart during
our headlong rush over the causeway here constructed,
yet it were unjust to withhold the highest encomiums
on the boldness of its original conception and the inge
nuity of those who executed it. It was gratifying, like
wise, to observe how much care had been taken to
dispel the everlasting gloom and supply the defect of
cheerful sunshine, not a ray of which has ever pene
trated among these awful shadows. For this purpose,
the inflammable gas which exudes plentifully from the
soil is collected by means of pipes, and thence com
municated to a quadruple row of lamps along the
whole extent of the passage. Thus a radiance has
been created even out of the fiery and sulphurous
curse that rests forever upon the valley — a radiance
hurtful, however, to the eyes, and somewhat bewilder
ing, as I discovered by the changes which it wrought
in the visages of my companions. In this respect, as
compared with natural daylight, there is the same dif
ference as between truth and falsehood ; but if the
reader have ever travelled through the dark Valley,
ke will have learned to be thankful for any light that

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 221

he could get — if not from the sky above, then from
the blasted soil beneath. Such was the red brilliancy
of these lamps that they appeared to build walls of fire
on both sides of the track, between which we held our
course at lightning speed, while a reverberating thun
der filled the Valley with its echoes. Had the engine
run off the track, — a catastrophe, it is whispered, by
no means unprecedented, — the bottomless pit, if there
be any such place, would undoubtedly have received
us. Just as some dismal fooleries of this nature had
made my heart quake there came a tremendous shriek,
careering along the valley as if a thousand devils had
burst their lungs to utter it, but which proved to be
merely the whistle of the engine on arriving at a stop
ping-place.

The spot where we had now paused is the same that
our friend Bunyan — a truthful man, but infected with
many fantastic notions — has designated, in terms
plainer than I like to repeat, as the mouth of the
infernal region. This, however, must be a mistake,
inasmuch as Mr. Smooth-it-away, while we remained
in the smoky and lurid cavern, took occasion to prove
that Tophet has not even a metaphorical existence.
The place, he assured us, is no other than the crater
of a half-extinct volcano, in which the directors had
caused forges to be set up for the manufacture of rail
road iron. Hence, also, is obtained a plentiful sup
ply of fuel for the use of the engines. Whoever had
gazed into the dismal obscurity of the broad cavern
mouth, whence ever and anon darted huge tongues of
dusky flame, and had seen the strange, half-shaped
monsters, and visions of faces horribly grotesque, into
which the smoke seemed to wreathe itself, and had
heard the awful murmurs, and shrieks, and deep,

222 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

shuddering whispers of the blast, sometimes forming
themselves into words almost articulate, would have
seized upon Mr. Smooth-it-away's comfortable expla
nation as greedily as we did. The inhabitants of the
cavern, moreover, were unlovely personages, dark,
smoke-begrimed, generally deformed, with misshapen
feet, and a glow of dusky redness in their eyes as if
their hearts had caught fire and were blazing out of
the upper windows. It struck me as a peculiarity
that the laborers at the forge and those who brought
fuel to the engine, when they began to draw short
breath, positively emitted smoke from their mouth and
nostrils.

Among the idlers about the train, most of whom
were puffing cigars which they had lighted at the
flame of the crater, I was perplexed to notice several
who, to my certain knowledge, had heretofore set forth
by railroad for the Celestial City. They looked dark,
wild, and smoky, with a singular resemblance, indeed,
to the native inhabitants, like whom, also, they had
a disagreeable propensity to ill-natured gibes and
sneers, the habit of which had wrought a settled con
tortion of their visages. Having been on speaking
terms with one of these persons, — an indolent, good-
for-nothing fellow, who went by the name of Take-it-
easy, — I called him, and inquired what was his busi
ness there.

"Did you not start," said I, "for the Celestial
City?"

" That 's a fact," said Mr. Take-it-easy, carelessly
puffing some smoke into my eyes. " But I heard such
bad accounts that I never took pains to climb the hill
on which the city stands. No business doing, no fun
going on, nothing to drink, and no smoking allowed,

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 223

and a thrumming of church music from morning till
night. I would not stay in such a place if they offered
me house room and living free."

"But, my good Mr. Take-it-easy," cried I, "why
take up your residence here, of all places in the
world?" "

"Oh," said the loafer, with a grin, "it is very
warm hereabouts, and I meet with plenty of old ac
quaintances, and altogether the place suits me. I hope
to see you back again some day soon. A pleasant
journey to you."

While he was speaking the bell of the engine rang,
and we dashed away after dropping a few passengers,
but receiving no new ones. Battling onward through
the Valley, we were dazzled with the fiercely gleam
ing gas lamps, as before. But sometimes, in the dark
of intense brightness, grim faces, that bore the aspect
and expression of individual sins, or evil passions,
seemed to thrust themselves through the veil of light,
glaring upon us, and stretching forth a great, dusky
hand, as if to impede our progress. I almost thought
that they were my own sins that appalled me there.
These were freaks of imagination — nothing more,
certainly — mere delusions, which I ought to be heart
ily ashamed of ; but all through the Dark Valley I
was tormented, and pestered, and dolefully bewildered
with the same kind of waking dreams. The mephitic
gases of that region intoxicate the brain. As the
light of natural day, however, began to struggle with
the glow of the lanterns, these vain imaginations lost
their vividness, and finally vanished with the first ray
of sunshine that greeted our escape from the Valley of
the Shadow of Death. Ere we had gone a mile be
yond it I could wellnigh have taken my oath that this
whole gloomy passage was a dream.

224 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

At the end of the valley, as John Bunyan mentions,
is a cavern, where, in his days, dwelt two cruel giants,
Pope and Pagan, who had strown the ground about
their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims.
These vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but
into their deserted cave another terrible giant has
thrust himself, and makes it his business to seize upon
honest travellers and fatten them for his table with
plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw pota
toes, and sawdust. He is a German by birth, and is
called Giant Transcendentalist ; but as to his form,
his features, his substance, and his nature generally,
it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant that
neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever
been able to describe them. As we rushed by the
cavern's mouth we caught a hasty glimpse of him,
looking somewhat like an ill-proportioned figure, but
considerably more like a heap of fog and duskiness.
He shouted after us, but in so strange a phraseology
that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to be
encouraged or affrighted.

It was late in the day when the train thundered into
the ancient city of Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still
at the height of prosperity, and exhibits an epitome of
whatever is brilliant, gay, and fascinating beneath the
sun. As I purposed to make a considerable stay here,
it gratified me to learn that there is no longer the
want of harmony between the town's-people and pil
grims, which impelled the former to such lamentably
mistaken measures as the persecution of Christian and
the fiery martyrdom of Faithful. On the contrary, as
the new railroad brings with it great trade and a con
stant influx of strangers, the lord of Vanity Fair is ita
chief patron, and the capitalists of the city are among

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 225

the largest stockholders. Many passengers stop to take
their pleasure or make their profit in the Fair, instead
of going onward to the Celestial City. Indeed, such
are the charms of the place that people often affirm
it to be the true and only heaven ; stoutly contending
that there is no other, that those who seek further are
mere dreamers, and that, if the fabled brightness of
the Celestial City lay but a bare mile beyond the gates
of Vanity, they would not be fools enough to go thither.
Without subscribing to these perhaps exaggerated en
comiums, I can truly say that my abode in the city wag
mainly agreeable, and my intercourse with the inhabi«
tants productive of much amusement and instruction.

Being naturally of a serious turn, my attention wa?
directed to the solid advantages derivable from a resi
dence here, rather than to the effervescent pleasures
which are the grand object with too many visitants^
The Christian reader, if he have had no accounts of
the city later than Bunyan's time, will be surprised to
hear that almost every street has its church, and that
the reverend clergy are nowhere held in higher re
spect than at Vanity Fair. And well do they deserve
such honorable estimation ; for the maxims of wisdom
and virtue which fall from their lips come from as
deep a spiritual source, and tend to as lofty a religious
aim, as those of the sagest philosophers of old. In
justification of this high praise I need only mention the
names of the Rev. Mr. Shallow-deep, the Rev. Mr.
Stumble-at-truth, that fine old clerical character the
Rev., Mr. This-to-day, who expects shortly to resign his
pulpit to the Rev. Mr. That-to-morrow ; together with
the Rev. Mr. Bewilderment, the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-
spirit, and, last and greatest, the Rev. Dr. Wind-of-
doctrine. The labors of these eminent divines are

VOL. ii. 15

226 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

aided by those of innumerable lecturers, who diffuse
such a various profundity, in all subjects of human or
celestial science, that any man may acquire an omnig-
enous erudition without the trouble of even learning to
read. Thus literature is etherealized by assuming for
its medium the human voice ; and knowledge, depos
iting all its heavier particles, except, doubtless, its
gold, becomes exhaled into a sound, which forthwith
steals into the ever-open ear of the community. These
ingenious methods constitute a sort of machinery, by
which thought and study are done to every person's
hand without his putting himself to the slightest incon
venience in the matter. There is another species of
machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual
morality. This excellent result is effected by societies
for all manner of virtuous purposes, with which a man
has merely to connect himself, throwing, as it were, his
quota of virtue into the common stock, and the presi
dent and directors will take care that the aggregate
amount be well applied. All these, and other won
derful improvements in ethics, religion, and literature,
being made plain to my comprehension by the in
genious Mr. Smooth-it-away, inspired me with a vast
admiration of Vanity Fair.

It would fill a volume, in an age of pamphlets,
were I to record all my observations in this great
capital of human business and pleasure. There was
an unlimited range of society — the powerful, the
wise, the witty, and the famous in every walk of life ;
princes, presidents, poets, generals, artists, actors, and
philanthropists, — all making their own market at the
fair, and deeming no price too exorbitant for such
commodities as hit their fancy. It was well worth
one's while, even if he had no idea of buying or selJr

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 227

ing, to loiter through the bazaars and observe the
various sorts of traffic that were going forward.

Some of the purchasers, I thought, made very fool
ish bargains. For instance, a young man having in
herited a splendid fortune, laid out a considerable por
tion of it in the purchase of diseases, and finally spent
all the rest for a heavy lot of repentance and a suit of
rags. A very pretty girl bartered a heart as clear as
crystal, and which seemed her most valuable posses
sion, for another jewel of the same kind, but so worn
and defaced as to be utterly worthless. In one shop
there were a great many crowns of laurel and myrtle,
which soldiers, authors, statesmen, and various other
people pressed eagerly to buy ; some purchased these
paltry wreaths with their lives, others by a toilsome
servitude of years, and many sacrificed whatever
was most valuable, yet finally slunk away without
the crown. There was a sort of stock or scrip, called
Conscience, which seemed to be in great demand, and
would purchase almost anything. Indeed, few rich
commodities were to be obtained without paying a
heavy sum in this particular stock, and a man's bus
iness was seldom very lucrative unless he knew pre
cisely when and how to throw his hoard of conscience
into the market. Yet as this stock was the only thing
of permanent value, whoever parted with it was sure to
find himself a loser in the long run. Several of the
speculations were of a questionable character. Occa
sionally a member of Congress recruited his pocket by
the sale of his constituents ; and I was assured that ./
public officers have often sold their country at very
moderate prices. Thousands sold their happiness for
& whim. Gilded chains were in great demand, and
purchased with almost any sacrifice. In truth, those

228 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

who desired, according to the old adage, to sell any.
thing valuable for a song, might find customers all
over the Fair ; and there were innumerable messes of
pottage, piping hot, for such as chose to buy them
with their birthrights. A few articles, however, could
not be found genuine at Vanity Fair. If a customer
wished to renew his stock of youth the dealers offered
him a set of false teeth and an auburn wig ; if he de
manded peace of mind, they recommended opium 01 a
brandy bottle.

Tracts of land and golden mansions, situate in the
Celestial City, were often exchanged, at very disadvan
tageous rates, for a few years' lease of small, dismal,
inconvenient tenements in Vanity Fair. Prince Beel
zebub himself took great interest in this sort of traffic,
and sometimes condescended to meddle with smaller
matters. I once had the pleasure to see him bargain
ing with a miser for his soul, which, after much in
genious skirmishing on both sides, his highness suc
ceeded in obtaining at about the value of sixpence.
The prince remarked with a smile, that he was a loser
by the transaction.

Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my
manners and deportment became more and more like
those of the inhabitants. The place began to seem
like home ; the idea of pursuing my travels to the
Celestial City was almost obliterated from my mind.
I was reminded of it, however, by the sight of the same
pair of simple pilgrims at whom we had laughed so
heartily when Apollyon puffed smoke and steam into
their faces at the commencement of our journey.
There they stood amidst the densest bustle of Vanity ;
the dealers offering them their purple and fine linen
and jewels, the men of wit and humor gibing at them,

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 229

a pair of buxom ladies ogling them askance, while the
benevolent Mr. Smooth-it-away whispered some of his
wisdom at their elbows, and pointed to a newly-erected
temple ; but there were these worthy simpletons, mak
ing the scene look wild and monstrous, merely by their
sturdy repudiation of all part in its business or pleas
ures.

One of them — his name was Stick-to-the-right —
perceived in my face, I suppose, a species of sympathy
and almost admiration, which, to my own great sur*
prise, I could not help feeling for this pragmatic couple.
It prompted him to address me.

" Sir," inquired he, with a sad, yet mild and kindly
voice, " do you call yourself a pilgrim ? "

" Yes," I replied, " my right to that appellation is
indubitable. I am merely a sojourner here in Vanity
Fair, being bound to the Celestial City by the new rail
road."

" Alas, friend," rejoined Mr. Stick-to-the-right, "I
do assure you, and beseech you to receive the truth of
my words, that that whole concern is a bubble. You
may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live
thousands of years, and yet never get beyond the
limits of Vanity Fair. Yea, though you should deem
yourself entering the gates of the blessed city, it will
be nothing but a miserable delusion."

" The Lord of the Celestial City," began the other
pilgrim, whose name was Mr. Foot-it-to-heaven, " has
refused, and will ever refuse, to grant an act of in
corporation for this railroad ; and unless that be ob
tained, no passenger can ever hope to enter his domin
ions. Wherefore every man who buys a ticket must
lay his account with losing the purchase money, which
is the value of his own soul."

230 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Poh, nonsense ! " said Mr. Smooth-it-away, taking
my arm and leading me off, " these fellows ought to
be indicted for a libel. If the law stood as it once did
in Vanity Fair we should see them grinning through
the iron bars of the prison window."

This incident made a considerable impression on my
mind, and contributed with other circumstances to in
dispose me to a permanent residence in the city of
Vanity ; although, of course, I was not simple enough
to give up my original plan of gliding along easily and
commodiously by railroad. Still, I grew anxious to
be gone. There was one strange thing that troubled
me. Amid the occupations or amusements of the
Fair, nothing was more common than for a person —
whether at feast, theatre, or church, or trafficking for
wealth and honors, or whatever he might be doing,
and however unseasonable the interruption — suddenly
to vanish like a soap bubble, and be never more seen
of his fellows ; and so accustomed were the latter to
such little accidents that they went on with their bus
iness as quietly as if nothing had happened. But it
was otherwise with me.

Finally, after a pretty long residence at the Fair,
I resumed my journey towards the Celestial City, still
with Mr. Smooth-it-away at my side. At a short dis
tance beyond the suburbs of Vanity we passed the an
cient silver mine, of which Demas was the first discov
erer, and which is now wrought to great advantage,
supplying nearly all the coined currency of the world.
A little further onward was the spot where Lot's wife
had stood forever under the semblance of a pillar of
salt. Curious travellers have long since carried it
away piecemeal. Had all regrets been punished as
rigorously as this poor dame's were, my yearning fof

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 231

khe relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might have
produced a similar change in my own corporeal sub
stance, and left me a warning to future pilgrims.

The next remarkable object was a large edifice, con
structed of mossgrown stone, but in a modern and airy
style of architecture. The engine came to a pause in
its vicinity, with the usual tremendous shriek.

" This was formerly the castle of the redoubted
giant Despair," observed Mr. Smooth-it-away ; " but
since his death Mr. Flimsy-faith has repaired it, and
keeps an excellent house of entertainment here. It is
one of our stopping-places."

" It seems but slightly put together," remarked I,
looking at the frail yet ponderous walls. " I do not
envy Mr. Flimsy-faith his habitation. Some day it
will thunder down upon the heads of the occupants."

"We shall escape at all events," said Mr. Smooth-
it-away, " for Apollyon is putting on the steam again."

The road now plunged into a gorge of the Delecta
ble Mountains, and traversed the field where in former
ages the blind men wandered and stumbled among the
tombs. One of these ancient tombstones had been
thrust across the track by some malicious person, and
gave the train of cars a terrible jolt. Far up the
rugged side of a mountain I perceived a rusty iron
door, half overgrown with bushes and creeping plants,
but with smoke issuing from its crevices.

"Is that," inquired I, "the very door in the hill-side
which the shepherds assured Christian was a by-way to
hell?"

" That was a joke on the part of the shepherds,"
said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a smile. " It is neither
more nor less than the door of a cavern which they
use as a smoke-house for the preparation of mutton
hams."

232 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

My recollections of the journey are now, for a little
space, dim and confused, inasmuch as a singular drow
siness here overcame me, owing to the fact that we
were passing over the enchanted ground, the air of
which encourages a disposition to sleep. I awoke,
however, as soon as we crossed the borders of the
pleasant land of Beulah. All the passengers were
rubbing their eyes, comparing watches, and congratu
lating one another on the prospect of arriving so sea
sonably at the journey's end. The sweet breezes of
this happy clime came refreshingly to our nostrils ;
we beheld the glimmering gush of silver fountains,
overhung by trees of beautiful foliage and delicious
fruit, which were propagated by grafts from the celes
tial gardens. Once, as we dashed onward like a hur
ricane, there was a flutter of wings and the bright
appearance of an angel in the air, speeding forth on
some heavenly mission. The engine now announced
the close vicinity of the final station-house by one last
and horrible scream, in which there seemed to be dis
tinguishable every kind of wailing and woe, and bitter
fierceness of wrath, all mixed up with the wild laugh
ter of a devil or a madman. Throughout our journey,
at every stopping-place, Apollyon had exercised his
ingenuity in screwing the most abominable sounds out
of the whistle of the steam-engine ; but in this closing
effort he outdid himself and created an infernal up
roar, which, besides disturbing the peaceful inhabi
tants of Beulah, must have sent its discord even
through the celestial gates.

While the horrid clamor was still ringing in our
cars we heard an exulting strain, as if a thousand in
struments of music, with height and depth and sweet
ness in their tones, at once tender and triumphant,

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD. 233

were struck in unison, to greet the approach of some
illustrious hero, who had fought the good fight and
won a glorious victory, and was come to lay aside his
battered arms forever. Looking to ascertain what
might be the occasion of this glad harmony, I per
ceived, on alighting from the cars, that a multitude of
shining ones had assembled on the other side of the
river, to welcome two poor pilgrims, who were just
emerging from its depths. They were the same whom
Apollyon and ourselves had persecuted with taunts,
and gibes, and scalding steam, at the commencement
of our journey — the same whose unworldly aspect
and impressive words had stirred my conscience amid
the wild revellers of Vanity Fair.

" How amazingly well those men have got on," cried
I to Mr. Smooth-it-away. " I wish we were secure of
as good a reception."

" Never fear, never fear ! " answered my friend.
" Come, make haste ; the ferry boat will be off di
rectly, and in three minutes you will be on the other
side of the river. No doubt you will find coaches to
carry you up to the city gates."

A steam ferry boat, the last improvement on this
important route, lay at the river side, puffing, snort
ing, and emitting all those other disagreeable utter
ances which betoken the departure to be immediate.
I hurried on board with the rest of the passengers,
most of whom were in great perturbation : some bawl
ing out for their baggage ; some tearing their hair and
exclaiming that the boat would explode or sink ; some
already pale with the heaving of the stream ; some gaz
ing affrighted at the ugly aspect of the steersman ; and
some still dizzy with the slumberous influences of the
Enchanted Ground. Looking back to the shore, I was

234 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

amazed to discern Mr. Smooth-it-away waving his hand
in token of farewell.

" Don't you go over to the Celestial City ? " ex
claimed I.

" Oh, no ! " answered he with a queer smile, and
that same disagreeable contortion of visage which I
had remarked in the inhabitants of the Dark Valley*
" Oh, no ! I have come thus far only for the sake of
your pleasant company. Good-by ! We shall meet
again."

And then did my excellent friend Mr. Smooth-it-
away laugh outright, in the midst of which cachinna-
tion a smoke-wreath issued from his mouth and nos
trils, while a twinkle of lurid flame darted out of
either eye, proving indubitably that his heart was all
of a red blaze. The impudent fiend ! To deny the
existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures rag
ing within his breast. I rushed to the side of the
boat, intending to fling myself on shore ; but the
wheels, as they began their revolutions, threw a dash
of spray over me so cold — so deadly cold, with the
chill that will never leave those waters until Death be
drowned in his own river — that with a shiver and
a heartquake I awoke. Thank Heaven it was a
Dream I

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE.

LIFE figures itself to me as a festal or funereal pro
cession. All of us have our places, and are to move
onward under the direction of the Chief Marshal.
The grand difficulty results from the invariably mis
taken principles on which the deputy marshals seek to
arrange this immense concourse of people, so much
more numerous than those that train their intermin
able length through streets and highways in times of
political excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far be.
yond the memory of man or even the record of history,
and has hitherto been very little modified by the in
nate sense of something wrong, and the dim percep
tion of better methods, that have disquieted all the
ages through which the procession has taken its march.
Its members are classified by the merest external cir
cumstances, and thus are more certain to be thrown
out of their true positions than if no principle of ar
rangement were attempted. In one part of the pro
cession we see men of landed estate or moneyed cap
ital gravely keeping each other company, for the pre
posterous reason that they chance to have a similar
standing in the tax-gatherer's book. Trades and pro
fessions march together with scarcely a more real bond
of union. In this manner, it cannot be denied, people
are disentangled from the mass and separated into va
rious classes according to certain apparent relations ;
all have some artificial badge which the world, and
themselves among the first, learn to consider as a gen-

\

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

uine characteristic. Fixing our attention on such out
side shows of similarity or difference, we lose sight of
those realities by which nature, fortune, fate, or Prov
idence has constituted for every man a brotherhood,
wherein it is one great office of human wisdom to
classify him. When the mind has once accustomed
itself to a proper arrangement of the Procession of
Life, or a true classification of society, even though
merely speculative, there is thenceforth a satisfaction
which pretty well suffices for itself without the aid of
any actual reformation in the order of march.

For instance, assuming to myself the power of mar
shalling the aforesaid procession, I direct a trumpeter
to send forth a blast loud enough to be heard from
hence to China ; and a herald, with world-pervading
voice, to make proclamation for a certain class of mor
tals to take their places. What shall be their prin
ciple of union ? After all, an external one, in com
parison with many that might be found, yet far more
real than those which the world has selected for a
similar purpose. Let all who are afflicted with like
physical diseases form themselves into ranks.

Our first attempt at classification is not very success
ful. It may gratify the pride of aristocracy to reflect
that disease, more than any other circumstance of hu
man life, pays due observance to the distinctions which
rank and wealth, and poverty and lowliness, have
established among mankind. Some maladies are rich
and precious, and only to be acquired by the right of
inheritance or purchased with gold. Of this kind is
the gout, which serves as a bond of brotherhood to
the purple- visaged gentry, who obey the herald's voice,
and painfully hobble from all civilized regions of the
globe to take their post in the grand procession. IB

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 237

mercy to their toes, let us hope that the march may
not be long. The Dyspeptics, too, are people of good
standing in the world. For them the earliest salmon
is caught in our eastern rivers, and the shy woodcock
stains the dry leaves with his blood in his remotest
haunts, and the turtle comes from the far Pacific Isl
ands to be gobbled up in soup. They can afford to
flavor all their dishes with indolence, which, in spite
of the general opinion, is a sauce more exquisitely
piquant than appetite won by exercise. Apoplexy is
another highly respectable disease. We will rank
together all who have the symptom of dizziness in the
brain, and as fast as any drop by the way supply
their places with new members of the board of alder
men.

On the other hand, here come whole tribes of people
whose physical lives are but a deteriorated variety of
life, and themselves a meaner species of mankind ; so
sad an effect has been wrought by the tainted breath
of cities, scanty and unwholesome food, destructive
modes of labor, and the lack of those moral supports
that might partially have counteracted such bad in
fluences. Behold here a train of house painters, all
afflicted with a peculiar sort of colic. Next in place
we will marshal those workmen in cutlery, who have
breathed a fatal disorder into their lungs with the im
palpable dust of steel. Tailors and shoemakers, being
sedentary men, will chiefly congregate into one part
of the procession and march under similar banners of
disease ; but among them we may observe here and
there a sickly student, who has left his health between
the leaves of classic volumes ; and clerks, likewise, who
have caught their deaths on high official stools ; and
Uieu of genius too, who have written sheet after sheet

238 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

with pens dipped in their heart's blood. These are a
wretched, quaking, short-breathed set. But what is
this cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb
the ear with the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs?
They are seamstresses, who have plied the daily and
nightly needle in the service of master tailors and
close-fisted contractors, until now it is almost time for
each to hem the borders of her own shroud. Con
sumption points their place in the procession. With
their sad sisterhood are intermingled many youthful
maidens who have sickened in aristocratic mansions,
and for whose aid science has unavailingly searched
its volumes, and whom breathless love has watched.
In our ranks the rich maiden and the poor seamstress
may walk arm in arm. We might find innumerable
other instances, where the bond of mutual disease —
not to speak of nation-sweeping pestilence — embraces
high and low, and makes the king a brother of the
clown. But it is not hard to own that disease is the
natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have
his established orders of rank, and wear his royal
mantle of the color of a fever flush; and let the
noble and wealthy boast their own physical infirmi
ties, and display their symptoms as the badges of
high station. All things considered, these are as
proper subjects of human pride as any relations of
human rank that men can fix upon.

Sound again, thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and
herald, with thy voice of might, shout forth another
summons that shall reach the old baronial castles of
Europe, and the rudest cabin of our western wilder
ness ! What class is next to take its place in the pro
cession of mortal life? Let it be those whom the
gifts of intellect have united in a noble brotherhood.

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 239

Ay, this is a reality, before which the conventional
distinctions of society melt away like a vapor when we
would grasp it with the hand. Were Byron now alive,
and Burns, the first would come from his ancestral ab
bey, flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited
honors of a thousand years, to take the arm of the
mighty peasant who grew immortal while he stooped
behind his plough. These are gone ; but the hall, the
farmer's fireside, the hut, perhaps the palace, the count
ing-room, the workshop, the village, the city, life's high
places and low ones, may all produce their poets, whom
a common temperament pervades like an electric sym
pathy. Peer or ploughman, we will muster them pair
by pair and shoulder to shoulder. Even society, in
its most artificial state, consents to this arrangement.
These factory girls from Lowell shall mate themselves
with the pride of drawing-rooms and literary circles,
the bluebells in fashion's nosegay, the Sapphos, and
Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes of
intellect bring together as strange companies. Silk-
gowned professor of languages, give your arm to this
sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself honored by the
conjunction, though you behold him grimy from the
anvil. All varieties of human speech are like his
mother tongue to this rare man. Indiscriminately let
those take their places, of whatever rank they come,
who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway
a people — Nature's generals, her lawgivers, her kings,
and with them also the deep philosophers who think
the thought in one generation that is to revolutionize
society in the next. With the hereditary legislator
in whom eloquence is a far-descended attainment —
a rich echo repeated by powerful voices from Cicero
downward — we will match some wondrous backwoods-

240 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE,

man, who has caught a wild power of language from
the breeze among his native forest boughs. But we
may safely leave these brethren and sisterhood to settle
their own congenialities. Our ordinary distinctions
become so trifling, so impalpable, so ridiculously vis
ionary, in comparison with a classification founded on
truth, that all talk about the matter is immediately
a common place.

Yet the longer I reflect the less am I satisfied with
the idea of forming a separate class of mankind on
the basis of high intellectual power. At best it is
but a higher development of innate gifts common to
all. Perhaps, moreover, he whose genius appears
deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save
the knack of expression ; he throws out occasionally a
lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is pro
foundly, though unutterably, conscious. Therefore.,
though we suffer the brotherhood of intellect to march
onward together, it may be doubted whether their pe
culiar relation will not begin to vanish as soon as the
procession shall have passed beyond the circle of this
present world. But we do not classify for eternity.

And next, let the trumpet pour forth a funereal
wail, and the herald's voice give breath in one vast
ery to all the groans and grievous utterances that are
audible throughout the earth. We appeal now to the
sacred bond of sorrow, and summon the great multi
tude who labor under similar afflictions to take their
places in the march.

How many a heart that would have been insensible
to any other call has responded to the doleful accents
of that voice ! It has gone far and wide, and high and
low, and left scarcely a mortal roof un visited Indeed,
the principle is only too universal for our purpose, and,

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 241

nnless we limit it, will quite break up our classification
of mankind, and convert the whole procession into a
funeral train. We will therefore be at some pains to
discriminate. Here comes a lonely rich man ; he has
built a noble fabric for his dwelling-house, with a front
of stately architecture and marble floors and doors of
precious woods ; the whole structure is as beautiful as
a dream and as substantial as the native rock. But the
visionary shapes of a long posterity, for whose home
this mansion was intended, have faded into nothingness
since the death of the founder's only son. The rich
man gives a glance at his sable garb in one of the
splendid mirrors of his drawing-room, and descending
a flight of lofty steps instinctively offers his arm to
yonder poverty stricken widow in the rusty black bon
net, and with a check apron over her patched gown.
The sailor boy, who was her sole earthly stay, was
washed overboard in a late tempest. This couple
from the palace and the almshouse are but the types
of thousands more who represent the dark tragedy of
life and seldom quarrel for the upper parts. Grief is
such a leveller, with its own dignity and its own hu
mility, that the noble and the peasant, the beggar and
the monarch, will waive their pretensions to external
rank without the officiousness of interference on our
part. If pride — the influence of the world's false dis
tinctions — remain in the heart, then sorrow lacks the
earnestness which makes it holy and reverend. It
loses its reality and becomes a miserable shadow. On
this ground we have an opportunity to assign over
multitudes who would willingly claim places here to
other parts of the procession. If the mourner have
anything dearer than his grief he must seek his true
position elsewhere. There are so many unsubstantial

VOL.. II. 16

242 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

sorrows which the necessity of our mortal state begets
on idleness, that an observer, casting aside sentiment,
is sometimes led to question whether there be any real
woe, except absolute physical suffering and the loss of
closest friends. A crowd who exhibit what they deem
to be broken hearts — and among them many lovelorn
maids and bachelors, and men of disappointed ambi
tion in arts or politics, and the poor who were once
rich, or who have sought to be rich in vain — the great
majority of these may ask admittance into some other
fraternity. There is no room here. Perhaps we may
institute a separate class where such unfortunates will
naturally fall into the procession. Meanwhile let them
stand aside and patiently await their time.

If our trumpeter can borrow a note from the dooms
day trumpet blast, let him sound it now. The dread
alarum should make the earth quake to its centre, for
ihe herald is about to address mankind with a sum
mons to which even the purest mortal may be sensible
of some faint responding echo in his breast. In many
bosoms it will awaken a still small voice more terrible
than its own reverberating uproar.

The hideous appeal has swept around the globe.
Come, all ye guilty ones, and rank yourselves in ac
cordance with the brotherhood of crime. This, indeed,
is an awful summons. I almost tremble to look at the
strange partnerships that begin to be formed, reluc
tantly, but by the invincible necessity of like to like in
this part of the procession. A forger from the state
prison seizes the arm of a distinguished financier.
How indignantly does the latter plead his fair reputa
tion upon 'Change, and insist that his operations, by
their magnificence of scope, were removed into quite
another sphere of morality than those of his pitiful

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 243

companion ! But let him cut the connection if he can.
Here comes a murderer with his clanking chains, and
pairs himself — horrible to tell — with as pure and up-
right a man, in all observable respects, as ever partook
of the consecrated bread and wine. He is one of those,
perchance the most hopeless of all sinners, who prac
tise such an exemplary system of outward duties, that
even a deadly crime may be hidden from their own
sight and remembrance, under this unreal frostwork.
Yet he now finds his place. Why do that pair of
flaunting girls, with the pert, affected laugh and the
sly leer at the by-standers, intrude themselves into the
same rank with yonder decorous matron, and that
somewhat prudish maiden? Surely these poor crea
tures, born to vice as their sole and natural inheri
tance, can be no fit associates for women who have
been guarded round about by all the proprieties of do
mestic life, and who could not err unless they first cre
ated the opportunity. Oh, no ; it must be merely the
impertinence of those unblushing hussies ; and we can
only wonder how such respectable ladies should have
responded to a summons that was not meant for them.
We shall make short work of this miserable class,
each member of which is entitled to grasp any other
member's hand, by that vile degradation wherein
guilty error has buried all alike. The foul fiend to
whom it properly belongs must relieve us of our loath
some task. Let the bond servants of sin pass on.
But neither man nor woman, in whom good predomi
nates, will smile or sneer, nor bid the Rogues' March
be played, in derision of their array. Feeling within
their breasts a shuddering sympathy, which at least
gives token of the sin that might have been, they will
thank God for any place in the grand procession of

244 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

human existence, save among those most wretehed
ones. Many, however, will be astonished at the fatal
impulse that drags them thitherward. Nothing is
more remarkable than the various deceptions by which
guilt conceals itself from the perpetrator's conscience,
and oftenest, perhaps, by the splendor of its garments.
Statesmen, rulers, generals, and all men who act over
an extensive sphere, are most liable to be deluded in
this way ; they commit wrong, devastation, and mur
der, on so grand a scale, that it impresses them as
speculative rather than actual ; but in our procession
we find them linked in detestable conjunction with the
meanest criminals whose deeds have the vulgarity of
petty details. Here the effect of circumstance and ac
cident is done away, and a man finds his rank accord
ing to the spirit of his crime, in whatever shape it may
have been developed.

We have called the Evil ; now let us call the Good.
The trumpet's brazen throat should pour heavenly
music over the earth, and the herald's voice go forth
with the sweetness of an angel's accents, as if to sum
mon each upright man to his reward. But how is
this ? Does none answer to the call ? Not one : for
the just, the pure, the true, and all who might most
worthily obey it, shrink sadly back, as most conscious
of error and imperfection. Then let the summons be
to those whose pervading principle is Love. This
classification will embrace all the truly good, and
none in whose souls there exists not something that
may expand itself into a heaven, both of well-doing
and felicity.

The first that presents himself is a man of wealth,
who has bequeathed the bulk of his property to a hos
pital; his ghost, methinks, would have a better right

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 245

here than his living body. But here they come, the
genuine benefactors of their race. Some have wan
dered about the earth with pictures of bliss in their
imagination, and with hearts that shrank sensitively
from the idea of pain and woe, yet have studied all
varieties of misery that human nature can endure.
The prison, the insane asylum, the squalid chamber
of the almshouse, the manufactory where the demon of
machinery annihilates the human soul, and the cotton
field where God's image becomes a beast of burden ;
to these and every other scene where man wrongs or
neglects his brother, the apostles of humanity have
penetrated. This missionary, black with India's burn
ing sunshine, shall give his arm to a pale-faced brother
who has made himself familiar with the infected al
leys and loathsome haunts of vice in one of our own
cities. The generous founder of a college shall be the
partner of a maiden lady of narrow substance, one of
whose good deeds it has been to gather a little school
of orphan children. If the mighty merchant whose
benefactions are reckoned by thousands of dollars
deem himself worthy, let him join the procession with
her whose love has proved itself by watchings at the
sick-bed, and all those lowly offices which bring her
into actual contact with disease and wretchedness.
And with those whose impulses have guided them to
benevolent actions, we will rank others to whom Prov
idence has assigned a different tendency and different
powers. Men who have spent their lives in generous
and holy contemplation for the human race; those
who, by a certain heavenliness of spirit, have purified
the atmosphere around them, and thus supplied a me
dium in which good and high things may be projected
and performed — give to these a lofty place among

246 MOSSES FROM AN OLD *fANSE.

the benefactors of mankind, although no deed, such as
the world calls deeds, may be recorded of them. There
are some individuals of whom we cannot conceive it
proper that they should apply their hands to any
earthly instrument, or work out any definite act ; and
others, perhaps not less high, to whom it is an essen
tial attribute to labor in body as well as spirit for the
welfare of their brethren. Thus, if we find a spiritual
sage whose unseen, inestimable influence has exalted
the moral standard of mankind, we will choose for his
companion some poor laborer who has wrought for love
in the potato field of a neighbor poorer than himself.

We have summoned this various multitude — and,
to the credit of our nature, it is a large one — on the
principle of Love. It is singular, nevertheless, to re
mark the shyness that exists among many members of
the present class, all of whom we might expect to rec
ognize one another by the freemasonry of mutual
goodness, and to embrace like brethren, giving God
thanks for such various specimens of human excel
lence. But it is far otherwise. Each sect surrounds its
own righteousness with a hedge of thorns. It is diffi
cult for the good Christian to acknowledge the good
Pagan ; almost impossible for the good Orthodox to
grasp the hand of the good Unitarian, leaving to their
Creator to settle the matters in dispute, and giving
their mutual efforts strongly and trustingly to what
ever right thing is too evident to be mistaken. Then
again, though the heart be large, yet the mind is often
of such moderate dimensions as to be exclusively filled
up with one idea. When a good man has long devoted
himself to a particular kind of beneficence — to one
species of reform — he is apt to become narrowed into
the limits of the path wherein he treads, and to fancy

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 247

that there is no other good to be done on earth but
that selfsame good to which he has put his hand, and
in the very mode that best suits his own conceptions.
All else is worthless. His scheme must be wrought
out by the united strength of the whole world's stock
of love, or the world is no longer worthy of a position
in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being the
rich grape juice expressed from the vineyard of the
ages, has an intoxicating quality, when imbibed by any
save a powerful intellect, and often, as it were, impels
the quaffer to quarrel in his cups. For such reasons,
strange to say, it is harder to contrive a friendly ar
rangement of these brethren of love and righteousness,
in the procession of life, than to unite even the wicked,
who, indeed, are chained together by their crimes.
The fact is too preposterous for tears, too lugubrious
for laughter.

But, let good men push and elbow one another as
they may during their earthly march, all will be peace
among them when the honorable array of their proces
sion shall tread on heavenly ground. There they will
doubtless find that they have been working each for
the other's cause, and that every well-delivered stroke,
which, with an honest purpose any mortal struck, even
for a narrow object, was indeed stricken for the univer
sal cause of good. Their own view may be bounded
by country, creed, profession, the diversities of indi
vidual character — but above them all is the breadth
of Providence. How many who have deemed them
selves antagonists will smile hereafter, when they look
back upon the world's wide harvest field, and perceive
that, in unconscious brotherhood, they were helping to
bind the selfsame sheaf !

But, come ! The sun is hastening westward, while

248 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the march of human life, that never paused before, is
delayed by our attempt to rearrange its order. It is
desirable to find some comprehensive principle, that
shall render our task easier by bringing thousands into
the ranks where hitherto we have brought one. There
fore let the trumpet, if possible, split its brazen throat
with a louder note than ever, and the herald summon
all mortals, who, from whatever cause, have lost, or
never found, their proper places in the world.

Obedient to this call, a great multitude come to
gether, most of them with a listless gait, betokening
weariness of soul, yet with a gleam of satisfaction in
their faces, at a prospect of at length reaching those
positions which, hitherto, they have vainly sought.
But here will be another disappointment ; for we can
attempt no more than merely to associate in one frater
nity all who are afflicted with the same vague trouble.
Some great mistake in life is the chief condition of ad
mittance into this class. Here are members of the
learned professions, whom Providence endowed with
special gifts for the plough, the forge, and the wheel
barrow, or for the routine of unintellectual business.
We will assign to them, as partners in the march,
those lowly laborers and handicraftsmen, who have
pined, as with a dying thirst, after the unattainable
fountains of knowledge. The latter have lost less
than their companions ; yet more, because they deem
it infinite. Perchance the two species of unfortunates
may comfort one another. Here are Quakers with
the instinct of battle in them ; and men of war who
should have worn the broad brim. Authors shall be
ranked here whom some freak of Nature, making
game of her poor children, had imbued with the con«
fidence of genius and strong desire of fame, but has

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 249

favored with no corresponding power ; and others,
whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied with the faculty
of expression, or any of that earthly machinery by
which ethereal endowments must be manifested to
mankind. All these, therefore, are melancholy laugh
ing-stocks. Next, here are honest and well intentioned
persons, who by a want of tact — by inaccurate per
ceptions — by a distorting imagination — have been
kept continually at cross purposes with the world and
bewildered upon the path of life. Let us see if they
can confine themselves within the line of our proces
sion. In this class, likewise, we must assign places
to those who have encountered that worst of ill success,
a higher fortune than their abilities could vindicate ;
writers, actors, painters, the pets of a day, but whose
laurels wither unrenewed amid their hoary hair ;
politicians, whom some malicious contingency of affairs
has thrust into conspicuous station, where, while the
world stands gazing at them, the dreary consciousness
of imbecility makes them curse their birth hour. To
such men, we give for a companion him whose rare
talents, which perhaps require a Revolution for their
exercise, are buried in the tomb of sluggish circum
stances.

Not far from these, we must find room for one whose
success has been of the wrong kind ; the man who
should have lingered in the cloisters of a university,
digging new treasures out of the Herculaneum of an
tique lore, diffusing depth and accuracy of literature
throughout his country, and thus making for himself
a great and quiet fame. But the outward tendencies
around him have proved too powerful for his inward
nature, and have drawn him into the arena of political
tumult, there to contend at disadvantage, whether front

250 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

to front, or side by side, with the brawny giants of act
ual life. He becomes, it may be, a name for brawling
parties to bandy to and fro, a legislator of the Union ;
a governor of his native state ; an ambassador to the
courts of kings or queens ; and the world may deem
him a man of happy stars. But not so the wise ; and
not so himself, when he looks through his experience,
and sighs to miss that fitness, the one invaluable touch
which makes all things true and real. So much
achieved, yet how abortive is his life ! Whom shall
we choose for his companion? Some weak framed
blacksmith, perhaps, whose delicacy of muscle might
have suited a tailor's shopboard better than the anvil.

Shall we bid the trumpet sound again ? It is hardly
worth the while. There remain a few idle men of
fortune, tavern and grog-shop loungers, lazzaroni, old
bachelors, decaying maidens, and people of crooked
intellect or temper, all of whom may find their like,
or some tolerable approach to it, in the plentiful diver
sity of our latter class. There too, as his ultimate des
tiny, must we rank the dreamer, who, all his life long,
has cherished the idea that he was peculiarly apt for
something, but never could determine what it was ;
and there the most unfortunate of men, whose purpose
it has been to enjoy life's pleasures, but to avoid a
manful struggle with its toil and sorrow. The re
mainder, if any, may connect themselves with whatever
ra,nk of the procession they shall find best adapted to
their tastes and consciences. The worst possible fate
would be to remain behind, shivering in the solitude of
time, while all the world is on the move towards eter
nity. Our attempt to classify society is now complete.
The result may be anything but perfect ; yet better —
to give it the very lowest praise — than the antique

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE. 251

rule of the herald's office, or the modern one of the
tax-gatherer, whereby the accidents and superficial at
tributes, with which the real nature of individuals has
least to do, are acted upon as the deepest character
istics of mankind. Our task is done ! Now let the
grand procession move !

Yet pause a while! We had forgotten the Chief
Marshal.

Hark ! That world-wide swell of solemn music, with
the clang of a mighty bell breaking forth through its
regulated uproar, announces his approach. He comes ;
a severe, sedate, immovable, dark rider, waving his
truncheon of universal sway, as he passes along the
lengthened line, on the pale horse of the Revelation.
It is Death ! Who else could assume the guidance of
a procession that comprehends all humanity ? And if
some, among these many millions, should deem them
selves classed amiss, yet let them take to their hearts
the comfortable truth, that Death levels us all into one
great brotherhood, and that another state of being will
surely rectify the wrong of this. Then breathe thy
wail upon the earth's wailing wind, thou band of mel
ancholy music, made up of every sigh that the human
heart, unsatisfied, has uttered ! There is yet triumph
in thy tones. And now we move ! Beggars in their
rags, and Kings trailing the regal purple in the dust ;
the Warrior's gleaming helmet ; the Priest in his sable
robe ; the hoary Grandsire, who has run life's circle
and come back to childhood; the ruddy School-boy
with his golden curls, frisking along the march ; the
Artisan's stuff jacket ; the Noble's star-decorated coat ;
— the whole presenting a motley spectacle, yet with a
dusky grandeur brooding over it. Onward, onward,
into that dimness where the lights of Time, which have

252 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

blazed along the procession, are flickering in theii
sockets ! And whither ! We know not ; and Death,
hitherto our leader, deserts us by the wayside, as the
tramp of our innumerable footsteps echoes beyond his
sphere. He knows not, more than we, our destined
goal. But God, who made us, knows, and will not
leave us on our toilsome and doubtful march, either to
waader in infinite uncertainty, or perish by the way !

FEATHERTOP : A MORALIZED LEGEND.

" DICKON," cried Mother Rigby, "a coal for my
pipe!"

The pipe was in the old dame's mouth when she said
these words. She had thrust it there after filling it
with tobacco, but without stooping to light it at the
hearth, where indeed there was no appearance of a
fire having been kindled that morning. Forthwith,
however, as soon as the order was given, there was an
intense red glow out of the bowl of the pipe, and a
whiff of smoke from Mother Rigby's lips. Whence
the coal came, and how brought thither by an invisible
hand, I have never been able to discover.

" Good ! " quoth Mother Rigby, with a nod of her
head. "Thank ye, Dickon! And now for making
this scarecrow. Be within call, Dickon, in case I need
you again." <

The good woman had risen thus early (for as yet it
was scarcely sunrise) in order to set about making a
scarecrow, which she intended to put in the middle of
her corn-patch. It was now the latter week of May,
and the crows and blackbirds had already discovered
the little, green, rolled-up leaf of the Indian corn just
peeping out of the soil. She was determined, therefore,
to contrive as lifelike a scarecrow as ever was seen,
and to finish it immediately, from top to toe, so that
it should begin its sentinel's duty that very morning.
Now Mother Rigby (as everybody must have heard)
was one of the most cunning and potent witches in New

254 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

England, and might, with very little trouble, have made
a scarecrow ugly enough to frighten the minister him
self. But on this occasion, as she had awakened in an
uncommonly pleasant humor, and was further dulcified
by her pipe of tobacco, she resolved to produce some
thing fine, beautiful, and splendid, rather than hideous
and horrible.

" I don't want to set up a hobgoblin in my own corn-
patch, and almost at my own doorstep," said Mother
Bigby to herself, puffing out a whiff of smoke; "I
could do it if I pleased, but I 'in tired of doing mar
vellous things, and so I '11 keep within the bounds of
every-day business just for variety's sake. Besides,
there is no use in scaring the little children for a mile
roundabout, though 't is true I 'm a witch."

It was settled, therefore, in her own mind, that the
scarecrow should represent a fine gentleman of the pe-'
riod, so far as the materials at hand would allow. Per
haps it may be as well to enumerate the chief of the
articles that went to the composition of this figure.

The most important item of all, probably, although it
made so little show, was a certain broomstick, on which
Mother Bigby had taken many an airy gallop at mid
night, and which now served the scarecrow by way of
a spinal column, or, as the unlearned phrase it, a back
bone. One of its arms was a disabled flail which used
to be wielded by Goodman Rigby, before his spouse
worried him out of this troublesome world ; the other,
if I mistake not, was composed of the pudding stick
and a broken rung of a chair, tied loosely together at
the elbow. As for its legs, the right was a hoe han
dle, and the left an undistinguished and miscellane
ous stick from the woodpile. Its lungs, stomach, and
Dther affairs of that kind were nothing better than a

FEATHERTOP; A MORALIZED LEGEND. 255

meal bag stuffed with straw. Thus we have made out
the skeleton and entire corporosity of the scarecrow,
with the exception of its head ; and this was admir
ably supplied by a somewhat withered and shrivelled
pumpkin, in which Mother Rigby cut two holes for
the eyes, and a slit for the mouth, leaving a bluish-
colored knob in the middle to pass for a nose. It
was really quite a respectable face.

" I 've seen worse ones on human shoulders, at any
rate," said Mother Rigby. " And many a fine gentle
man has a pumpkin head, as well as my scarecrow."

But the clothes, in this case, were to be the making
of the man. So the good old woman took down from
a peg an ancient plum-colored coat of London make,
and with relics of embroidery on its seams, cuffs, pock
et-flaps, and button-holes, but lamentably worn and
faded, patched at the elbows, tattered at the skirts, and
threadbare all over. On the left breast was a round
hole, whence either a star of nobility had been rent
away, or else the hot heart of some former wearer had
scorched it through and through. The neighbors said
that this rich garment belonged to the Black Man's
wardrobe, and that he kept it at Mother Rigby's cot
tage for the convenience of slipping it on whenever he
wished to make a grand appearance at the governor's
table. To match the coat there was a velvet waistcoat
of very ample size, and formerly embroidered with
foliage that had been as brightly golden as the maple
leaves in October, but which had now quite vanished
out of the substance of the velvet Next came a pair
of scarlet breeches, once worn by the French governor
of Louisbourg, and the knees of which had touched
the lower step of the throne of Louis le Grrand. The
Frenchman had given these smallclothes to an Indian

256 MOSSES PROM AN OLD MANSE.

powwow, who parted with them to the old witch for a
gill of strong waters, at one of their dances in the for
est. Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of
silk stockings and put them on the figure's legs, where
they showed as unsubstantial as a dream, with the
wooden reality of the two sticks making itself miser
ably apparent through the holes. Lastly, she put her
dead husband's wig on the bare scalp of the pumpkin,
and surmounted the whole with a dusty three-cornered
hat, in which was stuck the longest tail feather of &
rooster.

Then the old dame stood the figure up in a corner
of her cottage and chuckled to behold its yellow sem
blance of a visage, with its nobby little nose thrust
into the air. It had a strangely self-satisfied aspect,
and seemed to say, " Come look at me ! "

" And you are well worth looking at, that 's a fact ! "
quoth Mother Rigby, in admiration at her own handi
work. " I Ve made many a puppet since I 've been a
witch, but methinks this is the finest of them all. 'T is
almost too good for a scarecrow. And, by the by, I '11
just fill a fresh pipe of tobacco and then take him out
to the corn-patch."

While filling her pipe the old woman continued to
gaze with almost motherly affection at the figure in the
corner. To say the truth, whether it were chance, or
skill, or downright witchcraft, there was something
wonderfully human in this ridiculous shape, bedizened
with its tattered finery ; and as for the countenance, it
appeared to shrivel its yellow surface into a grin — a
funny kind of expression betwixt scorn and merriment,
as if it understood itself to be a jest at mankind. The
more Mother Rigby looked the better she was pleased,

" Dickon," cried she sharply, " another coal for my
pipe!"

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 257

Hardly had she spoken, than, just as before, there
was a red-glowing coal on the top of the tobacco. She
drew in a long whiff and puffed it forth again into the
bar of morning sunshine which struggled through the
one dusty pane of her cottage window. Mother Rigby
always liked to flavor her pipe with a coal of fire from
the particular chimney corner whence this had been
brought. But where that chimney corner might be, or
who brought the coal from it, — further than that the
invisible messenger seemed to respond to the name of
Dickon, — I cannot tell.

" That puppet yonder," thought Mother Rigby, still
with her eyes fixed on the scarecrow, " is too good a
piece of work to stand all summer in a corn -patch,
frightening away the crows and blackbirds. He 's ca
pable of better things. Why, I 've danced with a worse
one, when partners happened to be scarce, at our witch
meetings in the forest ! What if I should let him take
his chance among the other men of straw and empty
fellows who go bustling about the world ? "

The old witch took three or four more whiffs of her
pipe and smiled.

" He '11 meet plenty of his brethren at every street
corner ! " continued she. " Well ; I did n't mean to
dabble in witchcraft to-day, further than the lighting of
my pipe , but a witch I am, and a witch I "m likely to
be, and there 's no use trying to shirk it. I '11 make
a man of my scarecrow, were it only for the joke's
sake ! "

While muttering these words, Mother Rigby took
the pipe from her own mouth and thrust it into the cre
vice which represented the same feature in the pump
kin visage of the scarecrow.

VOL. II. 17

258 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Puff, darling, puff ! " said she. " Puff away, my
fine fellow ! your life depends on it ! "

This was a strange exhortation, undoubtedly, to be
addressed to a mere thing of sticks, straw, and old
clothes, with nothing better than a shrivelled pumpkin
for a head, — as we know to have been the scarecrow's
case. Nevertheless, as. we must carefully hold in re
membrance, Mother Rigby was a witch of singular
power and dexterity ; and, keeping this fact duly be
fore our minds, we shall see nothing beyond credibility
in the remarkable incidents of our story. Indeed, the
great difficulty will be at once got over, if we can only
bring ourselves to believe that, as soon as the old dame
bade him puff, there came a whiff of smoke from the
scarecrow's mouth. It was the very feeblest of whiffs,
to be sure ; but it was followed by another and another,
each more decided than the preceding one.

" Puff away, my pet ! puff away, my pretty one ! "
Mother Rigby kept repeating, with her pleasantest
smile. " It is the breath of life to ye ; and that you
may take my word for."

Beyond all question the pipe was bewitched. There
must have been a spell either in the tobacco or in the
fiercely-glowing coal that so mysteriously burned on
top of it, or in the pungently-aromatic smoke which
exhaled from the kindled weed. The figure, after a
few doubtful attempts, at length blew forth a volley of
smoke extending all the way from the obscure corner
into the bar of sunshine. There it eddied and melted
away among the motes of dust. It seemed a convul
sive effort ; for the two or three next whiffs were
fainter, although the coal still glowed and threw a
gleam over the scarecrow's visage. The old witch
clapped her skinny hands together, and smiled en-

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 259

couragingly upon her handiwork. She saw that the
charm worked well. The shrivelled, yellow face, which
heretofore had been no face at all, had already a thin,
fantastic haze, as it were of human likeness, shifting
to and fro across it ; sometimes vanishing entirely, bir
growing more perceptible than ever with the next whil
from the pipe. The whole figure, in like manner, as
sumed a show of life, such as we impart to ill-defined
shapes among the clouds, and half deceive ourselves
with the pastime of our own fancy.

If we must needs pry closely into the matter, it may
be doubted whether there was any real change, aftei
all, in the sordid, wornout, worthless, and ill-jointed
substance of the scarecrow ; but merely a spectral illu
sion, and a cunning effect of light and shade so colored
and contrived as to delude the eyes of most men. The
miracles of witchcraft seem always to have had a very
shallow subtlety ; and, at least, if the above explana
tion do not hit the truth of the process, I can suggest
no better.

" Well puffed, my pretty lad ! " still cried old
Mother Rigby. "Come, another good stout whiff,
and let it be with might and main. Puff for thy life,
I tell thee ! Puff out of the very bottom of thy heart,
if any heart thou hast, or any bottom to it ! Well
done, again ! Thou didst suck in that mouthful as if
for the pure love of it."

And then the witch beckoned to the scarecrow,
throwing so much magnetic potency into her gesture
that it seemed as if it must inevitably be obeyed, like
the mystic call of the loadstone when it summons the
iron.

" Why lurkest thou in the corner, lazy one?" said
Bhe. " Step forth ! Thou hast the world before thee ! "

260 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Upon my word, if the legend were not one which I
heard on my grandmother's knee, and which had estab<
lished its place among things credible before my child
ish judgment could analyze its probability, I question
whether I should have the face to tell it now.

In obedience to Mother Rigby's word, and extend
ing its arm as if to reach her outstretched hand, the
figure made a step forward — a kind of hitch and jerk,
however, rather than a step — then tottered and almost
lost its balance. What could the witch expect ? It
was nothing, after all, but a scarecrow stuck upon two
sticks. But the strong-willed old beldam scowled, and
beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so for
cibly at this poor combination of rotten wood, and
musty straw, and ragged garments, that it was com
pelled to show itself a man, in spite of the reality of
things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There
it stood — poor devil of a contrivance that it was ! —
with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude
about it, through which was evident1 the stiff, rickety,
incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing patch
work of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon
the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be
erect Shall I confess the truth ? At its present point
of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some of
the lukewarm and abortive characters, composed of
heterogeneous materials, used for the thousandth time,
and never worth using, with which romance writers
(and myself, no doubt, among the rest) have so over
peopled the world of fiction.

But the fierce old hag began to get angry and show
a glimpse of her diabolic nature (like a snake's head,
peeping with a hiss out of her bosom), at this pusil
lanimous behavior of the tiling which she had taken
the trouble to put together.

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 261

" Puff away, wretch ! " cried she, wrathfully. " Puff,
puff, puff, thou thing of straw and emptiness ! them
rag or two ! thou meal bag ! thou pumpkin head ! thou
nothing ! Where shall I find a name vile enough to
call thee by ? Puff, I say, and suck in thy fantastic
life along with the smoke ! else I snatch the pipe from
thy mouth and hurl thee where that red coal came
from."

Thus threatened, the unhappy scarecrow had nothing
for it but to puff away for dear life. As need was,
therefore, it applied itself lustily to the pipe, and sent
forth such abundant volleys of tobacco smoke that the
small cottage kitchen became all vaporous. The one
sunbeam struggled mistily through, and could but im
perfectly define the image of the cracked and dusty
window pane on the opposite wall. Mother Rigby,
meanwhile, with one brown arm akimbo and the other
stretched towards the figure, loomed grimly amid the
obscurity with such port and expression as when she
was wont to heave a ponderous nightmare on her vic
tims and stand at the bedside to enjoy their agony. In
fear and trembling did this poor scarecrow puff. But
its efforts, it must be acknowledged, served an excellent
purpose ; for, with each successive whiff, the figure lost
more and more of its dizzy and perplexing tenuity and
seemed to take denser substance. Its very garments,
moreover, partook of the magical change, and shone
with the gloss of novelty and glistened with the skil
fully embroidered gold that had long ago been rent
away. And, half revealed among the smoke, a yellow
visage bent its lustreless eyes on Mother Rigby.

At last the old witch clinched her fist and shook it
at the figure. Not that she was positively angry, but
merely acting on the principle — perhaps untrue, or

262 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

not the only truth, though as high a one as Mother
Rigby could be expected to attain — that feeble and
torpid natures, being incapable of better inspiration,
must be stirred up by fear. But here was the crisis.
Should she fail in what she now sought to effect, it
was her ruthless purpose to scatter the miserable sim-
ulacre into its original elements.

" Thou hast a man's aspect," said she, sternly,,
" Have also the echo and mockery of a voice ! I bid
thee speak ! "

The scarecrow gasped, struggled, and at length
emitted a murmur, which was so incorporated with
its smoky breath that you could scarcely tell whether
it were indeed a voice or only a whiff of tobacco.
Some narrators of this legend hold the opinion that
Mother Rigby's conjurations and the fierceness of her
will had compelled a familiar spirit into the figure,
and that the voice was his.

" Mother," mumbled the poor stifled voice, " be not
so awful with me! I would fain speak; but being
without wits, what can I say ? "

" Thou canst speak, darling, canst thou ? " cried
Mother Rigby, relaxing her grim countenance into a
smile. " And what shalt thou say, quotha ! Say, in
deed ! Art thou of the brotherhood of the empty skull,
and demandest of me what thou shalt say ? Thou
shalt say a thousand things, and saying them a thou
sand times over, thou shalt still have said nothing !
3e not afraid, I tell thee ! When thou comest into the
".irorld (whither I purpose sending thee forthwith) thou
shalt not lack the wherewithal to talk. Talk ! Why,
thou shall babble like a mill-stream, if thou wilt. Thou
iast brains enough for that, I trow ! "

" At your service, mother," responded the figure.

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 263

" And that was well said, my pretty one," answered
Mother Rigby. " Then thou speakest like thyself, and
meant nothing. Thou shalt have a hundred such set
phrases, and five hundred to the boot of them. And
now, darling, I have taken so much pains with thee
and thou art so beautiful, that, by my troth, I love thee
better than any witch's puppet in the world ; and I 've
made them of all sorts — clay, wax, straw, sticks, night
fog, morning mist, sea foam, and chimney smoke. But
thou art the very best. So give heed to what I say."

"Yes, kind mother," said the figure, " with all my
heart ! "

" With all thy heart ! " cried the old witch, setting
her hands to her sides and laughing loudly. " Thou
hast such a pretty way of speaking. With all thy
heart ! And thou didst put thy hand to the left side
of thy waistcoat as if thou really hadst one ! "

So now, in high good humor with this fantastic con
trivance of hers, Mother Rigby told the scarecrow that
it must go and play its part in the great world, where
not one man in a hundred, she affirmed, was gifted
with more real substance than itself. And, that he
might hold up his head with the best of them, she en
dowed him, on the spot, with an unreckonable amount
of wealth. It consisted partly of a gold mine in Eldo
rado, and of ten thousand shares in a broken bubble^
and of half a million acres of vineyard at the North
Pole, and of a castle in the air, and a chateau in Spain,
together with all the rents and income therefrom accru
ing. She further made over to him the cargo of a cer
tain ship, laden with salt of Cadiz, which she herself,
by her necromantic arts, had caused to founder, ten
years before, in the deepest part of mid-ocean. If the
Bait were not dissolved, and could be brought to mar-

264 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ket, it would fetch a pretty penny among the fisher*
men. That he might not lack ready money, she gave
him a copper farthing of Birmingham manufacture, be
ing all the coin she had about her, and likewise a great
deal of brass, which she applied to his forehead, thusr
making it yellower than ever.

" With that brass alone," quoth Mother Rigby?
"thou canst pay thy way all over the earth. Kiss
me, pretty darling ! I have done my best for thee."

Furthermore, that the adventurer might lack no pos
sible advantage towards a fair start in life, this excel
lent old dame gave him a token by which he was to in
troduce himself to a certain magistrate, member of the
council, merchant, and elder of the church (the four
capacities constituting but one man), who stood at the
head of society in the neighboring metropolis. The
token was neither more nor less than a single word,
which Mother Rigby whispered to the scarecrow, and
which the scarecrow was to whisper to the merchant.

" Gouty as the old fellow is, he '11 run thy errands
for thee, when once thou hast given him that word in
his ear," said the old witch. " Mother Rigby knows
the worshipful Justice Gookin, and the worshipful
Justice knows Mother Rigby ! "

Here the witch thrust her wrinkled face close to the
puppet's, chuckling irrepressibly, and fidgeting all
through her system, with delight at the idea which she
meant to communicate.

"The worshipful Master Gookin," whispered she,
" hath a comely maiden to his daughter. And hark
ye, my pet ! Thou hast a fair outside, and a pretty
wit enough of thine own. Yea, a pretty wit enough !
Thou wilt think better of it when thou hast seen more
of other people's wits. Now, with thy outside and thy

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 265

inside, thou art the very man to win a young girl's
heart. Never doubt it ! I tell thee it shall be so. Put
but a bold face on the matter, sigh, smile, flourish thy
hat, thrust forth thy leg like a dancing-master, put thy
right hand to the left side of thy waistcoat, and pretty
Polly Gookin is thine own ! "

All this while the new creature had been sucking
in and exhaling the vapory fragrance of his pipe, and
seemed now to continue this occupation as much for
the enjoyment it afforded as because it was an essen
tial condition of his existence. It was wonderful to
see how exceedingly like a human being1 it behaved.
Its eyes (for it appeared to possess a pair) were bent
on Mother Rigby, and at suitable junctures it nodded
or shook its head. Neither did it lack words proper
for the occasion : " Really ! Indeed ! Pray tell me !
Is it possible ! Upon my word ! By no means ! Oh !
Ah ! Hem ! " and other such weighty utterances aa»
imply attention, inquiry, acquiescence, or dissent on the
part of the auditor. Even had you stood by and seen
the scarecrow made, you could scarcely have resisted
the conviction that it perfectly understood the cunning
counsels which the old witch poured into its counter
feit of an ear. The more earnestly it applied its lips
to the pipe, the more distinctly was its human likeness
stamped among visible realities, the more sagacious
grew its expression, the more lifelike its gestures and
movements, and the more intelligibly audible its voice.
Its garments, too, glistened so much the brighter with
an illusory magnificence. The very pipe, in which
burned the spell of all this wonderwork, ceased to ap
pear as a smoke-blackened- earthen stump, and became
a meerschaum, with painted bowl and amber mouth
piece.

MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

It might be apprehended, however, that as the life
of the illusion seemed identical with the vapor of the
pipe, it would terminate simultaneously with the reduc
tion of the tobacco to ashes. But the beldam foresaw
the difficulty.

" Hold thou the pipe, my precious one," said she,
44 while I fill it for thee again."

It was sorrowfid to behold how the fine gentleman
began to fade back into a scarecrow while Mother
Rigby shook the ashes out of the pipe and proceeded
to replenish it from her tobacco-box.

" Dickon," cried she, in her high, sharp tone, " an
other coal for this pipe ! "

No sooner said than the intensely red speck of fire
was glowing within the pipe-bowl ; and the scarecrow,
without waiting for the witch's bidding, applied the
tube to his lips and drew in a few short, convulsive
whiffs, which soon, however, became regular and equa
ble.

"Now, mine own heart's darling," quoth Mother
Rigby, " whatever may happen to thee, thou must
stick to thy pipe. Thy life is in it ; and that, at least,
thou knowest well, if thou knowest nought besides.
Stick to thy pipe, I say ! Smoke, puff, blow thy cloud ;
and tell the people, if any question be made, that it is
for thy health, and that so the physician orders thee to
do. And, sweet one, when thou shalt find thy pipe
getting low, go apart into some corner, and (first fill
ing thyself with smoke) cry sharply, ' Dickon, a fresh
pipe of tobacco ! ' and, ' Dickon, another coal for my
pipe ! ' and have it into thy pretty mouth as speedily as
may be. Else, instead of a gallant gentleman in a
gold-laced coat, thou wilt be but a jumble of sticks and
tattered clothes, and a bag of straw, and a withered

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 267

pumpkin ! Now depart, my treasure, and good luck
go with thee ! "

" Never fear, mother ! " said the figure, in a stout
voice, and sending forth a courageous whiff of smoke,
" I will thrive, if an honest man and a gentleman
may ! "

" Oh, thou wilt be the death of me ! " cried the old
witch, convulsed with laughter. " That was well said.
If an honest man and a gentleman may ! Thou play-
est thy part to perfection. Get along with thee for a
smart fellow ; and I will wager on thy head, as a man
of pith and substance, with a brain and what they call
a heart, and all else that a man should have, against
jiny other thing on two legs. I hold myself a better
witch than yesterday, for thy sake. Did not I make
thee? And I defy any witch in New England to
make such another ! Here ; take my staff along with
thee ! "

The staff, though it was but a plain oaken stick, im
mediately took the aspect of a gold-headed cane.

" That gold head has as much sense in it as thine
own," said Mother Rigby, " and it will guide thee
straight to worshipful Master Gookin's door. Get
thee gone, my pretty pet, my darling, my precious one,
my treasure ; and if any ask thy name, it is Feathertop.
For thou hast a feather in thy hat, and I have thrust a
handful of feathers into the hollow of thy head, and
thy wig, too, is of the fashion they call Feathertop, —
so be Feathertop thy name ! "

And, issuing from the cottage, Feathertop strode
manfully towards town. Mother Rigby stood at the
threshold, well pleased to see how the sunbeams glis
tened on him, as if all his magnificence were real, and
how diligently and lovingly he smoked his pipe, and

268 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

how handsomely he walked, in spite of a little stiffness
of his legs. She watched him until out of sight, and
threw a witch benediction after her darling, when a
turn of the road snatched him from her view.

Betimes in the forenoon, when the principal street
of the neighboring town was just at its acme of life
and bustle, a stranger of very distinguished figure was
seen on the sidewalk. His port as well as his gar
ments betokened nothing short of nobility. He wore
a richly-embroidered plum-colored coat, a waistcoat of
costly velvet, magnificently adorned with golden foli
age, a pair of splendid scarlet breeches, and the finest
and glossiest of white silk stockings. His head was
covered with a peruke, so daintily powdered and ad
justed that it would have been sacrilege to disorder it
#lth a hat ; which, therefore (and it was a gold-laced
hat, set off with a snowy feather), he carried beneath
his arm. On the breast of his coat glistened a star.
He managed his gold-headed cane with an airy grace,
peculiar to the fine gentlemen of the period ; and, to
give the highest possible finish to his equipment, he
had lace ruffles at his wrist, of a most ethereal delicacy,
sufficiently avouching how idle and aristocratic must
be the hands which they half concealed.

It was a remarkable point in the accoutrement of
this brilliant personage that he held in his left hand a
fantastic kind of a pipe, with an exquisitely painted
bowl and an amber mouthpiece. This he applied to
his lips as often as every five or six paces, and inhaled
a deep whiff of smoke, which, after being retained a
moment in his lungs, might be seen to eddy gracefully
from his mouth and nostrils.

As may well be supposed, the street was all astir t3
find out the stranger's name.

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 269

" It is some great nobleman, beyond question," said
Dne of the towns-people. " Do you see the star at his
breast ? "

" Nay ; it is too bright to be seen," said another,
" Yes ; he must needs be a nobleman, as you say. But
by what conveyance, think you, can his lordship have
voyaged or travelled hither ? There has been no ves
sel from the old country for a month past ; and if he
have arrived overland from the southward, pray where
are his attendants and equipage ? "

" He needs no equipage to set off his rank," re
marked a third. " If he came among us in rags, no
bility would shine through a hole in his elbow. I never
saw such dignity of aspect. He has the old Norman
blood in his veins, I warrant him."

" I rather take him to be a Dutchman, or one of
your high Germans," said another citizen. " The
men of those countries have always the pipe at their
mouths."

"And so has a Turk," answered his companion.
" But, in my judgment, this stranger hath been bred at
the French court, and hath there learned politeness and
grace of manner, which none understand so well as the
nobility of France. That gait, now ! A vulgar spec
tator might deem it stiff — he might call it a hitch and
jerk — but, to my eye, it hath an unspeakable majesty,
and must have been acquired by constant observation
of the deportment of the Grand Monarque. The
stranger's character and office are evident enough. He
is a French ambassador, come to treat with our rulers
about the cession of Canada."

" More probably a Spaniard," said another, " and
hence his yellow complexion; or, most likely, he is
from the Havana, or from some port on the Spanish

270 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

main, and comes to make investigation about the pira
cies which our government is thought to connive at.
Those settlers in Peru and Mexico have skins as yel
low as the gold which they dig out of their mines."

"Yellow or not," cried a lady, "he is a beautiful
man ! — so tall, so slender ! such a fine, noble face,
with so well-shaped a nose, and all that delicacy of
expression about the mouth ! And, bless me, how
bright his star is ! It positively shoots out flames ! "

" So do your eyes, fair lady," said the stranger, with
a bow and a flourish of his pipe ; for he was just pass
ing at the instant. " Upon my honor, they have quite
dazzled me."

" Was ever so original and exquisite a compliment ? "
murmured the lady, in an ecstasy of delight.

Amid the general admiration excited by the strain

ger's appearance, there were only two dissenting voices.

One was that of an impertinent cur, which, after snuff

ing at the heels of the glistening figure, put its tail be-

itween its legs and skulked into its master's back yard,

' vociferating an execrable howl. The other dissentient

was a young child, who squalled at the fullest stretch

of his lungs, and babbled some unintelligible nonsense

about a pumpkin.

Feathertop meanwhile pursued his way along the
street. Except for the few complimentary words to
the lady, and now and then a slight inclination of the
head in requital of the profound reverences of the
bystanders, he seemed wholly absorbed in his pipe.
There needed no other proof of his rank and conse
quence than the perfect equanimity with which he com
ported himself, while the curiosity and admiration of
the town swelled almost into clamor around him.
With a crowd gathering behind his footsteps, he finally

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 271

reached the mansion-house of the worshipful Justice
Gookin, entered the gate, ascended the steps of the
front door, and knocked. In the interim, before his
Bummons was answered, the stranger was observed to
shake the ashes out of his pipe.

" What did he say in that sharp voice ? " inquired
one of the spectators.

"Nay, I know not," answered his friend. " But the
sun dazzles my eyes strangely. How dim and faded
his lordship looks all of a sudden ! Bless my wits,
what is the matter with me ? "

" The wonder is," said the other, " that his pipe,
which was out only an instant ago, should be all alight
again, and with the reddest coal I ever saw. There is
something mysterious about this stranger. What a
whiff of smoke was that ! Dim and faded did you call
him ? Why, as he turns about the star on his breast
is all ablaze."

" It is, indeed," said his companion ; " and it will go
near to dazzle pretty Polly Gookiii, whom I see peep
ing at it out of the chamber window."

The door being now opened, Feathertop turned to
the crowd, made a stately bend of his body like a great
man acknowledging the reverence of the meaner sort,
and vanished into the house. There was a mysterious
kind of a smile, if it might not better be called a grin
or grimace, upon his visage; but, of all the throng
that beheld him, not an individual appears to have
possessed insight enough to detect the illusive charac
ter of the stranger except a little child and a cur dog0

Our legend here loses somewhat of its continuity,
and, passing over the preliminary explanation between
Feathertop and the merchant, goes in quest of the
pretty Polly Gookin. She was a damsel of a soft,

272 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

round figure, with light hair and blue eyes, and a fairt
rosy face, which seemed neither very shrewd nor very
Bimple. This young lady had caught a glimpse of the
glistening stranger while standing at the threshold, and
had forthwith put on a laced cap, a string of beads,
her finest kerchief, and her stiffest damask petticoat
in preparation for the interview. Hurrying from her
chamber to the parlor, she had ever since been viewing
herself in the large looking-glass and practising pretty
airs — now a smile, now a ceremonious dignity of as
pect, and now a softer smile than the former, kissing
her hand likewise, tossing her head, and managing her
fan ; while within the mirror an unsubstantial little
maid repeated every gesture and did all the foolish
things that Polly did, but without making her ashamed
of them. In short, it was the fault of pretty Polly's
ability rather than her will if she failed to be as com*
plete an artifice as the illustrious Feathertop himself-,
and, when she thus tampered with her own simplicity,
the witch's phantom might well hope to win her.

No sooner did Polly hear her father's gouty foot
steps approaching the parlor door, accompanied with
the stiff clatter of Feathertop's high-heeled shoes, than
she seated herself bolt upright and innocently began
warbling a song.

"Polly ! daughter Polly ! " cried the old merchant.
" Come hither, child."

Master Gookin's aspect, as he opened the door, was
doubtful and troubled.

" Tliis gentleman," continued he, presenting the
stranger, " is the Chevalier Feathertop, — nay, I beg
his pardon, my Lord Feathertop, — who hath brought
me a token of remembrance from an ancient friend of
mine. Pay your duty to his lordship, child, and honor
him as his quality deserves."

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 273

After these few words of introduction, the worship
ful magistrate immediately quitted the room. But,
even in that brief moment, had the fair Polly glanced
aside at her father instead of devoting herself wholly
to the brilliant guest, she might have taken warning of
some mischief nigh at hand. The old man was nervous,
fidgety, and very pale. Purposing a smile of courtesy,
he had deformed his face with a sort of galvanic grin,
which, when Feathertop's back was turned, he ex
changed for a scowl, at the same time shaking his
fist and stamping his gouty foot — an incivility which
brought its retribution along with it. The truth ap
pears to have been that Mother TCigby's word of intro*
duction, whatever it might be, had operated far more
on the rich merchant's fears than on his good will
Moreover, being a man of wonderfully acute observe
tion, he had noticed that these painted figures on the
bowl of Feathertop's pipe were in motion. Looking
more closely, he became convinced that these ftgiires
were a party of little demons, each duly provided
with horns and a tail, and dancing hand in hand, with
gestures of diabolical merriment, round the circum
ference of the pipe bowl. As if to confirm his suspi
cions, while Master Gookin ushered his guest along
a dusky passage from his private room to the parlor,
the star on Feathertop's breast had scintillated actual
flames, and threw a flickering gleam upon the wall,
the ceiling, and the floor.

With such sinister prognostics manifesting thorn-
selves on all hands, it is not to be marvelled at that
the merchant should have felt that he was committing
his daughter to a very questionable acquaintance. He
eursed, in his secret soul, the insinuating elegance
of Feathertop's manners, as this brilliant personage

VOL. II. 18

274 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

bowed, smiled, put his hand on his heart, inhaled a
long whiff from his pipe, and enriched the atmosphere
with the smoky vapor of a fragrant and visible sigh.
Gladly would poor Master Gookin have thrust his
dangerous guest into the street ; but there was a con
straint and terror within him. This respectable old
gentleman, we fear, at an earlier period of life, had
given some pledge or other to the evil principle, and
perhaps was now co redeem it by the sacrifice of his
daughter.

It so happened that the parlor door was partly of
glass, shaded by a silken curtain, the folds of which
hung a little awry. So strong was the merchant's in
terest in witnessing what was to ensue between the fair
Polly and the gallant tfeathertop that, after quitting
the room, he could by no means refrain from peeping
through the cvevice of the curtain.

But there was nothing very miraculous to be seen;
nothing — except the trifles previously noticed — to
confirm the idea of a supernatural peril environing
the pretty Polly. The stranger it is true was evi
dently a thorough and practised man of the world, sys
tematic and self-possessed, and therefore the sort of a
person to whom a parent ought not to confide a sim
ple, young girl without due watchfulness for the result.
The worthy magistrate, who had been conversant with
all degrees and qualities of mankind, could not but
perceive every motion and gesture of the distinguished
Feathertop <3ame in its proper place ; nothing had
been left rude or native in him ; a well-digested con
ventionalism had incorporated itself thoroughly with
his substance and transformed him into a work of art.
Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him with
a species of ghastliness and awe. It is the effect

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND. 275

of anything completely and consummately artificial, in
human shape, that the person impresses us as an un
reality and as having hardly pith enough to cast a
shadow upon the floor. As regarded Feathertop, all
this resulted in a wild, extravagant, and fantastical
impression, as if his life and being were akin to the
smoke that curled upward from his pipe.

But pretty Polly Gookin felt not thus. The pair
were now promenading the room : Feathertop with his
dainty stride and no less dainty grimace ; the girl with
a native maidenly grace, just touched, not spoiled, by
a slightly affected manner, which seemed caught from
the perfect artifice of her companion. The longer
the interview continued, the more charmed was pretty
Polly, until, within the first quarter of an hour (as
the old magistrate noted by his watch), she was evi
dently beginning to be in love. Nor need it have
been witchcraft that subdued her in such a hurry ;
the poor child's heart, it may be, was so very fervent
that it melted her with its own warmth as reflected
from the hollow semblance of a lover. No matter
what Feathertop said, his words found depth and re
verberation in her ear ; no matter what he did, his
action was heroic to her eye. And by this time it is
to be supposed there was a blush on Polly's cheek, a
tender smile about her mouth, and a liquid softness in
her glance ; while the star kept coruscating on Feath-
ertop's breast, and the little demons careered with
more frantic merriment than ever about the circum
ference of his pipe bowl. O pretty Polly Gookin,
why should these imps rejoice so madly that a silly
maiden's heart was about to be given to a shadow!
Is it so unusual a misfortune, so rare a triumph ?

By and by Feathertop paused, and throwing himself

276 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

into an imposing attitude, seemed to summon the fail
girl to survey his figure and resist him longer if she
could. His star, his embroidery, his buckles glowed
at that instant with unutterable splendor ; the pictur
esque hues of his attire took a richer depth of color
ing ; there was a gleam and polish over his whole pres
ence betokening the perfect witchery of well-ordered
manners. The maiden raised her eyes and suffered
them to linger upon her companion with a bashful
and admiring gaze. Then, as if desirous of judging
what value her own simple comeliness might have side
by side with so much brilliancy, she cast a glance
towards the full-length looking-glass in front of which
they happened to be standing. It was one of the tru
est plates in the world and incapable of flattery. No
sooner did the images therein reflected meet Polly's
eye than she shrieked, shrank from the stranger's side,
gazed at him for a moment in the wildest dismay, and
sank insensible upon the floor. Feathertop likewise
had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld, not
the glittering mockery of his outside show, but a pict
ure of the sordid patchwork of his real composition,
stripped of all witchcraft.

The wretched simulacrum! We almost pity him.
He threw up his arms with an expression of despaii
that went further than any of his previous manifes
tations towards vindicating his claims to be reckoned
human ; for, perchance the only time since this so
often empty and deceptive life of mortals began its
course, an illusion had seen and fully recognized itself.

Mother Rigby was seated by her kitchen hearth in
the twilight of this eventful day, and had just shaken
the ashes out of a new pipe, when she heard a hurried
tramp along the road. Yet it did not seem so much

FEATHERTOP. A MORALIZED LEGEND. 277

the tramp of human footsteps as the clatter of sticks
or the rattling of dry bones.

" Ha ! " thought the old witch, " what step is that?
Whose skeleton is out of its grave now, I wonder ? "

A figure burst headlong into the cottage door. It
was Feathertop ! His pipe was still alight ; the star
still flamed upon his breast; the embroidery still
glowed upon his garments ; nor had he lost, in any de
gree or manner that could be estimated, the aspect
that assimilated him with our mortal brotherhood.
But yet, in some indescribable way (as is the case
with all that has deluded us when once found out), the
poor reality was felt beneath the cunning artifice.

" What has gone wrong ? " demanded the witch.
" Did yonder sniffling hypocrite thrust my darling
from his door ? The villain ! I '11 set twenty fiends
to torment him till he offer thee his daughter on his
bended knees ! "

" No, mother," said Feathertop despondingly ; " it
was not that."

" Did the girl scorn my precious one ? " asked
Mother Rigby, her fierce eyes glowing like two coals
of Tophet. " I '11 cover her face with pimples ! Her
nose shall be as red as the coal in thy pipe 1 Her
front teeth shall drop out!* In a week hence she shall
not be worth thy having !»"

" Let her alone, mother," answered poor Feather,
top ; " the girl was half won ; and methinks a kiss
from her sweet lips might have made me altogether
human. But," he added, after a brief pause and then
a howl of self -contempt, " I 've seen myself, mother !
I've seen myself for the wretched, ragged, empty
thing I am ! I '11 exist no longer ! "

Snatching the pipe from his mouth, he flung it with

278 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

all his might against the chimney, and at the same in
stant sank upon the floor, a medley of straw and tat
tered garments, with some sticks protruding from the
heap, and a shrivelled pumpkin in the midst. The
eyeholes were now lustreless; but the rudely-carved
gap, that just before had been a mouth, still seemed
to twist itself into a despairing grin, and was so far
human.

" Poor fellow ! " quoth Mother Rigby, with a rueful
glance at the relics of her ill-fated contrivance. " My
poor, dear, pretty Feathertop ! There are thousands
upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the
world, made up of just such a jumble of wornout, for
gotten, and good-for-nothing trash as he was! Yet
they live in fair repute, and never see themselves for
what they are. And why should my poor puppet be
the only one to know himself and perish for it ? "

While thus muttering, the witch had filled a fresh
pipe of tobacco, and held the stem between her fingers,
as doubtful whether to thrust it into her own mouth or
Feathertop's.

" Poor Feathertop ! " she continued. " I could easily
give him another chance and send him forth again to
morrow. But no ; his feelings are too tender, his sen
sibilities too deep. He seems to have too much heart
to bustle for his own advantage in such an empty and
heartless world. Well ! well ! I '11 make a scarecrow
of him after all. 'T is an innocent and useful voca
tion, and will suit my darling well ; and, if each of
his human brethren had as fit a one, 't would be the
better for mankind ; and as for this pipe of tobacco,
I need it more than he."

So saying, Mother Rigby put the stem between her
lips. " Dickon ! " cried she, in her high, sharp tone,
* another coal for my pipe ! "

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE.

WE who are born into the world's artificial system
can never adequately know how little in our present
state and circumstances is natural, and how much is
merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and
heart of man. Art has become a second and stronger
nature ; she is a stepmother, whose crafty tenderness
has taught us to despise the bountiful and wholesome
ministrations of our true parent. It is only through |
the medium of the imagination that we can lessen
those iron fetters, which we call truth and reality, and
make ourselves even partially sensible what prisoners
we are. For instance, let us conceive good Father Mil
ler's interpretation of the prophecies to have proved
true. The Day of Doom has burst upon the globe
and swept away the whole race of men. From cities
and fields, sea-shore and midland mountain region, vast
continents, and even the remotest islands of the ocean,
each living thing is gone. No breath of a created be
ing disturbs this earthly atmosphere. But the abodes
of man, and all that he has accomplished, the foot
prints of his wanderings and the results of his toil,
the visible symbols of his intellectual cultivation and
moral progress — in short, everything physical that
can give evidence of his present position — shall re
main untouched by the hand of destiny. Then, to
inherit and repeople this waste and deserted earth,
we will suppose a new Adam and a new Eve to have
been created, in the full development of mind and

280 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

heart, but with no knowledge of their predecessors
nor of the diseased circumstances that had become en
crusted around them. Such a pair would at once dis
tinguish between art and nature. Their instincts and
intuitions would immediately recognize the wisdom
and simplicity of the latter ; while the former with its
elaborate perversities, would offer them a continual
succession of puzzles.

Let us attempt in a mood half sportive and half
thoughtful, to track these imaginary heirs of our mor
tality through their first day's experience. No longer
ago than yesterday the flame of human life was extin
guished ; there has been a breathless night ; and now
another morn approaches expecting to find the earth
no less desolate than at eventide.

It is dawn. The east puts on its immemorial blush,
although no human eye is gazing at it ; for all the
phenomena of the natural world renew themselves, in
spite of the solitude that now broods around the globe.
There is still beauty of earth, sea, and sky for beauty's
sake. But soon there are to be spectators. Just
when the earliest sunshine gilds earth's mountain
tops, two beings have come into life, not in such an
Eden as bloomed to welcome our first parents, but in
the heart of a modern city. They find themselves in
existence, and gazing into one another's eyes. Their
emotion is not astonishment; nor do they perplex
themselves with efforts to discover what, and whence,
and why they are. Each is satisfied to be, because
the other exists likewise ; and their first consciousness
is of calm and mutual enjoyment, which seems not
to have been the birth of that very moment, but pro
longed from a past eternity. Thus content with an
inner sphere which they inhabit together, it is not

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 281

immediately that the outward world can obtrude itself
upon their notice.

Soon, however, they feel the invincible necessity of
this earthly life, and begin to make acquaintance with
the objects and circumstances that surround them.
Perhaps no other stride so vast remains to be taken
as when they first turn from the reality of their mu
tual glance to the dreams and shadows that perplex
them everywhere else.

" Sweetest Eve, where are we ? " exclaims the new
Adam ; for speech, or some equivalent mode of ex
pression, is born with them, and comes just as nat
ural as breath. " Methinks I do not recognize this
place."

" Nor I, dear Adam," replies the new Eve. " And
what a strange place too ! Let me come closer to thy
side and behold thee only ; for all other sights trouble
and perplex my spirit."

"Nay, Eve," replies Adam, who appears to have
the stronger tendency towards the material world j
" it were well that we gain some insight into these
matters. We are in an odd situation here. Let us
look about us."

Assuredly there are sights enough to throw the new
inheritors of earth into a state of hopeless perplexity.
The long lines of edifices, their windows glittering in
the yellow sunrise, and the narrow street between,
with its barren pavement tracked and battered by
wheels that have now rattled into an irrevocable past !
The signs, with their unintelligible hieroglyphics !
The squareness and ugliness, and regular or irregular
deformity of everything that meets the eye! The
marks of wear and tear, and unrenewed decay, which
distinguish the works of man from the growth of na-

282 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ture ! What is there in all this capable of the slight
est significance to minds that know nothing of the ar
tificial system which is implied in every lamp post and
each brick of the houses ? Moreover, the utter loneli
ness and silence, in a scene that originally grew out of
noise and bustle, must needs impress a feeling of des
olation even upon Adam and Eve, unsuspicious as
they are of the recent extinction of human existence.
In a forest, solitude would be life ; in a city, it is
death.

The new Eve looks round with a sensation of doubt
and distrust, such as a city dame, the daughter of num
berless generations of citizens, might experience if sud
denly transported to the garden of Eden. At length
her downcast eye discovers a small tuft of grass, just
beginning to sprout among the stones of the pave
ment ; she eagerly grasps it, and is sensible that this
little herb awakens some response within her heart.
Nature finds nothing else to offer her. Adam, after
staring up and down the street without detecting a
single object that his comprehension can lay hold
of, finally turns his forehead to the sky. There, in
deed, is something which the soul within him recog
nizes.

" Look up yonder, mine own Eve," he cries; " surely
we ought to dwell among those gold-tinged clouds or
in the blue depths beyond them. I know not how
nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from
our home ; for I see nothing hereabouts that seems
to belong to us."

" Can we not ascend thither ? " inquires Eve.

" Why not ? " answers Adam hopefully. " But no;
something drags us down in spite of our best efforts,
Perchance we may find a path hereafter."

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 283

In the energy of new life it appears no such imprac
ticable feat to climb into the sky. But they have al
ready received a woful lesson, which may finally go
far towards reducing them to the level of the departed
race, when they acknowledge the necessity of keeping
the beaten track of earth. They now set forth on a
ramble through the city, in the hope of making their
escape from this uncongenial -sphere. Already in the
fresh elasticity of their spirits they have found the
idea of weariness. We will watch them as they enter
some of the shops and public or private edifices ; for
every door, whether of alderman or beggar, church or
hall of state, has been flung wide open by the same
agency that swept away the inmates.

It so happens — and not unluckily for an Adam
and Eve who are still in the costume that might bet
ter have befitted Eden — it so happens that their first
visit is to a fashionable dry goods store. No cour
teous and importunate attendants hasten to receive
their orders ; no throng of ladies are tossing over
the rich Parisian fabrics. All is deserted; trade
is at a stand-still, and not even an echo of the na
tional watchword, " Go ahead ! " disturbs the quiet
of the new customers. But specimens of the latest
earthly fashions, silks of every shade, and whatever
is most delicate or splendid for the decoration of
the human form, lie scattered around, profusely as
bright autumnal leaves in a forest. Adam looks at a
few of the articles but throws them carelessly aside
with whatever exclamation may correspond to " Pish ! "
or " Pshaw ! " in the new vocabulary of nature. Eve,
however, — be it said without offence to her native
modesty, — examines these treasures of her sex with
somewhat livelier interest. A pair of corsets chance

284 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

to lie upon the counter ; she inspects them curiously,
but knows not what to make of them. Then she
handles a fashionable silk with dim yearnings, thoughts
that wander hither and thither, instincts groping in the
dark.

" On the whole, I do not like it," she observes, lay-
ing the glossy fabric upon the counter. " But, Adam,
it is very strange. What can these things mean?
Surely I ought to know ; yet they put me in a per*
feet maze."

" Poh ! my dear Eve, why trouble thy little head
about such nonsense?" cries Adam, in a 'fit of impa
tience. " Let us go somewhere else. But stay ; how
very beautiful ! My loveliest Eve, what a charm you
have imparted to that robe by merely throwing it over
your shoulders ! "

For Eve, with the taste that nature moulded into
her composition, has taken a remnant of exquisite sil
ver gauze and drawn it around her form, with an effect
that gives Adam his first idea of the witchery of dress.
He beholds his spouse in a new light and with re
newed admiration ; yet is hardly reconciled to any
other attire than her own golden locks. However,
emulating Eve's example, he makes free with a man
tle of blue velvet, and puts it on so picturesquely that
it might seem to have fallen from heaven upon his
stately figure. Thus garbed they go in search of
new discoveries.

They next wander into a church, not to make a dis
play of their fine clothes, but attracted by its spire,
pointing upwards to the sky, whither they have al
ready yearned to climb. As they enter the portal, a
clock, which it was the last earthly act of the sexton
to wind up, repeats the hour in deep reverberating

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 285

tones ; for Time has survived his former progeny,
and, with the iron tongue that man gave him, is now
speaking to his two grandchildren. They listen, but
understand him not. Nature would measure time
by the succession of thoughts and acts which consti
tute real life, and not by hours of emptiness. They
pass up the church aisle, and raise their eyes to the
ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve become mortal in
some European city, and strayed into the vastness
and sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have
recognized the purpose for which the deep-souled
founders reared it. Like the dim awfulness of an
ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have in
cited them to prayer. Within the snug walls of a
metropolitan church there can be no such influence.

Yet some odor of religion is still lingering heret
the bequest of pious souls, who had grace to enjo^
a foretaste of immortal life. Perchance they breathe
a prophecy of a better world to their successors, who
have become obnoxious to all their own cares and
calamities in the present one.

"Eve, something impels me to look upward," says
Adam ; " but it troubles me to see this roof between
us and the sky. Let us go forth and perhaps we
shall discern a Great Face looking down upon us."

" Yes ; a Great Face, with a beam of love bright
ening over it like sunshine," responds Eve. " Surely
we have seen such a countenance somewhere."

They go out of the church and kneeling at its
threshold give way to the spirit's natural instinct of
adoration towards a beneficent Father. But, in truth,
their life thus far has been a continual prayer. Pu
rity and simplicity hold converse at every moment with
their Creator.

286 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

We now observe them entering a Court of Justice.
But what remotest conception can they attain of the
purposes of such an edifice ? How should the idea
occur to them that human brethren, of like nature
with themselves, and originally included in the same
law of love which is their only rule of life, should ever
need an outward enforcement of the true voice within
their souls ? And what, save a woful experience, the
dark result of many centuries, could teach them the
sad mysteries of crime? O Judgment Seat, not by
the pure in heart wast thou established, nor in the
simplicity of nature ; but by hard and wrinkled men,
and upon the accumulated heap of earthly wrong.
Thou art the very symbol of man's perverted state.

On as fruitless an errand our wanderers next visit
a Hall of Legislation, where Adam places Eve in
the Speaker's chair, unconscious of the moral which
he thus exemplifies. Man's intellect, moderated by
Woman's tenderness and moral sense ! Were such
the legislation of the world there would be no need
of State Houses, Capitols, Halls of Parliament, nor
even of those little assemblages of patriarchs beneath
the shadowy trees, by whom freedom was first inter
preted to mankind on our native shores.

Whither go they next ? A perverse destiny seems
to perplex them with one after another of the riddles
which mankind put forth to the wandering universe,
and left unsolved in their own destruction. They en
ter an edifice of stern gray stone standing insulated in
the midst of others, and gloomy even in the sunshine,
which it barely suffers to penetrate through its iron-
grated windows. It is a prison. The jailer has left
his post at the summons of a stronger authority than
the sheriff 's. But the prisoners? Did the messenger

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 287

of fate, when he shook open all the doors, respect the
magistrate's warrant and the judge's sentence, and
leave the inmates of the dungeons to be delivered by
due course of earthly law ? No ; a new trial has been
granted in a higher court, which may set judge, jury,
and prisoner at its bar all in a row, and perhaps find
one no less guilty than another. The jail, like the
whole earth, is now a solitude, and has thereby lost
something of its dismal gloom. But here are the
narrow cells, like tombs, only drearier and deadlier,
because in these the immortal spirit was buried with
the body. Inscriptions appear on the walls, scrib
bled with a pencil or scratched with a rusty nail ;
brief words of agony, perhaps, or guilt's desperate
defiance to the world, or merely a record of a date
by which the writer strove to keep up with the march
of life. There is not a living eye that could now de
cipher these memorials.

Nor is it while so fresh from their Creator's hand
that the new denizens of earth — no, nor their descend
ants for a thousand years — could discover that this
edifice was a hospital for the direst disease which
could afflict their predecessors. Its patients bore the
outward marks of that leprosy with which all were
more or less infected. They were sick — and so
were the purest of their brethren — with the plague
of sin. A deadly sickness, indeed ! Feeling its
symptoms within the breast, men concealed it with
fear and shame, and were only the more cruel to
those unfortunates whose pestiferous sores were fla
grant to the common eye. Nothing save a rich gar
ment could ever hide the plague spot. In the course
of the world's lifetime, every remedy was tried for its
cure and extirpation except the single one, the flower

288 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

that grew in heaven and was sovereign for all the
miseries of earth. Man never had attempted to cure
| sin by LOVE ! Had he but once made the effort it
might well have happened that there would have been
no more need of the dark lazar house into which Adam
and Eve have wandered. Hasten forth with your na
tive innocence, lest the damps of these still conscious
walls infect you likewise, and thus another fallen race
be propagated !

Passing from the interior of the prison into the
space within its outward wall, Adam pauses beneath
a structure of the simplest contrivance, yet altogether
unaccountable to him. It consists merely of two up
right posts, supporting a transverse beam, from which
dangles a cord.

" Eve, Eve ! " cries Adam, shuddering with a name'
less horror. " What can this thing be ? "

"I know not," answers Eve; "but Adam, my heart
is sick ! There seems to be no more sky — no more
sunshine ! "

Well might Adam shudder and poor Eve be sick at
heart ; for this mysterious object was the type of man
kind's whole system in regard to the great difficulties
which God had given to be solved — a system of fear
and vengeance, never successful, yet followed to the
last. Here, on the morning when the final sum
mons came, a criminal — one criminal, where none
were guiltless — had died upon the gallows. Had
the world heard the footfall of its own approaching
doom, it would have been no inappropriate act thus
to close the record of its deeds by one so character
istic.

The two pilgrims now hurry from the prison. Had
they known how the former inhabitants of earth were

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 289

shut up in artificial error and cramped and chained by
their perversions, they might have compared the whole
moral world to a prison house, and have deemed the
removal of the race a general jail delivery.

They next enter, unannounced, but they might have
rung at the door in vain, a private mansion, one of the
stateliest in Beacon Street. A wild and plaintive
strain of music is quivering through the house, now
rising like a solemn organ peal, and now dying into
the faintest murmur, as if some spirit that had felt
an interest in the departed family were bemoaning
itself in the solitude of hall and chamber. Perhaps
a virgin, the purest of mortal race, has been left be
hind to perform a requiem for the whole kindred of
humanity. Not so. These are the tones of an .ZEo-
lian harp, through which Nature pours the harmony
that lies concealed in her every breath, whether of
summer breeze or tempest. Adam and Eve are lost
in rapture unmingled with surprise. The passing
wind, that stirred the harp strings, has been hushed,
before they can think of examining the splendid fur
niture, the gorgeous carpets, and the architecture of
the rooms. These things amuse their unpractised
eyes, but appeal to nothing within their hearts. Even
the pictures upon the walls scarcely excite a deeper
interest ; for there is something radically artificial
and deceptive in painting with which minds in the
primal simplicity cannot sympathize. The unbidden
guests examine a row of family portraits, but are too
dull to recognize them as men and women, beneath
the disguise of a preposterous garb, and with features
and expression debased, because inherited through ages
Df moral and physical decay.

Chance, however, presents them with pictures of hu-

VOL. II. 19

290 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

man beauty, fresh from the hand of Nature. As they
enter a magnificent apartment they are astonished, but
"lot affrighted, to perceive two figures advancing to
meet them. Is it not awful to imagine that any life
save their own, should remain in the wide world ?

" How is this ? " exclaims Adam. " My beautiful
Eve, are you in two places at once ? "

" And you, Adam ! " answers Eve, doubtful, yet de
lighted. " Surely that noble and lovely form is yours.
Yet here you are by my side. I am content with one.
— methinks there should not be two."

This miracle is wrought by a tall looking-glass, the
mystery of which they soon fathom, because Nature
creates a mirror for the human face in every pool of
water, and for her own great features in waveless
lakes. Pleased and satisfied with gazing at them
selves, they now discover the marble statue of a child
in a corner of the room so exquisitely idealized that it
is almost worthy to be the prophetic likeness of their
first born. Sculpture, in its highest excellence, is
more genuine than painting, and might seem to be
evolved from a natural germ, by the same law as a
leaf or flower. The statue of the child impresses the
solitary pair as if it were a companion; it likewise
hints at secrets both of the past and future.

" My husband ! " whispers Eve.

" What would you say, dearest Eve ? " inquires
Adam.

" I wonder if we are alone in the world," she con
tinues, with a sense of something like fear at the
thought of other inhabitants. " This lovely little
torm ! Did it ever breathe ? Or is it only the shadow
of something real, like our pictures in the mirror ? "

" It is strange ! *' replies Adam, pressing his hand to

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 291

his brow. " There are mysteries all around us. An
idea flits continually before me — would that I could
seize it ! Eve, Eve, are we treading in the footsteps
of beings that bore a likeness to ourselves ? If so,
whither are they gone ? — and why is their world so
unfit for our dwelling place ? "

" Our great Father only knows," answers Eve.
" But something tells me that we shall not always be
alone. And how sweet if other beings were to visit
us in the shape of this fair image ! "

Then they wander through the house, and every
where find tokens of human life, which now, with the
idea recently suggested, excite a deeper curiosity in
their bosoms. Woman has here left traces of her
delicacy and refinement, and of her gentle labors.
Eve ransacks a work-basket and instinctively thrusts
the rosy tip of her finger into a thimble. She takes
up a piece of embroidery, glowing with mimic flowers,
in one of which a fair damsel of the departed race has
left her needle. Pity that the Day of Doom should
have anticipated the completion of such a useful task !
Eve feels almost conscious of the skill to finish it. A
pianoforte has been left open. She flings her hand
carelessly over the keys, and strikes out a sudden mel
ody, no less natural than the strains of the ^Eolian
harp, but joyous with the dance of her yet unbur
dened life. Passing through a dark entry they find
a broom behind the door ; and Eve, who comprises
the whole nature of womanhood, has a dim idea that
it is an instrument proper for her hand. In another
apartment they behold a canopied bed, and all the ap
pliances of luxurious repose. A heap of forest leaves
would be more to the purpose. They enter the nur-
tery, and are perplexed with the sight of little gowns

292 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

and caps, tiny shoes, and a cradle, amid the drapery
of which is still to be seen the impress of a baby's
form. Adam slightly notices these trifles ; but Eve
becomes involved in a fit of mute reflection from
which it is hardly possible to rouse her.

By a most unlucky arrangement there was to have
been a grand dinner party in this mansion on the
very day when the whole human family, including the
invited guests, were summoned to the unknown re
gions of illimitable space. At the moment of fate,
the table was actually spread, and the company on
the point of sitting down. Adam and Eve come un
bidden to the banquet; it has now been some time
cold, but otherwise furnishes them with highly favor
able specimens of the gastronomy of their predeces
sors. But it is difficult to imagine the perplexity of
the unperverted couple, in endeavoring to find proper
food for their first meal, at a table where the culti
vated appetites of a fashionable party were to have
been gratified. Will Nature teach them the mystery
of a plate of turtle soup ? Will she embolden them
to attack a haunch of venison? Will she initiate
them into the merits of a Parisian pasty, imported by
the last steamer that ever crossed the Atlantic ? Will
she not, rather, bid them turn with disgust from fish,
fowl, and flesh, which, to their pure nostrils, steam
with a loathsome odor of death and corruption? —
Food ? The bill of fare contains nothing which they
recognize as such.

Fortunately, however, the dessert is ready upon a
neighboring table. Adam, whose appetite and ani
mal instincts are quicker than those of Eve, discovers
this fitting banquet.

" Here, dearest Eve," he exclaims, " here is food."

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 293

" Well," answered she, with the germ of a house
wife stirring within her, " we have been so busy to
day, that a picked-up dinner must serve."

So Eve comes to the table and receives a red-
cheeked apple from her husband's hand in requital of
her predecessor's fatal gift to our common grand
father. She eats it without sin, and, let us hope,
with no disastrous consequences to her future prog
eny. They make a plentiful, yet temperate, meal of
fruit, which, though not gathered in paradise, is legit
imately derived from the seeds that were planted there.
Their primal appetite is satisfied.

" What shall we drink, Eve? " inquires Adam.

Eve peeps among some bottles and decanters, which,
as they contain fluids, she naturally conceives must be
proper to quench thirst. But never before did claret,
hock, and madeira, of rich and rare perfume, excite
such disgust as now.

"Pah!" she exclaims, after smelling at various
wines. " What stuff is here ? The beings who have
gone before us could not have possessed the same na
ture that we do : for neither their hunger nor thirst
were like our own."

" Pray hand me yonder bottle," says Adam. " If it
be drinkable by any manner of mortal, I must moisten
my throat with it."

After some remonstrances she takes up a champagne
bottle, but is frightened by the sudden explosion of the
cork, and drops it upon the floor. There the untasted
liquor effervesces. Had they quaffed it they would
have experienced that brief delirium whereby, whether
excited by moral or physical causes, man sought to
recompense himself for the calm, lifelong joys which
he had lost by his revolt from Nature. At length in

294 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

a refrigerator, Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure,
cold, and bright as ever gushed from a fountain among
the hills. Both drink ; and such refreshment does it
bestow, that they question one another if this precious
liquid be not identical with the stream of life within
them.

" And now," observes Adam, " we must again try
to discover what sort of a world this is, and why we
have been sent hither."

" Why ? to love one another," cries Eve. " Is not
that employment enough ? "

"Truly is it," answers Adam, kissing her; "but
still — I know not — something tells us there is labor
to be done. Perhaps our allotted task is no other
than to climb into the sky, which is so much more
beautiful than earth."

" Then would we were there now," murmurs Eve,
" that no task or duty might come between us ! "

They leave the hospitable mansion, and we next see
them passing down State Street. The clock on the old
State House points to high noon, when the Exchange
should be in its glory and present the liveliest emblem
of what was the sole business of life, as regarded a
multitude of the foregone worldlings. It is over now.
The Sabbath of eternity has shed its stillness along the
street. Not even a newsboy assails the two solitary
passers-by with an extra penny paper from the office
of the Times or Mail, containing a full account of yes
terday's terrible catastrophe. Of all the dull times
that merchants and speculators have known, this is
the very worst; for, so far as they were concerned,
creation itself has taken the benefit of the bankrupt
act. After all, it is a pity. Those mighty capitalists
had just attained the wished-for wealth ! Those

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 295

shrewd men of traffic who had devoted so many years
to the most intricate and artificial of sciences, and had
barely mastered it when the universal bankruptcy was
announced by peal of trumpet ! Can they have been
so incautious as to provide no currency of the country
whither they have gone, nor any bills of exchange, or
letters of credit from the needy on earth to the cash
keepers of heaven ?

Adam and Eve enter a bank. Start not, ye whose
funds are treasured there ! You will never need them
now. Call not for the police. The stones of the street
and the coin of the vaults are of equal value to this sim
ple pair. Strange sight ! They take up the bright gold
in handfuls and throw it sportively into the air for the
sake of seeing the glittering worthlessness descend
again in a shower. They know not that each of those
small yellow circles was once a magic spell, potent to
sway men's hearts and mystify their moral sense.
Here let them pause in the investigation of the past.
They have discovered the mainspring, the life, the very
essence of the system that had wrought itself into the
vitals of mankind, and choked their original nature in
its deadly gripe. Yet how powerless over these young
inheritors of earth's hoarded wealth ! And here, too,
are huge packages of bank-notes, those talismanic slips
of paper which once had the efficacy to build up en,-,.,
chanted palaces like exhalations, and work all kinds
6T perilous wonders, yet were themselves but the ghosts
of money, the shadows of a shade. How like is this
vault to a magician's cave when the all-powerful wand
is broken, and the visionary splendor vanished, and the
floor strown with fragments of shattered spells, and
lifeless shapes, orce animated by demons !

" Everywhere, my dear Eve," observes Adam, " we

296 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

find heaps of rubbish of one kind or another. Some*
body, I am convinced, has taken pains to collect them,
but for what purpose ? Perhaps, hereafter, we shall be
moved to do the like. Can that be our business in the
world?"

" Oh no, no, Adam ! " answers Eve. " It would be
better to sit down quietly and look upward to the
sky."

They leave the bank, and in good time; for had
they tarried later they would probably have encoun
tered some gouty old goblin of a capitalist, whose soul
could not long be anywhere save in the vault with his
treasure.

Next they drop into a jeweller's shop. They are
pleased with the glow of gems ; and Adam twines a
string of beautiful pearls around the head of Eve, and
fastens his own mantle with a magnificent diamond
brooch. Eve thanks him, and views herself with de
light in the nearest looking-glass. Shortly afterward,
observing a bouquet of roses and other brilliant flow
ers in a vase of water, she flings away the inestimable
pearls, and adorns herself with these lovelier gems of
nature. They charm her with sentiment as well as
beauty.

"Surely they are living beings," she remarks to
Adam.

" I think so," replies Adam, " and they seem to be
as little at home in the world as ourselves."

We must not attempt to follow every footstep of
these investigators whom their Creator has commis
sioned to pass unconscious judgment upon the works
and ways of the vanished race. By this time, being
endowed with quick and accurate perceptions, they be
gin to understand the purpose of the many, things

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 297

around them. They conjecture, for instance, that the
edifices of the city were erected, not by the immediate
hand that made the world, but by beings somewhat
similar to themselves, for shelter and convenience.
But how will they explain the magnificence of one
habitation as compared with the squalid misery of
another ? Through what medium can the idea of ser
vitude enter their minds ? When will they compre
hend the great and miserable fact — the evidences of
which appeal to their senses everywhere — that one
portion of earth's lost inhabitants was rolling in lux
ury while the multitude was toiling for scanty food ?
A wretched change, indeed, must be wrought in their
own hearts ere they can conceive the primal decree
of^ Love to have been so completely abrogated, that
a brother should ever wrant what his brother had.
When their intelligence shall have reached so far,
Earth's new progeny will have little reason to exult
over her old rejected one.

Their wanderings have now brought them into the
suburbs of the city. They stand on a grassy brow of
a hill at the foot of a granite obelisk which points its
great finger upwards, as if the human family had
agreed, by a visible symbol of age-long endurance, to
offer some high sacrifice of thanksgiving or supplica
tion. The solemn height of the monument, its deep
simplicity, and the absence of any vulgar and practi
cal use, all strengthen its effect upon Adam and Eve,
and leave them to interpret it by a purer sentiment
than the builders thought of expressing.

" Eve, it is a visible prayer," observed Adam.

" And we will pray too," she replies.

Let us pardon these poor children of neither father
nor mother for so absurdly mistaking the purport of

298 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the memorial which man founded and woman finished
on far-famed Bunker Hill. The idea of war is not na
tive to their souls. Nor have they sympathies for the
brave defenders of liberty, since oppression is one of
their unconjectured mysteries. Could they guess that
the green sward on which they stand so peacefully was
once strewn with human corpses and purple with their
blood, it would equally amaze them that one genera
tion of men should perpetrate such carnage, and that
a subsequent generation should triumphantly com
memorate it.

With a sense of delight they now stroll across green
fields and along the margin of a quiet river. Not to
track them too closely, we next find the wanderers en
tering a Gothic edifice of gray stone where the by-gone
world has left whatever it deemed worthy of record, in
the rich library of Harvard University.

No student ever yet enjoyed such solitude and si
lence as now broods within its deep alcoves. Little
do the present visitors understand what opportunities
are thrown away upon them. Yet Adam looks anx
iously at the long rows of volumes, those storied
heights of human lore, ascending one above another
from floor to ceiling. He takes up a bulky folio. It
opens in his hands as if spontaneously to impart the
spirit of its author to the yet unworn and untainted
intellect of the fresh-created mortal. He stands por
ing over the regular columns of mystic characters,
seemingly in studious mood ; for the unintelligible
thought upon the page has a mysterious relation to
his mind, and makes itself felt as if it were a bur
den flung upon him. He is even painfully per
plexed, and grasps vainly at he knows not what.
O Adam, it is too soon, too soon by at least five

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 299

thousand years, to put on spectacles and bury your
self in the alcoves of a library !

" What can this be ? " he murmurs at last. " Eve,
methinks nothing is so desirable as to find out the
mystery of this big and heavy object with its thousand
thin divisions. See ! it stares me in the face as if it
were about to speak ! "

Eve, by a feminine instinct, is dipping into a vol
ume of fashionable poetry, the production certainly of
the most fortunate of earthly bards, since his lay con
tinues in vogue when all the great masters of the lyre
have passed into oblivion. But let not his ghost be
too exultant ! The world's one lady tosses the book
upon the floor and laughs merrily at her husband's
abstracted mien.

" My dear Adam," cries she, " you look pensive and
dismal. Do fling down that stupid thing ; for even if
it should speak it would not be worth attending to.
Let us talk with one another, and with the sky, and
the green earth, and its trees and flowers. They will
teach us better knowledge than we can find here."

" Well, Eve, perhaps you are right," replies Adam,
with a sort of sigh. " Still I cannot help thinking that
the interpretation of the riddles amid which we have
been wandering all day long might here be discov
ered."

" It may be better not to seek the interpretation,"
persists Eve. "For my part, the air of this place
does not suit me. If you love me, come away ! "

She prevails, and rescues him from the mysterious
perils of the library. Happy influence of woman !
Had he lingered there long enough to obtain a clue
to its treasures — as was not impossible, his intellect
being of human structure, indeed, but with an untrans-

300 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

mitted vigor and acuteness, — had he then and there
become a student, the annalist of our poor world would
soon have recorded the downfall of a second Adam.
The fatal apple of another Tree of Knowledge would
have been eaten. All the perversions, and sophistries,
and false wisdom so aptly mimicking the true — all
the narrow truth, so partial that it becomes more de
ceptive than falsehood — all the wrong principles and
worse practice, the pernicious examples and mistaken
rules of life — all the specious theories which turn
earth into cloudland and men into shadows — all the
sad experience which it took mankind so many ages
to accumulate, and from which they never drew a
moral for their future guidance, — the whole heap of
this disastrous lore would have tumbled at once upon
Adam's head. There would have been nothing left
for him but to take up the already abortive experi
ment of life where we had dropped it, and toil on
ward with it a little further.

But, blessed in his ignorance, he may still enjoy a
new world in our wornout one. Should he fall short
of good, even as far as we did, he has at least the free
dom — no worthless one — to make errors for himself.
And his literature, when the progress of centuries shall
create it, will be no interminably repeated echo of our
own poetry and reproduction of the images that were
moulded by our great fathers of song and fiction, but
a melody never yet heard on earth, and intellectual
forms unbreathed upon by our conceptions. There
fore let the dust of ages gather upon the volumes of
the library, and in due season the roof of the edifice
crumble down upon the whole. When the second
Adam's descendants shall have collected as much
rubbish of their own, it will be time enough to dig

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE. 801

Into our ruins and compare the literary advancement
of two independent races.

But we are looking forward too far. It seems to be
the vice of those who have a long past behind them.
We will return to the new Adam and Eve, who, hav
ing no reminiscences save dim and fleeting visions of
a preexistence, are content to live and be happy in
the present.

The day is near its close when these pilgrims, who
derive their being from no dead progenitors, reach the
cemetery of Mount Auburn. With light hearts — for
earth and sky now gladden each other with beauty — •
they tread along the winding paths, among marble
pillars, mimic temples, urns, obelisks, and sarcophagi,
sometimes pausing to contemplate these fantasies of
human growth, and sometimes to admire the flowers
wherewith Nature converts decay to loveliness. Can
death, in the midst of his old triumphs, make them sen
sible that they have taken up the heavy burden of mor
tality which a whole species had thrown down ? Dust
kindred to their own has never lain in the grave. Will
they then recognize, and so soon, that Time and the ele
ments have an indefeasible claim upon their bodies?
Not improbably they may. There must have been
shadows enough, even amid the primal sunshine of
their existence, to suggest the thought of the soul's in
congruity with its circumstances. They have already
learned that something is to be thrown aside. The
idea of Death is in them, or not far off. But, were
they to choose a symbol for him, it would be the but
terfly soaring upward, or the bright angel beckoning
them aloft, or the child asleep, with soft dreams visi
ble through her transparent purity.

Such a Child, in whitest marble, they have found
among the monuments of Mount Auburn.

302 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Sweetest Eve," observes Adam, while hand in
hand they contemplate this beautiful object, " yonder
sun has left us, and the whole world is fading from
our sight. Let us sleep as this lovely little figure
is sleeping. Our Father only knows whether what
outward things we have possessed to-day are to be
snatched from us forever. But should our earthly
life be leaving us with the departing light, we need
not doubt that another morn will find us somewhere
beneath the smile of God. I feel that he has im
parted the boon of existence never to be resumed."

" And no matter where we exist," replies Eve, " for
we shall always be together."

EGOTISM ; l OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT.

[PROM THE UNPUBLISHED "ALLEGORIES OP THE HEART."]

" HEKE he comes ! " shouted the boys along the
street. " Here comes the man with a snake in his
bosom ! "

This outcry, saluting Herkimer's ears as he was
about to enter the iron gate of the Elliston mansion,
made him pause. It was not without a shudder that
he found himself on the point of meeting his former
acquaintance, whom he had known in the glory of
youth, and whom now after an interval of five years,
he was to find the victim either of a diseased fancy or
a horrible physical misfortune.

" A snake in his bosom! " repeated the young sculp
tor to himself. " It must be he. No second man on
earth has such a bosom friend. And now, my poor
Rosina, Heaven grant me wisdom to discharge my er
rand aright ! Woman's faith must be strong indeed
since thine has not yet failed."

Thus musing, he took his stand at the entrance of
the gate and waited until ths personage so singularly
announced should make his appearance. After an
instant or two he beheld the figure of a lean man, of
unwholesome look, with glittering eyes and long black
iiair, who seemed to imitate the motion of a snake ; for,
instead of walking straight forward with open front,

1 The physical fact, to which it is here attempted to give a morai
Hgnification, has been known to occur in more than one instance.

304 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

he undulated along the pavement in a curved line. It
may be too fanciful to say that something, either in his
moral or material aspect, suggested the idea that a
miracle had been wrought by transforming a serpent
into a man, but so imperfectly that the snaky nature
was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden, under the mere
outward guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that
his complexion had a greenish tinge over its sickly
white, reminding him of a species of marble out of
which he had once wrought a head of Envy, with
her snaky locks.

The wretched being approached the gate, but, in
stead of entering, stopped short and fixed the glitter
of his eye full upon the compassionate yet steady coun
tenance of the sculptor.

" It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! " he exclaimed.

And then there was an audible hiss, but whether it
came from the apparent lunatic's own lips, or was the
real hiss of a serpent, might admit of a discussion.
At all events, it made Herkimer shudder to his heart's
core.

" Do you know me, George Herkimer ? " asked the
snake-possessed.

Herkimer did know him ; but it demanded all the
intimate and practical acquaintance with the human
face, acquired by modelling actual likenesses in clay,
to recognize the features of Roderick Elliston in the
visage that now met the sculptor's gaze. Yet it was
he. It added nothing to the wonder to reflect that the
once brilliant young man had undergone this odious
and fearful change during the no more than five
brief years of Herkimer' s abode at Florence. The
possibility of such a transformation being granted, it
was as easy to conceive it effected in a moment as in

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 305

an age. Inexpressibly shocked and startled, it was
still the keenest pang when Herkimer remembered
that the fate or his cousin Rosina, the ideal of gen
tle womanhood, was indissolubly interwoven with that
of a being whom Providence seemed to have unhu-
manized.

" Elliston ! Roderick ! " cried he, " I had heard of
this ; but my conception came far short of the truth.
What has befallen you? Why do I find you thus ? "

" Oh, 't is a mere nothing ! A snake ! A snake !
The commonest thing in the world. A snake in the
bosom — that 's all," answered Roderick Elliston.
" But how is your own breast ? " continued he, look
ing the sculptor in the eye with the most acute and
penetrating glance that it had ever been his fortune
to encounter. " All pure and wholesome ? No rep
tile there ? By my faith and conscience, and by the
devil within me, here is a wonder ! A man without
a serpent in his bosom ! "

" Be calm, Elliston," whispered George Herkimer,
laying his hand upon the shoulder of the snake-pos
sessed. " I have crossed the ocean to meet you. Lis
ten ! Let us be private. I bring a message from
Rosina — from your wife ! "

" It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! " muttered Rod
erick.

With this exclamation, the most frequent in his
mouth, the unfortunate man clutched both hands
upon his breast as if an intolerable sting or torture
impelled him to rend it open and let out the living
mischief, even should it be intertwined with his own
life. He then freed himself from Herkimer 's grasp
by a subtle motion, and, gliding through the gate, took
refuge in his antiquated family residence. The sculp*

806 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

tor did not pursue him. He saw that no available in
tercourse could be expected at such a moment, and was
desirous, before another meeting, to inquire closely
into the nature of Roderick's disease and the circum
stances that had reduced him to so lamentable a con
dition. He succeeded in obtaining the necessary infor
mation from an eminent medical gentleman.

Shortly after Elliston's separation from his wife —
now nearly four years ago — his associates had ob
served a singular gloom spreading over his daily life,
like those chill, gray mists that sometimes steal away
the sunshine from a summer's morning. The symp
toms caused them endless perplexity. They knew not
whether ill health were robbing his spirits of elasticity,
or whether a canker of the mind was gradually eating,
as such cankers do, from his moral system into the
physical frame, which is but the shadow of the former.
They looked for the root of this trouble in his shat
tered schemes of domestic bliss, — wilfully shattered
by himself, — but could not be satisfied of its exist
ence there. Some thought that their once brilliant
friend was in an incipient stage of insanity, of which
his passionate impulses had perhaps been the forerun
ners ; others prognosticated a general blight and grad
ual decline. From Roderick's own lips they could
learn nothing. More than once, it is true, he had
been heard to say, clutching his hands convulsively
upon his breast, — " It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! " —
but, by different auditors, a great diversity of explana
tion was assigned to this ominous expression. What
could it be that gnawed the breast of Roderick Ellis-
ton? Was it sorrow? Was it merely the tooth of
physical disease? Or, in his reckless course, often
verging upon profligacy, if not plunging into its

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 307

depths, had he been guilty of some deed which made
his bosom a prey to the deadlier fangs of remorse?
There was plausible ground for each of these con
jectures ; but it must not be concealed that more
than one elderly gentleman, the victim of good cheer
and slothful habits, magisterially pronounced the se
cret of the whole matter to be Dyspepsia !

Meanwhile, Roderick seemed aware how generally
he had become the subject of curiosity and conjee*
ture, and, with a morbid repugnance to such notice,
or to any notice whatsoever, estranged himself from
all companionship. Not merely the eye of man was
a horror to him ; not merely the light of a friend's
countenance ; but even the blessed sunshine, likewise^
which in its universal beneficence typifies the radi
ance of the Creator's face, expressing his love for all
the creatures of his hand. The dusky twilight was
now too transparent for Roderick Elliston ; the black
est midnight was his chosen hour to steal abroad ; and
if ever he were seen, it was when the watchman's Ian
tern gleamed upon his figure, gliding along the street,
with his hands clutched upon his bosom, still mutter
ing, " It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! " What could
it be that gnawed him ?

After a time, it became known that Elliston was in
the habit of resorting to all the noted quacks that in
fested the city, or whom money would tempt to jour
ney thither from a distance. By one of these persons,
in the exultation of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed
far and wide, by dint of handbills and little pamphlets
on dingy paper, that a distinguished gentleman, Rod
erick Elliston, Esq., had been relieved of a SNAKE in
his stomach ! So here was the monstrous secret,
ejected from its lurking place into public view, in

808 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

all its horrible deformity. The mystery was out;
but not so the bosom serpent. He, if it were any
thing but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living den.
The empiric's cure had been a sham, the effect, it was
supposed, of some stupefying drug which more nearly
caused the death of the patient than of the odious rep
tile that possessed him. When Roderick Elliston re
gained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune
the town talk — the more than nine days' wonder and
horror — while, at his bosom, he felt the sickening mo
tion of a thing alive, and the gnawing of that restless
fang which seemed to gratify at once a physical appe
tite and a fiendish spite.

He summoned the old black servant, who had been
bred up in his father's house, and was a middle-aged
man while Roderick lay in his cradle.

" Scipio ! " he began ; and then paused, with his
arms folded over his heart. " What do people say
of me, Scipio."

" Sir ! my poor master ! that you had a serpent in
your bosom," answered the servant with hesitation.

" And what else ? " asked Roderick, with a ghastly
look at the man.

" Nothing else, dear master," replied Scipio, " only
that the doctor gave you a powder, and that the snake
leaped out upon the floor."

" No, no ! " muttered Roderick to himself, as he
shook his head, and pressed his hands with a more
convulsive force upon his breast, " I feel him still.
It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! "

From this time the miserable sufferer ceased to
shun the world, but rather solicited and forced him
self upon the notice of acquaintances and strangers.
It was partly the result of desperation on finding that

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT 309

the cavern of his own bosom had not proved deep and
dark enough to hide the secret, even while it was so
secure a fortress for the loathsome fiend that had
crept into it. But still more, this craving for notori
ety was a symptom of the intense morbidness which
now pervaded his nature. All persons chronically
diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the
mind or body; whether it be sin, sorrow, or merely
the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain, or
mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such indi
viduals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the
torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to
be so prominent an object with them that they cannot
but present it to the face of every casual passer-by.
There is a pleasure — perhaps the greatest of which
the sufferer is susceptible — in displaying the wasted
or ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast ; and the
fouler the crime, with so much the more difficulty does
the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up its snake-
like head to frighten the world ; for it is that cancer,
or that crime, which constitutes their respective in
dividuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a little while be
fore, had held himself so scornfully above the common
lot of men, now paid full allegiance to this humili
ating law. The snake in his bosom seemed the sym
bol of a monstrous egotism to which everything was re
ferred, and which he pampered, night and day, with
a continual and exclusive sacrifice of devil worship.

He soon exhibited what most people considered in
dubitable tokens of insanity. In some of his moods,
strange to say, he prided and gloried himself on be
ing marked out from the ordinary experience of man
kind, by the possession of a double nature, and a life
within a life. He appeared to imagine that the snake

X

310 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

was a divinity, — not celestial, it is true, but darkly
infernal, — and that he thence derived an eminence
and a sanctity, horrid, indeed, yet more desirable than
whatever ambition aims at. Thus he drew his mis
ery around him like a regal mantle, and looked down
triumphantly upon those whose vitals nourished no
deadly monster. Oftener, however, his human nature
asserted its empire over him in the shape of a yearn
ing for fellowship. It grew to be his custom to spend
the whole day in wandering about the streets, aim
lessly, unless it might be called an aim to establish a
fcpecies of brotherhood between himself and the world.
With cankered ingenuity, he sought out his own dis
ease in every breast. Whether insane or not, he
ihowed so keen a perception of frailty, error, and
rice, that ir any persons gave him credit for being
possessed not merely with a serpent, but with an ac
tual fiend, who imparted this evil faculty of recog
nizing whatever was ugliest in man's heart.

For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty
J-ears, had cherished a hatred against his own brother.
Roderick, amidst the throng of the street, laid his hand
on this man's chest, and looking full into his forbid
ding face, —

" How is the snake to-day ? " he inquired, with a
mock expression of sympathy.

" The snake ! " exclaimed the brother hater —
" what do you mean ? "

" The snake ! The snake ! Does he gnaw you ? "
persisted Roderick. " Did you take counsel with him
this morning when you should have been saying your
prayers ? Did he sting, when you thought of your
brother's health, wealth, and good repute? Did he
eaper for joy, when you remembered the profligacy of

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 311

his only son ? And whether he stung, or whether he
frolicked, did you feel his poison throughout your body
and soul, converting everything to sourness and bit
terness ? That is the way of such serpents. I have
learned the whole nature of them from my own ! "

" Where is the police ? " roared the object of Rod
erick's persecution, at the same time giving an in
stinctive clutch to his breast. " Why is this luna
tic allowed to go at large ? "

" Ha, ha ! " chuckled Roderick, releasing his grasp
of the man. " His bosom serpent has stung him
then!"

Often it pleased the unfortunate young man to vex
people with a lighter satire, yet still characterized by
somewhat of snakelike virulence. One day he en
countered an ambitious statesman, and gravely in
quired after the welfare of his boa constrictor ; for of
that species, Roderick affirmed, this gentleman's ser
pent must needs be, since its appetite was enormous
enough to devour the whole country and constitution.
At another time, he stopped a close-fisted old fellow,
of great wealth, but who skulked about the city in
the guise of a scarecrow, with a patched blue surtout,
brown hat, and mouldy boots, scraping pence together,
and picking up rusty nails. Pretending to look ear
nestly at this respectable person's stomach, Roderick
assured him that his snake was a copper-head, and
had been generated by the immense quantities of
that base metal, with which he daily defiled his fin
gers. Again, he assaulted a man of rubicund vis
age, and told him that few bosom serpents had more
of the devil in them than those that breed in the vats
of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored
with his attention was a distinguished clergyman,

312 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

who happened just then to be engaged in a theolog
ical controversy, where human wrath was more pei*
ceptible than divine inspiration.

" You have swallowed a snake in a cup of sacramen
tal wine," quoth he.

" Profane wretch ! " exclaimed the divine ; but,
nevertheless, his hand stole to his breast.

He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some
early disappointment, had retired from the world, and
thereafter held no intercourse with his fellow-men, but
brooded sullenly or passionately over the irrevocable
past. This man's very heart, if Roderick might be
believed, had been changed into a serpent, which
would finally torment both him and itself to death.
Observing a married couple, whose domestic troubles
were matter of notoriety, he condoled with both on
having mutually taken a house adder to their bosoms.
To an envious author, who depreciated works which
he could never equal, he said that his snake was the
slimiest and filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but was
fortunately without a sting. A man of impure life,
and a brazen face, asking Roderick if there were any
serpent in his breast, he told him that there was, and
of the same species that once tortured Don Rodrigo,
the Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand,
and gazing sadly into her eyes, warned her that she
cherished a serpent of the deadliest kind within her
gentle breast ; and the world found the truth of those
ominous words, when, a few months afterwards, the
poor girl died of love and shame. Two ladies, rivals
in fashionable life, who tormented one another with a
thousand little stings of womanish spite, were given
to understand that each of their hearts was a nest of
diminutive snakes, which did quite as much mischief
as one great one.

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 313

But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than
to lay hold of a person infected with jealousy, which
he represented as an enormous green reptile, with an
Jce-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting of any
snake save one.

" And what one is that ? " asked a by-stander, over
hearing him.

It was a dark-browed man who put the question ;
he had an evasive eye, which in the course of a dozen
years had looked no mortal directly in the face. There
was an ambiguity about this person's character, — a
stain upon his reputation, — yet none could tell pre
cisely of what nature, although the city gossips, male
and female, whispered the most atrocious surmises.
Until a recent period he had followed the sea, and
was, in fact, the very shipmaster whom George Her-
kimer had encountered, under such singular circum
stances, in the Grecian Archipelago.

" What bosom serpent has the sharpest sting ? " re
peated this man ; but he put the question as if by a
reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he was utter
ing it.

" Why need you ask ? " replied Roderick, with a
look of dark intelligence. " Look into your own
breast. Hark ! my serpent bestirs himself ! He
acknowledges the presence of a master fiend ! "

And then, as the by-standers afterwards affirmed, a
hissing sound was heard, apparently in Roderick Ellis*
ton's breast. It was said, too, that an answering hiss
came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake
were actually lurking there and had been aroused by
the call of its brother reptile. If there were in fact
any such sound, it might have been caused by a mail
cious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of Roder>
ick

314 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Thus making his own actual serpent — if a serpent
there actually was in his bosom — the type of each
man's fatal error, or hoarded sin, or unquiet con
science, and striking his sting so unremorsefully into
the sorest spot, we may well imagine that Roderick
became the pest of the city. Nobody could elude him
— none could withstand him. He grappled with the
ugliest truth that he could lay his hand on, and com
pelled his adversary to do the same. Strange spec
tacle in human life where it is the instinctive effort
of one and all to hide those sad realities, and leave
them undisturbed beneath a heap of superficial topics
which constitute the materials of intercourse between
man and man ! It was not to be tolerated that Rod
erick Elliston should break through the tacit compact
by which the world has done its best to secure repose
without relinquishing evil. The victims of his mali
cious remarks, it is true, had brothers enough to keep
them in countenance ; for, by Roderick's theory, every
mortal bosom harbored either a brood of small ser
pents or one overgrown monster that had devoured
all the rest. Still the city could not bear this new
apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and par
ticularly by the most respectable inhabitants, that
Roderick should no longer be permitted to violate
the received rules of decorum by obtruding his own
bosom serpent to the public gaze, and dragging those
of decent people from their lurking places.

Accordingly, his relatives interfered and placed
him in a private asylum for the insane. When the
news was noised abroad, it was observed that many
persons walked the streets with freer countenances
and covered their breasts less carefully with their
hands.

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 315

His confinement, however, although it contributed
not a little to the peace of the town, operated unfa
vorably upon Roderick himself. In solitude his mel
ancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole
days — indeed, it was his sole occupation — in com
muning with the serpent. A conversation was sus
tained, in which, as it seemed, the hidden monster
bore a part, though unintelligibly to the listeners,
and inaudible except in a hiss. Singular as it may
appear, the sufferer had now contracted a sort of af
fection for his tormentor, mingled, however, with the
intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such dis
cordant emotions incompatible. Each, on the con
trary, imparted strength and poignancy to its oppo
site. Horrible love — horrible antipathy — embrac
ing one another in his bosom, and both concentrat
ing themselves upon a being that had crept into his
vitals or been engendered there, and which was nour
ished with his food, and lived upon his life, and was
as intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was
the foulest of all created things ! But not the less
was it the true type of a morbid nature.

Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter ha
tred against the snake and himself, Roderick deter
mined to be the death of him, even at the expense of
his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation ;
but, while the wretched man was on the point of f am
ishing, the monster seemed to feed upon his heart,
and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his
sweetest and most congenial diet. Then he privily
took a dose of active poison, imagining that it would
not fail to kill either himself or the devil that pos
sessed him, or both together. Another mistake ; for
if Roderick had not yet been destroyed by his own

316 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

poisoned heart nor the snake by gnawing it, they had
little to fear from arsenic or corrosive sublimate. In
deed, the venomous pest appeared to operate as an
antidote against all other poisons. The physicians
tried to suffocate the fiend with tobacco smoke. He
breathed it as freely as if it were his native atmos
phere. Again, they drugged their patient with opium
and drenched him with intoxicating liquors, hoping
that the snake might thus be reduced to stupor and
perhaps be ejected from the stomach. They suc
ceeded in rendering Koderick insensible ; but, placing
their hands upon his breast, they were inexpressibly
horror stricken to feel the monster wriggling, twining?
and darting to and fro within his narrow limits, evi
dently enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited
to unusual feats of activity. Thenceforth they gave up
all attempts at cure or palliation. The doomed suf
ferer submitted to his fate, resumed his former loath
some affection for the bosom fiend, and spent whole
miserable days before a looking-glass, with his mouth
wide open, watching, in hope and horror, to catch
a glimpse of the snake's head far down within his
throat. It is supposed that he succeeded; for the
attendants once heard a frenzied shout, and, rush
ing into the room, found Roderick lifeless upon the
floor.

He was kept but little longer under restraint. Af
ter minute investigation, the medical directors of the
asylum decided that his mental disease did not amount
to insanity, nor would warrant his confinement, espe
cially as its influence upon his spirits was unfavorable,
and might produce the evil which it was meant to rem
edy. His eccentricities were doubtless great ; he had
habitually violated many of the customs and preji*

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 317

dices of society ; but the world was not, without surer
ground, entitled to treat him as a madman. On this
decision of such competent authority Roderick was
released, and had returned to his native city the very
day before his encounter with George Herkimer.

As soon as possible after learning these particulars
the sculptor, together with a sad and tremulous com
panion, sought Elliston at his own house. It was a
large, sombre edifice of wood, with pilasters and a
balcony, and was divided from one of the principal
streets by a terrace of three elevations, which was
ascended by successive flights of stone steps. Some
immense old elms almost concealed the front of the
mansion. This spacious and once magnificent family
residence was built by a grandee of the race early in
the past century, at which epoch, land being of small
comparative value, the garden and other grounds had
formed quite an extensive domain. Although a por
tion of the ancestral heritage had been alienated, there
was still a shadowy enclosure in the rear of the man
sion where a student, or a dreamer, or a man of
stricken heart might lie all day upon the grass, amid
the solitude of murmuring boughs, and forget that a
city had grown up around him. .

Into this retirement the sculptor and his companion
were ushered by Scipio, the old black servant, whose
wrinkled visage grew almost sunny with intelligence
and joy as he paid his humble greetings to one of the
two visitors.

" Remain in the arbor," whispered the sculptor to
the figure that leaned upon his arm. "You will know
whether, and when, to make your appearance."

" God will teach me," was the reply. " May He
Bupport me too 1 "

318 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Roderick was reclining on the margin of a fountain
which gushed into the fleckered sunshine with the same
clear sparkle and the same voice of airy quietude as
when trees of primeval growth flung their shadows
across its bosom. How strange is the life of a foun
tain ! — born at every moment, yet of an age coeval
with the rocks, and far surpassing the venerable antiq
uity of a forest.

" You are come ! I have expected you," said Ellis-
ton, when he became aware of the sculptor's pres
ence.

His manner was very different from that of the
preceding day — quiet, courteous, and, as Herkimer
thought, watchful both over his guest and himself.
This unnatural restraint was almost the only trait that
betokened anything amiss. He had just thrown a
book upon the grass, where it lay half opened, thus
disclosing itself to be a natural history of the serpent
tribe, illustrated by lifelike plates. Near it lay that
bulky volume, the Ductor Dubitantium of Jeremy
Taylor, full of cases of conscience, and in which
most men, possessed of a conscience, may find some
thing applicable to their purpose.

" You see," observed Elliston, pointing to the book
of serpents, while a smile gleamed upon his lips, " I
am making an effort to become better acquainted
with my bosom friend ; but I find nothing satisfac
tory in this volume. If I mistake not, he will prove
to be sui generis, and akin to no other reptile in cre
ation."

" Whence came this strange calamity ? " inquired
the sculptor.

" My sable friend Scipio has a story," replied Rod*
erick, " of a snake that had lurked in this fountain —

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 319

pure and innocent as it looks — ever since it was
known to the first settlers. This insinuating person
age once crept into the vitals of my great grandfather
and dwelt there many years, tormenting the old gen
tleman beyond mortal endurance. In short it is a
family peculiarity. But, to tell you the truth, I have
no faith in this idea of the snake's being an heirloom.
He is my own snake, and no man's else."

" But what was his origin ? " demanded Herkimer.

" Oh, there is poisonous stuff in any man's heart
sufficient to generate a brood of serpents," said Ellis-
ton with a hollow laugh. " You should have heard
my homilies to the good town's-people. Positively, I
deem myself fortunate in having bred but a single ser
pent. You, however, have none in your bosom, and
therefore cannot sympathize with the rest of the world,
It gnaws me ! It gnaws me ! "

With this exclamation Roderick lost his self-control
and threw himself upon the grass, testifying his agony
by intricate writhings, in which Herkimer could not
but fancy a resemblance to the motions of a snake.
Then, likewise, was heard that frightful hiss, which
often ran through the sufferer's speech, and crept be
tween the words and syllables without interrupting
their succession.

" This is awful indeed ! " exclaimed the sculptor —
" an awful infliction, whether it be actual or imaginary.
Tell me, Roderick Elliston, is there any remedy for
this loathsome evil ? "

"Yes, but an impossible one," muttered Roderick,
as he lay wallowing with his face in the grass. " Could
I for one instant forget myself, the serpent might not
abide within me. It is my diseased self -contemplation
that has engendered and nourished him."

320 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Then forget yourself, my husband," said a gentle
voice above him ; " forget yourself in the idea of
another ! "

Rosina had emerged from the arbor, and was bend
ing over him with the shadow of his anguish reflected
in her countenance, yet so mingled with hope and un
selfish love that all anguish seemed but an earthly
shadow and a dream. She touched Roderick with
her hand. A tremor shivered through his frame. At
that moment, if report be trustworthy, the sculptor
beheld a waving motion through the grass, and heard
a tinkling sound, as if something had plunged into the
fountain. Be the truth as it might, it is certain that
Roderick Elliston sat up like a man renewed, restored
to his right mind, and rescued from the fiend which
had so miserably overcome him in the battle-field of
his own breast.

* Rosina! " cried he, in broken and passionate tones,
but with nothing of the wild wail that had haunted

O

his voice so long, " forgive ! forgive ! "

Her happy tears bedewed his face.

"The punishment has been severe," observed the
sculptor. " Even Justice might now forgive ; how
much more a woman's tenderness ! Roderick Elliston,
whether the serpent was a physical reptile, or whether
the morbidness of your nature suggested that symbol
to your fancy, the moral of the story is not the less
true and strong. A tremendous Egotism, manifest
ing itself in your case in the form of jealousy, is as
fearful a fiend as ever stole into the human heart.
Can a breast, where it has dwelt so long, be puri
fied?"

" Oh yes," said Rosina with a heavenly smile. " The

EGOTISM, OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT. 321

serpent was but a dark fantasy, and what it typified
was as shadowy as itself. The past, dismal as it
seems, shall fliiig no gloom upon the future. To
give it its due importance we must think of it but as
an anecdote in our Eternity."
VOL. n. *t

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET.

[FROM THE UNPUBLISHED "ALLEGORIES OP THE HEART."]

"I have here attempted," said Roderick, unfolding
a few sheets of manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and
the sculptor in the summer-house, — "I have attempted
to seize hold of a personage who glides past me occa
sionally, in my walk through life. My former sad
experience, as you know, has gifted me with some
degree of insight into the gloomy mysteries of the
human heart, through which I have wandered like one
astray in a dark cavern, with his torch fast flickering
to extinction. But this man, this class of men, is a
hopeless puzzle."

" Well, but propound him," said the sculptor. " Let
us have an idea of him, to begin with."

" Why, indeed," replied Roderick, " he is such a
being as I could conceive you to carve out of marble,
and some yet unrealized perfection of human science
to endow with an exquisite mockery of intellect; but
still there lacks the last inestimable touch of a divine
Creator. He looks like a man ; and, perchance, like a
better specimen of man than you ordinarily meet. You
might esteem him wise ; he is capable of cultivation
and refinement, and has at least an external conscience,
but the demands that spirit makes upon spirit are pre
cisely those to which he cannot respond. When at
last you come close to him you find him chill and
unsubstantial — a mere vapor."

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET.

u I believe," said Rosina, " I have a glimmering idea
of what you mean."

" Then be thankful," answered her husband, smil
ing ; " but do not anticipate any further illumination
from what I am about to read. I have here imagined
such a man to be — what, probabty, he never is — con
scious of the deficiency in his spiritual organization.
Methinks the result would be a sense of cold unreal
ity wherewith he would go shivering through the
world, longing to exchange his load of ice for any
burden of real grief that fate could fling upon a hu
man being."

Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick be
gan to read.

In a certain old gentleman's last will and testament
there appeared a bequest, which, as his final thought
and deed, was singularly in keeping with a long life of
melancholy eccentricity. He devised a considerable
sum for establishing a fund, the interest of which was
to be expended, annually forever, in preparing a Christ
mas Banquet for ten of the most miserable persons that
could be found. It seemed not to be the testator's pur
pose to make these half a score of sad hearts merry,
but to provide that the stern or fierce expression of
human discontent should not be drowned, even for that
one holy and joyful day, amid the acclamations of fes
tal gratitude which all Christendom sends up. And he
desired, likewise, to perpetuate his own remonstrance
against the earthly course of Providence, and his sad
and sour dissent from those systems of religion or phi
losophy which either find sunshine in the world or
draw it down from heaven.

The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting

824 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

among such as might advance their claims to par*
take of this dismal hospitality, was confided to the
two trustees or stewards of the fund. These gentle
men, like their deceased friend, were sombre humor
ists, who made it their principal occupation to number
the sable threads in the web of human life, and drop
all the golden ones out of the reckoning. They per
formed their present office with integrity and judg
ment. The aspect of the assembled company on the
day of the first festival might not, it is true, have sat
isfied every beholder that these were especially the in
dividuals, chosen forth from all the world, whose griefs
were worthy to stand as indicators of the mass of hu
man suffering. Yet, after due consideration, it could
not be disputed that here was a variety of hopeless dis
comfort, which, if it sometimes arose from causes ap
parently inadequate, was thereby only the shrewder
imputation against the nature and mechanism of life.

The arrangements and decorations of the banquet
were probably intended to signify that death in life
which had been the testator's definition of existence.
The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with
curtains of deep and dusky purple, and adorned with
branches of cypress and wreaths of artificial flowers,
imitative of such as used to be strown over the dead.
A sprig of parsley was laid by every plate. The main
reservoir of wine was a sepulchral urn of silver, whence
the liquor was distributed around the table in small
vases, accurately copied from those that held the tears
of ancient mourners. Neither had the stewards — if
it were their taste that arranged these details — for
gotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated
a skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their
own merriment with the imperturbable grin of a

THE CHRIS TMA S BANQUET. 325

death's head. Such a fearful guest, shrouded in a
black mantle, sat now at the head of the table. It
was whispered, I know not with what truth, that the
testator himself had once walked the visible world
with the machinery of that same skeleton, and that it
was one of the stipulations of his will that he should
thus be permitted to sit, from year to year, at the ban
quet which he had instituted. If so, it was perhaps
covertly implied that he had cherished no hopes of
bliss beyond the grave to compensate for the evils
which he felt or imagined here. And if, in their be
wildered conjectures as to the purpose of earthly exist
ence, the banqueters should throw aside the veil, and
cast an inquiring glance at this figure of death, as
seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable,
the only reply would be a stare of the vacant eye cav
erns and a grin of the skeleton jaws. Such was the
response that the dead man had fancied himself to
receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of
his life ; and it was his desire to repeat it when the
guests of his dismal hospitality should find themselves
perplexed with the same question.

" What means that wreath ? " asked several of the
company, while viewing the decorations of the table.

They alluded to a wreath of cypress which was
held on high by a skeleton arm, protruding from
within the black mantle.

" It is a crown," said one of the stewards, " not for \
the worthiest, but for the wof ulest, when he shall prove
his claim to it."

The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man
of soft and gentle character, who had not energy to
struggle against the heavy despondency to which his
temperament rendered him liable ; and therefore with

326 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

nothing outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he
had spent a life of quiet misery that made his blood
torpid, and weighed upon his breath, and sat like a
ponderous night fiend upon every throb of his unre
sisting heart. His wretchedness seemed as deep as his
original nature, if not identical with it. It was the
misfortune of a second guest to cherish within his bo
som a diseased heart, which had become so wretchedly
sore that the continual and unavoidable rubs of the
world, the blow of an enemy, the careless jostle of a
stranger, and even the faithful and loving touch of a
friend, alike made ulcers in it. As is the habit of
people thus afflicted, he found his chief employment in
exhibiting these miserable sores to any who would give
themselves the pain of viewing them. A third guest
was a hypochondriac, whose imagination wrought nec
romancy in its outward and inward world, and caused
him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and
dragons in the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise
of beautiful women, and something ugly or wicked be
neath all the pleasant surfaces of nature. His neigh
bor at table was one who, in his early youth, had
trusted mankind too much, and hoped too highly in
their behalf, and, in meeting with many disappoint
ments, had become desperately soured. For several
years back this misanthrope had employed himself in
accumulating motives for hating and despising his race
— such as murder, lust, treachery, ingratitude, faithless
ness of trusted friends, instinctive vices of children, im
purity of women, hidden guilt in men of saintlike as
pect — and, in short, all manner of black realities that
sought to decorate themselves with outward grace or
glory. But at every atrocious fact that was added to
his catalogue, at every increase of the sad knowledge

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 327

which he spent his life to collect, the native impulses
of the poor man's loving and confiding heart made
him groan with anguish. Next, with his heavy brow
bent downward, there stole into the hall a man natu
rally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemo
rial infancy, had felt the consciousness of a high mes
sage to the world; but, essaying to deliver it, ha<J
found either no voice or form of speech, or else no
ears to listen. Therefore his whole life was a bitter
questioning of himself — " Why have not men ac
knowledged my mission? Am I not a self -deluding
fool? What business have I on earth? Where is
my grave ? " Throughout the festival, he quaffed fre
quent draughts from the sepulchral urn of wine, hop
ing thus to quench the celestial fire that tortured his
own breast and could not benefit his race.

Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a
ball, a gay gallant of yesterday, who had found four
or five wrinkles in his brow, and more gray hairs than
he could well number on his head. Endowed with
sense and feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth
in folly, but had reached at last that dreary point in
life where Folly quits us of her own accord, leaving
us to make friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus,
cold and desolate, he had come to seek Wisdom at
the banquet, and wondered if the skeleton were she.
To eke out the company, the stewards had invited a
distressed poet from his home in the almshouse, and
a melancholy idiot from the street corner. The latter
had just the glimmering of sense that was sufficient to
make him conscious of a vacancy, which the poor fel
low, all his life long, had mistily sought to fill up with
intelligence, wandering up and down the streets, and
groaning miserably because his attempts were ineffee

328 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

tual. The only lady in the hall was one who had
fallen short of absolute and perfect beauty, merely
by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left eye.
But this blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the
pure ideal of her soul, rather than her vanity, that
she passed her life in solitude, and veiled her coun
tenance even from her own gaze. So the skeleton sat
shrouded at one end of the table and this poor lady
at the other.

One other guest remains to be described. He was
a young man of smooth brow, fair cheek, and fash
ionable mien. So far as his exterior developed him,
he might much more suitably have found a place at
some merry Christmas table, than have been num
bered among the blighted, fate - stricken, fancy -tor
tured set of ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs arose
among the guests as they noted the glance of general
scrutiny which the intruder threw over his compan
ions. What had he to do among them ? Why did
not the skeleton of the dead founder of the feast un
bend its rattling joints, arise, and motion the unwel
come stranger from the board ?

" Shameful ! " said the morbid man, while a new
ulcer broke out in his heart. " He comes to mock us,
— we shall be the jest of his tavern friends ! — he will
make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the

" Oh, never mind him ! " said the hypochondriac,
smiling sourly. " He shall feast from yonder tureen
of viper soup ; and if there is a fricassee of scorpions
on the table, pray let him have his share of it. For
the dessert, he shall taste the apples of Sodom. Then,
if he like our Christmas fare, let him return again
next year I "

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 329

" Trouble him not," murmured the melancholy man,
with gentleness. " What matters it whether the con
sciousness of misery come a few years sooner or later ?
If this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit
with us for the sake of the wretchedness to come."

The poor idiot approached the young man with that
mournful aspect of vacant inquiry which his face con
tinually wore, and which caused people to say that he
was always in search of his missing wits. After no
little examination he touched the stranger's hand, but
immediately drew back his own, shaking his head and
shivering.

" Cold, cold, cold ! " muttered the idiot.

The young man shivered too, and smiled.

" Gentlemen, — and you, madam," — said one of the
stewards of the festival, " do not conceive so ill either
of our caution or judgment as to imagine that we have
admitted this young stranger — Gervayse Hastings by
name — without a full investigation and thoughtful
balance of his claims. Trust me, not a guest at the
table is better entitled to his seat."

The steward's guaranty was perforce satisfactory.
The company, therefore, took their places and ad
dressed themselves to the serious business of the feast,
but were soon disturbed by the hypochondriac, who
thrust back his chair complaining that a dish of
stewed toads and vipers was set before him, and that
there was green ditch water in his cup of wine. This
mistake being amended, he quietly resumed his seat.
The wine, as it flowed freely from the sepulchral urn,
seemed to come imbued with all gloomy inspirations ;
so that its influence was not to cheer, but either to
sink the revellers into a deeper melancholy or ele
vate their spirits to an enthusiasm of wretchedness.

330 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

The conversation was various. They told sad stories
about people who might have been worthy guests at
such a festival as the present. They talked of grisly
incidents in human history ; of strange crimes, which,
if truly considered, were but convulsions of agony ;
of some lives that had been altogether wretched, and
of others, which, wearing a general semblance of hap
piness, had yet been deformed sooner or later by
misfortune, as by the intrusion of a grim face at a
banquet ; of death-bed scenes, and what dark inti
mations might be gathered from the words of dying
men ; of suicide, and whether the more eligible mode
were by halter, knife, poison, drowning, gradual star
vation, or the fumes of charcoal. The majority of
the guests, as is the custom with people thoroughly
and profoundly sick at heart, were anxious to make
their own woes the theme of discussion, and prove
themselves most excellent in anguish. The misanthro
pist went deep into the philosophy of evil, and wan
dered about in the darkness, with now and then a
gleam of discolored light hovering on ghastly shapes
and horrid scenery. Many a miserable thought, such
as men have stumbled upon from age to age, did he
now rake up again, and gloat over it as an inestima
ble gem, a diamond, a treasure far preferable to those
bright, spiritual revelations of a better world, which
are like precious stones from heaven's pavement. And
then, amid his lore of wretchedness he hid his face
and wept.

It was a festival at which the woful man of Uz
might suitably have been a guest, together with all,
in each succeeding age, who have tasted deepest of the
bitterness of life. And be it said, too, that every son
or daughter of woman, however favored with happy

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 331

fortune, might, at one sad moment or another, have
claimed the privilege of a stricken heart, to sit down
at this table. But, throughout the feast, it was re
marked that the young stranger, Gervayse Hastings,
was unsuccessful in his attempts to catch its pervad
ing spirit. At any deep, strong thought that found
utterance, and which was torn out, as it were, from the
saddest recesses of human consciousness, he looked
mystified and bewildered ; even more than the poor
idiot, who seemed to grasp at such things with his
earnest heart, and thus occasionally to comprehend
them. The young man's conversation was of a colder
and lighter kind, often brilliant, but lacking the pow
erful characteristics of a nature that had been devel
oped by suffering.

" Sir," said the misanthropist, bluntly, in reply to
some observation by Gervayse Hastings, " pray do not
address me again. We have no right to talk together.
Our minds have nothing in common. By what claim
you appear at this banquet I cannot guess ; but me-
thinks, to a man who could say what you have just
now said, my companions and myself must seem no
more than shadows flickering on the wall. And pre
cisely such a shadow are you to us."

The young man smiled and bowed, but drawing
himself back in his chair, he buttoned his coat over
his breast, as if the banqueting hall were growing
chill. Again the idiot fixed his melancholy stare upon
the youth and murmured, " Cold, cold, cold ! "

The banquet drew to its conclusion, and the guests
departed. Scarcely had they stepped across the thresh
old of the hall, when the scene that had there passed
seemed like the vision of a sick fancy, or an exhala
tion from a stagnant heart Now and then, however,

332 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

during the year that ensued, these melancholy peo
ple caught glimpses of one another, transient, indeed,
but enough to prove that they walked the earth with
the ordinary allotment of reality. Sometimes a pair
of them came face to face, while stealing through
the evening twilight, enveloped in their sable cloaks.
Sometimes they casually met in churchyards. Once,
also, it happened that two of the dismal banqueters
mutually started at recognizing each other in the noon
day sunshine of a crowded street, stalking there like
ghosts astray. Doubtless they wondered why the skel
eton did not come abroad at noonday too.

But whenever the necessity of their affairs compelled
these Christmas guests into the bustling world, they
were sure to encounter the young man who had so un
accountably been admitted to the festival. They saw
him among the gay and fortunate; they caught the
sunny sparkle of his eye ; they heard the light and
careless tones of his voice, and muttered to themselves
with such indignation as only the aristocracy of wretch
edness could kindle — " The traitor ! The vile impos
tor ! Providence, in its own good time, may give him
a right to feast among us ! " But the young man's un
abashed eye dwelt upon their gloomy figures as they
passed him, seeming to say, perchance with somewhat
of a sneer, " First know my secret ! — then, measure
your claims with mine ! "

The step of Time stole onward, and soon brought
merry Christmas round again, with glad and solemn
worship in the churches, and sports, games, festivals,
and everywhere the bright face of Joy beside the
household fire. Again likewise the hall, with its cur
tains of dusky purple, was illuminated by the death
torches gleaming on the sepulchral decorations of the

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 333

banquet. The veiled skeleton sat in state, lifting the
cypress wreath above its head, as the guerdon of
some guest illustrious in the qualifications which there
claimed precedence. As the stewards deemed the
world inexhaustible in misery, and were desirous of
recognizing it in all its forms, they had not seen fit
to reassemble the company of the former year. New
faces now threw their gloom across the table.

There was a man of nice conscience, who bore a
blood stain in his heart — the death of a fellow -creature
— which, for his more exquisite torture, had chanced
with such a peculiarity of circumstances, that he could
not absolutely determine whether his will had entered
into the deed or not. Therefore, his whole life was
spent in the agony of an inward trial for murder, with
a continual sifting of the details of his terrible calam
ity, until his mind had no longer any thought, nor his
soul any emotion, disconnected with it. There was a
mother, too — a mother once, but a desolation now —
who, many years before, had gone out on a pleasure
party, and, returning, found her infant smothered in
its little bed. And ever since she had been tortured
with the fantasy that her buried baby lay smothering
in its coffin. Then there was an aged lady, who had
lived from time immemorial with a constant tremor
quivering through her frame. It was terrible to dis
cern her dark shadow tremulous upon the wall ; her
lips, likewise, were tremulous; and the expression of
her eye seemed to indicate that her soul was trem
bling too. Owing to the bewilderment and confu
sion which made almost a chaos of her intellect, it
was impossible to discover what dire misfortune had
thus shaken her nature to its depths ; so that the stew
ards had admitted her to the table, not from any ac-

334 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

quaintance with her history, but on the safe testimony
of her miserable aspect. Some surprise was expressed
at the presence of a bluff, red-faced gentleman, a cer
tain Mr. Smith, who had evidently the fat of many
a rich feast within him, and the habitual twinkle of
whose eye betrayed a disposition to break forth into
uproarious laughter for little cause or none. It turned
out, however, that with the best possible flow of spir
its, our poor friend was afflicted with a physical dis
ease of the heart, which threatened instant death on
the slightest cachinnatory indulgence, or even that
titillation of the bodily frame produced by merry
thoughts. In this dilemma he had sought admit
tance to the banquet, on the ostensible plea of his
irksome and miserable state, but, in reality, with the
hope of imbibing a life-preserving melancholy.

A married couple had been invited from a motive
of bitter humor, it being well understood that they
rendered each other unutterably miserable whenever
they chanced to meet, and therefore must necessarily
be fit associates at the festival. In contrast with
these was another couple, still unmarried, who had
interchanged their hearts in early life, but had been
divided by circumstances as impalpable as morning
mist, and kept apart so long that their spirits now
found it impossible to meet. Therefore yearning
for communion, yet shrinking from one another and
choosing none beside, they felt themselves compan-
ionless in life, and looked upon eternity as a bound
less desert. Next to the skeleton sat a mere son of
earth — a hunter of the Exchange — a gatherer of
shining dust — a man whose life's record was in his
ledger, and whose soul's prison house the vaults of the
bank where he kept his deposits. This person had

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 335

been greatly perplexed at his invitation, deeming
himself one of the most fortunate men in the city;
but the stewards persisted in demanding his presence,
assuring him that he had no conception how miserable
he was.

And now appeared a figure which we must ac
knowledge as our acquaintance of the former festi
val. It was Gervayse Hastings, whose presence had
then caused so much question and criticism, and who
now took his place with the composure of one whose
claims were satisfactory to himself and must needs be
allowed by others. Yet his easy and unruffled face be
trayed no sorrow. The well-skilled beholders gazed a
moment into his eyes and shook their heads, to miss
the unuttered sympathy — the countersign, never to be
falsified — of those whose hearts are cavern mouths,
through which they descend into a region of illimita
ble woe and recognize other wanderers there.

44 Who is this youth? " asked the man with a blood
stain on his conscience. " Surely he has never gone
down into the depths ! I know all the aspects of those
who have passed through the dark valley. By what
right is he among us ? "

" Ah, it is a sinful thing to come hither without a
sorrow," murmured the aged lady, in accents that par
took of the eternal tremor which pervaded her whole
being. " Depart, young man ! Your soul has never
been shaken, and, therefore, I tremble so much the
more to look at you."

" His soul shaken ! No ; I '11 answer for it," said
bluff Mr. Smith, pressing his hand upon his heart
and making himself as melancholy as he could, for
fear of a fatal explosion of laughter. " I know the
lad well ; he has as fair prospects as any young man

336 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

about town, and has no more right among us miser
able creatures than the child unborn. He never was
miserable and probably never will be ! "

"Our honored guests," interposed the stewards,
" pray have patience with us, and believe, at least,
that our deep veneration for the sacredness of this
solemnity would preclude any wilful violation of it.
Receive this young man to your table. It may not
be too much to say that no guest here would exchange
his own heart for the one that beats within that youth
ful bosom ! "

" I 'd call it a bargain, and gladly too," muttered
Mr. Smith, with a perplexing mixture of sadness and
mirthful conceit. " A plague upon their nonsense !
My own heart is the only really miserable one in
the company ; it will certainly be the death of me at
last!"

Nevertheless, as on the former occasion, the judg
ment of the stewards being without appeal, the com
pany sat down. The obnoxious guest made no more
attempt to obtrude his conversation on those about
him, but appeared to listen to the table talk with pe
culiar assiduity, as if some inestimable secret, other
wise beyond his reach, might be conveyed in a cas
ual word. And in truth, to those who could under
stand and value it, there was rich matter in the up-
gushings and outpourings of these initiated souls to
whom sorrow had been a talisman, admitting them
into spiritual depths which no other spell can open.
Sometimes out of the midst of densest gloom there
flashed a momentary radiance, pure as crystal, bright
as the flame of stars, and shedding such a glow upon
the mysteries of life that the guests were ready to ex
claim, " Surely the riddle is on the point of being

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 337

solved ! " At such illuminated intervals the saddest
mourners felt it to be revealed that mortal griefs are
but shadowy and external ; no more than the sable
robes voluminously shrouding a certain divine real
ity, and thus indicating what might otherwise be al
together invisible to mortal eye.

"Just now," remarked the trembling old woman,
54 1 seemed to see beyond the outside. And then my
everlasting tremor passed away ! "

" Would that I coidd dwell always in these momen
tary gleams of light ! " said the man of stricken con
science. " Then the blood stain in my heart would be
washed clean away."

This strain of conversation appeared so unintelli
gibly absurd to good Mr. Smith, that he burst into
precisely the fit of laughter which his physicians had
warned him against, as likely to prove instantaneously
fatal. In effect, he fell back in his chair a corpse,
with a broad grin upon his face, while his ghost,
perchance, remained beside it bewildered at its unpre
meditated exit. This catastrophe of course broke up
the festival.

"How is this? You do not tremble ?" observed the
tremulous old woman to Gervayse Hastings, who was
gazing at the dead man with singular intentness. " Is
it not awful to see him so suddenly vanish out of the
midst of life — this man of flesh and blood, whose
earthly nature was so warm and strong ? There is a
never-ending tremor in my soul, but it trembles afresh
at this ! And you are calm ! "

" Would that he could teach me somewhat I " said
Gervayse Hastings, drawing a long breath. "Men
pass before me like shadows on the wall ; their actions,
passions, feelings, are flickerings of the light, and then

338 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

they vanish ! Neither the corpse, nor yonder skeleton,
nor this old woman's everlasting tremor, can give me
what I seek."

And then the company departed.

We cannot linger to narrate, in such detail, more
circumstances of these singular festivals, which, in
accordance with the founder's will, continued to be
kept with the regularity of an established institutionc
In process of time the stewards adopted the custom
of inviting, from far and near, those individuals whose
misfortunes were prominent above other men's, and
whose mental and moral development might, therefore,
be supposed to possess a corresponding interest. The
exiled noble of the French Revolution, and the broken
soldier of the Empire, were alike represented at the
table. Fallen monarchs, wandering about the earth,
have found places at that forlorn and miserable feast.
The statesman, when his party flung him off, might, if
he chose it, be once more a great man for the space
of a single banquet. Aaron Burr's name appears on
the record at a period when his ruin — the prof ound-
est and most striking, with more of moral circum
stance in it than that of almost any other man — was
complete in his lonely age. Stephen Girard, when
his wealth weighed upon him like a mountain, once
sought admittance of his own accord. It is not prob
able, however, that these men had any lesson to teach
in the lore of discontent and misery which might not
equally well have been studied in the common walks
of life. Illustrious unfortunates attract a wider sym
pathy, not because their griefs are more intense, but
because, being set on lofty pedestals, they the better
serve mankind as instances and by-words of calamity.
It concerns our present purpose to say that, at each

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 339

successive festival, Gervayse Hastings showed his face,
gradually changing from the smooth beauty of his
youth to the thoughtful comeliness of manhood, and
thence to the bald impressive dignity of age. He was
the only individual invariably present. Yet on every
occasion there were murmurs, both from those who
knew his character and position, and from them whose
hearts shrank back as denying his companionship in
their mystic fraternity.

" Who is this impassive man ? " had been asked a
hundred times. " Has he suffered ? Has he sinned ?
There are no traces of either. Then wherefore is he
here ? "

" You must inquire of the stewards, or of himself,"
was the constant reply. " We seem to know him well
here in our city, and know nothing of him but what is
creditable and fortunate. Yet hither he comes, year
after year, to this gloomy banquet, and sits among
the guests like a marble statue. Ask yonder skele
ton ; perhaps that may solve the riddle."

It was in truth a wonder. The life of Gervayse
Hastings was not merely a prosperous, but a brilliant
one. Everything had gone well with him. He was
wealthy, far beyond the expenditure that was required
by habits of magnificence, a taste of rare purity and
cultivation, a love of travel, a scholar's instinct to col
lect a splendid library, and, moreover, what seemed a
magnificent liberality to the distressed. He had sought
happiness, and not vainly, if a lovely and tender wife
and children of fair promise could insure it. He had,
besides, ascended above the limit which separates the
obscure from the distinguished, and had won a stain
less reputation in affairs of the widest public impor
tance. Not that he was a popular character, or had

340 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

within him the mysterious attributes which are essen
tial to that species of success. To the public he was

/ a cold abstraction, wholly destitute of those rich hues
of personality, that living warmth, and the peculiar
faculty of stamping his own heart's impression on a
multitude of hearts by which the people recognize
their favorites. And it must be owned that, after his
most intimate associates had done their best to know
him thoroughly and love him warmly, they were star
tled to find how little hold he had upon their affec
tions. They approved, they admired, but still in those
moments when the human spirit most craves reality
they shrank back from Gervayse Hastings, as power
less to give them what they sought. It was the feel
ing of distrustful regret with which we should draw
back the hand after extending it, in an illusive twi
light, to grasp the hand of a shadow upon the wall.

As the superficial fervency of youth decayed, this
peculiar effect of Gervayse Hastings' s character grew
more perceptible. His children, when he extended his

[ arms, came coldly to his knees, but never climbed them
of their own accord. His wife wept secretly, and al
most adjudged herself a criminal, because she shivered
in the chill of his bosom. He, too, occasionally ap
peared not unconscious of the dullness of his moral
atmosphere, and willing, if it might be so, to warm
himself at a kindly fire. But age stole onward and
benumbed him more and more. As the hoarfrost be
gan to gather on him his wife went to her grave, and
was doubtless warmer there ; his children either died
or were scattered to different homes of their own ; and
old Gervayse Hastings, unscathed by grief — alone,
but needing no companionship, continued his steady
walk through life, and still on every Christinas day

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 341

attended at the dismal banquet. His privilege as a
guest had become prescriptive now. Had he claimed
the head of the table, even the skeleton would have
been ejected from its seat.

Finally, at the merry Christmas tide, when he had
numbered fourscore years complete, this pale, high-
browed, marble-featured old man once more entered
the long-frequented hall, with the same impassive as
pect that had called forth so much dissatisfied remark
at his first attendance. Time, except in matters
merely external, had done nothing for him, either of
good or evil. As he took his place he threw a calm,
inquiring glance around the table, as if to ascertain
whether any guest had yet appeared, after so many
unsuccessful banquets, who might impart to him the I
mystery — the deep, warm secret — the life within the)
life — which, whether manifested in joy or sorrow, is
what gives substance to a world of shadows.

" My friends," said Gervayse Hastings, assuming a
position which his long conversance with the festival
caused to appear natural, " you are welcome ! I drink
to you all in this cup of sepulchral wine."

The guests replied courteously, but still in a manner
that proved them unable to receive the old man as a
member of their sad fraternity. It may be well to
give the reader an idea of the present company at the
banquet.

One was formerly a clergyman, enthusiastic in his
profession, and apparently of the genuine dynasty of
those old Puritan divines whose faith in their calling,
and stern exercise of it, had placed them among the
mighty of the earth. But, yielding to the speculative
tendency of the age, he had gone astray from the firm
foundation of an ancient faith, and wandered into a

342 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

cloud region, where everything was misty and decep
tive, ever mocking him with a semblance of reality,
but still dissolving when he flung himself upon it f o*
support and rest. His instinct and early training de
manded something steadfast ; but, looking forward, he
beheld vapors piled on vapors, and behind him an im
passable gulf between the man of yesterday and to
day, on the borders of which he paced to and fro,
sometimes wringing his hands in agony, and often
making his own woe a theme of scornful merriment.
This surely was a miserable man. Next there was
a theorist — one of a numerous tribe, although he
deemed himself unique since the creation — a theorist
who had conceived a plan, by which all the wretched
ness of earth, moral and physical, might be done away,
and the bliss of the millennium at once accomplished.
But, the incredulity of mankind debarring him from
action, he was smitten with as much grief as if the
whole mass of woe which he was denied the opportu
nity to remedy were crowded into his own bosom. A
plain old man in black attracted much of the compa
ny's notice, on the supposition that he was no other
than Father Miller, who, it seemed, had given himself
up to despair at the tedious delay of the final confla
gration. Then there was a man distinguished for na
tive pride and obstinacy, who, a little while before,
had possessed immense wealth, and held the control
of a vast moneyed interest which he had wielded in
the same spirit as a despotic monarch would wield the
power of his empire, carrying on a tremendous moral
warfare, the roar and tremor of which was felt at every
fireside in the land. At length came a crushing ruin

— a total overthrow of fortune, power, and character

— the effect of which on his imperious, and, in many

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 343

respects, noble and lofty nature, might have entitled
him to a place, not merely at our festival, but among
the peers of Pandemonium.

There was a modern philanthropist, who had become
so deeply sensible of the calamities of thousands and
millions of his fellow-creatures, and of the impractica-
bleness of any general measures for their relief, that
he had no heart to do what little good lay immediately
within his power, but contented himself with being mis
erable for sympathy. Near him sat a gentleman in a
predicament hitherto unprecedented, but of which the
present epoch probably affords numerous examples.
Ever since he was of capacity to read a newspaper,
this person had prided himself on his consistent ad
herence to one political party, but, in the confusion of
these latter days, had got bewildered and knew not
whereabouts his party was. This wretched condition,
so morally desolate and disheartening to a man who
has long accustomed himself to merge his individu
ality in the mass of a great body, can only be con
ceived by such as have experienced it. His next com
panion was a popular orator who had lost his voice,
and __ as it was pretty much all that he had to lose —
had fallen into a state of hopeless melancholy. The
table was likewise graced by two of the gentler sex :
one, a half-starved, consumptive seamstress, the repre
sentative of thousands just as wretched ; the other, a
woman of unemployed energy, who found herself in
the world with nothing to achieve, nothing to enjoy,
and nothing even to suffer. She had, therefore,
driven herself to the verge of madness by dark brood-
ings over the wrongs of her sex, and its exclusion
from a proper field of action. The roll of guests
being thus complete, a side table had been set for

344 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

three or four disappointed office seekers, with hearts
as sick as death, whom the stewards had admitted
partly because their calamities really entitled them
to entrance here, and partly that they were in especial
need of a good dinner. There was likewise a home
less dog, with his tail between his legs, licking up the
crumbs and gnawing the fragments of the feast, —
such a melancholy cur as one sometimes sees about
the streets without a master, and willing to follow the
first that will accept his service.

In their own way, these were as wretched a set of
people as ever had assembled at the festival. There
they sat, with the veiled skeleton of the founder hold
ing aloft the cypress wreath at one end of the table,
and at the other, wrapped in furs, the withered figure
of Gervayse Hastings, stately, calm, and cold, im
pressing the company with awe, yet so little interest
ing their sympathy that he might have vanished into
thin air without their once exclaiming, " Whither is
he gone?"

"Sir," said the philanthropist, addressing the old
man, " you have been so long a guest at this annual
festival, and have thus been conversant with so many
varieties of human affliction, that, not improbably, you
have thence derived some great and important les
sons. How blessed were your lot could you reveal a
secret by which all this mass of woe might be re
moved ! "

" I know of but one misfortune," answered Gervayse
Hastings, quietly, " and that is my own."

" Your own ! " rejoined the philanthropist. " And
looking back on your serene and prosperous life, how
can you claim to be the sole unfortunate of the human
race?"

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET. 345

"You will not understand it," replied Gervayse
Hastings, feebly, and with a singular inefficiency of
pronunciation, and sometimes putting one word for
another. " None have understood it — not even those
who experience the like. It is a chilliness — a want
of earnestness — a feeling as if what should be my
heart were a thing of vapor — a haunting perception
of unreality ! Thus seeming to possess all that other
men have — all that men aim at — I have really pos
sessed nothing, neither joy nor griefs. All things, all
persons — as was truly said to me at this table long
and long ago — have been like shadows flickering on
the wall. It was so with my wife and children —
with those who seemed my friends : it is so with your
selves, whom I see now before me. Neither have I
myself any real existence, but am a shadow like the
rest."

" And how is it with your views of a future life ? "
inquired the speculative clergyman.

" Worse than with you," said the old man, in a
hollow and feeble tone ; " for I cannot conceive it
earnestly enough to feel either hope or fear. Mine
— mine is the wetchedness ! This cold heart — this
unreal life ! Ah ! it grows colder still."

It so chanced that at this juncture the decayed
ligaments of the skeleton gave way, and the dry
bones fell together in a heap, thus causing the dusty
wreath of cypress to drop upon the table. The atten
tion of the company being thus diverted for a single
instant from Gervayse Hastings, they perceived, on
turning again towards him, that the old man had
undergone a change. His shadow had ceased to
flicker on the wall.

346 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Well, Rosina, what is your criticism ? " asked
Roderick as he rolled up the manuscript.

" Frankly, your success is by no means complete,"
replied she. " It is true, I have an idea of the charac
ter you endeavor to describe ; but it is rather by dint
of my own thought than your expression."

" That is unavoidable," observed the sculptor, " be
cause the characteristics are all negative. If Gervayse
Hastings could have imbibed one human grief at the
gloomy banquet, the task of describing him would
have been infinitely easier. Of such persons — and
we do meet with these moral monsters now and then
— it is difficult to conceive now they came to exist
here, or what there is in them capable of existence
hereafter. They seem to be on the outside of every
thing ; and nothing wearies the soul more than an
attempt to comprehend them within its grasp."

BROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE.

ONE sunshiny morning, in the good old times of the
town of Boston, a young carver in wood, well known
by the name of Drowne, stood contemplating a large
oaken log, which it was his purpose to convert into
the figure-head of a vessel. And while he discussed
within his own mind what sort of shape or similitude
it were well to bestow upon this excellent piece of
timber, there came into Drowne' s workshop a cer
tain Captain Hunnewell, owner and commander of
the good brig called the Cynosure, which had just
returned from her first voyage to Fayal.

" Ah ! that will do, Drowne, that will do ! " cried
the jolly captain, tapping the log with his rattan. " I
bespeak this very piece of oak for the figure-head of
the Cynosure. She has shown herself the sweetest
craft that ever floated, and I mean to decorate her
prow with the handsomest image that the skill of man
can cut out of timber. And, Drowne, you are the
fellow to execute it."

" You give me more credit than I deserve, Captain
Hunnewell," said the carver, modestly, yet as one con
scious of eminence in his art. "But, for the sake
of the good brig, I stand ready to do my best. And
which of these designs do you prefer ? Here," —
pointing to a staring, half-length figure, in a white
wig and scarlet coat, — " here is an excellent model,
the likeness of our gracious king. Here is the valiant
Admiral Vernon. Or, if you prefer a female figure,
what say you to Britannia with the trident ? "

348 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" All very fine, Drowne ; all very fine," answered
the mariner. " But as nothing like the brig ever
swam the ocean, so I am determined she shall have
such a figure-head as old Neptune never saw in his
life. And what is more, as there is a secret in the
matter, you must pledge your credit not to betray it."

" Certainly," said Drowne, marvelling, however, what
possible mystery there could be in reference to an af
fair so open, of necessity, to the inspection of all the
world as the figure-head of a vessel. " You may de
pend, captain, on my being as secret as the nature of
the case will permit."

Captain Hunnewell then took Drowne by the but
ton, and communicated his wishes in so low a tone
that it would be unmannerly to repeat what was evi
dently intended for the carver's private ear. We
shall, therefore, take the opportunity to give the reader
a few desirable particulars about Drowne himself.

He was the first American who is known to have at
tempted — in a very humble line, it is true — that art
in which we can now reckon so many names already
distinguished, or rising to distinction. From his ear
liest boyhood he had exhibited a knack — for it would
be too proud a word to call it genius — a knack, there
fore, for the imitation of the human figure in what
ever material came most readily to hand. The snows
of a New England winter had often supplied him with
a species of marble as dazzingly white, at least, as the
Parian or the Carrara, and if less durable, yet suffi
ciently so to correspond with any claims to permanent
existence possessed by the boy's frozen statues. Yet
they won admiration from maturer judges than his
school - fellows, and were indeed, remarkably clever,
though destitute of the native warmth that might

DROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE. 349

have made the snow melt beneath his hand. As he
advanced in life, the young man adopted pine and oak
as eligible materials for. the display of his skill, which
now began to bring him a return of solid silver as well
as the empty praise that had been an apt reward
enough for his productions of evanescent snow. He
became noted for carving ornamental pump heads,
and wooden urns for gate posts, and decorations,
more grotesque than fanciful, for mantelpieces. No
apothecary would have deemed himself in the way of
obtaining custom without setting up a gilded mortar,
if not a head of Galen or Hippocrates, from the skil
ful hand of Drowne.

But the great scope of his business lay in the manu
facture of .figure-heads for vessels. Whether it were
the monarch himself, or some famous British admiral
or general, or the governor of the province, or per
chance the favorite daughter of the ship-owner, there
the image stood above the prow, decked out in gor
geous colors, magnificently gilded, and staring the
whole world out of countenance, as if from an innate
consciousness of its own superiority. These specimens
of native sculpture had crossed the sea in all direc
tions, and been not ignobly noticed among the crowded
shipping of the Thames and wherever else the hardy
mariners of New England had pushed their adven
tures. It must be confessed that a family likeness
pervaded these respectable progeny of Drowne's skill ;
that the benign countenance of the king resembled
those of his subjects, and that Miss Peggy Hobart, the
merchant's daughter, bore a remarkable similitude to
Britannia, Victory, and other ladies of the allegoric
sisterhood; and, finally, that they all had a kind of
wooden aspect which proved an intimate relationship

350 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

with the unshaped blocks of timber in the carver's
workshop. But at least there was no inconsiderable
skill of hand, nor a deficiency of any attribute to ren
der them really works of art, except that deep qual
ity, be it of soul or intellect, which bestows life upon
the lifeless and warmth upon the cold, and which, had
it been present, would have made Drowne's wooden
image instinct with spirit.

The captain of the Cynosure had now finished his
instructions.

" And Drowne," said he, impressively, " you must
lay aside all other business and set about this forth
with. And as to the price, only do the job in first-
rate style, and you shall settle that point yourself."

"Very well, captain," answered the carver, who
looked grave and somewhat perplexed, yet had a sort
of smile upon his visage ; " depend upon it, I. '11 do my
utmost to satisfy you."

From that moment the men of taste about Long
Wharf and the Town Dock who were wont to show
their love for the arts by frequent visits to Drowne's
workshop, and admiration of his wooden images, be
gan to be sensible of a mystery in the carver's con
duct. Often he was absent in the daytime. Some
times, as might be judged by gleams of light from the
shop windows, he was at work until a late hour of the
evening ; although neither knock nor voice, on such
occasions, could gain admittance for a visitor, or elicit
any word of response. Nothing remarkable, however,
was observed in the shop at those hours when it was
thrown open. A fine piece of timber, indeed, which
Drowne was known to have reserved for some work
of especial dignity, was seen to be gradually assuming
shape. What shape it was destined ultimately to take

DROWNE' S WOODEN IMAGE. 351

was a problem to his friends and a point on which the
carver himself preserved a rigid silence. But day af
ter day, though Drowne was seldom noticed in the act
of working upon it, this rude form began to be devel
oped until it became evident to all observers that a
female figure was growing into mimic life. At each
new visit they beheld a larger pile of wooden chips
and a nearer approximation to something beautiful.
It seemed as if the hamadryad of the oak had shel
tered herself from the unimaginative world within the
heart of her native tree, and that it was only necessary
to' remove the strange shapelessness that had incrusted
her, and reveal the grace and loveliness of a divinity.
Imperfect as the design, the attitude, the costume, and
especially the face of the image still remained, there
was already an effect that drew the eye from the wooden
cleverness of Drowne's earlier productions and fixed it
upon the tantalizing mystery of this new project.

Copley, the celebrated painter, then a young man
and a resident of Boston, came one day to visit Drowne ;
for he had recognized so much of moderate ability in
the carver as to induce him, in the dearth of profes
sional sympathy, to cultivate his acquaintance. On
entering the shop, the artist glanced at the inflexible
image of king, commander, dame, and allegory, that
stood around, on the best of which might have been
bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a
living man had here been changed to wood, and that
not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual
part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not
a single instance did it seem as if the wood were im
bibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide
distinction is here ! and how far would the slightest
portion of the latter merit have outvalued the utmost
degree of the former I

852 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" My friend Drowne," said Copley, smiling to him*
self, but alluding to the mechanical and wooden clever
ness that so invariably distinguished the images, " you
are really a remarkable person ! I have seldom met
with a man in your line of business that could do so
much ; for one other touch might make this figure of
General Wolfe, for instance, a breathing and intelli
gent human creature."

" You would have me think that you are praising me
highly, Mr. Copley," answered Drowne, turning his
back upon Wolfe's image in apparent disgust. " But
there has come a light into my mind. I know, what
you know as well, that the one touch which you speak
of as deficient is the only one that would be truly val
uable, and that without it these works of mine are no
better than worthless abortions. There is the same
difference between them and the works of an inspired
artist as between a sign-post daub and one of your
best pictures."

" This is strange," cried Copley, looking him in the
face, which now, as the painter fancied, had a singular
depth of intelligence, though hitherto it had not given
him greatly the advantage over his own family of
wooden images. " What has come over you ? How
is it that, possessing the idea which you have now ut
tered, you should produce only such works as these ? "

The carver smiled, but made no reply. Copley
turned again to the images, conceiving that the sense
of deficiency which Drowne had just expressed, and
which is so rare in a merely mechanical character,
must surely imply a genius, the tokens of which had
heretofore been overlooked. But no ; there was not a
trace of it. He was about to withdraw when his eyes
chanced to fall upon a half -developed figure which lay

DROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE. 353

in a corner of the workshop, surrounded by scattered
chips of oak. It arrested him at once.

" What is here ? Who has done this ? " he broke
out, after contemplating it in speechless astonishment
for an instant. " Here is the divine, the life-giving
touch. What inspired hand is beckoning this wood
to arise and live? Whose work is this? "

"No man's work," replied Drowne. "The figure
lies within that block of oak, and it is my business to
find it."

" Drowne," said the true artist, grasping the carver
fervently by the hand, " you are a man of genius ! "

As Copley departed, happening to glance backward
from the threshold, he beheld Drowne bending over
the half-created shape, and stretching forth his arms
as if he would have embraced and drawn it to his
heart ; while, had such a miracle been possible, his
countenance expressed passion enough to communicate
warmth and sensibility to the lifeless oak.

" Strange enough ! " said the artist to himself. " Who
would have looked for a modern Pygmalion in the per
son of a Yankee mechanic ! "

As yet, the image was but vague in its outward pre
sentment ; so that, as in the cloud shapes around the
western sun, the observer rather felt, or was led to im
agine, than really saw what was intended by it. Day
by day, however, the work assumed greater precision,
and settled its irregular and misty outline into dis-
tincter grace and beauty. The general design was now
obvious to the common eye. It was a female figure, in
what appeared to be a foreign dress ; the gown being
laced over the bosom, and opening in front so as to dis
close a skirt or petticoat, the folds and inequalities of
which were admirably represented in the oaken sub-

354 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

stance. She wore a hat of singular gracefulness, and
abundantly laden with flowers, such as never grew in
the rude soil of New England, but which, with all their
fanciful luxuriance, had a natural truth that it seemed
impossible for the most fertile imagination to have at
tained without copying from real prototypes. There
were several little appendages to this dress, such as a
fan, a pair of earrings, a chain about the neck, a watch
in the bosom, and a ring upon the finger, all of which
would have been deemed beneath the dignity of sculp
ture. They were put on, however, with as much taste
as a lovely woman might have shown in her attire, and
could therefore have shocked none but a judgment
spoiled by artistic rules.

The face was still imperfect ; but gradually, by a
magic touch, intelligence and sensibility brightened
through the features, with all the effect of light gleam
ing forth from within the solid oak. The face became
alive. It was a beautiful, though not precisely regu
lar and somewhat haughty aspect, but with a certain
piquancy about the eyes and mouth, which, of all ex
pressions, would have seemed the most impossible to
throw over a wooden countenance. And now, so far
as carving went, this wonderful production was com
plete.

" Drowne," said Copley, who had hardly missed a

single day in his visits to the carver's workshop, " if

this work were in marble it would make you famous at

, once ; nay, I would almost affirm that it would make

^ an era in the art. It is as ideal as an antique statue,

and yet as real as any lovely woman whom one meets

at a fireside or in the street. But I trust you do not

mean to desecrate this exquisite creature with paint,

like those staring kings and admirals yonder?**

DROWNE 'S WOODEN IMAGE. 355

" Not paint her ! " exclaimed Captain Hunnewell,
who stood by ; " not paint the figure-head of the Cyno
sure ! And what sort of a figure should I cut in a for
eign port with such an unpainted oaken stick as this
over my prow ! She must, and she shall, be painted
to the life, from the topmost flower in her hat down to
the silver spangles on her slippers."

"Mr. Copley," said Drowne, quietly, "I know noth
ing of marble statuary, and nothing of the sculptor's
rules of art ; but of this wooden image, this work of
my hands, this creature of my heart," — and here his
voice faltered and choked in a very singular manner, —
" of this — of her — I may say that I know something,
A well-spring of inward wisdom gushed within me as
I wrought upon the oak with my whole strength, and
soul, and faith. Let others do what they may with
marble, and adopt what rules they choose. If I can
produce my desired effect by painted wood, those rules /
are not for me, and I have a right to disregard them."

" The very spirit of genius," muttered Copley to him
self. " How otherwise should this carver feel himself
entitled to transcend all rules, and make me ashamed
of quoting them ? "

He looked earnestly at Drowne, and again saw that
expression of human love which, in a spiritual sense,
as the artist could not help imagining, was the secret
of the life that had been breathed into this block of
wood.

The carver, still in the same secrecy that marked all
his operations upon this mysterious image, proceeded
to paint the habiliments in their proper colors, and the
countenance with Nature's red and white. When all
was finished he threw open his workshop, and admitted
the towns-people to behold what he had done. Most

356 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

persons, at their first entrance, felt impelled to remove
their hats, and pay such reverence as was due to the
richly-dressed and beautiful young lady who seemed to
stand in a corner of the room, with oaken chips and
shavings scattered at her feet. Then came a sensation
of fear ; as if, not being actually human, yet so like
humanity, she must therefore be something preternat
ural. There was, in truth, an indefinable air and ex
pression that might reasonably induce the query, Who
and from what sphere this daughter of the oak should
be ? The strange, rich flowers of Eden on her head ;
the complexion, so much deeper and more brilliant
than those of our native beauties ; the foreign, as it
seemed, and fantastic garb, yet not too fantastic to be
worn decorously in the street ; the delicately-wrought
embroidery of the skirt ; the broad gold chain aboui-
her neck ; the curious ring upon her finger ; the fan,
so exquisitely sculptured in open work, and painted to
resemble pearl and ebony ; — where could Drowne, in
his sober walk of life, have beheld the vision here so
matchlessly embodied ! And then her face ! In the
dark eyes, and around the voluptuous mouth, there
played a look made up of pride, coquetry, and a gleam
of mirthfulness, which impressed Copley with the idea
that the image was secretly enjoying the perplexing
admiration of himself and other beholders.

" And will you," said he to the carver, "permit this
masterpiece to become the figure-head of a vessel?
Give the honest captain yonder figure of Britannia —
it will answer his purpose far better — and send this
fairy queen to England, where, for aught I know, it
may bring you a thousand pounds."

" I have not wrought it for money," said Drowne.

«' What sort of a fellow is this ! " thought Copley,

DROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE. 357

" A Yankee, and throw away the chance of making his
fortune ! He has gone mad ; and thence has come this
gleam of genius."

There was still further proof of Drowne's lunacy, if
credit were due to the rumor that he had been seen
kneeling at the feet of the oaken lady, and gazing with
a lover's passionate ardor into the face that his own
hands had created. The bigots of the day hinted that
it would be no matter of surprise if an evil spirit were
allowed to enter this beautiful form, and seduce the
carver to destruction.

The fame of the image spread far and wide. The
inhabitants visited it so universally, that after a few
days of exhibition there was hardly an old man or a
child who had not become minutely familiar with its
aspect. Even had the story of Drowne's wooden im
age ended here, its celebrity might have been pro
longed for many years by the reminiscences of those
who looked upon it in their childhood, and saw nothing
else so beautiful in after life. But the town was now
astounded by an event, the narrative of which has
formed itself into one of the most singular legends
that are yet to be met with in the traditionary chim
ney corners of the New England metropolis, where old
men and women sit dreaming of the past, and wag
their heads at the dreamers of the present and the fu
ture.

One fine morning, just before the departure of the
Cynosure on her second voyage to Fayal, the com
mander of that gallant vessel was seen to issue from
his residence in Hanover Street. He was stylishly
dressed in a blue broadcloth coat, with gold lace at the
Beams and button-holes, an embroidered scarlet waist
coat, a triangular hat, with a loop and broad binding

358 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

of gold, and wore a silver-hilted hanger at his side.
But the good captain might have been arrayed in the
robes of a prince or the rags of a beggar, without in
either case attracting notice, while obscured by such a
companion as now leaned on his arm. The people in
the street started, rubbed their eyes, and either leaped
aside from their path, or stood as if transfixed to wood
or marble in astonishment.

" Do you see it? — do you see it ? " cried one, with
tremulous eagerness. " It is the very same ! "

"The same?" answered another, who had arrived
in town only the night before. u Who do you mean ?
I see only a sea-captain in his shore-going clothes, and
a young lady in a foreign habit, with a bunch of beau
tiful flowers in her hat. On my word, she is as fair
and bright a damsel as my eyes have looked on this
many a day ! "

" Yes ; the same ! — the very same ! " repeated the
other. " Drowne's wooden image has come to life ! "

Here was a miracle indeed! Yet, illuminated by
the sunshine, or darkened by the alternate shade of
the houses, and with its garments fluttering lightly in
the morning breeze, there passed the image along the
street. It was exactly and minutely the shape, the
garb, and the face which the towns-people had so re
cently thronged to see and admire. Not a rich flower
upon her head, not a single leaf, but had had its proto
type in Drowne's wooden workmanship, although now
their fragile grace had become flexible, and was shaken
by every footstep that the wearer made. The broad
gold chain upon the neck was identical with the one
represented on the image, and glistened with the mo
tion imparted by the rise and fall of the bosom which
it decorated. A real diamond sparkled on her finger.

BROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE. 359

In her right hand she bore a pearl and ebony fan,
which she flourished with a fantastic and bewitching
coquetry, that was likewise expressed in all her move
ments as well as in the style of her beauty and the
attire that so well harmonized with it. The face
with its brilliant depth of complexion had the same
piquancy of mirthful mischief that was fixed upon the
countenance of the image, but which was here varied
and continually shifting, yet always essentially the
same, like the sunny gleam upon a bubbling fountain.
On the whole, there was something so airy and yet so
real in the figure, and withal so perfectly did it rep
resent Drowne's image, that people knew not whether
to suppose the magic wood etherealized into a spirit
or warmed and softened into an actual woman.

" One thing is certain," muttered a Puritan of the
old stamp, " Drowne has sold himself to the devil ;
and doubtless this gay Captain Hunnewell is a party
to the bargain."

" And I," said a young man who overheard him,
" would almost consent to be the third victim, for the
liberty of saluting those lovely lips."

" And so would I," said Copley, the painter, " for
the privilege of taking her picture."

The image, or the apparition, whichever it might be,
?till escorted by the bold captain, proceeded from Han
over Street through some of the cross lanes that make
this portion of the town so intricate, to Ann Street,
thence into Dock Square, and so downward to Drowne's
shop, which stood just on the water's edge. The crowd
still followed, gathering volume as it rolled along.
Never had a modern miracle occurred in such broad
daylight, nor in the presence of such a multitude of
fitnesses. The airy image, as if conscious that she

360 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

was the object of the murmurs and disturbance that
swelled behind her, appeared slightly vexed and flus
tered, yet still in a manner consistent with the light
vivacity and sportive mischief that were written in
her countenance. She was observed to flutter her fan
with such vehement rapidity that the elaborate deli
cacy of its workmanship gave way, and it remained
broken in her hand.

Arriving at Drowne's door, while the captain threw
it open, the marvellous apparition paused an instant
on the threshold, assuming the very attitude of the
image, and casting over the crowd that glance of sunny
coquetry which all remembered on the face of the
oaken lady. She and her cavalier then disappeared.

" Ah ! " murmured the crowd, drawing a deep breath,
as with one vast pair of lungs.

" The world looks darker now that she has vanished,"
said some of the young men.

But the aged, whose recollections dated as far back
as witch times, shook their heads, and hinted that our
forefathers would have thought it a pious deed to burn
the daughter of the oak with fire.

" If she be other than a bubble of the elements,"
exclaimed Copley, " I must look upon her face again."

He accordingly entered the shop ; and there, in her
usual corner, stood the image, gazing at him, as it
might seem, with the very same expression of mirthful
mischief that had been the farewell look of the appa
rition when, but a moment before, she turned her face
towards the crowd. The carver stood beside his cre
ation mending the beautiful fan, which by some acci
dent was broken in her hand. But there was no
longer any motion in the lifelike image, nor any real
woman in the workshop, nor even the witchcraft of a

DROWNE'S WOODEN IMAGE. 361

Bunny shadow, that might have deluded people's eyes
as it flitted along the street. Captain Hunnewell, too,
had vanished. His hoarse sea-breezy tones, however,
were audible on the other side of a door that opened
upon the water.

" Sit down in the stern sheets, my lady," said the
gallant captain. " Come, bear a hand, you lubbers,
and set us on board in the turning of a minute-glass."

And then was heard the stroke of oars.

" Drowne," said Copley with a smile of intelligence,
44 you have been a truly fortunate man. What painter
or statuary ever had such a subject ! No wonder that
she inspired a genius into you, and first created the
artist who afterwards created her image."

Drowne looked at him with a visage that bore the
traces of tears, but from which the light of imagina
tion and sensibility, so recently illuminating it, had
departed. He was again the mechanical carver that
he had been known to be all his lifetime.

" I hardly understand what you mean, Mr. Copley,"
said he, putting his hand to his brow. " This image !
Can it have been my work ? Well, I have wrought it
in a land of dream ; and now that I am broad awake
I must set about finishing yonder figure of Admiral
Vernon."

And forthwith he employed himself on the stolid
countenance of one of his wooden progeny, and com
pleted it in his own mechanical style, from which he
was never known afterwards to deviate. He followed
his business industriously for many years, acquired a
competence, and in the latter part of his life attained
to a dignified station in the church, being remembered
in records and traditions as Deacon Drowne, the carver.
One of his productions, an Indian chief, gilded all over,

862 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

stood during the better part of a century on the cupola
of the Province House, bedazzling the eyes of those
who looked upward, like an angel of the sun. Another
work of the good deacon's hand — a reduced likeness
of his friend Captain Hunnewell, holding a telescope
and quadrant — may be seen to this day, at the corner
of Broad and State streets, serving in the useful capac
ity of sign to the shop of a nautical instrument maker.
We know not how to account for the inferiority of this
quaint old figure, as compared with the recorded excel
lence of the Oaken Lady, unless on the supposition
that in every human spirit there is imagination, sensi
bility, creative power, genius, which, according to cir
cumstances, may either be developed in this world, or
shrouded in a mask of dulness until another state of
being. To our friend Drowne there came a brief sea
son of excitement, kindled by love. It rendered him
a genius for that one occasion, but, quenched in disap
pointment, left him again the mechanical carver in
wood, without the power even of appreciating the work
that his own hands had wrought. Yet who can doubt
that the very highest state to which a human spirit
can attain, in its loftiest aspirations, is its truest and
most natural state, and that Drowne was more consist
ent with himself when he wrought the admirable fig
ure of the mysterious lady, than when he perpetrated
a whole progeny of blockheads ?

There was a rumor in Boston, about this period, that
a young Portuguese lady of rank, on some occasion of
political or domestic disquietude, had fled from her
home in Fayal and put herself under the protection of
Captain Hunnewell, on board of whose vessel, and at
whose residence, she was sheltered until a change of
affairs. This fair stranger must have been the origi
nal of Drowne's Wooden Image.

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE.

A GEAVE figure, with a pair of mysterious spectacles
on his nose and a pen behind his ear, was seated at a
desk in the corner of a metropolitan office. The apart
ment was fitted up with a counter, and furnished with
an oaken cabinet and a chair or two, in simple and
business-like style. Around the walls were stuck ad
vertisements of articles lost, or articles wanted, or ar
ticles to be disposed of ; in one or another of which
classes were comprehended nearly all the conveniences,
or otherwise, that the imagination of man has con
trived. The interior of the room was thrown into
shadow, partly by the tall edifices that rose on the op
posite side of the street, and partly by the immense
show bills of blue and crimson paper that were ex
panded over each of the three windows. Undisturbed
by the tramp of feet, the rattle of wheels, the hum of
voices, the shout of the city crier, the scream of the
newsboys, and other tokens of the multitudinous life
that surged along in front of the office, the figure at
the desk pored diligently over a folio volume, of ledg
er-like size and aspect. He looked like the spirit of a
record — the soul of his own great volume — made vis
ible in mortal shape.

But scarcely an instant elapsed without the appear
ance at the door of some individual from the busy pop
ulation whose vicinity was manifested by so much buzz,
and clatter, and outcry. Now, it was a thriving me-
onanic in quest of a tenement that should come within

364 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

his moderate means of rent ; now, a ruddy Irish girl
from the banks of Killarney, wandering from kitchen
to kitchen of our land, while her heart still hung in the
peat smoke of her native cottage ; now, a single gen
tleman looking out for economical board ; and now —
for this establishment offered an epitome of worldly
pursuits — it was a faded beauty inquiring for her lost
bloom ; or Peter Schlemihl for his lost shadow ; or an
author of ten years' standing for his vanished reputa
tion ; or a moody man for yesterday's sunshine.

At the next lifting of the latch there entered a per
son with his hat awry upon his head, his clothes per
versely ill suited to his form, his eyes staring in direc
tions opposite to their intelligence, and a certain odd
unsuitableness pervading his whole figure. Wherever
he might chance to be, whether in palace or cottage,
church or market, on land or sea, or even at his own
fireside, he must have worn the characteristic expres-
\ sion of a man out of his right place.

" This," inquired he, putting his question in the
form of an assertion, " this is the Central Intelligence
Office?"

" Even so," answered the figure at the desk, turning
another leaf of his volume ; he then looked the appli
cant in the face and said briefly, " Your business ? "

" I want," said the latter, with tremulous earnest
ness, " a place ! "

" A place ! and of what nature ? " asked the Intelli
gencer. " There are many vacant, or soon to be so,
some of which will probably suit, since they range from
that of a footman up to a seat at the council board, or
in the cabinet, or a throne, or a presidential chair."

The stranger stood pondering before the desk with
an unquiet, dissatisfied air — a dull, vague pain of

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 365

heart, expressed by a slight contortion of the brow — -
an earnestness of glance, that asked and expected, yet
continually wavered as if distrusting. In short, he evi
dently wanted, not in a physical or intellectual sense,
but with an urgent moral necessity that is the hard
est of all things to satisfy, since it knows not its own
object.

" Ah, you mistake me ! " said he at length, with a
gesture of nervous impatience. " Either of the places
you mention, indeed, might answer my purpose ; or,
more probably, none of them. I want my place ! my
own place! my true place in the world! my proper
sphere ! my thing to do, which nature intended me to
perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which
I have vainly sought all my lifetime ! Whether it be
a footman's duty or a king's is of little consequence,
so it be naturally mine. Can you help me here? "

" I will enter your application," answered the In
telligencer, at the same time writing a few lines in his
volume. "But to undertake such a business, I tell
you frankly, is quite apart from the ground covered by
my official duties. Ask for something specific, and it
may doubtless be negotiated for you on your compli
ance with the conditions. But were I to go further, I
should have the whole population of the city upon my
shoulders ; since far the greater proportion of them
are, more or less, in your predicament."

The applicant sank into a fit of despondency, and
passed out of the door without again lifting his eyes ;
and, if he died of the disappointment, he was probably
buried in the wrong tomb, inasmuch as the fatality of
such people never deserts them, and whether alive or
dead they are invariably out of place.

Almost immediately another foot was heard on the

366 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

threshold. A youth entered hastily, and threw a glance
around the office to ascertain whether the man of intel
ligence was alone. He then approached close to the
desk, blushed like a maiden, and seemed at a loss how
to broach his business.

" You come upon an affair of the heart," said the
official personage, looking into him through his mys
terious spectacles. " State it in as few words as may
be."

"You are right," replied the youth. "I have a
heart to dispose of."

"You seek an exchange?" said the Intelligencer.
" Foolish youth, why not be contented with your own ? "

" Because," exclaimed the young man, losing his
embarrassment in a passionate glow, " because my
heart burns me with an intolerable fire ; it tortures
me all day long with yearnings for I know not what,
and feverish throbbings, and the pangs of a vague sor
row ; and it awakens me in the night-time with a quake
when there is nothing to be feared. I cannot endure
it any longer. It were wiser to throw away such a
heart, even if it brings me nothing in return."

" Oh, very well," said the man of office, making an
entry in his volume. " Your affair will be easily trans
acted. This species of brokerage makes no inconsid
erable part of my business, and there is always a large
assortment of the article to select from. Herein, if I
mistake not, comes a pretty fair sample."

Even as he spoke the door was gently and slowly
thrust ajar, affording a glimpse of the slender figure of
a young girl, who, as she timidly entered, seemed to
bring the light and cheerfulness of the outer atmosphere
into the somewhat gloomy apartment. We know not
her errand there, nor can we reveal whether the young

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 367

man gave up his heart into her custody. If so, the
arrangement was neither better nor worse than in nine
ty-nine cases out of a hundred, where the parallel sen
sibilities of a similar age, importunate affections, and
the easy satisfaction of characters not deeply conscious
of themselves, supply the place of any prof ounder sym
pathy.

Not always, however, was the agency of the passions
and affections an office of so little trouble. It hap
pened rarely, indeed, in proportion to the cases that
came under an ordinary rule, but still it did happen —
that a heart was occasionally brought hither of such
exquisite material, so delicately attempered, and so
curiously wrought, that no other heart could be found
to match it. It might almost be considered a misfor
tune, in a worldly point of view, to be the possessor of
such a diamond of the purest water ; since in any rea
sonable probability it could only be exchanged for an
ordinary pebble, or a bit of cunningly-manufactured
glass, or, at least, for a jewel of native richness, but
ill set, or with some fatal flaw, or an earthy vein run
ning through its central lustre. To choose another
figure, it is sad that hearts which have their well-spring
in the infinite, and contain inexhaustible sympathies,
should ever be doomed to pour themselves into shallow
vessels, and thus lavish their rich affections on the
ground. Strange that the finer and deeper nature,
whether in man or woman, while possessed of every
other delicate instinct, should so often lack that most
invaluable one of preserving itself from contamination
with what is of a baser kind ! Sometimes, it is true,
the spiritual fountain is kept pure by a wisdom within
itself, and sparkles into the light of heaven without a
stain from the earthy strata through which it had gushed

868 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

upward. And sometimes, even here on earth, the pur$
mingles with the pure, and the inexhaustible is recom
pensed with the infinite. But these miracles, though
.he should claim the credit of them, are far beyond the
scope of such a superficial agent in human affairs as
the figure in the mysterious spectacles.

Again the door was opened, admitting the bustle of
the city with a fresher reverberation into the Intelli
gence Office. Now entered a man of woe-begone and
downcast look ; it was such an aspect as if he had lost
the very soul out of his body, and had traversed all the
world over, searching in the dust of the highways, and
along the shady footpaths, and beneath the leaves of
the forest, and among the sands of the sea-shore, in
hopes to recover it again. He had bent an anxious
glance along the pavement of the street as he came
hitherward ; he looked also in the angle of the door
step, and upon the floor of the room ; and, finally, com
ing up to the man of Intelligence, he gazed through the
inscrutable spectacles which the latter wore, as if the
lost treasure might be hidden within his eyes.

" I have lost " — he began ; and then he paused.

" Yes," said the Intelligencer, " I see that you have
lost — but what?"

" I have lost a precious jewel ! " replied the unfor
tunate person, "the like of which is not to be found
among any prince's treasures. While I possessed it>
the contemplation of it was my sole and sufficient hap
piness. No price should have purchased it of me ; but
it has fallen from my bosom where I wore it in my
careless wanderings about the city."

After causing the stranger to describe the marks of
his lost jewel, the Intelligencer opened a drawer of the
oaken cabinet which has been mentioned as forming a

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 369

part of the furniture of the room. Here were deposited
whatever articles had been picked up in the streets,
until the right owners should claim them. It was a
strange and heterogeneous collection. Not the least
remarkable part of it was a great number of wedding-
rings, each one of which had been riveted upon the
finger with holy vows, and all the mystic potency that
the most solemn rites could attain, but had, neverthe
less, proved too slippery for the wearer's vigilance.
The gold of some was worn thin, betokening the attri
tion of years of wedlock ; others, glittering from the
jeweller's shop, must have been lost within the honey
moon. There were ivory tablets, the leaves scribbled
over with sentiments that had been the deepest truths
of the writer's earlier years, but which were now quite
obliterated' from his memory. So scrupulously were
articles preserved in this depository, that not even
withered flowers were rejected ; white roses, and blush
roses, and moss roses, fit emblems of virgin purity and
shamefacedness, which had been lost or flung away,
and trampled into the pollution of the streets ; locks of
hair — the golden and the glossy dark — the long tresses
of woman and the crisp curls of man, signified that
lovers were now and then so heedless of the faith in
trusted to them as to drop its symbol from the treasure
place of the bosom. Many of these things were im
bued with perfumes, and perhaps a sweet scent had
departed from the lives of their former possessors ever
since they had so wilfully or negligently lost them.
Here were gold pencil cases, little ruby hearts with
golden arrows through them, bosom-pins, pieces of
coin, and small articles of every description, compris
ing nearly all that have been lost since a long time
ago. Most of them, doubtless, had a history and a

370 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

meaning, if there were time to search it out and room
to tell it. Whoever has missed anything valuable,
whether out of his heart, mind, or pocket, would do
well to make inquiry at the Central Intelligence Office.

And in the corner of one of the drawers of the
oaken cabinet, after considerable research, was found
a great pearl, looking like the soul of celestial purity
congealed and polished.

" There is my jewel ! my very pearl ! " cried the
stranger, almost beside himself with rapture. " It is
mine ! Give it me, this moment ! or I shall perish ! "

" I perceive," said the Man of Intelligence, examin
ing it more closely, " that this is the Pearl of Great
Price."

" The very same," answered the stranger. " Judge,
then, of my misery at losing it out of my bosom ! Re
store it to me ! I must not live without it an instant
longer."

"Pardon me," rejoined the Intelligencer, calmly.
u You ask what is beyond my duty. This pearl, as
you well know, is held upon a peculiar tenure ; and
having once let it escape from your keeping, you have
no greater claim to it — nay, not so great — as any
other person. I cannot give it back."

Nor could the entreaties of the miserable man —
who saw before his eyes the jewel of his life without
the power to reclaim it — soften the heart of this stern
being, impassive to human sympathy, though exercis
ing such an apparent influence over human fortunes.
Finally the loser of the inestimable pearl clutched his
hands among his hair, and ran madly forth into the
world, which was affrighted at his desperate looks.
There passed him on the doorstep a fashionable young
gentleman, whose business was to inquire for a damask

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 371

fosebud, the gift of his lady love, which he had lost out
of his button-hole within an hour after receiving it.
So various were the errands of those who visited this
Central Office, where all human wishes seemed to be
made known, and so far as destiny would allow, nego
tiated to their fulfilment.

The next that entered was a man beyond the middle
age, bearing the look of one who knew the world and
his own course in it. He had just alighted from a
handsome private carriage, which had orders to wait
in the street while its owner transacted his business.
This person came up to the desk with a quick, deter
mined step, and looked the Intelligencer in the face
with a resolute eye ; though, at the same time, some
secret trouble gleamed from it in red and dusky light.

" I have an estate to dispose of," said he, with a
brevity that seemed characteristic.

"Describe it," said the Intelligencer.

The applicant proceeded to give the boundaries of
his property, its nature, comprising tillage, pasture,
woodland, and pleasure grounds, in ample circuit; to
gether with a mansion-house, in the construction of
which it had been his object to realize a castle in the
air, hardening its shadowy walls into granite, and ren
dering its visionary splendor perceptible to the awak
ened eye. Judging from his description, it was beau
tiful enough to vanish like a dream, yet substantial
enough to endure for centuries. He spoke, too, of the
gorgeous furniture, the refinements of upholstery, and
all the luxurious artifices that combined to render this
a residence where life might flow onward in a stream
of golden days, undisturbed by the ruggedness which
fate loves to fling into it.

" I am a man of strong will," said he, in conclusion,

872 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

"and at my first setting out in life, as a poor, un
friended youth, I resolved to make myself the possessor
of such a mansion and estate as this, together with the
abundant revenue necessary to uphold it. I have suc
ceeded to the extent of my utmost wish. And this is
the estate which I have now concluded to dispose of."

" And your terms ? " asked the Intelligencer, after
taking down the particulars with which the stranger
had supplied him.

" Easy, abundantly easy ! " answered the successful
man, smiling, but with a stern and almost frightful
contraction of the brow, as if to quell an inward pang.
" I have been engaged in various sorts of business —
a distiller, a trader to Africa, an East India merchant,
a speculator in the stocks — and, in the course of these
affairs, have contracted an incumbrance of a certain
nature. The purchaser of the estate shall merely be
required to assume this burden to himself."

" I understand you," said the man of Intelligence,
putting his pen behind his ear. " I fear that no bar
gain can be negotiated on these conditions. Very prob
ably the next possessor may acquire the estate with a
similar incumbrance, but it will be of his own con
tracting, and will not lighten your burden in the least."

" And am I to live on," fiercely exclaimed the
stranger, " with the dirt of these accursed acres and
the granite of this infernal mansion crushing down my
soul ? How, if I should turn the edifice into an alms-
house or a hospital, or tear it down and build a
church? "

" You can at least make the experiment," said the
Intelligencer ; " but the whole matter is one which you
\nust settle for yourself."

The man of deplorable success withdrew, and got

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 373

into his coach, which rattled off lightly over the wooden
pavements, though laden with the weight of much land,
a stately house, and ponderous heaps of gold, all com
pressed into an evil conscience.

There now appeared many applicants for places ;
among the most noteworthy of whom was a small,
smoke-dried figure, who gave himself out to be one of
the bad spirits that had waited upon Doctor Faustus
in his laboratory. He pretended to show a certificate
of character, which, he averred, had been given him
by that famous necromancer, and countersigned by sev
eral masters whom he had subsequently served.

"I am afraid, my good friend," observed the Intel
ligencer, " that your chance of getting a service is but
poor. Nowadays, men act the evil spirit for them
selves and their neighbors, and play the part more
effectually than ninety-nine out of a hundred of your
fraternity."

But, just as the poor fiend was assuming a vaporous
consistency, being about to vanish through the floor in
sad disappointment and chagrin, the editor of a politi
cal newspaper chanced to enter the office in quest of a
scribbler of party paragraphs. The former servant of
Doctor Faustus, with some misgivings as to his suffi
ciency of venom, was allowed to try his hand in this
capacity. Next appeared, likewise seeking a service,
the mysterious man in Red, who had aided Bona
parte in his ascent to imperial power. He was exam
ined as to his qualifications by an aspiring politician,
but finally rejected, as lacking familiarity with the
tunning tactics of the present day.

People continued to succeed each other with as much
briskness as if everybody turned aside, out of the roar
and tumult of the city, to record here some want, or

374 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

superfluity, or desire. Some had goods or possessions,
of which they wished to negotiate the sale. A China
merchant had lost his health by a long residence in
that wasting climate. He very liberally offered his
disease, and his wealth along with it, to any physician
who would rid him of both together. A soldier offered
his wreath of laurels for as good a leg as that which
it had cost him on the battle-field. One poor weary
wretch desired nothing but to be accommodated with
any creditable method of laying down his life ; for mis
fortune and pecuniary troubles had so subdued his
spirits that he could no longer conceive the possibility
of happiness, nor had the heart to try for it. Never
theless, happening to overhear some conversation in
the Intelligence Office respecting wealth to be rapidly
accumulated by a certain mode of speculation, he re
solved to live out this one other experiment of better
fortune. Many persons desired to exchange their
youthful vices for others better suited to the gravity of
advancing age ; a few, we are glad to say, made ear
nest efforts to exchange vice for virtue, and, hard as
the bargain was, succeeded in effecting it. But it was
remarkable that what all were the least willing to give
up, even on the most advantageous terms, were the
habits, the oddities, the characteristic traits, the little
ridiculous indulgences, somewhere between faults and
follies, of which nobody but themselves could under
stand the fascination.

The great folio, in which the Man of Intelligence
recorded all these freaks of idle hearts, and aspira
tions of deep hearts, and desperate longings of misera
ble hearts, and evil prayers of perverted hearts, would
be curious reading were it possible to obtain it for
publication. Human character in its individual de-

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 375

relopments — human nature in the mass — may best
be studied in its wishes ; and this was the record of
them all. There was an endless diversity of mode
and circumstance, yet withal such a similarity in the
real ground-work, that any one page of the volume —
whether written in the days before the Flood, or the
yesterday that is just gone by, or to be written on the
morrow that is close at hand, or a thousand ages hence
— might serve as a specimen of the whole. Not but
that there were wild sallies of fantasy that could scarcely
occur to more than one man's brain, whether reason
able or lunatic. The strangest wishes — yet most in
cident to men who had gone deep into scientific pur
suits, and attained a high intellectual stage, though
not the loftiest — were to contend with Nature, and
wrest from her some secret or some power which she
had seen fit to withhold from mortal grasp. She loves
to delude her aspiring students, and mock them with
mysteries that seem but just beyond their utmost reach.
To concoct new minerals, to produce new forms of
vegetable life, to create an insect, if nothing higher in
the living scale, is a sort of wish that has often rev
elled in the breast of a man of science. An astron
omer, who lived far more among the distant worlds
of space than in this lower sphere, recorded a wish to
behold the opposite side of the moon, which, unless
the system of the firmament be reversed, she can never
turn towards the earth. On the same page of the
volume was written the wish of a little child to have
the stars for playthings.

The most ordinary wish, that was written down
with wearisome recurrence, was, of course, for wealth,
wealth, wealth, in sums from a few shillings up to un-
reckonable thousands. But in reality this often-re-

376 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

peated expression covered as many different desires.
Wealth is the golden essence of the outward world,
embodying almost everything that exists beyond the
limits of the soul ; and therefore it is the natural
yearning for the life in the midst of which we find
ourselves, and of which gold is the condition of en
joyment, that men abridge into this general wish.
Here and there, it is true, the volume testified to some
heart so perverted as to desire gold for its own sake.
Many wished for power ; a strange desire indeed, since
it is but another form of slavery. Old people wished
for the delights of youth; a fop, for a fashionable
coat ; an idle reader, for a new novel ; a versifier, for a
rhyme to some stubborn word ; a painter, for Titian's
secret of coloring ; a prince, for a cottage ; a republi
can, for a kingdom and a palace ; a libertine for his
neighbor's wife ; a man of palate, for green peas / and
a poor man, for a crust of bread. The ambitious de
sires of public men, elsewhere so craftily concealed,
were here expressed openly and boldly, side by side
with the unselfish wishes of the philanthropist for the
welfare of the race, so beautiful, so comforting, in
contrast with the egotism that continually weighed
self against the world. Into the darker secrets of
, the Book of Wishes we will not penetrate.

It would be an instructive employment for a student
of mankind, perusing this volume carefully and com-
| paring its records with men's perfected designs, as
expressed in their deeds and daily life, to ascertain how
far the one accorded with the other. Undoubtedly, in
most cases, the correspondence would be found remote.
The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense
from a pure heart towards heaven, often lavishes its
sweet perfume on the blast of evil times. The foul,

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 377

selfish, murderous wish, that steams forth from a cor
rupted heart, often passes into the spiritual atmosphere
without beiiig concreted into an earthly deed. Yet this
volume is probably truer, as a representation of the
human heart, than is the living drama of action as it
evolves around us. There is more of good and more
of evil in it ; more redeeming points of the bad and
more errors of the virtuous; higher upsoarings, and
baser degradation of the soul ; in short, a more per
plexing amalgamation of vice and virtue than we wit
ness in the outward world. Decency and external j
conscience often produce a far fairer outside than is/
warranted by the stains within. And be it owned, on
the other hand, that a man seldom repeats to his near
est friend, any more than he realizes in act, the purest
wishes, which, at some blessed time or other, have
arisen from the depths of his nature and witnessed for
him in this volume. Yet there is enough on every leaf
to make the good man shudder for his own wild and
idle wishes, as well as for the sinner, whose whole life
is the incarnation of a wicked desire.

But again the door is opened, and we hear the tu
multuous stir of the world — a deep and awful sound,
expressing in another form some portion of what is
written in the volume that lies before the Man of Intel
ligence. A grandfatherly personage tottered hastily
into the office, with such an earnestness in his infirm
alacrity that his white hair floated backward as he hur
ried up to the desk, while his dim eyes caught a mo
mentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This
venerable figure explained that he was in search of
To-Morrow.

" I have spent all my life in pursuit of it," added the
sage old gentleman, "being assured that To-Morrow

378 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I
am now getting a little in years, and must make haste ;
for, unless I overtake To-Morrow soon, I begin to be
afraid it will finally escape me."

" This fugitive To-Morrow, my venerable friend,"
said the Man of Intelligence, " is a stray child of Time,
and is flying from his father into the region of the in
finite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless
come up with him ; but as to the earthly gifts which
you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng
of Yesterdays."

Obliged to content himself with this enigmatical
response, the grandsire hastened forth with a quick
clatter of his staff upon the floor ; and, as he disap
peared, a little boy scampered through the door in
chase of a butterfly which had got astray amid the
barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman
been shrewder, he might have detected To-Morrow
under the semblance of that gaudy insect. The golden
butterfly glistened through the shadowy apartment, and
brushed its wings against the Book of Wishes, and
fluttered forth again with the child still in pursuit.

A man now entered, in neglected attire, with the
aspect of a thinker, but somewhat too rough-hewn and
brawny for a scholar. His face was full of sturdy
vigor, with some finer and keener attribute beneath.
Though harsh at first, it was tempered with the glow
of a large, warm heart, which had force enough to
heat his powerful intellect through and through. He
advanced to the Intelligencer and looked at him with a
glance of such stern sincerity that perhaps few secrets
were beyond its scope.

"I seek for Truth," said he.

" It is precisely the most rare pursuit that has ever

THE INTELLIGENCE OFFICE. 379

come under my cognizance," replied the Intelligencer,
as he made the new inscription in his volume. " Most
men seek to impose some cunning falsehood upon
themselves for truth. But I can lend no help to your
researches. You must achieve the miracle for your
self. At some fortunate moment you may find Truth
at your side, or perhaps she may be mistily discerned
far in advance, or possibly behind you."

" Not behind me," said the seeker ; " for I have left
nothing on my track without a thorough investigation.
She flits before me, passing now through a naked soli
tude, and now mingling with the throng of a popular
assembly, and now writing with the pen of a French
philosopher, and now standing at the altar of an old
cathedral, in the guise of a Catholic priest, performing
the high mass. Oh weary search ! But I must not
falter ; and surely my heart-deep quest of Truth shall
avail at last."

He paused and fixed his eyes upon the Intelligencer
with a depth of investigation that seemed to hold com
merce with the inner nature of this being, wholly re
gardless of his external development.

" And what are you? " said he. "It will not satisfy
me to point to this fantastic show of an Intelligence
Office and this mockery of business. Tell me what
is beneath it, and what your real agency in life, and
your influence upon mankind."

"Yours is a mind," answered the Man of Intelli
gence, " before which the forms and fantasies that con
ceal the inner idea from the multitude vanish at once
and leave the naked reality beneath. Know, then, the
secret. My agency in worldly action, my connection
with the press, and tumult, and intermingling, and de
velopment of human affairs, is merely delusive. The

380 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

desire of man's heart does for him whatever I seem to
do. I am no minister of action, but the Recording
Spirit."

What further secrets were then spoken remains a
mystery, inasmuch as the roar of the city, the bustle
of human business, the outcry of the jostling masses,
the rush and tumult of man's life in its noisy and brief
career, arose so high that it drowned the words of these
two talkers; and whether they stood talking in the
moon, or in Vanity Fair, or in a city of this actua)
world, is more than I can say.

ROGEE MALVIN'S BURIAL.

ONE of the few incidents of Indian warfare natur
ally susceptible of the moonlight of romance was that
expedition undertaken for the defence of the frontiers
in the year 1725, which resulted in the well-remem
bered " Lo veil's Fight." Imagination, by casting cer
tain circumstances judicially into the shade, may see
much to admire in the heroism of a little band who
gave battle to twice their number in the heart of the
enemy's country. The open bravery displayed by
both parties was in accordance with civilized ideas of
valor ; and chivalry itself might not blush to record
the deeds of one or two individuals. The battle,
though so fatal to those who fought, was not unfor
tunate in its consequences to the country ; for it broke
the strength of a tribe and conduced to the peace
which subsisted during several ensuing years. His
tory and tradition are unusually minute in their me
morials of this affair; and the captain of a scouting
party of frontier men has acquired as actual a mili
tary renown as many a victorious leader of thousands.
Some of the incidents contained in the following pages
will be recognized, notwithstanding the substitution of
fictitious names, by such as have heard, from old men's
lips, the fate of the few combatants who were in a
condition to retreat after " Lovell's Fight."

The early sunbeams hovered cheerfully upon the
tree-tops, beneath which two weary and wounded men

382 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

had stretched their limbs the night before. Their bed
of withered oak leaves was strewn upon the small level
space, at the foot of a rock, situated near the summit
of one of the gentle swells by which the face of the
country is there diversified. T^fi inass of granite,
rearing its smooth, flat surface fifteen or twenty feet
above their heads, was not unlike a gigantic grave
stone, upon which the veins seemed to form an inscrip
tion in forgotten characters. On a tract of several
acres around this rock, oaks and other hard-wood trees
had supplied the place of the pines, which were the
usual growth of the land ; and a young and vigorous
sapling stood close beside the travellers.

The severe wound of the elder man had probably
deprived him of sleep ; for, so soon as the first ray of
sunshine rested on the top of the highest tree, he reared
himself painfully from his recumbent posture and sat
erect. The deep lines of his countenance and the
scattered gray of his hair marked him as past the
middle age ; but his muscular frame would, but for the
effects of his wound, have been as capable of sustain
ing fatigue as in the early vigor of life. Languor and
exhaustion now sat upon his haggard features ; and the
despairing glance which he sent forward through the
depths of the forest proved his own conviction that his
pilgrimage was at an end. He next turned his eyes to
the companion who reclined by his side. The youth
— - for he had scarcely attained the years of manhood —
lay, with his head upon his arm, in the embrace of an
unquiet sleep, which a thrill of pain from his wounds
seemed each moment on the point of breaking. His
right hand grasped a musket ; and, to judge from the
violent action of his features, his slumbers were bring
ing back a vision of the conflict of which he was one

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 383

of the few survivors. A shout — deep and loud in his
dreaming fancy — found its way in an imperfect mur
mur to his lips ; and, s.tarting even at the slight sound
of his own voice, he suddenly awoke. The first act
of reviving recollection was to make anxious inquiries
respecting the condition of his wounded fellow-travel
ler. The latter shook his head.

" Reuben, my boy," said he, " this rock beneath
which we sit will serve for an old hunter's gravestone*
There is many and many a long mile of howling wil
derness before us yet ; nor would it avail me anything
if the smoke of my own chimney were but on the
other side of that swell of land. The Indian bullet
was deadlier than I thought."

"You are weary with our three days' travel," replied
the youth, " and a little longer rest will recruit you. Sit
you here while I search the woods for the herbs and
roots that must be our sustenance ; and, having eaten,
you shall lean on me, and we will turn our faces home
ward. I doubt not that, with my help, you can attain
to some one of the frontier garrisons."

" There is not two days' life in me, Reuben," said
the other, calmly, "and I will no longer burden you
with my useless body, when you can scarcely support
your own. Your wounds are deep and your strength
is failing fast ; yet, if you hasten onward alone, you
may be preserved. For me there is no hope, and I
will await death here."

"If it must be so, I will remain and watch by you,"
said Reuben, resolutely.

" No, my son, no," rejoined his companion. " Let
the wish of a dying man have weight with you ; give
me one grasp of your hand, and get you hence.
Think you that my last moments will be eased by the

384 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

thought that I leave you to die a more lingering death ?
I have loved you like a father, Reuben ; and at a time
like this I should have something of a father's author
ity. I charge you to be gone that I may die in peace."

"And because you have been a father to me, should
I therefore leave you to perish and to lie unburied in
the wilderness ? " exclaimed the youth. " No ; if your
end be in truth approaching, I will watch by you and
receive your parting words. I will dig a grave here by
the rock, in which, if my weakness overcome me, we
will rest together; or, if Heaven gives me strength,
I will seek my way home."

" In the cities and wherever men dwell," replied the
other, " they bury their dead in the earth ; they hide
them from the sight of the living ; but here, where no
step may pass perhaps for a hundred years, wherefore
should I not rest beneath the open sky, covered onlj
by the oak leaves when the autumn winds shall stre\\
them ? And for a monument, here is this gray rock, on
which my dying hand shall carve the name of Rogei
Malvin ; and the traveller in days to come will know
that here sleeps a hunter and a warrior. Tarry not,
then, for a folly like this, but hasten away, if not for
your own sake, for hers who will else be desolate."

Malvin spoke the last few words in a faltering voice,
and their effect upon his companion was strongly visi
ble. They reminded him that there were other and
less questionable duties than that of sharing the fate
of a man whom his death could not benefit. Nor can
it be affirmed that no selfish feeling strove to enter
Reuben's heart, though the consciousness made him
more earnestly resist his companion's entreaties.

" How terrible to wait the slow approach of death in
this solitude ! " exclaimed he. " A brave man does not

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 385

shrink in the battle ; and, when friends stand round the
bed, even women may die composedly ; but here " —

" I shall not shrink even here, Reuben Bourne," in
terrupted Malvin. " I am a man of no weak heart,
and, if I were, there is a surer support than that of
earthly friends. You are young, and life is dear to
you. Your last moments will need comfort far more
than mine ; and when you have laid me in the earth,
and are alone, and night is settling on the forest, you
will feel all the bitterness of the death that may now
be escaped. But I will urge no selfish motive to your
generous nature. Leave me for my sake, that, having
said a prayer for your safety, I may have space to set
tle my account undisturbed by worldly sorrows."

" And your daughter, — how shall I dare to meet
her eye ? " exclaimed Reuben. " She will ask the fate
of her father, whose life I vowed to defend with my
own. Must I tell her that he travelled three days'
march with me from the field of battle and that then
I left him to perish in the wilderness ? Were it not
better to lie down and die by your side than to return
safe and say this to Dorcas ? "

" Tell my daughter," said Roger Malvin, " that,
though yourself sore wounded, and weak, and weary,
you led my tottering footsteps many a mile, and left
me only at my earnest entreaty, because I would not
have your blood upon my soul. Tell her that through
pain and danger you were faithful, and that, if your
lifeblood could have saved me, it would have flowed
to its last drop ; and tell her that you will be some
thing dearer than a father, and that my blessing is
with you both, and that my dying eyes can see a long
and pleasant path in which you will journey to
gether."

VOL. II. 25

886 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

As Malvin spoke he almost raised himself from the
ground, and the energy of his concluding words seemed
to fill the wild and lonely forest with a vision of hap
piness ; but, when he sank exhausted upon his bed of
oak leaves, the light which had kindled in Reuben's
eye was quenched. He felt as if it were both sin and
folly to think of happiness at such a moment. His
companion watched his changing countenance, and
sought with generous art to wile him to his own good.

" Perhaps I deceive myself in regard to the time I
have to live," he resumed. "It may be that, with
speedy assistance, I might recover of my wound. The
foremost fugitives must, ere this, have carried tidings
of our fatal battle to the frontiers, and parties will be
out to succor those in like condition with ourselves.
Should you meet one of these and guide them hither,
who can tell but that I may sit by my own fireside
again?"

A mournful smile strayed across the features of the
dying man as he insinuated that unfounded hope, —
which, however, was not without its effect on Reuben.
No merely selfish motive, nor even the desolate condi
tion of Dorcas, could have induced him to desert his
companion at such a moment — but his wishes seized
on the thought that Malvin's life might be preserved,
and his sanguine nature heightened almost to cer
tainty the remote possibility of procuring human aid.

" Surely there is reason, weighty reason, to hope
that friends are not far distant," he said, half aloud.
" There fled one coward, un wounded, in the beginning
of the fight, and most probably he made good speed.
Every true man on the frontier would shoulder his
musket at the news ; and, though no party may range
BO far into the woods as this, I shall perhaps encountet

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 387

them in one day's march. Counsel me faithfully," he
added, turning to Malvin, in distrust of his own mo
tives. " Were your situation mine, would you desert
me while life remained ? "

" It is now twenty years," replied Roger Malvin, —
sighing, however, as he secretly acknowledged the wide
dissimilarity between the two cases, — "it is now
twenty years since I escaped with one dear friend
from Indian captivity near Montreal. We journeyed
many days through the woods, till at length overcome
with hunger and weariness, my friend lay down and
besought me to leave him ; for he knew that, if I re
mained, we both must perish ; and, with but little hope
of obtaining succor, I heaped a pillow of dry leaves
beneath his head and hastened on."

" And did you return in time to save him ? " asked
Reuben, hanging on Malvin's words as if they were to
be prophetic of his own success.

" I did," answered the other. " I came upon the
camp of a hunting party before sunset of the same day.
I guided them to the spot where my comrade was ex
pecting death ; and he is now a hale and hearty man
upon his own farm, far within the frontiers, while I lie
wounded here in the depths of the wilderness."

This example, powerful in affecting Reuben's decis
ion, was aided, unconsciously to himself, by the hid
den strength of many another motive. Roger Malvin
perceived that the victory was nearly won.

" Now, go, my son, and Heaven prosper you ! " he
said. "Turn not back with your friends when you
meet them, lest your wounds and weariness overcome
you ; but send hitherward two or three, that may be
spared, to search for me ; and believe me, Reuben, my
heart will be lighter with every step you take towards

388 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

home." Yet there was, perhaps, a change both in his
countenance and voice as he spoke thus ; for, after all,
it was a ghastly fate to be left expiring in the wilder
ness.

Reuben Bourne, but half convinced that he was act
ing rightly, at length raised himself from the ground
and prepared himself for his departure. And first,
though contrary to Malvin's wishes, he collected a stock
of roots and herbs, which had been their only food dur
ing the last two days. This useless supply he placed
within reach of the dying man, for whom, also, he swept
together a bed of dry oak leaves. Then climbing to
the summit of the rock, which on one side was rough
and broken, he bent the oak sapling downward, and
bound his handkerchief to the topmost branch. This
precaution was not unnecessary to direct any who might
come in search of Malvin ; for every part of the rock,
except its broad, smooth front, was concealed at a lit
tle distance by the dense undergrowth of the forest.
The handkerchief had been the bandage of a wound
upon Reuben's arm ; and, as he bound it to the tree,
he vowed by the blood that stained it that he would re
turn, either to save his companion's life or to lay his
body in the grave. He then descended, and stood,
with downcast eyes, to receive Roger Malvin's part
ing words.

The experience of the latter suggested much and
minute advice respecting the youth's journey through
the trackless forest. Upon this subject he spoke with
calm earnestness, as if he were sending Reuben to the
battle or the chase while he himself remained secure
at home, and not as if the human countenance that
was about to leave him were the last he would ever
behold. But his firmness was shaken before he con
cluded.

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 389

" Carry my blessing to Dorcas, and say that my last
prayer shall be for her and you. Bid her to have no
hard thoughts because you left me here," — Eeuben's
heart smote him, — " for that your life would not have
weighed with you if its sacrifice could have done me
good. She will marry you after she has mourned a
little while for her father ; and Heaven grant you long
and happy days, and may your children's children stand
round your death bed ! And, Reuben," added he, as
the weakness of mortality made its way at last, " re
turn, when your wounds are healed and your weari
ness refreshed, — return to this wild rock, and lay my
bones in the grave, and say a prayer over them."

An almost superstitious regard, arising perhaps from
the customs of the Indians, whose war was with the
dead as well as the living, was paid by the frontier in
habitants to the rites of sepulture ; and there are many
instances of the sacrifice of life in the attempt to bury
those who had fallen by the " sword of the wilderness."
Reuben, therefore, felt the full importance of the prom
ise which he most solemnly made to return and per
form Roger Malvin's obsequies. It was remarkable
that the latter, speaking his whole heart in his parting
words, no longer endeavored to persuade the youth that
even the speediest succor might avail to the preserva
tion of his life. Reuben was internally convinced that
he should see Malvin's Ming face no more. His gen
erous nature would fain have delayed him, at whatever
risk, till the dying scene were past ; but the desire of
existence and the hope of happiness had strengthened
in his heart, and he was unable to resist them.

" It is enough," said Roger Malvin, having listened
to Reuben's promise. " Go, and God speed you ! "

The youth pressed his hand in silence, turned, and

890 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

was departing. His slow and faltering steps, however,
had borne him but a little way before Malvin's voice
recalled him.

" Reuben, Reuben," said he, faintly ; and Reuben
returned and knelt down by the dying man.

" Raise me, and let me lean against the rock," was
his last request. "My face will be turned towards
home, and I shall see you a moment longer as you
pass among the trees."

Reuben, having made the desired alteration in his
companion's posture, again began his solitary pilgrim
age. He walked more hastily at first than was consis
tent with his strength; for a sort of guilty feeling,
which sometimes torments men in their most justifiable
acts, caused him to seek concealment from Malvin's
eyes ; but after he had trodden far upon the rustling
forest leaves he crept back, impelled by a wild and
painful curiosity, and, sheltered by the earthy roots of
an uptorn tree, gazed earnestly at the desolate man.
The morning sun was unclouded, and the trees and
shrubs imbibed the sweet air of the month of May ;
yet there seemed a gloom on Nature's face, as if she
sympathized with mortal pain and sorrow. Roger
Malvin's hands were uplifted in a fervent prayer, some
of the words of which stole through the stillness of the
woods and entered Reuben's heart, torturing it with an
unutterable pang. They were the broken accents of a
petition for his own happiness and that of Dorcas ; and,
as the youth listened, conscience, or something in its
similitude, pleaded strongly with him to return and lie
down again by the rock. He felt how hard was the
doom of the kind and generous being whom he had
deserted in his extremity. Death would come like the
slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually towards

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 391

him through the forest, and showing its ghastly and
motionless features from behind a nearer and yet a
nearer tree. But such must have been Reuben's own
fate had he tarried another sunset ; and who shall im
pute blame to him if he shrink from so useless a sacri
fice? As he gave a parting look, a breeze waved the
little banner upon the sapling oak and reminded Reu
ben of his vow.

Many circumstances combined to retard the wounded
traveller in his way to the frontiers. On the second
day the clouds, gathering densely over the sky, pre
cluded the possibility of regulating his course by the
position of the sun : and he knew not but that every
effort of his almost exhausted strength was removing
him farther from the home he sought. His scanty sus
tenance was supplied by the berries and other sponta
neous products of the forest. Herds of deer, it is true,
sometimes bounded past him, and partridges frequently
whirred up before his footsteps ; but his ammunition
had been expended in the fight, and he had no means
of slaying them. His wounds, irritated by the constant
exertion in which lay the only hope of life, wore away
his strength and at intervals confused his reason. But,
even in the wanderings of intellect, Reuben's young
heart clung strongly to existence ; and it was only
through absolute incapacity of motion that he at last sank
down beneath a tree, compelled there to await death.

In this situation he was discovered by a party who,
upon the first intelligence of the fight, had been de
spatched to the relief of the survivors. They conveyed
him to the nearest settlement, which chanced to be that
of his own residence.

Dorcas, in the simplicity of the olden time, watched by

892 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the bedside of her wounded lover, and administered all
those comforts that are in the sole gift of woman's heart
and hand. During several days Reuben's recollection
strayed drowsily among the perils and hardships through
which he had passed, and he was incapable of return
ing definite answers to the inquiries with which many
were eager to harass him. No authentic particulars
of the battle had yet been circulated ; nor could moth
ers, wives, and children tell whether their loved ones
were detained by captivity or by the stronger chain of
death. Dorcas nourished her apprehensions in silence
till one afternoon when Reuben awoke from an unquiet
sleep, and seemed to recognize her more perfectly than
at any previous time. She saw that his intellect had
become composed, and she could no longer restrain her
filial anxiety.

" My father, Reuben ? " she began ; but the change
in her lover's countenance made her pause.

The youth shrank as if with a bitter pain, and the
blood gushed vividly into his wan and hollow cheeks.
His first impulse was to cover his face ; but, appar
ently with a desperate effort, he half raised himself
and spoke vehemently, defending himself against an
imaginary accusation.

" Your father was sore wounded in the battle, Dor
cas ; and he bade me not burden myself with him, but
only to lead him to the lakeside, that he might quench
his thirst and die. But I would not desert the old man
in his extremity, and, though bleeding myself, I sup
ported him ; I gave him half my strength, and led him
away with me. For three days we journeyed on to
gether, and your father was sustained beyond my hopes,
but, awaking at sunrise on the fourth day, I found him
faint and exhausted ; he was unable to proceed ; his
life had ebbed away fast ; and " —

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 398

" He died ! " exclaimed Dorcas, faintly.

Eeuben felt it impossible to acknowledge that hia
selfish love of life had hurried him away before her
father's fate was decided. He spoke not; he only
bowed his head ; and, between shame and exhaustion,
sank back and hid his face in the pillow. Dorcas wept
when her fears were thus confirmed ; but the shock, as
it had been long anticipated, was on that account the
less violent.

" You dug a grave for my poor father in the wilder
ness, Reuben ? '" was the question by which her filial
piety manifested itself.

" My hands were weak ; but I did what I could,"
replied the youth in a smothered tone. " There stands
a noble tombstone above his head; and I would to
Heaven I slept as soundly as he ! "

Dorcas, perceiving the wildness of his latter words,
inquired no further at the time ; but her heart found
ease in the thought that Roger Malvin had not lacked
such funeral rites as it was possible to bestow. The
tale of Reuben's courage and fidelity lost nothing when
she communicated it to her friends ; and the poor
youth, tottering from his sick chamber to breathe the
sunny air, experienced from every tongue the miserable
and humiliating torture of unmerited praise. All ac
knowledged that he might worthily demand the hand of
the fair maiden to whose father he had been " faithful
unto death ; " and, as my tale is not of love, it shall
suffice to say that in the space of a few months Reu
ben became the husband of Dorcas Malvin. During
the marriage ceremony the bride was covered with
blushes, but the bridegroom's face was pale.

There was now in the breast of Reuben Bourne an
incommunicable thought — something which he was to

394 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

conceal most heedfully from her whom he most loved
and trusted. He regretted, deeply and bitterly, the
moral cowardice that had restrained his words when
he was about to disclose the truth to Dorcas ; bu*
pride, the fear of losing her affection, the dread of
universal scorn, forbade him to rectify this falsehood.
He felt that for leaving Roger Malvin he deserved
no censure. His presence, the gratuitous sacrifice of
his own life, would have added only another and a
needless agony to the last moments of the dying man ;
but concealment had imparted to a justifiable act
much of the secret effect of guilt ; and Reuben, while
reason told him that he had done right, experienced
in no small degree the mental horrors which punish
the perpetrator of undiscovered crime. By a certain
association of ideas, he at times almost imagined him
self a murderer. For years, also, a thought would
occasionally recur, which, though he perceived all its
folly and extravagance, he had not power to banish
from his mind. It was a haunting and torturing fan
cy that his father-in-law was yet sitting at the foot
of the rock, on the withered forest leaves, alive, and
awaiting his pledged assistance. These mental decep
tions, however, came and went, nor did he ever mis
take them for realities ; but in the calmest and clear
est moods of his mind he was conscious that he had a
deep vow unredeemed, and that an unburied corpse
was calling to him out of the wilderness. Yet such
was the consequence of his prevarication that he could
not obey the call. It was now too late to require the
assistance of Roger Malvin's friends in performing
his long - deferred sepulture; and superstitious fears,
of which none were more susceptible than the peo«
pie of the outward settlements, forbade Reuben to go

ROGER HALVINGS BURIAL. 395

alone. Neither did he know where in the pathless
and illimitable forest to seek that smooth and lettered
rock at the base of which the body lay : his remem
brance of every portion of his travel thence was indis
tinct, and the latter part had left no impression upon
his mind. There was, however, a continual impulse,
a voice audible only to himself, commanding him to
go forth and redeem his vow ; and he had a strange'
impression that, were he to make the trial, he would
be led straight to Malvin's bones. But year after
year that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed.
His one secret thought became like a chain binding
down his spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his
heart ; and he was transformed into a sad and down
cast yet irritable man.

In the course of a few years after their marriage
changes began to be visible in the external prosperity
of Reuben and Dorcas. The only riches of the former
had been his stout heart and strong arm ; but the lat
ter, her father's sole heiress, had made her husband
master of a farm, under older cultivation, larger, and
better stocked than most of the frontier establishments.
Reuben Bourne, however, was a neglectful husband
man ; and, while the lands of the other settlers became
annually more fruitful, his deteriorated in the same
proportion. The discouragements to agriculture were
greatly lessened by the cessation of Indian war, dur
ing which men held the plough in one hand and the
musket in the other, and were fortunate if the products
of their dangerous labor were not destroyed, either in
the field or in the barn, by the savage enemy. But
Reuben did not profit by the altered condition of the
country; nor can it be denied that his intervals of
industrious attention to his affairs were but scantily

396 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

rewarded with success. The irritability by which he
had recently become distinguished was another cause
of his declining prosperity, as it occasioned frequent
quarrels in his unavoidable intercourse with the neigh
boring settlers. The results of these were innumer
able lawsuits ; for the people of New England, in the
earliest stages and wildest circumstances of the coun
try, adopted, whenever attainable, the legal mode of
deciding their differences. To be brief, the world did
not go well with Reuben Bourne ; and, though not
till many years after his marriage, he was finally a
ruined man, with but one remaining expedient against
the evil fate that had pursued him. He was to throw
sunlight into some deep recess of the forest, and seek
subsistence from the virgin bosom of the wilderness.

The only child of Reuben and Dorcas was a son,
now arrived at the age of fifteen years, beautiful in
youth, and giving promise of a glorious manhood. He
was peculiarly qualified for, and already began to excel
in, the wild accomplishments of frontier life. His foot
was fleet, his aim true, his apprehension quick, his
heart glad and high ; and all who anticipated the re
turn of Indian war spoke of Cyrus Bourne as a future
leader in the land. The boy was loved by his father
with a deep and silent strength, as if whatever was
good and happy in his own nature had been transferred
to his child, carrying his affections with it. Even Dor
cas, though loving and beloved, was far less dear to
him ; for Reuben's secret thoughts and insulated emo
tions had gradually made him a selfish man, and he
could no longer love deeply except where he saw or
imagined some reflection or likeness of his own mind.
In Cyrus he recognized what he had himself been in
other days ; and at intervals he seemed to partake of

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 397

the boy's spirit, and to be revived with a fresh and
happy life. Reuben was accompanied by his son in
the expedition, for the purpose of selecting a tract of
land and felling and burning the timber, which nec
essarily preceded the removal of the household gods.
Two months of autumn were thus occupied, after which
Reuben Bourne and his young hunter returned to spend
their last winter in the settlements.

It was early in the month of May that the little fam
ily snapped asunder whatever tendrils of affections had
clung to inanimate objects, and bade farewell to the
few who, in the blight of fortune, called themselves
their friends. The sadness of the parting moment
had, to each of the pilgrims, its peculiar alleviations.
Reuben, a moody man, and misanthropic because un
happy, strode onward with his usual stern brow and
downcast eye, feeling few regrets and disdaining to ac
knowledge any. Dorcas, while she wept abundantly
over the broken ties by which her simple and affection
ate nature had bound itself to everything, felt that the
inhabitants of her inmost heart moved on with her, and
that all else would be supplied wherever she might go.
And the boy dashed one tear-drop from his eye, and
thought of the adventurous pleasures of the untrodden
forest.

Oh, who, in the enthusiasm of a daydream, has not
wished that he were a wanderer in a world of summer
wilderness, with one fair and gentle being hanging
lightly on his arm ? In youth his free and exulting
step would know no barrier but the rolling ocean or the
snow-topped mountains ; calmer manhood would choose
a home where Nature had strewn a double wealth in the
rale of some transparent stream ; and when hoary age,

398 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

after long, long years of that pure life, stole on and
found him there, it would find him the father of a race,
the patriarch of a people, the founder of a mighty na
tion yet to be. When death, like the sweet sleep which
we welcome after a day of happiness, came over him,
his far descendants would mourn over the venerated
dust. Enveloped by tradition in mysterious attributes,
the men of future generations would call him godlike ;
and remote posterity would see him standing, dimly
glorious, far up the valley of a hundred centuries.

The tangled and gloomy forest through which the
personages of my tale were wandering differed widely
from the dreamer's land of fantasy; yet there was
something in their way of life that Nature asserted as
her own, and the gnawing cares which went with them
from the world were all that now obstructed their hap
piness. One stout and shaggy steed, the bearer of all
their wealth, did not shrink from the added weight of
Dorcas ; although her hardy breeding sustained her,
during the latter part of each day's journey, by her
husband's side. Reuben and his son, their muskets on
their shoulders and their axes slung behind them, kept
an unwearied pace, each watching with a hunter's eye
for the game that supplied their food. When hunger
bade, they halted and prepared their meal on the bank
of some unpolluted forest brook, which, as they knelt
down with thirsty lips to drink, murmured a sweet un
willingness, like a maiden at love's first kiss. They
slept beneath a hut of branches, and awoke at peep of
light refreshed for the toils of another day. Dorcas
and the boy went on joyously, and even Reuben's spirit
shone at intervals with an outward gladness ; but in
wardly there was a cold, cold sorrow, which he com*
pared to the snowdrifts lying deep in the glens and hot

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 399

lows of the rivulets while the leaves were brightly green
above.

Cyrus Bourne was sufficiently skilled in the travel of
the woods to observe that his father did not adhere to
the course they had pursued in their expedition of the
preceding autumn. They were now keeping farther to
the north, striking out more directly from the settle
ments, and into a region of which savage beasts and
savage men were as yet the sole possessors. The boy
sometimes hinted his opinions upon the subject, and
Reuben listened attentively, and once or twice altered
the direction of their march in accordance with his
son's counsel ; but, having so done, he seemed ill at
ease. His quick and wandering glances were sent for
ward, apparently in search of enemies lurking behind
the tree trunks ; and, seeing nothing there, he would
cast his eyes backwards as if in fear of some pursuer.
Cyrus, perceiving that his father gradually resumed
the old direction, forbore to interfere ; nor, though
something began to weigh upon his heart, did his ad
venturous nature permit him to regret the increased
length and the mystery of their way.

On the afternoon of the fifth day they halted, and
made their simple encampment nearly an hour before
sunset. The face of the country, for the last few miles,
had been diversified by swells of land resembling huge
waves of a petrified sea ; and in one of the correspond
ing hollows, a wild and romantic spot, had the family
reared their hut and kindled .their fire. There is some
thing chilling, and yet heart-warming, in the thought
of these three, united by strong bands of love and in
sulated from all that breathe beside. The dark and
gloomy pines looked down upon them, and, as the wind
swept through their tops, a pitying sound was heard in

400 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE,

the forest ; or did those old trees groan in fear that
men were come to lay the axe to their roots at last ?
Reuben and his son, while Dorcas made ready theii
meal, proposed to wander out in search of game, of
which that day's march had afforded no supply. The
boy, promising not to quit the vicinity of the encamp
ment, bounded off with a step as light and elastic as
that of the deer he hoped to slay ; while his father,
feeling a transient happiness as he gazed after him, was
about to pursue an opposite direction. Dorcas, in the
meanwhile, had seated herself near their fire of fallen
branches, upon the mossgrown and mouldering trunk
of a tree uprooted years before. Her employment,
diversified by an occasional glance at the pot, now be
ginning to simmer over the blaze, was the perusal of
the current year's Massachusetts Almanac, which, with
the exception of an old black-letter Bible, comprised all
the literary wealth of the family. None pay a greater
regard to arbitrary divisions of time than those who
are excluded from society; and Dorcas mentioned, as
if the information were of importance, that it was now
the twelfth of May. Her husband started.

" The twelfth of May ! I should remember it well,"
muttered he, while many thoughts occasioned a mo
mentary confusion in his mind. " Where am I ?
Whither am I wandering? Where did I leave him?"

Dorcas, too well accustomed to her husband's way
ward moods to note any peculiarity of demeanor, now
laid aside the almanac and addressed him in that
mournful tone which the tender hearted appropriate
to griefs long cold and dead.

" It was near this time of the month, eighteen years
ago, that my poor father left this world for a better.
He had a kind arm to hold his head and a kind voice

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 401

to cheer him, Reuben, in his last moments ; and the
thought of the faithful care you took of him has com
forted me many a time since. Oh, death would have
been awful to a solitary man in a wild place like
this!"

"Pray Heaven, Dorcas," said Reuben, in a broken
voice, — " pray Heaven that neither of us three dies
solitary and lies unburied in this howling wilderness ! "
And he hastened away, leaving her to watch the fire
beneath the gloomy pines.

Reuben Bourne's rapid pace gradually slackened as
the pang, unintentionally inflicted by the words of
Dorcas, became less acute. Many strange reflections,
however, thronged upon him; and, straying onward
rather like a sleep walker than a hunter, it was at
tributable to no care of his own that his devious
course kept him in the vicinity of the encampment.
His steps were imperceptibly led almost in a circle;
nor did he observe that he was on the verge of a tract
of land heavily timbered, but not with pine-trees.
The place of the latter was here supplied by oaks
and other of the harder woods ; and around their
roots clustered a dense and bushy under-growth, leav
ing, however, barren spaces between the trees, thick
strewn with withered leaves. Whenever the rustling
of the branches or the creaking of the trunks made
a sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber,
Reuben instinctively raised the musket that rested on
his arm, and cast a quick, sharp glance on every side ;
but, convinced by a partial observation that no ani
mal was near, he would again give himself up to his
thoughts. He was musing on the strange influence
that had led him away from his premeditated course,
and so far into the depths of the wilderness. Unable

402 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where hig
motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural
voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural
power had obstructed his retreat. He trusted that it
was Heaven's intent to afford him an opportunity of
expiating his sin ; he hoped that he might find the
bones so long unburied ; and that, having laid the
earth over them, peace would throw its sunlight into
the sepulchre of his heart. From these thoughts he
was aroused by a rustling in the forest at some dis
tance from the spot to which he had wandered. Per
ceiving the motion of some object behind a thick veil
of undergrowth, he fired, with the instinct of a hunter
and the aim of a practised marksman. A low moan,
which told his success, and by which even animals
can express their dying agony, was unheeded by Reu
ben Bourne. What were the recollections now break
ing upon him ?

The thicket into which Reuben had fired was near
the summit of a swell of land, and was clustered
around the base of a rock, which, in the shape and
smoothness of one of its surfaces, was not unlike a
gigantic gravestone. As if reflected in a mirror,
its likeness was in Reuben's memory. He even rec
ognized the veins which seemed to form an inscrip
tion in forgotten characters : everything remained the
same, except that a thick covert of bushes shrouded
the lower part of the rock, and would have hidden
Roger Malvin had he still been sitting there. Yet
in the next moment Reuben's eye was caught by
another change that time had effected since he last
stood where he was now standing again behind the
earthy roots of the uptorn tree. The sapling to which
he had bound the bloodstained symbol of his vow had

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 403

increased and strengthened into an oak, far indeed
from its maturity, but with no mean spread of shad
owy branches. There was one singularity observable
in this tree which made Reuben tremble. The middle
and lower branches were in luxuriant life, and an ex
cess of vegetation had fringed the trunk almost to the
ground ; but a blight had apparently stricken the upper
part of the oak, and the very topmost bough was with
ered, sapless, and utterly dead. Reuben remembered
how the little banner had fluttered on that topmost
bough, when it was green and lovely, eighteen years
before. Whose guilt had blasted it?

Dorcas, after the departure of the two hunters, con
tinued her preparations for their evening repast. Her
sylvan table was the moss -covered trunk of a large
fallen tree, on the broadest part of which she had
spread a snow-white cloth and arranged what were
left of the bright pewter vessels that had been her
pride in the settlements. It had a strange aspect,
that one little spot of homely comfort in the desolate
heart of Nature. The sunshine yet lingered upon the
higher branches of the trees that grew on rising
ground ; but the shadows of evening had deepened
into the hollow where the encampment was made, and
the firelight began to redden as it gleamed up the
tall trunks of the pines or hovered on the dense and
obscure mass of foliage that circled round the spot.
The heart of Dorcas was not sad ; for she felt that
it was better to journey in the wilderness with two
whom she loved than to be a lonely woman in a crowd
that cared not for her. As she busied herself in ar
ranging seats of mouldering wood, covered with leaves,
for Reuben and her son, her voice danced through

404 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the gloomy forest in the measure of a song that she
had learned in youth. The rude melody, the produc
tion of a bard who won no name, was descriptive of
a winter evening in a frontier cottage, when, secured
from savage inroad by the high-piled snow-drifts, the
family rejoiced by their own fireside. The whole song
possessed the nameless charm peculiar to unborrowed
thought, but four continually-recurring lines shone out
from the rest like the blaze of the hearth whose joys
they celebrated. Into them, working magic with a
few simple words, the poet had instilled the very
essence of domestic love and household happiness,
and they were poetry and picture joined in one. As
Dorcas sang, the walls of her forsaken home seemed
to encircle her ; she no longer saw the gloomy pines,
nor heard the wind which still, as she began each
verse, sent a heavy breath through the branches, and
died away in a hollow moan from the burden of the
song. She was aroused by the report of a gun in the
vicinity of the encampment; and either the sudden
sound, or her loneliness by the glowing fire, caused
her to tremble violently. The next moment she
laughed in the pride of a mother's heart.

" My beautiful young hunter ! My boy has slain a
deer ! " she exclaimed, recollecting that in the direc
tion whence the shot proceeded Cyrus had gone to the
chase.

She waited a reasonable time to hear her son's light
step bounding over the rustling leaves to tell of his
success. But he did not immediately appear ; and
she sent her cheerful voice among the trees in search
of him.

" Cyrus ! Cyrus ! "

His coming was still delayed ; and she determined,

ROGER MALVIN'S BURIAL. 405

as the report had -apparently been very near, to seek
for him in person. Her assistance, also, might be nec
essary in bringing home the venison which she flat
tered herself he had obtained. She therefore set for
ward, directing her steps by the long-past sound, and
singing as she went, in order that the boy might be
aware of her approach and run to meet her. From
behind the trunk of every tree, and from every hid
ing-place in the thick foliage of the undergrowth, she
hoped to discover the countenance of her son, laugh
ing with the sportive mischief that is born of affection.
The sun was now beneath the horizon, and the light
that came down among the leaves was sufficiently dim
to create many illusions in her expecting fancy. Sev
eral times she seemed indistinctly to see his face gazing
out from among the leaves; and once she imagined
that he stood beckoning to her at the base of a craggy
rock. Keeping her eyes on this object, however, it
proved to be no more than the trunk of an oak fringed
to the very ground with little branches, one of which,
thrust out farther than the rest, was shaken by the
breeze. Making her way round the foot of the rock,
she suddenly found herself close to her husband, who
had approached in another direction. Leaning upon
the butt of his gun, the muzzle of which rested upon
the withered leaves, he was apparently absorbed in
the contemplation of some object at his feet.

"How is this Reuben? Have you slain the deer
and fallen asleep over him?" exclaimed Dorcas, laugh
ing cheerfully, on her first slight observation of his
posture and appearance.

He stirred not, neither did he turn his eyes towards
her ; and a cold, shuddering fear, indefinite in its
source and object, began to creep into her blood. She

.406 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

now perceived that her husband's face was ghastly
pale, and his features were rigid, as if incapable of
assuming any other expression than the strong despair
which had hardened upon them. He gave not the
slightest evidence that he was aware of her approach.

" For the love of Heaven, Reuben, speak to me ! "
cried Dorcas ; and the strange sound of her own voice
affrighted her even more than the dead silence.

Her husband started, stared into her face, drew her
to the front of the rock, and pointed with his finger.

Oh, there lay the boy, asleep, but dreamless, upon
the fallen forest leaves! His cheek rested upon his
arm — his curled locks were thrown back from his
brow — his limbs were slightly relaxed. Had a sud
den weariness overcome the youthful hunter? Would
his mother's voice arouse him ? She knew that it was
death.

" This broad rock is the gravestone of your near
kindred, Dorcas," said her husband. " Your tears will
fall at once over your father and your son."

She heard him not. With one wild shriek, that
seemed to force its way from the suffere'r's inmost soul,
she sank insensible by the side of her dead boy. At
that moment the withered topmost bough of the oak
loosened itself in the stilly air, and fell in soft, light
fragments upon the rock, upon the leaves, upon Reu
ben, upon his wife and child, and upon Roger Malvin's
bones. Then Reuben's heart was stricken, and the
tears gushed out like water from a rock. The vow
that the wounded youth had made the blighted man
had come to redeem. His sin was expiated, — the
curse was gone from him ; and in the hour when he
had shed blood dearer to him than his own, a prayer,
the first for years, went up to Heaven from the lips of
Heuben Bourne.

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE.

MY unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his
life by the interposition of long intervals of partially
disordered reason. The past and present are jumbled
together in his mind in a manner often productive of
curious results, and which will be better understood
after the perusal of the following letter than from any
description that I could give. The poor fellow, with
out once stirring from the little whitewashed, iron-
grated room to which he alludes in his first paragraph,
is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his wan
derings a variety of personages who have long ceased
to be visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion,
all this is not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and
partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which
his disease has imparted such morbid energy that he
beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no
less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with
somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his let
ters are in my possession, some based upon the same va
gary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses
not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a
series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably
remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of
moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in edit
ing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering
after literary reputation, and has made more than one
unsuccessful effort to achieve it. It would not be a
little odd if, after missing his object while seeking it

408 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

by the light of reason, he should prove to have stum
bled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits
of sanity.

LONDON, February 29, 1845.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — Old associations cling to the
mind with astonishing tenacity. Daily custom grows
up about us like a stone wall, and consolidates itself
into almost as material entity as mankind's strongest
architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with
me whether ideas be not really visible and tangible
and endowed with all the other qualities of matter.
Sitting as I do at this moment in my hired apartment,
writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of
Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the
world's metropolis, and with a window at but five paces
distant, through which, whenever I please, I can gaze
out on actual London, — with all this positive certainty
as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you
think, is just now perplexing my brain ? Why, —
would you believe it? — that all this time I am still an
inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber — that
whitewashed little chamber — that little chamber with
its one small window, across which, from some inscru
table reason of taste or convenience, my landlord had
placed a row of iron bars — that same little chamber,
in short, whither your kindness has so often brought
you to visit me ! Will no length of time or breadth
of space enfranchise me from that unlovely abode?
I travel ; but it seems to be like the snail, with my
house upon my head. Ah, well ! I am verging, I
suppose, on that period of life when present scenes and
events make but feeble impressions in comparison with
those of yore ; so that I must reconcile myself to be

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 409

more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely
lets me hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
My letters of introduction have been of the utmost
service, enabling me to make the acquaintance of sev
eral distinguished characters, who, until now, have
seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal in
tercourse as the wits of Queen Anne's time or Ben
Jonson's compotators at the Mermaid. One of the
first of which I availed myself was the letter to Lord
Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than
I had anticipated, although, considering his former
irregularities of life and the various wear and tear of
his constitution, not older than a man on the verge of
sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his
earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet's spir-
icual immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxu
riantly curled, and extending down over his forehead.
The expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles.
His early tendency to obesity having increased, Lord
Byron is now enormously fat — so fat as to give the
impression of a person quite overladen with his own
flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his per
sonal life through the great mass of corporeal substance
which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the
mortal heap ; and, while it fills your eye with what
purports to be Byron, you murmur within yourself,
" For Heaven's sake, where is he ? " Were I disposed
to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly
matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those
evil habits and carnal vices which unspiritualize man's
nature and clog up his avenues of communication with
the better life. But this would be too harsh ; and, be
sides, Lord Byron's morals have been improving while
his outward man has swollen to such unconscionable

410 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

circumference. Would that he were leaner ; for though
he did me the honor to present his hand, yet it was so
puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel
as if I had touched the hand that wrote Childe Har-
old.

On my entrance his lordship apologized for not ris
ing to receive me on the sufficient plea that the gout
for several years past had taken up its constant resi
dence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed
in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion.
The other foot was hidden in the drapery of his chair.
Do you recollect whether Byron's right or left foot was
the deformed one?

The noble poet's reconciliation with Lady Byron is
now, as you are aware, of ten years' standing ; nor does
it exhibit, I am assured, any symptom of breach or
fracture. They are said to be, if not a happy, at least
a contented, or at all events a quiet couple, descending
the slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual
support which will enable them to come easily and com
fortably to the bottom. It is pleasant to reflect how
entirely the poet has redeemed his youthful errors in
this particular. Her ladyship's influence, it rejoices
me to add, has been productive of the happiest results
upon Lord Byron in a religious point of view. He now
combines the most rigid tenets of Methodism with the
ultra doctrines of the Puseyites ; the former being per
haps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by
his noble consort, while the latter are the embroidery
and picturesque illumination demanded by his imagi
native character. Much of whatever expenditure his
increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is be
stowed in the reparation or beautifying of places of
worship ; and this nobleman, whose name was once

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 411

considered a synonyme of the foul fiend, is now all but
canonized as a saint in many pulpits of the metropolis
and elsewhere. In polities, Lord Byron is an un
compromising conservative, and loses no opportunity,
whether in the House of Lords or in private circles, of
denouncing and repudiating the mischievous and anar
chical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to
visit similar sins in other people with the sincerest ven
geance which his somewhat blunted pen is capable of
inflicting. Southey and he are on the most intimate
terms. You are aware, that some little time before the
death of Moore, Byron caused that brilliant but repre
hensible man to be ejected from his house. Moore took
the insult so much to heart that it is said to have been
one great cause of the fit of illness which brought him
to the grave. Others pretend that the lyrist died in a
very happy state of mind, singing one of his own sa
cred melodies, and expressing his belief that it would
be heard within the gate of paradise, and gain him in
stant and honorable admittance. I wish he may have
found it so.

I failed not, as you may suppose in the course of
conversation with Lord Byron, to pay the meed of
homage due to a mighty poet, by allusions to pas
sages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan,
which have made so large a portion of the music of
my life. My words, whether apt or otherwise, were
at least warm with the enthusiasm of one worthy to
discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however,
that they did not go precisely to the right spot. I
could perceive that there was some mistake or other,
and was not a little angry with myself, and ashamed
of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own
heart to the gifted author's ear, the echo of those

412 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

strains that have resounded throughout the world,
But by and by the secret peeped quietly out. Byron,

— I have the information from his own lips, so that
you need not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,

— Byron is preparing a new edition of his complete
works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and amended,
in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals,
politics, and religion. It so happened that the very
passages of highest inspiration to which I had alluded
were among the condemned and rejected rubbish which
it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of oblivion. To
whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his pas
sions having burned out, the extinction of their vivid
and riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the il
lumination by which he not merely wrote, but was
enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written.
Positively he no longer understands his own poetry.

This became very apparent on his favoring me so
far as to read a few specimens of Don Juan in the
moralized version. Whatever is licentious, whatever
disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith,
whatever morbidly melancholic or splenetically sport
ive, whatever assails settled constitutions of govern
ment or systems of society, whatever could wound the
sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a republican,
or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and
its place supplied by unexceptionable verses in his
lordship's later style. You may judge how much of
the poem remains as hitherto published. The result
is not so good as might be wished ; in plain terms,
it is a very sad affair indeed ; for, though the torches
kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave
an abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by no
glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, never-

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 413

theless, that this attempt on Lord Byron's part to
atone for his youthful errors will at length induce
the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is
concerned, to allow Thorwaldsen's statue of the poet
its due niche in the grand old Abbey. His bones,
you know, when brought from Greece, were denied /
sepulture among those of his tuneful brethren there.

What a vile slip of the pen was that ! How ab
surd in me to talk about burying the bones of Byron,
whom I have just seen alive, and incased in a big,
round bulk of flesh ! But, to say the truth, a pro
digiously fat man always impresses me as a kind of
hobgoblin ; in the very extravagance of his mortal
system I find something akin to the immateriality of
a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted
into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Mis-
solonghi, above twenty years ago. More and more
I recognize that we dwell in a world of shadows ;
and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble,
to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind
and shadows out of it. If there be any difference, the
former are rather the more substantial.

Only think of my good fortune! The venerable
Robert Burns — now, if I mistake not, in his eighty-
seventh year — happens to be making a visit to Lon
don, as if on purpose to afford me an opportunity of
grasping him by the hand. For upwards of twenty
years past he has hardly left his quiet cottage in
Ayrshire for a single night, and has only been drawn
hither now by the irresistible persuasions of all the
distinguished men in England. They wish to cele
brate the patriarch's birthday by a festival. It will
be the greatest literary triumph on record. Pray
Heaven the little spirit of life within the aged bard's

414 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

bosom may not be extinguished in the lustre of that
hour ! I have already had the honor of an introduc
tion to him at the British Museum, where he was ex
amining a collection of his own unpublished letters,
interspersed with songs, which have escaped the notice
of all his biographers.

Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of ? How
should Burns have been embalmed in biography when
he is still a hearty old man ?

The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest
degree reverend, nor the less so that it is much bent
by the burden of time. His white hair floats like a
snow - drift around his face, in which are seen the
furrows of intellect and passion, like the channels
of headlong torrents that have foamed themselves
away. The old gentleman is in excellent preserva
tion considering his time of life. He has that crick-
ety sort of liveliness — I mean the cricket's humor
of chirping for any cause or none — which is perhaps
the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old
age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves,
although we perceive it to be a beneficence of nature
in the case of others. I was surprised to find it in
Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and brilliant
imagination had both burned down to the last embers,
leaving only a little flickering flame in one corner,
which keeps dancing upward and laughing all by
itself. He is no longer capable of pathos. At the
request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing
his own song to Mary in Heaven ; but it was evident
that the feeling of those verses, so profoundly true
and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the
scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch
of it did partially awaken him, the tears immediately

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 415

gushed into his eyes and his voice broke into a tremu
lous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly knew where
fore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again
of Mary in Heaven until he shake off the dull im
pediment of time and ascend to meet her there.

Burns then began to repeat Tarn O'Shanter; but
was so tickled with its wit and humor — of which,
however, I suspect he had but a traditionary sense
— that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter,
succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very
agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would
rather not have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea,
however, that the last forty years of the peasant poet's
life have been passed in competence and perfect com
fort. Having been cured of his bardic improvidence
for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the
main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is
now considered to be quite well off as to pecuniary
circumstances. This, I suppose, is worth having lived
so long for.

I took occasion to inquire of some of the country
men of Burns in regard to the health of Sir Walter
Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say, remains the
same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless
paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those
nobler attributes of which the body is the instrument.
And thus he vegetates from day to day and from year
to year at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which
grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the
great romancer's tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices,
and modes of intellect. Whether in verse, prose, or
architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although
that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a
eouch in his library, and is said to spend whole hours

416 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

of every day in dictating tales to an amanuensis,—-
to an imaginary amanuensis ; for it is not deemed
worth any one's trouble now to take down what flows
from that once brilliant fancy, every image of which
was formerly worth gold and capable of being coined.
Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him, assures me
that there is now and then a touch of the genius, —
a striking combination of incident, or a picturesque
trait of character, such as no other man alive could
have hit off, — a glimmer from that ruined mind, as
if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted hel
met in the gloom of an ancient hall. But the plots
of these romances become inextricably confused; the
characters melt into one another; and the tale loses
itself like the course of a stream flowing through
muddy and marshy ground.

For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter
Scott had lost his consciousness of outward things
before his works went out of vogue. It was good
that he should forget his fame rather than that fame
should first have forgotten him. Were he still a
writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could no
longer maintain anything like the same position in
literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more
earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and
homelier truth than he was qualified to supply it
with. Yet who can be to the present generation
even what Scott has been to the past? I had ex
pectations from a young man — one Dickens — who
published a few magazine articles, very rich in hu
mor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos,
but the poor fellow died shortly after commencing
an odd series of sketches, entitled, I think, the Pick
wick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 417

than it dreams of by the untimely death of this Mr.
Dickens.

Whom do you think I met in Pall Mall the other
day? You would not hit it in ten guesses. Why,
no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte, or all that
is now left of him — that is to say, the skin, bones,
and corporeal substance, little cocked hat, green coat,
white breeches, and small sword, which are still known
by his redoubtable name. He was attended only by
two policemen, who walked quietly behind the phan
tasm of the old ex-emperor, appearing to have no duty
in regard to him except to see that none of the light-
fingered gentry should possess themselves of the star
of the Legion of Honor. Nobody, save myself, so
much as turned to look after him ; nor, it grieves me
to confess, could even I contrive to muster up any
tolerable interest, even by all that the warlike spirit,
formerly manifested within that now decrepit shape,
had wrought upon our globe. There is no surer
method of annihilating the magic influence of a great
renown than by exhibiting the possessor of it in the
decline, the overthrow, the utter degradation of his
powers, — buried beneath his own mortality, — and
lacking even the qualities of sense that enable the
most ordinary men to bear themselves decently in the
eye of the world. This is the state to which disease,
aggravated by long endurance of a tropical climate,
and assisted by old age, — for he is now above sev
enty, — has reduced Bonaparte. The British govern
ment has acted shrewdly in retransporting him from
St. Helena to England. They should now restore
him to Paris, and there let him once again review the
relics of his armies. His eye is dull and rheumy,
liis nether lip hung down upon his chin. While I

VOL. ii. 27

418 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

was observing him there chanced to be a little extra
bustle in the street; and he, the brother of Caesar and
Hannibal, — the great captain who had veiled the
world in battle smoke and tracked it round with
bloody footsteps, — was seized with a nervous trem
bling, and claimed the protection of the two policemen
by a cracked and dolorous cry. The fellows winked at
one another, laughed aside, and, patting Napoleon on
the back, took each an arm and led him away.

Death and fury ! Ha, villain, how came you hither?
Avaunt ! or I fling my inkstand at your head. Tush,
tush ; it is all a mistake. Pray, my dear friend, par
don this little outbreak. The fact is, the mention of
those two policemen, and their custody of Bonaparte,
had called up the idea of that odious wretch — you
remember him well — who was pleased to take such
gratuitous and impertinent care of my person before I
quitted New England. Forthwith up rose before my
mind's eye that same little whitewashed room, with
the iron-grated window, — strange that it should have
been iron-grated ! — where, in too easy compliance
with the absurd wishes of my relatives, I have wasted
several good years of my life. Positively it seemed
to me that I was still sitting there, and that the keeper
— not that he ever was my keeper neither, but only a
kind of intrusive devil of a body servant — had just
peeped in at the door. The rascal! I owe him an
old grudge, and will find a time to pay it yet. Fie !
fie ! The mere thought of him has exceedingly dis
composed me. Even now that hateful chamber — the
iron-grated window, which blasted the blessed sunshine
as it fell through the dusty panes and made it poison
to my soul — looks more distinct to my view than does
this my comfortable apartment in the heart of London.

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 419

The reality — that which I know to be such — hangs
like remnants of tattered scenery over the intolerably
prominent illusion. Let us think of it no more.

You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not
say, what is known to all the world, that this celebrated
poet has for many years past been reconciled to the
Church of England. In his more recent works he has
applied his fine powers to the vindication of the Chris
tian faith, with an especial view to that particular de
velopment. Latterly, as you may not have heard, he
has taken orders, and been inducted to a small country
living in the gift of the lord chancellor. Just now,
luckily for me, he has come to the metropolis to super
intend the publication of a volume of discourses treat
ing of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity
on the basis of the Thirty-Nine Articles. On my first
introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the
manner of combining what I had to say to the author
of Queen Mab, the Revolt of Islam, and Prometheus
Unbound with such acknowledgments as might be ac
ceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder
of the established church. But Shelley soon placed
me at my ease. Standing where he now does, and re
viewing all his successive productions from a higher
point, he assures me that there is a harmony, an order,
a regular procession, which enables him to lay his hand
upon any one of the earlier poems and say, " This is
my work," with precisely the same complacency of con
science wherewithal he contemplates the volume of dis
courses above mentioned. They are like the successive
steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth
of chaos, is as essential to the support of the whole as
the highest and final one resting upon the threshold of
the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what would

420 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps
of his staircase instead of building his way aloft into
the celestial brightness.

How all this may be I neither pretend to understand
nor greatly care, so long as Shelley has really climbed,
as it seems he has, from a lower region to a loftier
one. Without touching upon their religious merits, I
consider the productions of his maturity superior, as
poems, to those of his youth. They are warmer with
human love, which has served as an interpreter between
his mind and the multitude. The author has learned
to dip his pen oftener into his heart, and has thereby
avoided the faults into which a too exclusive use of
fancy and intellect are wont to betray him. Formerly
his page was often little other than a concrete arrange
ment of crystallizations, or even of icicles, as cold as
they were brilliant. Now you take it to your heart,
and are conscious of a heart warmth responsive to your
own. In his private character Shelley can hardly have
grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate, than his
friends always represented him to be up to that dis
astrous night when he was drowned in the Mediter
ranean. Nonsense, again — sheer nonsense ! What
am I babbling about ? I was thinking of that old fig
ment of his being lost in the Bay of Spezzia, and
washed ashore near Via Reggio, and burned to ashes
on a funeral pyre, with wine, and spices, and frankin
cense ; while Byron stood on the beach and beheld a
flame of marvellous beauty rise heavenward from the
dead poet's heart, and that his fire-purified relics were
finally buried near his child in Roman earth. If all
this happened three and twenty years ago, how could
I have met the drowned, and burned, and buried man
here in London only yesterday ?

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 421

Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr.
Reginald Heber, heretofore Bishop of Calcutta, but re
cently translated to a see in England, called on Shelley
while I was with him. They appeared to be on terms
of very cordial intimacy, and are said to have a joint
poem in contemplation. What a strange, incongruous
dream is the life of man !

Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel.
It will be issued entire by old John Murray in the
course of the present publishing season. The poet, I
hear, is visited with a troublesome affection of the
tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser stop, to
the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing
from his lips. He will not survive it above a month
unless his accumulation of ideas be sluiced off in some
other way. Wordsworth died only a week or two ago.
Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have
completed The Excursion ! Methinks I am sick of
everything he wrote except his Laodamia. It is very
sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom it
once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and
writes with his usual diligence. Old Gifford is still
alive in the extremity of age, and with most pitiable
decay of what little sharp and narrow intellect the
devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such
a man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It
takes away our speculative license of kicking him.

Keats ? No ; I have not seen him except across a
crowded street, with coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, om
nibuses, foot passengers, and divers other sensual ob
structions intervening betwixt his small and slender fig
ure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him
on the sea-shore, or beneath a natural arch of forest
trees, or the Gothic arch of an old cathedral, or among

422 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Grecian ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the verge
of evening, or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into
the dreary depths of which he would have led me by
the hand ; anywhere, in short, save at Temple Bar,
where his presence was blotted out by the porter-swol
len bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and
watched him fading away, fading away along the pave
ment, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual
man or a thought that had slipped out of my mind and
clothed itself in human form and habiliments merely
to beguile me. At one moment he put his handker
chief to his lips, and withdrew it, I am almost certain,
stained with blood. You never saw anything so frag
ile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life
felt the effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs
caused by the article on his Endymion in the Quarterly
Review, and which so nearly brought him to the grave.
Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost,
sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there
a friend, but never sending forth his voice to greet
the multitude. I can hardly think him a great poet.
The burden of a mighty genius would never have been
imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit
so infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron
sinews.

Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given
nothing to the world, is understood to have devoted
himself to the composition of an epic poem. Some
passages of it have been communicated to the inner
circle of his admirers, and impressed them as the
loftiest strains that have been audible on earth since
Milton's days. If I can obtain copies of these speci
mens, I will ask you to present them to James Russell
Lowell, who seems to be one of the poet's most fervent

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 423

and worthiest worshippers. The information took me
"by surprise. I had supposed that all Keats's poetic
incense, without being embodied in human language,
floated up to hea,ven and mingled with the songs of the
immortal choristers, who, perhaps, were conscious of
an unknown voice among them, and thought their
melody the sweeter for it. But it is not so ; he has
positively written a poem on the subject of Paradise
Regained, though in another sense than that which
presented itself to the mind of Milton. In com
pliance, it may be imagined, with the dogma of those
who pretend that all epic possibilities in the past his
tory of the world are exhausted, Keats has thrown
his poem forward into an indefinitely remote futurity.
He pictures mankind amid the closing circumstances
of the timelong warfare between good and evil. Our
race is on the eve of its final triumph. Man is within
the last stride of perfection ; Woman, redeemed from
the thraldom against which our sibyl uplifts so pow
erful and so sad a remonstrance, stands equal by his
side, or communes for herself with angels ; the Earth,
sympathizing with her children's happier state, has
clothed herself in such luxuriant and loving beauty
as no eye ever witnessed since our first parents saw
the sun rise over dewy Eden. Nor then indeed ; for
this is the fulfilment of what was then but a golden
promise. But the picture has its shadows. There
remains to mankind another peril — a last encounter
with the evil principle. Should the battle go against
as, we sink back into the slime and misery of ages.
If we triumph — But it demands a poet's eye to con
template the splendor of such a consummation and
not to be dazzled.

To this great work Keats is said to have brought

424 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

so deep and tender a spirit of humanity that the poem
has all the sweet and warm interest of a village tale
no less than the grandeur which befits so high a
theme. Such, at least, is the perhaps partial repre
sentation of his friends ; for I have not read or heard
even a single line of the performance in question,,
Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under
an idea that the age has not enough of spiritual in
sight to receive it worthily. I do not like this dis
trust ; it makes me distrust the poet. The universe
is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best
child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse
to listen, it is because he mumbles and stammers,
or discourses things unseasonable and foreign to the
purpose.

I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear
Canning, who, you know, is now a peer, with I forget
what title. He disappointed me. Time blunts both
point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his
order of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower
house and listened to a few words from Cobbett, who
looked as earthy as a real clod-hopper, or rather as
if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The
men whom I meet nowadays often impress me thus ;
probably because my spirits are not very good, and
lead me to think much about graves, with the long
grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry
bones of people who made noise enough in their day,
but now can only clatter, clatter, clatter when the sex
ton's spade disturbs them. Were it only possible to
find out who are alive and who dead, it would con
tribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of
my life somebody comes and stares me in the face
whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 425

men, and trusted nevermore to be pestered with the
sight or sound of him. For instance, going to Drury
Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose before
me, in the ghost of Hamlet's father, the bodily pres
ence of the elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have
died, in some drunken fit or other, so long ago that
his fame is scarcely traditionary now. His powers
are quite gone ; he was rather the ghost of himself
than the ghost of the Danish king.

In the stage box sat several elderly and decrepit
people, and among them a stately ruin of a woman
on a very large scale, with a profile — for I did not
see her front face — that stamped itself into my brain
as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture
with which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it
must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother, John Kemble,
sat behind — a broken-down figure, but still with a
kingly majesty about him. In lieu of all former
achievements, Nature enables him to look the part
of Lear far better than in the meridian of his genius.
Charles Matthews was likewise there ; but a paralytic
affection has distorted his once mobile countenance
into a most disagreeable one-sidedness, from which he
could no more wrench it into proper form than he
•could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It
looks as if, for the joke's sake, the poor man had
twisted his features into an expression at once the
most ludicrous and horrible that he could contrive,
and at that very moment, as a judgment for making
himself so hideous, an avenging Providence had seen
fit to petrify him. Since it is out of his own power.
I would gladly assist him to change countenance, for
his ugly visage haunts me both at noontide and night
time. Some other players of the past generation were

426 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

present, but none that greatly interested me. It be
hooves actors, more than all other men of publicity, to
vanish from the scene betimes. Being at best but
painted shadows flickering on the wall, and empty
sounds that echo another's thought, it is a sad disen
chantment when the colors begin to fade and the voice
to croak with age.

What is there new in the literary way on your side
of the water ? Nothing of the kind has come under
my inspection except a volume of poems published
above a year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before
know that this eminent writer is a poet ; nor does the
volume alluded to exhibit any of the characteristics
of the author's mind as displayed in his prose works ;
although some of the poems have a richness that is
not merely of the surface, but glows still brighter the
deeper and more faithfully you look into them. They
seem carelessly wrought, however, like those rings and
ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude, native
manufacture, which are found among the gold dust
from Africa. I doubt whether the American public
will accept them ; it looks less to the assay of metal
than to the neat and cunning manufacture. How
slowly our literature grows up ! Most of our writers
of promise have come to untimely ends. There was
that wild fellow, John Neal, who almost turned my
boyish brain with his romances ; he surely has long
been dead, else he never could keep himself so quiet,
Bryant has gone to his last sleep, with the Thanatop-
sis gleaming over him like a sculptured marble sepul
chre by moonlight. Halleck, who used to write queer
verses in the newspapers and published a Don Juanic
poem called Fanny, is defunct as a poet, though
averred to be exemplifying the metempsychosis as a

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 427

man of business. Somewhat later there was Whit-
tier, a fiery Quaker youth, to whom the muse had per
versely assigned a battle trumpet, and who got himself
lynched, ten years agone, in South Carolina. I re
member, too, a lad just from college, Longfellow by
name, who scattered some delicate verses to the winds,
and went to Germany, and perished, I think, of in
tense application, at the University of Gottingen.
Willis — what a pity ! — was lost, if I recollect rightly,
in 1833, on his voyage to Europe, whither he was
going to give us sketches of the world's sunny face.
If these had lived, they might, one or all of them,
have grown to be famous men.

And yet there is no telling ; it may be as well that
they have died. I was myself a young man of prom
ise. Oh shattered brain, oh broken spirit, where is
the f ulfilment of that promise ? The sad truth is, that,
when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes
away the hopef ulest mortals in their youth ; when it
would laugh the world's hopes to scorn, it lets them
live. Let me die upon this apothegm, for I shall
never make a truer one.

What a strange substance is the human brain! Or
rather, — for there is no need of generalizing the re
mark, — what an odd brain is mine! Would you
believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of
poetry humming in my intellectual ear — some as airy
as bird notes, and some as delicately neat as parlor
music, and a few as grand as organ peals — that
seem just such verses as those departed poets would
have written had not an inexorable destiny snatched
them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit,
perhaps desiring to engage my services as the aman
uensis of their posthumous productions, and thus se-

428 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

cure the endless renown that they have forfeited by
going hence too early. But I have my own business
to attend to ; and besides, a medical gentleman, who
interests himself in some little ailments of mine, ad
vises me not to make too free use of pen and ink.
There are clerks enough out of employment who would
be glad of such a job.

Good by! Are you alive or dead? and what are
you about ? Still scribbling for the Democratic ?
And do those infernal compositors and proof readers
misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as
ever? It is too bad. Let every man manufacture
his own nonsense, say I. Expect me home soon, and
— to whisper you a secret — in company with the
poet Campbell, who purposes to visit Wyoming and
enjoy the shadow of the laurels that he planted there.
Campbell is now an old man. He calls himself well,
better than ever in his life, but looks strangely pale,
and so shadow-like that one might almost poke a fin
ger through his densest material. I tell him, by way
of joke, that he is as dim and forlorn as Memory,
though as unsubstantial as Hope.

Your true friend, P.

P. S. — Pray present my most respectful regards to
our venerable and revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his
works, in a double-columned octavo volume, is shortly
to issue from the press at Philadelphia. Tell him
that no American writer enjoys a more classic reputa
tion on this side of the water. Is old Joel Barlow
yet alive ? Unconscionable man ! Why, he must
have nearly fulfilled his century. And does he med
itate an epic on the war between Mexico and Texas

P.'S CORRESPONDENCE. 429

with machinery contrived on the principle of the steam-
engine, as being the nearest to celestial agency that
our epoch can boast ? How can he expect ever to rise
again, if, while just sinking into his grave, he persists
in burdening himself with such a ponderosity of leaden
verses ?

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST.

ONCE upon a time — but whether in the time past
or time to come is a matter of little or no moment —
this wide world had become so overburdened with an
accumulation of wornout trumpery that the inhabi
tants determined to rid themselves of it by a general
bonfire. The site fixed upon at the representation of
the insurance companies, and as being as central a
spot as any other on the globe, was one of the broadest
prairies of the West, where no human habitation would
be endangered by the flames, and where a vast assem
blage of spectators might commodiously admire the
show. Having a taste for sights of this kind, and im
agining, likewise, that the illumination of the bonfire
, might reveal some profundity of moral truth hereto
fore hidden in mist or darkness, I made it convenient
to journey thither and be present. At my arrival,
although the heap of condemned rubbish was as yet
comparatively small, the torch had already been ap
plied. Amid that boundless plain, in the dusk of the
evening, like a far off star alone in the firmament,
there was merely visible one tremulous gleam, whence
none could have anticipated so fierce a blaze as was
destined to -ensue. With every moment, however,
there came foot travellers, women holding up their
aprons, men on horseback, wheelbarrows, lumbering
baggage wagons, and other vehicles, great and small,
and from far and near laden with articles that were
judged fit for nothing but to be burned.

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 431

" What materials have been used to kindle the
flame ? " inquired I of a by-stander ; for I was desirous
of knowing the whole process of the affair from begin
ning to end.

The person whom I addressed was a grave man, fifty
years old or thereabout, who had evidently come thither
as a looker on. He struck me immediately as having
weighed for himself the true value of life and its cir
cumstances, and therefore as feeling little personal in
terest in whatever judgment the world might form of
them. Before answering my question, he looked me in
the face by the kindling light of the fire.

" Oh, some very dry combustibles," replied he, " and
extremely suitable to the purpose — no other, in fact,
than yesterday's newspapers, last month's magazines,
and last year's withered leaves. Here now comes some
antiquated trash that will take fire like a handful of
shavings."

As he spoke some rough-looking men advanced to
the verge of the bonfire, and threw in, as it appeared,
all the rubbish of the herald's office — the blazonry of
coat armor, the crests and devices of illustrious fami
lies, pedigrees that extended back, like lines of light,
into the mist of the dark ages, together with stars, gar
ters, and embroidered collars, each of which, as paltry
a bawble as it might appear to the uninstructed eye,
had once possessed vast significance, and was still, in
truth, reckoned among the most precious of moral or
material facts by the worshippers of the gorgeous past.
Mingled with this confused heap, which was tossed
into the flames by armfuls at once, were innumerable
badges of knighthood, comprising those of all the Eu
ropean sovereignties, and Napoleon's decoration of the
Legion of Honor, the ribbons of which were entangled

432 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

with those of the ancient order of St. Louis. There,
too, were the medals of our own society of Cincinnati,
by means of which, as history tells us, an order of he
reditary knights came near being constituted out of
the king quellers of the revolution. And besides, there
were the patents of nobility of German counts and bar
ons, Spanish grandees, and English peers, from the
worm-eaten instruments signed by William the Con
queror down to the bran new parchment of the latest
lord who has received his honors from the fair hand of
Victoria.

At sight of the dense volumes of smoke, mingled
with vivid jets of flame, that gushed and eddied forth
from this immense pile of earthly distinctions, the mul
titude of plebeian spectators set up a joyous shout, and
clapped their hands with an emphasis that made the
welkin echo. That was their moment of triumph,
achieved, after long ages, over creatures of the same
clay and the same spiritual infirmities, who had dared
to assume the privileges due only to Heaven's better
workmanship. But now there rushed towards the blaz
ing heap a grayhaired man, of stately presence, wear
ing a coat, from the breast of which a star, or other
badge of rank, seemed to have been forcibly wrenched
away. He had not the tokens of intellectual power in
his face ; but still there was the demeanor, the habit
ual and almost native dignity, of one who had been
born to the idea of his own social superiority, and had
never felt it questioned till that moment.

" People," cried he, gazing at the ruin of what was
dearest to his eyes with grief and wonder, but never
theless with a degree of stateliness, — " people, what
have you done ? This fire is consuming all that marked
your advance from barbarism, or that could have pro-

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 433

vented your relapse thither. We, the men of the priv
ileged orders, were those who kept alive from age to
age the old chivalrous spirit ; the gentle and generous
thought ; the higher, the purer, the more refined and
delicate life. With the nobles, too, you cast off the
poet, the painter, the sculptor — all the beautiful arts ;
for we were their patrons, and created the atmosphere
in which they flourish. In abolishing the majestic dis
tinctions of rank, society loses not only its grace, but
its steadfastness" —

More he would doubtless have spoken ; but here
there arose an outcry, sportive, contemptuous, and in
dignant, that altogether drowned the appeal of the
fallen nobleman, insomuch that, casting one look of
despair at his own half-burned pedigree, he shrunk /
back into the crowd, glad to shelter himself under his*'
new-found insignificance.

" Let him thank his stars that we have not flung
him into the same fire ! " shouted a rude figure, spurn-
ing the embers with his foot. " And henceforth let
no man dare to show a piece of musty parchment as
his warrant for lording it over his fellows. If he
have strength of arm, well and good ; it is one species
of superiority. If he have wit, wisdom, courage,
force of character, let these attributes do for him what
they may ; but from this day forward no mortal must
hope for place and consideration by reckoning up the
mouldy bones of his ancestors. That nonsense is done
away."

" And in good time," remarked the grave observer
by my side, in a low voice, however, " if no worse •
nonsense comes in its place ; but, at all events, this!
species of nonsense has fairly lived out its life."

There was little space to muse or moralize over the
VOL. H. 28

434 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

embers of this time-honored rubbish ; for, before it
was half burned out, there came another multitude
from beyond the sea, bearing the purple robes of roy
alty, and the crowns, globes, and sceptres of emperors
and kings. All these had been condemned as useless
bawbles, playthings at best, fit only for the infancy of
the world or rods to govern and chastise it in its non
age, but with which universal manhood at its full-grown
stature could no longer brook to be insulted. Into
such contempt had these regal insignia now fallen
that the gilded crown and tinselled robes of the player
king from Drury Lane Theatre had been thrown in
among the rest, doubtless as a mockery of his brother
monarchs on the great stage of the world. It was a
strange sight to discern the crown jewels of England
glowing and flashing in the midst of the fire. Some
of them had been delivered down from the time of the
Saxon princes ; others were purchased with vast reve
nues, or perchance ravished from the dead brows of
the native potentates of Hindostan ; and the whole
now blazed with a dazzling lustre, as if a star had
fallen in that spot and been shattered into fragments.

The splendor of the ruined monarchy had no reflection
save in those inestimable precious stones. But enough
on this subject. It were but tedious to describe how the
Emperor of Austria's mantle was converted to tinder,
and how the posts and pillars of the French throne
became a heap of coals, which it was impossible to
distinguish from those of any other wood. Let me
add, however, that I noticed one of the exiled Poles
stirring up the bonfire with the Czar of Russia's seep
tre, which he afterwards flung into the flames.

" The smell of singed garments is quite intolerable
here," observed my new acquaintance, as the breeze

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 435

enveloped us in the smoke of a royal wardrobe. " Let
us get to windward and see what they are doing on
the other side of the bonfire."

We accordingly passed around, and were just in
time to witness the arrival of a vast procession of
Washingtonians, — as the votaries of temperance call
themselves nowadays, — accompanied by thousands of
the Irish disciples of Father Mathew, with that great
apostle at their head. They brought a rich contribu
tion to the bonfire — being nothing less than all the
hogsheads and barrels of liquor in the world, which
they rolled before them across the prairie.

"Now, my children," cried Father Mathew, when
they reached the verge of the fire, " one shove more,
and the work is done. And now let us stand off and
see Satan deal with his own liquor."

Accordingly, having placed their wooden vessels
within reach of the flames, the procession stood off at
a safe distance, and soon beheld them burst into a
blaze that reached the clouds and threatened to set
the sky itself on fire. And well it might; for here
was the whole world's stock of spirituous liquors, which,
instead of kindling a frenzied light in the eyes of indi
vidual topers as of yore, soared upwards with a bewil
dering gleam that startled all mankind. It was the
aggregate of that fierce fire which would otherwise
have scorched the hearts of millions. Meantime num
berless bottles of precious wine were flung into the
blaze, which lapped up the contents as if it loved
them, and grew, like other drunkards, the merrier and
fiercer for what it quaffed. Never again will the insa
tiable thirst of the fire fiend be so pampered. Here
were the treasures of famous bon vivants — liquors
that had been tossed on ocean, and mellowed in the

436 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

sun, and hoarded long in the recesses of the earth— -
the pale, the gold, the ruddy juice of whatever vine
yards were most delicate — the entire vintage of To
kay — all mingling in one stream with the vile fluids
of the common pothouse, and contributing to heighten
the selfsame blaze. And while it rose in a gigantic
spire that seemed to wave against the arch of the
firmament and combine itself with the light of stars,
the multitude gave a shout as if the broad earth were
exulting in its deliverance from the curse of ages.

But the joy was not universal. Many deemed that
human life would be gloomier than ever when that
brief illumination should sink down. While the re
formers were at work, I overheard muttered expostu
lations from several respectable gentlemen with red
noses and wearing gouty shoes ; and a ragged worthy,
whose face looked like a hearth where the fire is
burned out, now expressed his discontent more openly
and boldly.

" What is this world good for," said the last toper,
*' now that we can never be jolly any more ? What
is to comfort the poor man in sorrow and perplexity ?
How is he to keep his heart warm against the cold
winds of this cheerless earth? And what do you
propose to give him in exchange for the solace that
you take away ? How are old friends to sit together
by the fireside without a cheerful glass between them ?
A plague upon your reformation ! It is a sad world,
a cold world, a selfish world, a low world, not worth
an honest fellow's living in, now that good fellowship
is gone forever ! "

This harangue excited great mirth among the by
standers ; but, preposterous as was the sentiment, I
could not help commiserating the forlorn condition of

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 437

the last toper, whose boon companions had dwindled
away from his side, leaving the poor fellow without a
soul to countenance him in sipping his liquor, nor in
deed any liquor to sip. Not that this was quite the
true state of the case ; for I had observed him at a
critical moment filch a bottle of fourth-proof brandy
that fell beside the bonfire and hide it in his pocket.

The spirituous and fermented liquors being thus dis
posed of, the zeal of the reformers next induced them
to replenish the fire with all the boxes of tea and bags
of coffee in the world. And now came the planters
of Virginia, bringing their crops and tobacco. These,
being cast upon the heap of inutility, aggregated it to
the size of a mountain, and incensed the atmosphere
with such potent fragrance that methought we should
never draw pure breath again. The present sacrifice
seemed to startle the lovers of the weed more than any
that they had hitherto witnessed.

" Well, they 've put my pipe out," said an old gen
tleman flinging it into the flames in a pet. " What is
this world coming to ? Everything rich and racy —
all the spice of life — is to be condemned as useless.
Now that they have kindled the bonfire, if these non
sensical reformers would fling themselves into it, all
would be well enough ! "

" Be patient," responded a stanch conservative ; " it
will come to that in the end. They will first fling ua
in, and finally themselves."

From the general and systematic measures of re
form I now turned to consider the individual contri
butions to this memorable bonfire. In many instances
these were of a very amusing character. One poor
fellow threw in his empty purse, and another a bundle
af counterfeit or insolvable bank notes. Fashionable

438 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ladies threw in their last season's bonnets, together
with heaps of ribbons, yellow lace, and much other
half-worn milliner's ware, all of which proved even
more evanescent in the fire than it had been in the
fashion. A multitude of lovers of both sexes — dis
carded maids or bachelors and couples mutually weary
of one another — tossed in bundles of perfumed letters
and enamored sonnets. A hack politician, being de
prived of bread by the loss of. office, threw in his
teeth, which happened to be false ones. The Rev.
Sydney Smith — having voyaged across the Atlantic
for that sole purpose — came up to the bonfire with
a bitter grin and threw in certain repudiated bonds,
fortified though they were with the broad seal of a
sovereign state. A little boy of five years old, in the
premature manliness of the present epoch, threw in
his playthings ; a college graduate his diploma ; an
apothecary, ruined by the spread of homosopathy, his
whole stock of drugs and medicines ; a physician his
library ; a parson his old sermons ; and a fine gentle
man of the old school his code of manners, which he
had formerly written down for the benefit of the next
generation. A widow, resolving on a second mar
riage, slyly threw in her dead husband's miniature.
A young man, jilted by his mistress, would willingly
have flung his own desperate heart into the flames,
but could find no means to wrench it out of his bosom.
An American author, whose works were neglected by
the public, threw his pen and paper into the bonfire,
and betook himself to , some less discouraging occu
pation. It somewhat startled me to overhear a num
ber of ladies, highly respectable in appearance, pro
posing to fling their gowns and petticoats into the
flames, and assume the garb, together with the man

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 439

ners, duties, offices, and responsibilities, of the opposite
sex.

What favor was accorded to this scheme I am un
able to say, my attention being suddenly drawn to a
poor, deceived, and half -delirious girl, who, exclaim
ing that she was the most worthless thing alive or
dead, attempted to cast herself into the fire amid all
that wrecked and broken trumpery of the world. A
good man, however, ran to her rescue.

" Patience, my poor girl ! " said he, as he drew her
back from the fierce embrace of the destroying angel.
"Be patient, and abide Heaven's will. So long as
you possess a living soul, all may be restored to its
first freshness. These things of matter and creations
of human fantasy are fit for nothing but to be burned
when once they have had their day ; but your day is
eternity ! "

" Yes," said the wretched girl, whose frenzy seemed
now to have sunk down into deep despondency, —
•" yes and the sunshine is blotted out of it ! "

It was now rumored among the spectators that all
the weapons and munitions of war were to be thrown
into the bonfire, with the exception of the world's
stock of gunpowder, which, as the safest mode of dis
posing of it, had already been drowned in the sea.
This intelligence seemed to awaken great diversity of
opinion. The hopeful philanthropist esteemed it a
token that the millennium was already come; while
persons of another stamp, in whose view mankind was
a breed of bulldogs, prophesied that all the old stout
ness, fervor, nobleness, generosity, and magnanimity of
the race would disappear, — these qualities, as they af
firmed, requiring blood for their nourishment. They
comforted themselves, however, in the belief that the

440 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

proposed abolition of war was impracticable for any
length of time together.

Be that as it might, numberless great guns, whose
thunder had long been the voice of battle, — the artil
lery of the Armada, the battering trains of Marlbor-
ough, and the adverse cannon of Napoleon and Wel
lington, — were trundled into the midst of the fire. By
the continual addition of dry combustibles, it had now
waxed so intense that neither brass nor iron could
withstand it. It was wonderful to behold how these
terrible instruments of slaughter melted away like
playthings of wax. Then the armies of the earth
wheeled around the mighty furnace, with their mili
tary music playing triumphant marches, and flung
in their muskets and swords. The standard-bearers,
likewise, cast one look upward at their banners, all
tattered with shot holes and inscribed with the names
of victorious fields ; and, giving them a last flourish
on the breeze, they lowered them into the flame, which
snatched them upward in its rush towards the clouds.
This ceremony being over, the world was left without
a single weapon in its hands, except possibly a few
old king's arms and rusty swords and other trophies
of the Kevolution in some of our state armories. And
now the drums were beaten and the trumpets brayed
all together, as a prelude to the proclamation of uni
versal and eternal peace and the announcement that
glory was no longer to be won by blood, but that it
would henceforth be the contention of the human
race to work out the greatest mutual good, and that
beneficence, in the future annals of the earth, would
claim the praise of valor. The blessed tidings were
accordingly promulgated, and caused infinite rejoicings
among those who had stood aghast at the horror and
absurdity of war.

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 441

But I saw a grim smile pass over the seared visage
of a stately old commander, — by his warworn figure
and rich military dress, he might have been one of
Napoleon's famous marshals, — who, with the rest of
the world's soldiery, had just flung away the sword
that had been familiar to his right hand for half a
century.

" Ay ! ay ! " grumbled he. " Let them proclaim
what they please ; but, in the end, we shall find that
all this foolery has only made more work for the ar
morers and cannon founders."

" Why, sir," exclaimed I, in astonishment, " do you
imagine that the human race will ever so far return
on the steps of its past madness as to weld another
sword or cast another cannon ? "

" There will be no need," observed, with a sneer,
one who neither felt benevolence nor had faith in it.
" When Cain wished to slay his brother, he was at no
loss for a weapon."

"We shall see," replied the veteran commander.
" If I am mistaken, so much the better ; but in my
opinion, without pretending to philosophize about the
matter, the necessity of war lies far deeper than these
honest gentlemen suppose. What ! is there a field
for all the petty disputes of individuals? and shall
there be no great law court for the settlement of
national difficulties ? The battle field is the only court
where such suits can be tried."

" You forget, general," rejoined I, " that, in this
advanced stage of civilization, Reason and Philan
thropy combined will constitute just such a tribunal
as is requisite."

" Ah, I had forgotten that, indeed 1 " said the old
warrior, as he limped away.

442 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

The fire was now to be replenished with materials
that had hitherto been considered of even creator im-

O

portanee to the well being of society than the warlike
munitions which we had already seen consumed. A
body of reformers had travelled all over the earth in
quest of the machinery by which the different nations
were accustomed to inflict the punishment of death.
A shudder passed through the multitude as these
ghastly emblems were dragged forward. Even the
flames seemed at first to shrink away, displaying the
shape and murderous contrivance of each in a full
blaze of light, which of itself was sufficient to con
vince mankind of the long and deadly error of human
law. Those old implements of cruelty; those horri
ble monsters of mechanism ; those inventions which
seemed to demand something worse than man's nat
ural heart to contrive, and which had lurked in the
dusky nooks of ancient prisons, the subject of terror-
stricken legend, — were now brought forth to view.
Headsmen's axes, with the rust of noble and royal
blood upon them, and a vast collection of halters
that had choked the breath of plebeian victims, were
thrown in together. A shout greeted the arrival of
the guillotine, which was thrust forward on the same
wheels that had borne it from one to another of the
blood-stained streets of Paris. But the loudest roar
of applause went up, telling the distant sky of the
triumph of the earth's redemption, when the gallows
made its appearance. An ill-looking fellow, however,
rushed forward, and, putting himself in the path of
the reformers, bellowed hoarsely, and fought with
brute fury to stay their progress.

It was little matter of surprise, perhaps, that the
executioner should thus do his best to vindicate and

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 443

uphold the machinery by which he himself had his
livelihood and worthier individuals their death ; but
it deserved special note that men of a far different
sphere — even of that consecrated class in whose
guardianship the world is apt to trust its benevolence
— were found to take the hangman's view of the ques
tion.

" Stay, my brethren ! " cried one of them. " You
are misled by a false philanthropy ; you know not
what you do. The gallows is a Heaven-ordained in
strument. Bear it back, then, reverently, and set it
up in its old place, else the world will fall to speedy
ruin and desolation ! "

" Onward ! onward ! " shouted a leader in the re
form. " Into the flames with the accursed instrument
of man's blood policy ! How can human law inculcate
benevolence and love while it persists in setting up
the gallows as its chief symbol? One heave more?
good friends, and the world will be redeemed from
its greatest error."

A thousand hands, that nevertheless loathed the
touch, now lent their assistance, and thrust the omi
nous burden far, far into the centre of the raging
furnace. There its fatal and abhorred image was be
held, first black, then a red coal, then ashes.

" That was well done ! " exclaimed I.

" Yes, it was well done," replied, but with less en
thusiasm than I expected, the thoughtful observer who\
was still at my side ; " well done, if the world be good*
enough for the measure. Death, however, is an idea
that cannot easily be dispensed with in any condition
between the primal innocence and that other purity
and perfection which perchance we are destined to at
tain after travelling round the full circle ; but, at all

444 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

events, it is well that the experiment should now be
tried."

" Too cold ! too cold ! " impatiently exclaimed the
young and ardent leader in this triumph. " Let the
heart have its voice here as well as the intellect. And
as for ripeness, and as for progress, let mankind al
ways do the highest, kindest, noblest thing that, at
any given period, it has attained the perception of;
and surely that thing cannot be wrong nor wrongly
timed."

I know not whether it were the excitement of the
scene, or whether the good people around the bonfire
were really growing more enlightened every instant ;
but they now proceeded to measures in the full length
of which I was hardly prepared to keep them com
pany. For instance, some threw their marriage cer
tificates into the flames, and declared themselves can
didates for a higher, holier, and more comprehensive
union than that which had subsisted from the birth
of time under the form of the connubial tie. Others
hastened to the vaults of banks and to the coffers of
the rich, — all of which were open to the first comer
on this fated occasion, — and brought entire bales of
paper money to enliven the blaze, and tons of coin
to be melted down by its intensity. Henceforth, they
said, universal benevolence, uncoined and exhaustless,
was to be the golden currency of the world. At this
intelligence the bankers and speculators in the stocks
grew pale, and a pickpocket, who had reaped a rich
harvest among the crowd, fell down in a deadly faint
ing fit. A few men of business burned their day
books and ledgers, the notes and obligations of their
creditors, and all other evidences of debts due to them
selves ; while perhaps a somewhat larger number satis-

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 445

fied their zeal for reform with the sacrifice of any
uncomfortable recollection of their own indebtment.
There was then a cry that the period was arrived when
the title deeds of landed property should be given to
the flames, and the whole soil of the earth revert to the
public, from whom it had been wrongfully abstracted
and most unequally distributed among individuals.
Another party demanded that all written constitu
tions, set forms of government, legislative acts, statute
books, and everything else on which human invention
had endeavored to stamp its arbitrary laws, should at
once be destroyed, leaving the consummated world as
free as the man first created.

Whether any ultimate action was taken with re
gard to these propositions is beyond my knowledge ;
for, just then, some matters were in progress that con
cerned my sympathies more nearly.

" See ! see ! What heaps of books and pamphlets ! "
cried a fellow, who did not seem to be a lover of litera
ture. " Now we shall have a glorious blaze ! "

" That 's just the thing ! " said a modern philoso
pher. " Now we shall get rid of the weight of dead
men's thought, which has hitherto pressed so heavily
on the living intellect that it has been incompetent
to any effectual self-exertion. Well done, my lads I
Into the fire with them ! Now you are enlightening
the world indeed ! "

"But what is to become of the trade?" cried a
frantic bookseller.

" Oh, by all means, let them accompany their mer
chandise," coolly observed an author. " It will be a
noble funeral pile ! "

The truth was, that the human race had now reached
a stage of progress so far beyond what the wisest and

446 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

wittiest men of former ages had ever dreamed of that
it would have been a manifest absurdity to ai'ow the
earth to be any longer encumbered with their poor
achievements in the literary line. Accordingly a thor
ough and searching investigation had swept the book
sellers' shops, hawkers' stands, public, and private li
braries, and even the little book-shelf by the country
fireside, and had brought the world's entire mass of
printed paper, bound or in sheets, to swell the already
mountain bulk of our illustrious bonfire. Thick, heavy
folios, containing the labors of lexicographers, com
mentators and encyclopedists, were flung in, and fall
ing among the embers with a leaden thump, smoul-
dered away to ashes like rotten wood. The small,
richly gilt French tomes of the last age, with the hun
dred volumes of Voltaire among them, went off in a
brilliant shower of sparkles and little jets of flame ;
while the current literature of the same nation burned
red and blue, and threw an infernal light over the
visages of the spectators, converting them all to the
aspect of party-colored fiends. A collection of Ger
man stories emitted a scent of brimstone. The Eng
lish standard authors made excellent fuel, generally
exhibiting the properties of sound oak logs. Milton's
works, in particular, sent up a powerful blaze, grad
ually reddening into a coal, which promised to endure
longer than almost any other material of the pile.
From Shakespeare there gushed a flame of such mai-
! vellous splendor that men shaded their eyes as against
\ the sun's meridian glory ; nor even when the works of
his own elucidators were flung upon him did he cease
to flash forth a dazzling radiance from beneath the
ponderous heap. It is my belief that he is blazing as
fervidly as ever.

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 447

" Could a poet but light a lamp at that glorious
flame," remarked I, " he might then consume the mid
night oil to some good purpose."

" That is the very thing which modern poets have
been too apt to do, or at least to attempt," answered a
critic. " The chief benefit to be expected from this
conflagration of past literature undoubtedly is, that
writers will henceforth be compelled to light their
lamps at the sun or stars."

" If they can reach so high," said I ; " but that
task requires a giant, who may afterwards distribute
the light among inferior men. It is not every one
that can steal the fire from heaven like Prometheus ;
but, when once he had done the deed, a thousand
hearths were kindled by it."

It amazed me much to observe how indefinite was
the proportion between the physical mass of any given
author and the property of brilliant and long-continued
combustion. For instance, there was not a quarto vol
ume of the last century — nor, indeed, of the present —
that could compete in that particular with a child's
little gilt -covered book, containing Mother Goose's
Melodies. The Life and Death of Tom Thumb out
lasted the biography of Marlborough. An epic, indeed
a dozen of them, was converted to white ashes before
the single sheet of an old ballad was half consumed, j
In more than one case, too, when volumes of applauded
verse proved incapable of anything better than a sti
fling smoke, an unregarded ditty of some nameless
bard — perchance in the corner of a newspaper —
soared up among the stars with a flame as brilliant as
their own. Speaking of the properties of flame, me-
thought Shelley's poetry emitted a purer light than
almost any other productions of his day, contrasting

448 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

beautifully with the fitful and lurid gleams and gushes
of black vapor that flashed and eddied from the vol
umes of Lord Byron. As for Tom Moore, some of his
songs diffused an odor like a burning pastil.

I felt particular interest in watching the combustion
of American authors, and scrupulously noted by my
watch the precise number of moments that changed
most of them from shabbily-printed books to indistin
guishable ashes. It would be invidious, however, if
not perilous, to betray these awful secrets ; so that I
shall content myself with observing that it was not in
variably the writer most frequent in the public mouth
that made the most splendid appearance in the bonfire.
I especially remember that a great deal of excellent in
flammability was exhibited in a thin volume of poems
by Ellery Channing ; although, to speak the truth,
there were certain portions that hissed and spluttered
in a very disagreeable fashion. A curious phenom
enon occurred in reference to several writers, native
as well as foreign. Their books, though of highly
respectable figure, instead of bursting into a blaze, or
even smouldering out their substance in smoke, sud
denly melted away in a manner that proved them to
be ice.

If it be no lack of modesty to mention my own
works, it must here be confessed that I looked for
them with fatherly interest, but in vain. Too prob
ably they were changed to vapor by the first action of
the heat ; at best, I can only hope that, in their quiet
way, they contributed a glimmering spark or two to
the splendor of the evening.

" Alas ! and woe is me ! " thus bemoaned himself a
heavy-looking gentleman in green spectacles. "The
is utterly ruined, and there is nothing to live

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 449

for any longer. The business of my life is snatched
from me. Not a volume to be had for love or
money ! "

" This," remarked the sedate observer beside me,
" is a bookworm — one of those men who are born to
gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are cov
ered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward
fountain of ideas ; and, in good earnest, now that the
old stock is abolished, I do not see what is to become
of the poor fellow. Have you no word of comfort for/
him?"

" My dear sir," said I to the desperate bookworm, v^
" is not Natoe better than a book ? Is not the hu- ]
man heart deeper than any system of philosophy ? Is
not life replete with more instruction than past observ
ers have found it possible to write down in maxims ?
Be of good cheer. The great book of Time is still
spread wide open before us ; and, if we read it aright,
it will be to us a volume of eternal truth."

" Oh, my books, my books, my precious printed
books ! " reiterated the forlorn bookworm. " My only
reality was a bound volume ; and now they will not
leave me even a shadowy pamphlet ! "

In fact, the last remnant of the literature of all the
ages was now descending upon the blazing heap in
the shape of a cloud of pamphlets from the press of
the New World. These likewise were consumed in
the twinkling of an eye, leaving the earth, for the first
time since the days of Cadmus, free from the plague
of letters — an enviable field for the authors of the
next generation.

" Well, and does anything remain to be done ? *
inquired I somewhat anxiously. " Unless we set fire
to the earth itself, and then leap boldly off into in-

VOL. ii. 29

450 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

finite space, I know not that we can carry reform to
any farther point."

" You are vastly mistaken, my good friend," said
the observer. " Believe me, the fire will not be al
lowed to settle down without the addition of fuel that
will startle many persons who have lent a willing
hand thus far."

Nevertheless there appeared to be a relaxation of
effort for a little time, during which, probably, the
leaders of the movement were considering what should
be done next. In the interval, a philosopher threw his
theory into the flames, — a sacrifice which, by those
who knew how to estimate it, was pronounced the
most remarkable that had yet been made. The com
bustion, however, was by no means brilliant. Some
indefatigable people, scorning to take a moment's ease,
now employed themselves in collecting all the withered
leaves and fallen boughs of the forest, and thereby re
cruited the bonfire to a greater height than ever. But
this was mere by-play.

" Here comes the fresh fuel that I spoke of," said
my companion.

To my astonishment, the persons who now advanced
into the vacant space around the mountain fire bore
surplices and other priestly garments, mitres, crosiers,
and a confusion of Popish and Protestant emblems,
with which it seemed their purpose to consummate the
great act of faith. Crosses from the spires of old
cathedrals were cast upon the heap with as little re
morse as if the reverence of centuries, passing in long
array beneath the lofty towers, had not looked up to
them as the holiest of symbols. The font in which
infants were consecrated to God, the sacramental ves
sels whence piety received the hallowed draught, were

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 451

given to the same destruction. Perhaps it most nearly ,
touched my heart to see among these devoted relics/
fragments of the humble communion tables and uiidec-
orated pulpits which I recognized as having been torn
from the meeting-houses of New England. Those
simple edifices might have been permitted to retain all
of sacred embellishment that their Puritan founders
had bestowed, even though the mighty structure of St.
Peter's had sent its spoils to the fire of this terrible
sacrifice. Yet I felt that these were but the externals I
of religion, and might most safely be relinquished by
spirits that best knew their deep significance. »

" All is well," said I, cheerfully. " The woodpaths^ '
shall be the aisles of our cathedral, — the firmament
itself shall be its ceiling. What needs an earthly roof
between the Deity and his worshippers ? Our faith
can well afford to lose all the drapery that even the
holiest men have thrown around it, and be only the
more sublime in its simplicity."

•' True," said my companion ; " but will they pause
here?"

The doubt implied in his question was well founded,
In the general destruction of books already described,
a holy volume, that stood apart from the catalogue
of human literature, and yet, in one sense, was at its
head, had been spared. But the Titan of innovation,
— angel or fiend, double in his nature, and capable
of deeds befitting both characters, — at first shaking
down only the old and rotten shapes of things, had
now, as it appeared, laid his terrible hand upon the
main pillars which supported the whole edifice of our
moral and spiritual state. The inhabitants of the
earth had grown too enlightened to define their faith
within a form of words, or to limit the spiritual by

452 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

any analogy to our material existence. Truths which
the heavens trembled at were now but a fable of the
world's infancy. Therefore, as the final sacrifice of
human error, what else remained to be thrown upon
the embers of that awful pile except the book which,
though a celestial revelation to past ages, was but a
voice from a lower sphere as regarded the present
race of man ? It was done ! Upon the blazing heap
of falsehood and wornout truth — things that the
earth had never needed, or had ceased to need, or
had grown childishly weary of — fell the ponderous
church Bible, the great old volume that had lain so
long on the cushion of the pulpit, and whence the
pastor's solemn voice had given holy utterance on so
many a Sabbath day. There, likewise, fell the family
Bible, which the long-buried patriarch had read to hid
children, — in prosperity or sorrow, by the fireside and
in the summer shade of trees, — and had bequeathed
downward as the heirloom of generations. There fell
the bosom Bible, the little volume that had been the
soul's friend of some sorely-tried child of dust, who
thence took courage, whether his trial were for life or
death, steadfastly confronting both in the strong as
surance of immortality.

All these were flung into the fierce and riotous
blaze; and then a mighty wind came roaring across
the plain with a desolate howl, as if it were the angry
lamentation of the earth for the loss of heaven's sun«
shine ; and it shook the gigantic pyramid of flame and
scattered the cinders of half-consumed abominations
around upon the spectators.

" This is terrible ! " said I, feeling that my cheek
grew pale, and seeing a like change in the visages
about me.

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 453

" Be of good courage yet," answered the man with
whom I had so often spoken. He continued to gaze
steadily at the spectacle with a singular calmness, as
if it concerned him merely as an observer. " Be of
good courage, nor yet exult too much; for there is
far less both of good and evil in the effect of this bon
fire than the world might be willing to believe."

"How can that be?" exclaimed I, impatiently.
" Has it not consumed everything ? Has it not swal
lowed up or melted down every human or divine ap
pendage of our mortal state that had substance enough
to be acted on by fire ? Will there be anything left
us to-morrow morning better or worse than a heap of
embers and ashes ? "

"Assuredly there will," said my grave friend.
" Come hither to-morrow morning, or whenever the
combustible portion of the pile shall be quite burned
out, and you will find among the ashes everything
really valuable that you have seen cast into the flames.
Trust me, the world of to-morrow will again enrich
itself with the gold and diamonds which have beei^
cast off by the world of to-day. Not a truth is de
stroyed nor buried so deep among the ashes but it will
be raked up at last."

This was a strange assurance. Yet I felt inclined
to credit it, the more especially as I beheld among
the wallowing flames a copy of the Holy Scriptures,
the pages of which, instead of being blackened into
tinder, only assumed a more dazzling whiteness as
the finger marks of human imperfection were purified
away. Certain marginal notes and commentaries, it
is true, yielded to the intensity of the fiery test, but
without detriment to the smallest syllable that had
flamed from the pen of inspiration.

454 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Yes ; there is the proof of what you say," an
swered I, turning to the observer ; "but if only what
is evil can feel the action of the fire, then, surely, the
conflagration has been of inestimable utility. Yet, if
I understand aright, you intimate a doubt whether the
world's expectation of benefit would be realized by it."

"Listen to the talk of these worthies," said he,
pointing to a group in front of the blazing pile ; " pos
sibly they may teach you something useful without
intending it."

The persons whom he indicated consisted of that
brutal and most earthy figure who had stood forth so
furiously in defence of the gallows, — the hangman, in
short, — together with the last thief and the last mur
derer, all three of whom were clustered about the last
toper. The latter was liberally passing the brandy
bottle, which he had rescued from the general destruc
tion of wines and spirits. This little convivial party
seemed at the lowest pitch of despondency, as consid
ering that the purified world must needs be utterly
unlike the sphere that they had hitherto known, and
therefore but a strange and desolate abode for gentle
men of their kidney.

" The best counsel for all of us is," remarked the
hangman, " that, as soon as we have finished the last
drop of liquor, I help you, my three friends, to a com
fortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang my
self on the same bough. This is no world for us any
longer."

" Poh, poh, my good fellows ! " said a dark-complex
ioned personage, who now joined the group, — his com
plexion was indeed fearfully dark, and his eyes glowed
with a redder light than that of the bonfire ; " be not
tio cast down, my dear friends ; you shall see good

EARTH'S HOLOCAUST. 455

days yet. There 's one thing that these wiseacres
have forgotten to throw into the fire, and without
which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing
at all ; yes, though they had burned the earth itself to
a cinder."

"And what may that be?" eagerly demanded the
last murderer.

" What but the human heart itself? " said the dark-^
visaged stranger, with a portentous grin. " And, un
less they hit upon some method of purifying that foul
cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of
wrong and misery — the same old shapes or worse
ones — which they have taken such a vast deal of
trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this
livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole
business. Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old
world yet! "

This brief conversation supplied me with a theme
for lengthened thought. How sad a truth, if true it
were, that man's agelong endeavor for perfection had
served only to render him the mockery of the evil
principle, from the fatal circumstance of an error at
the very root of the matter ! The heart, the heart, — ,
there was the little yet boundless sphere wherein ex
isted the original wrong of which the crime and
misery of this outward world were merely types.
Purify that inward sphere, and the many shapes of /
evil that haunt the outward, and which now seem
almost our only realities, will turn to shadowy phan
toms and vanish of their own accord ; but if we go
no deeper than the intellect, and strive, with merely /
that feeble instrument, to discern and rectify what is
wrong, our whole accomplishment will be a dream, so
unsubstantial that it matters little whether the bon-

456 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

fire, which I have so faithfully described, were what
we choose to call a real event and a flame that would
scorch the finger, or only a phosphoric radiance and a
parable of my own brain.

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK.

AT HOME.

FROM infancy I was under the guardianship of a
village parson, who made me the subject of daily
prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes, using
no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, be
tween myself and his own three boys. The result, it
must be owned, has been very different in their cases
and mine, they being all respectable men and well set
tled in life ; the eldest as the successor to his father's
pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a
partner in a wholesale shoe store ; while I, with better
prospects than either of them, have run the course
which this volume will describe. Yet there is room
for doubt whether I should have been any better con
tented with such success as theirs than with my own
misfortunes — at least, till after my experience of the
latter had made it too late for another trial.

My guardian had a name of considerable eminence,
and fitter for the place it occupies in ecclesiastical his
tory than for so frivolous a page as mine. In his own
vicinity, among the lighter part of his hearers, he was
called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Cer
tainly, if his powers as a preacher were to be estimated
by the damage done to his pulpit furniture, none of
bis living brethren, and but few dead ones, would have
been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after

458 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

him. Such pounding and expounding the moment he
began to grow warm, such slapping with his open
palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with
the whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that
/ he held, in imagination, either the Old Nick or some
Unitarian infidel at bay, and belabored his unhappy
cushion as proxy for those abominable adversaries.
Nothing but this exercise of the body while delivering
his sermons could have supported the good parson's
health under the mental toil which they cost him in
composition.

Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart,
and some called it a warm one, he was invariably
stern and severe, on principle, I suppose, to me. With
late justice, though early enough, even now, to be
tinctured with generosity, I acknowledge him to have
been a good and wise man after his own fashion. If
his management failed as to myself, it succeeded with
his three sons ; nor, I must frankly say, could any
mode of education with which it was possible for him
to be acquainted have made me much better than what
I was or led me to a happier fortune than the present.
He could neither change the nature that God gave me
nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar char
acter. Perhaps it was my chief misfortune that I had
neither father nor mother alive ; for parents have an
instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their
children, and the child feels a confidence both in the
wisdom and affection of his parents which he cannot
transfer to any delegate of their duties, however con
scientious. An orphan's fate is hard, be he rich or
poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see
the old gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and
sorrowfully at me, holding out his hand as if each had

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 459

something to forgive. With such kindness and such
forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next
meeting be !

I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with
an incorrigible levity of spirit, of no vicious propensi
ties, sensible enough, but wayward and fanciful. What
a character was this to be brought in contact with the
stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian ! We were at
variance on a thousand points ; but our chief and final
dispute arose from the pertinacity with which he in
sisted on my adopting a particular profession ; while I,
being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of
life. This would have been a dangerous resolution
anywhere in the world ; it was fatal in New England.
There is a grossness in the conceptions of my country
men ; they will not be convinced that any good thing
may consist with what they call idleness; they can
anticipate nothing but evil of a young man who neither
studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor
takes to farming but manifests an incomprehensible
disposition to be satisfied with what his father left him.
The principle is excellent in its general influence, but
most miserable in its effect on the few that violate it.
I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt
as if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town
paupers, — with the drunken poet who hawked his
own Fourth of July odes, and the broken soldier who
had been good for nothing since last war. The conse
quence of all this was a piece of light-hearted desper
ation.

I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it
for granted that many of my readers must have heard
of me in the wild way of life which I adopted. The

460 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

idea of becoming a wandering story teller had been
suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with
several merry vagabonds in a showman's wagon, where
they and I had sheltered ourselves during a summer
shower. The project was not more extravagant than
most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are
executed every day; and, not to mention my proto
types in the East, and the wandering orators and poets
whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of
one illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere, — of
Goldsmith, who planned and performed his travels
through France and Italy on a less promising scheme
than mine. I took credit to myself for various qualifi
cations, mental and personal, suited to the undertak
ing. Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for
employment, keeping up an irregular activity even in
sleep, and making me conscious that I must toil, if it
were but in catching butterflies. But my chief mo
tives were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge
against Parson Thumpcushion, who would rather have
laid me in my father's tomb than seen me either a nov
elist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit upon
a method of uniting. After all it was not half so
foolish as if I had written romances instead of reciting
them.

The following pages will contain a picture of my
vagrant life, intermixed with specimens, generally
brief and slight, of that great mass of fiction to which
I gave existence, and which has vanished like cloud
shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pe
cuniary reward, I was accustomed to exercise my nar
rative faculty wherever chance had collected a little
audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals were
useful in testing the strong points of my stories ; and,

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 461

indeed, the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abun
dantly that its indulgence was its own reward, though
the hope of praise also became a powerful incitement.
Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought
as I did then, let me beseech the reader to believe that
my tales were not always so cold as he may find them
now. With each specimen will be given a sketch of
the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus
my airdrawn pictures will be set in frames perhaps
more valuable than the pictures themselves, since they
will be embossed with groups of characteristic figures,
amid the lake and mountain scenery, the villages and
fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book
for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming
youth may profit by, though it is the experience of a
wandering story teller.

A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.

I set out on my rambles one morning in June about
sunrise. The day promised to be fair, though at that
early hour a heavy mist lay along the earth and set
tled in minute globules on the folds of my clothes, so
that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost.
The sky was quite obscured, and the trees and houses
invisible till they grew out of the fog as I came close
upon them. There is a hill towards the west whence
the road goes abruptly down, holding a level course
through the village and ascending an eminence on the
other side, behind which it disappears. The whole
view comprises an extent of half a mile. Here I
paused and, while gazing through the misty veil, it
partially rose and swept away with so sudden an effect
that a gray cloud seemed to have taken the aspect of
* small white town. A thin vapor being still diffused

462 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

through the atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of
fog, whether hung in air or based on earth, appeared
not less substantial than the edifices, and gave their
own indistinctness to the whole. It was singular that
such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.

Half of the parson's dwelling was a dingy white
house, and half of it was a cloud ; but Squire Moody's
mansion, the grandest in the village, was wholly visi
ble, even the lattice work of the balcony under the
front window; while in another place only two red
chimneys were seen above the mist, appertaining to
my own paternal residence, then tenanted by stran
gers. I could not remember those with whom I had
dwelt there, not even my mother. The brick edifice
of the bank was in the clouds ; the foundations of
what was to be a great block of buildings had van
ished, ominously, as it proved ; the dry goods store of
Mr. Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern ; and Do-
minicus Pike's tobacco manufactory an affair of
smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian chief
in front. The white spire of the meeting-house as
cended out of the densest heap of vapor, as if that
shadowy base were its only support ; or, to give a
truer interpretation, the steeple was the emblem of
Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet pointing to
a cloudless atmosphere, and catching the brightness of
the east on its gilded vane.

As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with
grassy intervals and a border of trees between the
wheel track and the sidewalks, all so indistinct, and not
to be traced without an effort, the, whole seemed more
like memory than reality. I would have imagined
that years had already passed, and I was far away,
contemplating that dim picture of my native place,

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 463

tfhich I should retain in my mind through the mist of
time. No tears fell from my eyes among the dew-
drops of the morning ; nor does it occur to me that I
heaved a sigh. In truth, I had never felt such a de
licious excitement, nor known what freedom was, till
that moment when I gave up my home and took the
whole world in exchange, fluttering the wings of my
spirit as if I would have flown from one star to another
through the universe. I waved my hand towards tho
dusky village, bade it a joyous farewell, and turned
away to follow any path but that which might lead me
back. Never was Childe Harold's sentiment adopted
in a spirit more unlike his own.

Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote. Re
collecting how the knight and Sancho had watched for
auguries when they took the road to Toboso, I began,
between jest and earnest, to feel a similar anxiety. It
was gratified, and by a more poetical phenomenon
than the braying of the dappled ass or the neigh of
Rosinante. The sun, then just above the horizon,
shone faintly through the fog, and formed a species of
rainbow in the west, bestriding my intended road like
a gigantic portal. I had never known before that a
bow could be generated between the sunshine and the
morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible
hues, but was a mere unpainted framework, as white
and ghostlike as the lunar rainbow, which is deemed
ominous of evil. But, with a light heart to which all
omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the misty
archway of futurity.

I had determined not to enter on my profession
within a hundred miles of home, and then to cover
myself with a fictitious name. The first precaution
*as reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson Thump

464 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

cushion might have put an untimely catastrophe to my
story ; but as nobody would be much affected by my
disgrace, and all was to be suffered in my own person,
1 know not why I cared about a name. For a week
or two I travelled almost at random, seeking hardly
any guidance except the whirling of a leaf at some
turn of the road, or the green bough that beckoned
me, or the naked branch that pointed its withered
finger onward. All my care was to be farther from
home each night than the preceding morning.

A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.

One day at noontide, when the sun had burst sud
denly out of a cloud and threatened to dissolve me, I
looked round for shelter, whether of tavern, cottage,
barn, or shady tree. The first which offered itself was
a wood — not a forest, but a trim plantation of young
oaks, growing just thick enough to keep the mass of
sunshine out, while they admitted a few straggling
beams, and thus produced the most cheerful gloom im
aginable. A brook, so small and clear, and appar
ently so cool, that I wanted to drink it up, ran under
the road through a little arch of stone without once
meeting the sun in its passage from the shade on one
side to the shade on the other. As there was a step-
ping-place over the stone wall, and a path along the
rivulet, I followed it and discovered its source — a
spring gushing out of an old barrel.

In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended
from the branch of a tree, a stick leaning against the
trunk, and a person seated on the grassy verge of the
spring, with his back towards me. He was a slender
figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of
the finest nor very fashionably cut. On hearing my

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 465

footsteps he started up rather nervously, and, turning
round, showed the face of a young man about my own
age, with his finger in a volume which he had been
reading till my intrusion. His book was evidently a
pocket Bible. Though I piqued myself at that period
on my great penetration into people's characters and
pursuits, I could not decide whether this young man in
black were an unfledged divine from Andover, a col
lege student, or preparing for college at some acad
emy. In either case I would quite as willingly have
found a merrier companion ; such, for instance, as the
comedian with whom Gil Bias shared his dinner be
side a fountain in Spain.

After a nod which was duly returned, I made a gob
let of oak leaves, filled and emptied it two or three
times, and then remarked, to hit the stranger's classi
cal associations, that this beautiful fountain ought to
flow from an urn instead of an old barrel. He did
not show that he understood the allusion, and replied
very briefly, with a shyness that was quite out of place
between persons who met in such circumstances. Had
he treated my next observation in the same way, we
should have parted without another word.

" It is very singular," said I, — " though doubtless
there are good reasons for it, — that Nature should
provide drink so abundantly, and lavish it everywhere
by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat. Why
should we not find a loaf of bread on this tree as well
as a barrel of good liquor at the foot of it ? "

" There is a loaf of bread on the tree," replied the
stranger, without even smiling at a coincidence which
made me laugh. " I have something to eat in my
bundle ; and, if you can make a dinner with me, you
shall be welcome."

466 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" I accept your offer with pleasure," said I. " A
pilgrim such as I am must not refuse a providential
meal."

The young man had risen to take his bundle from
the branch of the tree, but now turned round and re
garded me with great earnestness, coloring deeply at
the same time. However, he said nothing, and pro
duced part of a loaf of bread and some cheese, the
former being evidently home-baked, though some days
out of the oven. The fare was good enough, with a
real welcome, such as his appeared to be. After
spreading these articles on the stump of a tree, he
proceeded to ask a blessing on our food, an unex
pected ceremony, and quite an impressive one at our
woodland table, with the fountain gushing beside us
and the bright sky glimmering through the boughs ;
nor did his brief petition affect me less because his
embarrassment made his voice tremble. At the end of
the meal he returned thanks with the same tremulous
fervor.

He felt a natural kindness for me after thus reliev
ing my necessities, and showed it by becoming less re
served. On my part, I professed never to have rel
ished a dinner better; and, in requital of the stran
ger's hospitality, solicited the pleasure of his company
to supper.

" Where ? At your home ? " asked he.

" Yes," said I, smiling.

"Perhaps our roads are not the same," observed he.

" Oh, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss
my way," answered I. " This morning I breakfasted
at home ; I shall sup at home to-night ; and a moment
ago I dined at home. To be sure, there was a certain
place which I called home ; but I have resolved not to

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 467

see it again till I have been quite round the globe and
enter the street on the east as I left it on the west.
In the mean time, I have a home everywhere or no
where, just as you please to take it."

" Nowhere, then ; for this transitory world is not
our home," said the young man, with solemnity. " We
are all pilgrims and wanderers ; but it is strange that
we two should meet."

I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could
obtain no satisfactory reply. But we had eaten salt
together, and it was right that we should form ac
quaintance after that ceremony as the Arabs of the
desert do, especially as he had learned something
about myself, and the courtesy of the country entitled
me to as much information in return. I asked whither
he was travelling.

" I do not know," said he ; " but God knows."

" That is strange ! " exclaimed I ; " not that God
should know it, but that you should not. And how is
your road to be pointed out ? "

" Perhaps by an inward conviction," he replied,
looking sideways at me to discover whether I smiled ;
" perhaps by an outward sign."

" Then, believe me," said I, " the outward sign is
already granted you, and the inward conviction ought
to follow. We are told of pious men in old times who
committed themselves to the care of Providence, and
saw the manifestation of its will in the slightest cir
cumstances, as in the shooting of a star, the flight of a
bird, or the course taken by some brute animal. Some
times even a stupid ass was their guide. May not I
be as good a one ? "

" I do not know," said the pilgrim, with perfect sim
plicity.

468 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

We did, however, follow the same road, and were
not overtaken, as I partly apprehended, by the keepers
of any lunatic asylum in pursuit of a stray patient.
Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my sanity
as I did of his, though certainly with less justice, since
I was fully aware of my own extravagances, while he
acted as wildly and deemed it heavenly wisdom. We
were a singular couple, strikingly contrasted, yet cu
riously assimilated, each of us remarkable enough by
himself, and doubly so in the other's company. With
out any formal compact, we kept together day after
day till our union appeared permanent. Even had I
seen nothing to love and admire in him, I could never
have thought of deserting one who needed me continu
ally ; for I never knew a person, not even a woman,
so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he was — so
painfully shy, so easily discouraged by slight obstacles,
and so often depressed by a weight within himself.

I was now far from my native place, but had not
yet stepped before the public. A slight tremor seized
me whenever I thought of relinquishing the immuni
ties of a private character, and giving every man, and
for money too, the right, which no man yet possessed,
of treating me with open scorn. But about a week
after contracting the above alliance I made my bow
to an audience of nine persons, seven of whom hissed
me in a very disagreeable manner, and not without
good cause. Indeed, the failure was so signal that it
would have been mere swindling to retain the money,
which had been paid on my implied contract to give
its value of amusement. So I called in the door
keeper, bade him refund the whole receipts, a mighty
sum, and was gratified with the round of applause
by way of offset to the hisses. This event would

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 469

have looked most horrible in anticipation, — a thing
to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or hide
himself in caverns where he might not see his own
burning blush ; but the reality was not so very hard
to bear. It is a fact that I was more deeply grieved
by an almost parallel misfortune which happened to
my companion on the same evening. In my own
behalf I was angry and excited, not depressed; my
blood ran quick, my spirits rose buoyantly, and I had
never felt such a confidence of future success and de
termination to achieve it as at that trying moment.
I resolved to persevere, if it were only to wring the
reluctant praise from my enemies.

Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficul
ties of my idle trade ; now I recognized that it de
manded nothing short of my whole powers, cultivated
to the utmost, and exerted with the same prodigality
as if I were speaking for a great party or for the
nation at large on the floor of the Capitol. No talent
or attainment could come amiss ; everything, indeed,
was requisite — wide observation, varied knowledge,
deep thoughts, and sparkling ones ; pathos and levity,
and a mixture of both, like sunshine in a raindrop ;
lofty imagination, veiling itself in the garb of common
life ; and the practised art which alone could render
these gifts, and more than these, available. Not that
I ever hoped to be thus qualified. But my despair
was no ignoble one, for knowing the impossibility of
satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied,
I did my best to overcome it ; investigated the causes
of every defect ; and strove, with patient stubbornness,
to remove them in the next attempt. It is one of my
few sources of pride, that, ridiculous as the object was,
I followed it up with the firmness and energy of a
man.

470 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

I manufactured a great variety of plots and skele
tons of tales, and kept them ready for use, leaving the
filling up to the inspiration of the moment ; though I
cannot remember ever to have told a tale .which did
not vary considerably from my preconceived idea, and
acquire a novelty of aspect as often as I repeated it.
Oddly enough, my success was generally in proportion
to the difference between the conception and accom
plishment. I provided two or more commencements
and catastrophes to many of the tales, — a happy ex
pedient, suggested by the double sets of sleeves and
trimmings which diversified the suits in Sir Piercy
Shafton's wardrobe. But my best efforts had a unity,
a wholeness, and a separate character that did not ad
mit of this sort of mechanism.

THE VILLAGE THEATRE.

About the first of September my fellow-traveller
and myself arrived at a country town, where a small
company of actors, on their return from a summer's
campaign in the British provinces, were giving a
series of dramatic exhibitions. A moderately sized
hall of the tavern had been converted into a theatre.
The performances that evening were, The Heir at
Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the recitation
of Alexander's Feast between the play and farce.
The house was thin and dull. But the next day there
appeared to be brighter prospects, the play-bills an
nouncing at every corner, on the town pump, and —
awful sacrilege! — on the very door of the meeting
house, an Unprecedented Attraction ! After setting
forth the ordinary entertainments of a theatre, the
public were informed, in the hugest type that the
printing-office could supply, that the manager had

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 471

been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement
with the celebrated Story Teller. He would make
his first appearance that evening, and recite his fa
mous tale of Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe, which
had been received with rapturous applause by au
diences in all the principal cities. This outrageous
flourish of trumpets, be it known, was wholly un
authorized by me, who had merely made an engage
ment for a single evening, without assuming any more
celebrity than the little I possessed. As for the tale,
it could hardly have been applauded by rapturous au
diences, being as yet an unfilled plot ; nor even when
I stepped upon the stage was it decided whether Mr.
Higginbotham should live or die.

In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills
which announced the Story Teller, was pasted a small
slip of paper, giving notice, in tremulous characters,
of a religious meeting to be held at the school-house,
where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.

In the evening, after the commencement of the trag
edy of Douglas, I took a ramble through the town to
quicken my ideas by active, motion. My spirits were
good, with a certain glow of mind which I had al
ready learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic
of success. Passing a small and solitary school-house,
where a light was burning dimly and a few people
were entering the door, I went in with them, and saw
my friend Eliakim at the desk. He had collected
about fifteen hearers, mostly females. Just as I en
tered he was beginning to pray in accents so low and
interrupted that he seemed to doubt the reception of
his efforts both with God and man. There was room
for distrust in regard to the latter. At the conclusion

472 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

of the prayer several of the little audience went out,
leaving him to begin his discourse under such discour
aging circumstances, added to his natural and agoniz
ing diffidence. Knowing that my presence on these
occasions increased his embarrassment, I had stationed
myself in a dusky place near the door, and now stole
softly out.

On my return to the tavern the tragedy was al
ready concluded ; and, being a feeble one in itself and
indifferently performed, it left so much the better
chance for the Story Teller. The bar was thronged
with customers, the toddy stick keeping a continual
tattoo ; while in the hall there was a broad, deep,
buzzing sound, with an occasional peal of impatient
thunder, — all symptoms of an overflowing house and
an eager audience. I drank a glass of wine and
water, and stood at the side scene conversing with a
young person of doubtful sex. If a gentleman, how
could he have performed the singing girl the night
before in No Song, no Supper? Or, if a lady, why
did she enact Young Norval, and now wear a green
coat and white pantaloons in the character of Little
Pickle ? In either case the dress was pretty and the
wearer bewitching ; so that, at the proper moment, I
stepped forward with a gay heart and a bold one;
while the orchestra played a tune that had resounded
at many a country ball, and the curtain as it rose dis
covered something like a country bar-room. Such a
scene was well enough adapted to such a tale.

The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two
fiddles and a clarinet ; but, if the whole harmony of
the Tremont had been there, it might have swelled in
vain beneath the tumult of applause that greeted me.
The good people of the town, knowing that the world

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 473

contained innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed
of by them, took it for granted that I was one, and
that their roar of welcome was but a feeble echo of
those which had thundered around me in lofty thea
tres. Such an enthusiastic uproar was never heard.
Each person seemed a Briareus clapping a hundred
hands, besides keeping his feet and several cudgels in
play with stamping and thumping on the floor ; while
the ladies flourished their white cambric handker
chiefs, intermixed with yellow and red bandanna, like
the flags of different nations. After such a saluta
tion, the celebrated Story Teller felt almost ashamed
to produce so humble an affair as Mr. Higginbotham's
Catastrophe.

This story was originally more dramatic than as
there presented, and afforded good scope for mimicry
and buffoonery, neither of which, to my shame, did I
spare. I never knew the " magic of a name " till I
used that of Mr. Higginbotham. Often as I repeated
it, there were louder bursts of merriment than those
which responded to what, in my opinion, were more
legitimate strokes of humor. The success of the piece
was incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horse
hair, which Little Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-
loving character, had fastened to my collar, where,
unknown to me, it kept making the queerest gestures
of its own in correspondence with all mine. The au
dience, supposing that some enormous joke was ap
pended to this long tail behind, were ineffably de
lighted, and gave way to such a tumult of approbation
that, just as the story closed, the benches broke be
neath them and left one whole row of my admirers on
the floor. Even in that predicament they continued
their applause. In after times, when I had grown a

474 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

bitter moralizer, I took this scene for an example how
much of fame is humbug; how much the meed of
what our better nature blushes at ; how much an ac
cident ; how much bestowed on mistaken principles ;
and how small and poor the remnant. From pit and
boxes there was now a universal call for the Story
TeUer.

That celebrated personage came not when they did
call to him. As I left the stage, the landlord, being
also the postmaster, had given me a letter with the
postmark of my native village, and directed to my
assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson
Thumpcushion. Doubtless he had heard of the rising
renown of the Story Teller, and conjectured at once
that such a nondescript luminary could be no other
than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read
it, affected me most painfully. I seemed to see the
Puritanic figure of my guardian standing among the
fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the players,
— the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted
women, the giddy girl in boy's clothes, merrier than
modest, — pointing to these with solemn ridicule, and
eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type
of the austere duty, and they of the vanities of life.

I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held
it unopened in my hand while the applause of my
buffoonery yet sounded through the theatre. Another
train of thought came over me. The stern old man
appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sor
row, softening his authority with love as a father
might, and even bending his venerable head, as if to
say that my errors had an apology in his own mis
taken discipline. I strode twice across the chamber,
flien held the letter in the flame of the candle, and

PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK. 475

beheld it consume unread. It is fixed in my mind,
and was so at the time, that he had addressed me in a
style of paternal wisdom, and love, and reconciliation,
which I could not have resisted had I but risked the
trial. The thought still haunts me that then I made j
my irrevocable choice between good and evil fate.

Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my
mind, and indisposed me to the present exercise of my
profession, I left the town, in spite of a laudatory
critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the lib
eral offers of the manager. As we walked onward,
following the same road, on two such different errands,
Eliakim groaned in spirit, and labored with tears to
convince me of the guilt and madness of my life.

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY.

THE NOTCH OF THE WHITE MOUNTAINS.

IT was now the middle of September. We hntK
come since sunrise from Ejartlett, passing up through
the valley of the Saco, which extends between moun
tainous walls, sometimes with a steep ascent, but often
as level as a church aisle. All that day and two pre
ceding ones we had been loitering towards the heart
of the White Mountains, — those old crystal hills,
whose mysterious brilliancy had gleamed upon our
distant wanderings before we thought of visiting
them. Height after height had risen and towered
one above another till the clouds began to hang below
the peaks. Down their slopes were the red pathways
of the slides, those avalanches of earth, stones and
trees, which descend into the hollows, leaving vestiges
of their track hardly to be effaced by the vegetation
of ages. We had mountains behind us and mountains
on each side, and a group of mightier ones ahead.
Still our road went up along the Saco, right towards
the centre of that group, as if to climb above the
clouds in its passage to the farther region.

In old times the settlers used to be astounded by
the inroads of the northern Indians coining down
upon them from this mountain rampart through some
defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a won
drous path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of
the Titans, was travelling up the valley, elbowing the

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 477

heights carelessly aside as he passed, till at length a
great mountain took its stand directly across his in
tended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but,
rending it asunder a thousand feet from peak to base,
discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its sunless
waters, all the secrets of the mountain's inmost heart.,
with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each
side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame
on me that I have attempted to describe it by so mean
an image — feeling, as I do, that it is one of those
symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment,
though not to the conception, of Omnipotence.

We had now reached a narrow passage, which
showed almost the appearance of having been cut bj
human strength and artifice in the solid rock. There
was a wall of granite on each side, high and precip
itous, especially on our right, and so smooth that 4
few evergreens could hardly find foothold enough to
grow there. This is the entrance, or, in the direction
we were going, the extremity, of the romantic defile oi
the Notch. Before emerging from it, the rattling oi
wheels approached behind us, and a stage-coach rum
bled out of the mountain, with seats on top and trunks
behind, and a smart driver, in a drab greatcoat, touch
ing the wheel horses with the whipstock and reining
in the leaders. To my mind there was a sort of po
etry in such an incident, hardly inferior to what would
have accompanied the painted array of an Indian war
party gliding forth from the same wild chasm. All
the passengers, except a very fat lady on the back
seat, had alighted. One was a mineralogist! a scien
tific, green-spectacled figure in black, bearing a heavy
hammer, with which he did great damage to the preo

478 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ipices, and put the fragments in his pocket. Another
was a well-dressed young man, who carried an opera
glass set in gold, and seemed to be making a quota
tion from some of Byron's rhapsodies on mountain
scenery. There was also a trader, returning from
Portland to the upper part of Vermont ; and a fair
young girl, with a very faint bloom like one of those
pale and delicate flowers which sometimes occur among
alpine cliffs.

They disappeared, and we followed them, passing
through a deep pine forest, which for some miles al
lowed us to see nothing but its own dismal shade.
Towards nightfall we reached a level amphitheatre,
surrounded by a great rampart of hills, which shut out
the sunshine long before it left the external world. It
was here that we obtained our first view, except at a
distance, of the principal group of mountains. They
are majestic, and even awful, when contemplated in a
proper mood, yet, by their breadth of base and the
long ridges which support them, give the idea of im
mense bulk rather than of towering height. Mount
Washington, indeed, looked near to heaven : he was
white with snow a mile downward, and had caught the
only cloud that was sailing through the atmosphere to
veil his head. Let us forget the other names of Amer
ican statesmen that have been stamped upon these
hills, but still call the loftiest WASHINGTON. Moun
tains are Earth's undecaying monuments. They must
stand while she endures, and never should be conse
crated to the mere great men of their own age and
country, but to the mighty ones alone, whose glory is
universal, and whom all time will render illustrious.

The air, not often sultry in this elevated region,
nearly two thousand feet above the sea, was now sharp

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 479

Mid cold, like that of a clear November evening in the
lowlands. By morning, probably, there would be a
frost, if not a snowfall, on the grass and rye, and an
icy surface over the standing water. I was glad to
perceive a prospect of comfortable quarters in a house
which we were approaching, and of pleasant company
in the guests who were assembled at the door.

OUR EVENING PARTY AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.

We stood in front of a good substantial farm-house,
of old date in that wild country. A sign over the door
denoted it to be the White Mountain Post Office, —
an establishment which distributes letters and news
papers to perhaps a score of persons, comprising the
population of two or three townships among the hills.
The broad and weighty antlers of a deer, " a stag of
ten," were fastened at the corner of the house; a
fox's bushy tail was nailed beneath them ; and a huge
black paw lay on the ground, newly severed and still
bleeding — the trophy of a bear hunt. Among sev
eral persons collected about the doorsteps, the most
remarkable was a sturdy mountaineer, of six feet two
and corresponding bulk, with a heavy set of features,
such as might be moulded on his own blacksmith's an
vil, but yet indicative of mother wit and rough hu
mor. As we appeared, he uplifted a tin trumpet,
four or five feet long, and blew a tremendous blast,
either in honor of our arrival or to awaken an echo
from the opposite hill.

Ethan Crawford's guests were of such a motley de
scription as to form quite a picturesque group, seldom
seen together except at some place like this, at once
the pleasure house of fashionable tourists and the
homely inn of country travellers. Among the com

480 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

pany at the door were the mineralogist and the ownei
of the gold opera glass whom we had encountered in
the Notch ; two Georgian gentlemen, who had chilled
their southern blood that morning on the top of Mount
Washington ; a physician and his wife from Conway ;
a trader of Burlington, and an old squire of the Green
Mountains ; and two young married couples, all the
way from Massachusetts, on the matrimonial jaunt,
Besides these strangers, the rugged county of Coos,
in which we were, was represented by half a dozen
wood-cutters, who had slain a bear in the forest and
smitten off his paw.

I had joined the party, and had a moment's leisure
to examine them before the echo of Ethan's blast re •
turned from the hill. Not one, but many echoes had
caught up the harsh and tuneless sound, untwisted its
complicated threads, and found a thousand aerial har
monies in one stern trumpet tone. It was a distinct!
yet distant and dreamlike symphony of melodious in
struments, as if an airy band had been hidden on the
hill-side and made faint music at the summons. No
subsequent trial produced so clear, delicate, and spir
itual a concert as the first. A field-piece was then dis*
charged from the top of a neighboring hill, and gave
birth to one long reverberation, which ran round the
circle of mountains in an unbroken chain of sound
and rolled away without a separate echo. After these
experiments^ the cold atmosphere drove us all into the
house, with the keenest appetites for supper.

It did one's heart good to see the great fires that
were kindled in the parlor and bar-room, especially
the latter, where the fireplace was built of rough stone,
and might have contained the trunk of an old tree for
a backlog. A man keeps a comfortable hearth when

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 481

his own forest is at his very door. In the parlor, when
the evening was fairly set in, we held our hands before
our eyes to shield them from the ruddy glow, and be
gan a pleasant variety of conversation. The mineral
ogist and the physician talked about the invigorating
qualities of the mountain air, and its excellent effect on
Ethan Crawford's father, an old man of seventy-five,
with the unbroken frame of middle life. The two
brides and the doctor's wife held a whispered discus
sion, which, by their frequent titterings and a blush or
two, seemed to have reference to the trials or enjoy
ments of the matrimonial state. The bridegrooms sat
together in a corner, rigidly silent, like Quakers whom
the spirit moveth not, being still in the odd predica
ment of bashfulness towards their own young wives.
The Green Mountain squire chose me for his compan
ion, and described the difficulties he had met with half
a century ago in travelling from the Connecticut Kiver
through the Notch to Conway, now a single day's
journey, though it had cost him eighteen. The Geor
gians held the album between them, and favored us
with the few specimens of its contents which they
considered ridiculous enough to be worth hearing.
One extract met with deserved applause. It was a
44 Sonnet to the Snow on Mount Washington," and had
been contributed that very afternoon, bearing a signa
ture of great distinction in magazines and annals.
The lines were elegant and full of fancy, but too re
mote from familiar sentiment, and cold as their subject,
resembling those curious specimens of crystallized va
por which I observed next day on the mountain top.
The poet was understood to be the young gentleman
of the gold opera glass, who heard our laudatory re
marks with the composure of a veteran.

VOL. II. 31

182 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Such was our party, and such their ways of amuse
ment. But on a winter evening another set of guests
assembled at the hearth where these summer travellers
were now sitting. I once had it in contemplation to
spend a month hereabouts, in sleighing time, for the
sake of studying the yeomen of New England, who
then elbow each other through the Notch by hundreds,,
on their way to Portland. There could be no better
school for such a place than Ethan Crawford's inn.
Let the student go thither in December, sit down with
the teamsters at their meals, share their evening mer
riment, and repose with them at night when every bed
has its three occupants, and parlor, bar-room, and
kitchen are strewn with slumberers around the fire.
Then let him rise before daylight, button his great
coat, muffle up his ears, and stride with the departing
caravan a mile or two, to see how sturdily they make
head against the blast. A treasure of characteristic
traits will repay all inconveniences, even should a fro
zen nose be of the number.

The conversation of our party soon became more
animated and sincere, and we recounted some tradi
tions of the Indians, who believed that the father and
mother of their race were saved from a deluge by as
cending the peak of Mount Washington. The children
of that pair have been overwhelmed, and found no such
refuge. In the mythology of the savage, these moun
tains were afterwards considered sacred and inacces
sible, full of unearthly wonders, illuminated at lofty
heights by the blaze of precious stones, and inhabited
by deities, who sometimes shrouded themselves in
the snow-storm and came down on the lower world.
There are few legends more poetical than that of the
" Great Carbuncle" of the White Mountains. The

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 483

belief was communicated to the English settlers, and
is hardly yet extinct, that a gem, of such immense
size as to be seen shining miles away, hangs from a
rock over a clear, deep lake, high up among the hills.
They who had once beheld its splendor were inthralled
with an unutterable yearning to possess it. But a
spirit guarded that inestimable jewel, and bewildered
the adventurer with a dark mist from the enchanted
lake. Thus life was worn away in the vain search
for an unearthly treasure, till at length the deluded
one went up the mountain, still sanguine as in youth,
but returned no more. On this theme methinks I
could frame a tale with a deep moral.

The hearts of the pale-faces would not thrill to these
superstitions of the red men, though we spoke of them
in the centre of the haunted region. The habits and
sentiments of that departed people were too distinct
from those of their successors to find much real sym
pathy. It has often been a matter of regret to me
that I was shut out from the most peculiar field of
American fiction by an inability to see any romance,
or poetry, or grandeur, or beauty in the Indian char
acter, at least till such traits were pointed out by
others. I do abhor an Indian story. Yet no writer
can be more secure of a permanent place in our litera
ture than the biographer of the Indian chiefs. His
subject, as referring to tribes which have mostly van
ished from the earth, gives him a right to be placed on
a classic shelf, apart from the merits which will sustain
him there.

I made inquiries whether, in his researches about
these parts, our mineralogist had found the three
w Silver Hills " which an Indian sachem sold to an
Englishman nearly two hundred years ago, and the

484 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

treasure of which the posterity of the purchaser have
been looking for ever since. But the man of science
had ransacked every hill along the Saco, and knew
nothing of these prodigious piles of wealth. By this
time, as usual with men on the eve of great adventure,
we had prolonged our session deep into the night, con
sidering how early we were to set out on our six miles'
ride to the foot of Mount Washington. There was
now a general breaking up. I scrutinized the faces
of the two bridegrooms, and saw but little probability
of their leaving the bosom of earthly bliss, in the first
week of the honeymoon and at the frosty hour of
three, to climb above the clouds ; nor when I felt how
sharp the wind was as it rushed through a broken
pane and eddied between the chinks of my unplastered
chamber, did I anticipate much alacrity on my own
part, though we were to seek for the " Great Car
buncle."

THE CANAL BOAT.

I was inclined to be poetical about the Grand Canal.
In my imagination De Witt Clinton was an enchanter,
who had waved his magic wand from the Hudson to
Lake Erie and united them by a watery highway,
crowded with the commerce of two worlds, till then in
accessible to each other. This simple and mighty con
ception had conferred inestimable value on spots which
Nature seemed to have thrown carelessly into the great
body of the earth, without foreseeing that they could
ever attain importance. I pictured the surprise of the
sleepy Dutchmen when the new river first glittered by
their doors, bringing them hard cash or foreign com
modities in exchange for their hitherto unmarketable
produce. Surely the water of this canal must be the
most fertilizing of all fluids ; for it causes towns; with

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 485

their masses of brick and stone, their churches and
theatres, their business and hubbub, their luxury and
refinement, their gay dames and polished citizens, to
spring up, till in time the wondrous stream may flow
between two continuous lines of buildings, through one
thronged street, from Buffalo to Albany. I embarked
about thirty miles below Utica, determining to voyage
along the whole extent of the canal at least twice in
the course of the summer.

Behold us, then, fairly afloat, with three horses har
nessed to our vessel, like the steeds of Neptune to a
huge scallop shell in mythological pictures. Bound to
a distant port, we had neither chart nor compass, nor
cared about the wind, nor felt the heaving of a billow,
nor dreaded shipwreck, however fierce the tempest, in
our adventurous navigation of an interminable mud
puddle ; for a mud puddle it seemed, and as dark and
turbid as if every kennel in the land paid contribution
to it. With an imperceptible current, it holds its
drowsy way through all the dismal swamps and unim
pressive scenery that could be found between the great
lakes and the sea-coast. Yet there is variety enough,
both on the surface of the canal and along its banks,
to amuse the traveller, if an overpowering tedium did
not deaden his perceptions.

Sometimes we met a black and rusty-looking vessel,
laden with lumber, salt from Syracuse, or Genesee
flour, and shaped at both ends like a square-toed boot,
as if it had two sterns, and were fated always to ad
vance backward. On its deck would be a square hut,
and a woman seen through the window at her house
hold work, with a little tribe of children, who perhaps
had been born in this strange dwelling and knew no
t>ther home. Thus, while the husband smoked his pipe

486 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

at the helm, and the eldest son rode one of the horses,
on went the family, travelling hundreds of miles in
their own house and carrying their fireside with them.
The most frequent species of craft were the " line
boars," which had a cabin at each end, and a great
bulk of barrels, bales, and boxes in the midst, or light
packets, like our own, decked all over with a row of
curtained windows from stem to stern, and a drowsy
face at every one. Once we encountered a boat of
rude construction, painted all in gloomy black, and
manned by three Indians, who gazed at us in silence
and with a singular fixedness of eye. Perhaps these
three alone, among the ancient possessors of the land,
had attempted to derive benefit from the white man's
mighty projects and float along the current of his en
terprise. Not long after, in the midst of a swamp and
beneath a clouded sky, we overtook a vessel that seemed
full of mirth and sunshine. It contained a little colony
of Swiss on their way to Michigan, clad in garments
of strange fashion and gay colors, scarlet, yellow, and
bright blue, singing, laughing, and making merry in
odd tones and a babble of outlandish words. One
pretty damsel, with a beautiful pair of naked white
arms, addressed a mirthful remark to me. She spoke
in her native tongue, and I retorted in good English,
both of us laughing heartily at each other's unintel
ligible wit. I cannot describe how pleasantly this in
cident affected me. These honest Swiss were an itin
erant community of jest and fun journeying through a
gloomy land and among a dull race of money-getting
drudges, meeting none to understand their mirth, and
only one to sympathize with it, yet still retaining the
*iappy lightness of their own spirit.
Had I been on my feet at the time instead of sailing

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 487

slowly along in a dirty canal boat, I should often have
paused to contemplate the diversified panorama along
the banks of the canal. Sometimes the scene was a
forest, dark, dense, and impervious, breaking away oc
casionally and receding from a lonely tract, covered
with dismal black stumps where, on the verge of the
canal, might be seen a log cottage and a sallow-faced
woman at the window. Lean and aguish, she looked
like poverty personified, half - clothed, half -fed, and
dwelling in a desert, while a tide of wealth was sweep
ing by her door. Two or three miles farther would
bring us to a lock, where the slight impediment to nav
igation had created a little mart of trade. Here would
be found commodities of all sorts, enumerated in yellow
letters on the window shutters of a small grocery store,
the owner of which had set his soul to the gathering of
coppers and small change, buying and selling through
the week, and counting his gains on the blessed Sab
bath. The next scene might be the dwelling-houses
and stores of a thriving village, built of wood or small
gray stones, a church spire rising in the midst, and
generally two taverns, bearing over their piazzas the
pompous titles of " hotel," " exchange," " tontine," or
" coffee-house." Passing on, we glide now into the un
quiet heart of an inland city, — of Utica, for instance,
— and find ourselves amid piles of brick, crowded
docks and quays, rich warehouses, and a busy popula
tion. We feel the eager and hurrying spirit of the
place, like a stream and eddy whirling us along with
it. Through the thickest of the tumult goes the canal,
flowing between lofty rows of buildings and arched
bridges of hewn stone. Onward, also, go we, till the
hum and bustle of struggling enterprise die away be
hind us and we are threading an avenue of the ancient
Woods again.

488 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

This sounds not amiss in description, but was so tire
some in reality that we were driven to the most childish
expedients for amusement. An English traveller pa
raded the deck, with a rifle in his walking stick, and
waged war on squirrels and woodpeckers, sometimes
sending an unsuccessful bullet among flocks of tame
ducks and geese which abound in the dirty water of the
canal. I, also, pelted these foolish birds with apples,
and smiled at the ridiculous earnestness of their scram
bles for the prize while the apple bobbed about like a
thing of life. Several little accidents afforded us good-
natured diversion. At the moment of changing horses
the tow-rope caught a Massachusetts farmer by the leg
and threw him down in a very indescribable posture,
leaving a purple mark around his sturdy limb. A new
passenger fell flat on his back in attempting to step on
deck as the boat emerged from under a bridge. An
other, in his Sunday clothes, as good luck would have
it, being told to leap aboard from the bank, forthwith
plunged up to his third waistcoat button in the canal,
and was fished out in a very pitiable plight, not at all
amended by our three rounds of applause. Anon a
Virginia schoolmaster, too intent on a pocket Virgil
to heed the helmsman's warning, " Bridge ! bridge ! "
was saluted by the said bridge on his knowledge box.
I had prostrated myself like a pagan before his idol,
but heard the dull, leaden sound of the contact, and
fully expected to see the treasures of the poor man's
cranium scattered about the deck. However, as there
was no harm done, except a large bump on the head,
and probably a corresponding dent in the bridge, the
rest of»us exchanged glances and laughed quietly. Oh,
how pitiless are idle people !

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 489

The table being now lengthened through the cabin
and spread for supper, the next twenty minutes were
the pleasantest I had spent on the canal, the same space
at dinner excepted. At the close of the meal it had be
come dusky enough for lamplight. The rain pattered
unceasingly on the deck, and sometimes came with a
sullen rush against the windows, driven by the wind
as it stirred through an opening of the forest. The
intolerable dulness of the scene engendered an evil
spirit in me. Perceiving that the Englishman was tak
ing notes in a memorandum book, with occasional
glances round the cabin, I presumed that we were all
to figure in a future volume of travels, and amused
my ill humor by falling into the probable vein of his
remarks. He would hold up an imaginary mirror,
wherein our reflected faces would appear ugly and
ridiculous, yet still retain an undeniable likeness to the
originals. Then, with more sweeping malice, he would
make these caricatures the representatives of great
classes of my countrymen.

He glanced at the Virginia schoolmaster, a Yankee
by birth, who, to recreate himself, was examining a
freshman from Schenectady College in the conjugation
of a Greek verb. Him the Englishman would por
tray as the scholar of America, and compare his erudi
tion to a schoolboy's Latin theme made up of scraps
ill selected and worse put together. Next the tourist
looked at the Massachusetts farmer, who was delivering
a dogmatic harangue on the iniquity of Sunday mails.
Here was the far-famed yeoman of New England ; his
religion, writes the Englishman, is gloom on the Sab
bath, long prayers every morning and eventide, and
illiberality at all times ; his boasted information is
merely an abstract and compound of newspaper para-

±90 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

graphs, Congress debates, caucus harangues, and the
argument and judge's charge in his own lawsuits. The
bookmonger cast his eye at a Detroit merchant, and
began scribbling faster than ever. In this sharp-eyed
man, this lean man, of wrinkled brow, we see daring
enterprise and close-fisted avarice combined. Here is
the worshipper of Mammon at noonday ; here is the
three times bankrupt, richer after every ruin ; here, in
one word, (O wicked Englishman to say it !) here is
the American. He lifted his eye-glass to inspect a
western lady, who at once became aware of the glance,
reddened, and retired deeper into the female part of
the cabin. Here was the pure, modest, sensitive, and
shrinking woman of America, — shrinking when no
evil is intended, and sensitive like diseased flesh, that
thrills if you but point at it ; and strangely modest,
without confidence in the modesty of other people;
and admirably pure, with such a quick apprehension
of all impurity.

In this manner I went all through the cabin, hitting
everybody as hard a lash as I could, and laying the
whole blame on the infernal Englishman. At length I
caught the eyes of my own image in the looking-glass,
where a number of the party were likewise reflected,
and among them the Englishman, who at that moment
was intently observing myself.

The crimson curtain being let down between the
ladies and gentlemen, the cabin became a bedchamber
for twenty persons, who were laid on shelves one above
another. For a long time our various incommodities
kept us all awake except five or six, who were accus
tomed to sleep nightly amid the uproar of their own
snoring, and had little to dread from any other speciea

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 491

of disturbance. It is a curious fact that these snorers
had been the most quiet people in the boat while awake,
and became peacebreakers only when others cease to
be so, breathing tumult out of their repose. Would it
were possible to affix a wind instrument to the nose,
and thus make melody of a snore, so that a sleeping
lover might serenade his mistress or a congregation
snore a psalm tune ! Other, though fainter, sounds
than these contributed to my restlessness. My head
was close to the crimson curtain, — the sexual division
of the boat, — behind which I continually heard whis
pers and stealthy footsteps ; the noise of a comb laid on
the table or a slipper dropped on the floor ; the twang,
like a broken harpstring, caused by loosening a tight
belt ; the rustling of a gown in its descent ; and the
unlacing of a pair of stays. My ear seemed to have
the properties of an eye ; a visible image pestered my
fancy in the darkness ; the curtain was withdrawn be
tween me and the western lady, who yet disrobed her
self without a blush.

Finally all was hushed in that quarter. Still I was
more broad awake than through the whole preceding
day, and felt a feverish impulse to toss my limbs miles
apart and appease the unquietness of mind by that
of matter. Forgetting that my berth was hardly so
wide as a coffin, I turned suddenly over, and fell like
an avalanche on the floor, to the disturbance of the
whole community of sleepers. As there were no bones
broken, I blessed the accident and went on deck. A
lantern was burning at each end of the boat, and one
of the crew was stationed at the bows, keeping watch
.as mariners do on the ocean. Though the rain had
ceased, the sky was all one cloud, and the darkness so
intense that there seemed to be no world except the

*92 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

little space on which our lantern glimmered. Yet it
was an impressive scene.

We were traversing the "long level," a dead flat
between Utica and Syracuse, where the canal has not
rise or fall enough to require a lock for nearly seventy
miles. There can hardly be a more dismal tract of
country. The forest which covers it consisting chiefly
of white cedar, black ash, and other trees that live in
excessive moisture, is now decayed and death-struck by
the partial draining of the swamp into the great ditch
of the canal. Sometimes, indeed, our lights were re
flected from pools of stagnant water which stretched
far in among the trunks of the trees, beneath dense
masses of dark foliage. But generally the tall stems
and intermingled branches were naked, and brought
into strong relief amid the surrounding gloom by the
whiteness of their decay. Often we beheld the pros
trate form of some old sylvan giant which had fallen
and crushed down smaller trees under its immense
ruin. In spots where destruction had been riotous,
the lanterns showed perhaps a hundred trunks, erect,
half overthrown, extended along the ground, resting
on their shattered limbs or tossing them desperate]^
into the darkness, but all of one ashy white, all naked
together, in desolate confusion. Thus growing out of
the night as we drew nigh, and vanishing as we glided
on, based on obscurity, and overhung and bounded by
it, the scene was ghostlike — the very land of unsub
stantial things, whither dreams might betake them
selves when they quit the slumberer's brain.

My fancy found another emblem. The wild nature
of America had been driven to this desert-place by
the encroachments of civilized man. And even here,
where the savage queen was throned on the ruins of

SKETCHES FROM MEMORY. 493

her empire, did we penetrate, a vulgar and worldly
throng, intruding on her latest solitude. In other
lands decay sits among fallen palaces ; but here her
home is in the forests.

Looking ahead, I discerned a distant light, announc
ing the approach of another boat, which soon passed
us, and proved to be a rusty old scow — just such a
craft as the " Flying Dutchman" would navigate on
the canal. Perhaps it was that celebrated personage
himself whom I imperfectly distinguished at the helm,
in a glazed cap and rough greatcoat, with a pipe in
his mouth, leaving the fumes of tobacco a hundred
yards behind. Shortly after our boatman blew a horn,
sending a long and melancholy note through the for
est avenue, as a signal for some watcher in the wilder
ness to be ready with a change of horses. We had
proceeded a mile or two with our fresh team when the
tow rope got entangled in a fallen branch on the edge
of the canal and caused a momentary delay, during
which I went to examine the phosphoric light of an/
old tree a little within the forest. It was not the first/
delusive radiance that I had followed.

The tree lay along the ground, and was wholly con
verted into a mass of diseased splendor, which threw a
ghastliness around. Being full of conceits that night,
I called it a frigid fire, a funeral light, illumining de
cay and death, an emblem of fame that gleams around
the dead man without warming him, or of genius when
it owes its brilliancy to moral rottenness, and was
thinking that such ghostlike torches were just fit to
light up this dead forest or to blaze coldly in tombs,
when, starting from my abstraction, I looked up the
canal. I recollected myself, and discovered the lan
terns glimmering far away.

494 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Boat ahoy ! " shouted I, making a trumpet of my
closed fists.

Though the cry must have rung for miles along that
hollow passage of the woods, it produced no effect.
These packet boats make up for their snail-like pace
by never loitering day nor night, especially for those
who have paid their fare. Indeed, the captain had an
interest in getting rid of me, for I was his creditor
for a breakfast.

" They are gone, Heaven be praised ! " ejaculated 1 3
" for I cannot possibly overtake them. Here am I,
on the ' long level,' at midnight, with the comfortable
prospect of a walk to Syracuse, where my baggage will
be left. And now to find a house or shed wherein to
pass the night." So thinking aloud, I took a flambeau
from the old tree, burning, but consuming not, to light
my steps withal, and, like a jack-o'-the-lantern, set out
on my midnight tour.

THE OLD APPLE DEALER.

THE lover of the moral picturesque may sometimes
find what he seeks in a character which is neverthe
less of too negative a description to be seized upon
and represented to *the imaginative vision by word
painting. As an instance, I remember an old man
who carries on a little trade of gingerbread and ap
ples at the depot of one of our railroads. While
awaiting the departure of the cars, my observation,
flitting to and fro among the livelier characteristics
of the scene, has often settled insensibly upon this
almost hueless object. Thus, unconsciously to myself
and unsuspected by him, I have studied the old apple
dealer until he has become a naturalized citizen of my
inner world. How little would he imagine — poor,
neglected, friendless, unappreciated, and with little
that demands appreciation — that the mental eye of
an utter stranger has so often reverted to his figure !
Many a noble form, many a beautiful face, has flitted
before me and vanished like a shadow. It is a strange
witchcraft whereby this faded and featureless old ap
ple dealer has gained a settlement in my memory.

He is a small man, with gray hair and gray stubble
beard, and is invariably clad in a shabby surtout of
snuff color, closely buttoned, and half concealing a
pair of gray pantaloons; the whole dress, though
clean and entire, being evidently flimsy with much
wear. His face, thin, withered, furrowed, and with
features which even age has failed to render impres-

496 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Bive, has a frost-bitten aspect. It is a moral frost
which no physical warmth or comfortableness could
counteract. The summer sunshine may fling its white
heat upon him, or the good fire of the depot room may
make him the focus of its blaze on a winter's day ; but
all in vain ; for still the old man looks as if he were in
a frosty atmosphere, with scarcely warmth enough to
keep life in the region about his heart. It is a pa
tient, long-suffering, quiet, hopeless, shivering aspect.
He is not desperate, — that, though its etymology im
plies no more, would be too positive an expression, —
but merely devoid of hope. As all his past life, prob
ably, offers no spots of brightness to his memory, so
he takes his present poverty and discomfort as en
tirely a matter of course : he thinks it the definition
of existence, so far as himself is concerned, to be poor,
cold, and uncomfortable. It may be added, that tune
has not thrown dignity as a mantle over the old man's
figure : there is nothing venerable about him : you pity
him without a scruple.

He sits on a bench in the depot room ; and before
him, on the floor, are deposited two baskets of a capac
ity to contain his whole stock in trade. Across from
one basket to the other extends a board, on which is
displayed a plate of cakes and gingerbread, some rus
set and red -cheeked apples, and a box containing
variegated sticks of candy, together with that delec
table condiment known by children as Gibraltar rock,
neatly done up in white paper. There is likewise a
half -peck measure of cracked walnuts and two or
three tin half pints or gills filled with the nut kernels,
ready for purchasers. Such are the small commodi
ties with which our old friend comes daily before the
world, ministering to its petty needs and little freaks

THE OLD APPLE DEALER. 497

of appetite, and seeking thence the solid subsistence
— - so far as he may subsist — of his life.

A slight observer would speak of the old man's qui
etude ; but, on closer scrutiny, you discover that there
is a continual unrest within him, which somewhat re
sembles the fluttering action of the nerves in a corpse
from which life has recently departed. Though he
never exhibits any violent action, and, indeed, might
appear to be sitting quite still, yet you perceive, when
his minuter peculiarities begin to be detected, that he
)g always making some little movement or other. He
looks anxiously at his plate of cakes or pyramid of
apples and slightly alters their arrangement, with an
evident idea that a great deal depends on their being
disposed exactly thus and so. Then for a moment he
gazes out of the window ; then he shivers quietly and
folds his arms across his breast, as if to draw himself
closer within himself, and thus keep a flicker of warmth
in his lonesome heart. Now he turns again to his mer
chandise of cakes, apples, and candy, and discovers
that this cake or that apple, or yonder stick of red
and white candy, has somehow got out of its proper
position. And is there not a walnut kernel too many
or too few in one of those small tin measures ? Again
the whole arrangement appears to be settled to his
mind ; but, in the course of a minute or two, there
will assuredly be something to set right. At times,
by an indescribable shadow upon his features, too
quiet, however, to be noticed until you are familiar
with his ordinary aspect, the expression of frost-bitten,
patient despondency becomes very touching. It seems
as if just at that instant the suspicion occurred to him ]
that, in his chill decline of life, earning scanty bread »

VOL. It 32

198 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

by selling cakes, apples, and candy, he is a very miser
able old fellow.

But, if he think so, it is a mistake. He can never
suffer the extreme of misery, because the tone of his
whole being is too much subdued for him to feel any
thing acutely.

Occasionally one of the passengers, to while away a
tedious interval, approaches the old man, inspects the
articles upon his board, and even peeps curiously into
the two baskets. Another, striding to and fro along
the room, throws a look at the apples and gingerbread
at every turn. A third, it may be of a more sensitive
and delicate texture of being, glances shyly thither
ward, cautious not to excite expectations of a pur
chaser while yet undetermined whether to buy. But
there appears to be no need of such a scrupulous re
gard to our old friend's feelings. True, he is con
scious of the remote possibility to sell a cake or an
apple ; but innumerable disappointments have ren
dered him so far a philosopher, that, even if the pur
chased article should be returned, he will consider it
altogether in the ordinary train of events. He speaks
to none, and makes no sign of offering his wares to the
public : not that he is deterred by pride, but by the
certain conviction that such demonstrations would not
increase his custom. Besides, this activity in business
would require an energy that never could have been
a characteristic of his almost passive disposition even
in youth. Whenever an actual customer appears the
old man looks up with a patient eye : if the price and
the article are approved, he is ready to make change ;
otherwise his eyelids droop again sadly enough, but
with no heavier despondency than before. He shivers,
perhaps folds his lean arms around his lean body, and

THE OLD APPLE DEALER. 499

resumes the lifelong, frozen patience in which consists
his strength. Once in a while a school -boy comes
hastily up, places a cent or two upon the board, and
takes up a cake, or stick of candy, or a measure of
walnuts, or an apple as red cheeked as himself. There
are no words as to price, that being as well known to
the buyer as to the seller. The old apple dealer never
peaks an unnecessary word : not that he is sullen and
morose ; but there is none of the cheeriness and brisk
ness in him that stirs up people to talk.

Not seldom he is greeted by some old neighbor, a
man well to do in the world, who makes a civil, pat
ronizing observation about the weather ; and then, by
way of performing a charitable deed, begins to chaffer
for an apple. Our friend presumes not on any past
acquaintance ; he makes the briefest possible response
to all general remarks, and shrinks quietly into him
self again. After every diminution of his stock hfe
takes care to produce from the basket another cake>
another stick of candy, another apple, or another meas
ure of walnuts, to supply the place of the article sold.
Two or three attempts — or, perchance, half a dozen
— are requisite before the board can be rearranged
to his satisfaction. If he have received a silver coin,
he waits till the purchaser is out of sight, then he ex
amines it closely, and tries to bend it with his finger
and thumb : finally he puts it into his waistcoat pocket
with seemingly a gentle sigh. This sigh, so faint as
to be hardly perceptible, and not expressive of any
definite emotion, is the accompaniment and conclusion
of all his actions. It is the symbol of the chillness
and torpid melancholy of his old age, which only make
themselves felt sensibly when his repose is slightly
ilisturbed.

SCO MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

Our man of gingerbread and apples is not a speci
men of the " needy man who has seen better days."
Doubtless there have been better and brighter days in
the far-off time of his youth ; but none with so much
sunshine of prosperity in them that the chill, the de
pression, the narrowness of means, in his declining
years, can have come upon him by surprise. His life
has all been of a piece. His subdued and nerveless
boyhood prefigured his abortive prime, which likewise
contained within itself the prophecy and image of his
lean and torpid age. He was perhaps a mechanic, who
nevej? came to be a master in his craft, or a petty
tradesman, rubbing onward between passably to do
and poverty. Possibly he may look back to some
brilliant epoch of his career when there were a hun
dred or two of dollars to his credit in the Savings
Bank. Such must have been the extent of his better
fortune — his little measure of this world's triumphs
— all that he has known of success. A meek, down
cast, humble, uncomplaining creature, he probably has
never felt himself entitled to more than so much of
the gifts of Providence. Is it not still something that
he has never held out his hand for charity, nor has yet
been driven to that sad home and household of Earth's
forlorn and broken-spirited children, the almshouse?
He cherishes no quarrel, therefore, with his destiny,
nor with the Author of it. All is as it should be.

If, indeed, he have been bereaved of a son, a bold,
energetic, vigorous young man, on whom the father's
feeble nature leaned as on a staff of strength, in that
case he may have felt a bitterness that could not oth
erwise have been generated in his heart. But me*
thinks the joy of possessing such a son and the agony
' of losing him would have developed the old man's

THE OLD APPLE DEALER. 501

moral and intellectual nature to a much greater de
gree than we now find it. Intense grief appears to
be as much out of keeping with his life as fervid hap
piness.

To confess the truth, it is not the easiest matter in
the world to define and individualize a character like
this which we are now handling. The portrait must
be so generally negative that the most delicate pencil
is likely to spoil it by introducing some too positive
tint. Every touch must be kept down, or else you
destroy the subdued tone which is absolutely essential
to the whole effect. Perhaps more may be done by
contrast than by direct description. For this purpose
I make use of another cake and candy merchant, who
likewise infests the railroad depot. This latter wor
thy is a very smart and well-dressed boy of ten years
old or thereabouts, who skips briskly hither and thith
er, addressing the passengers in a pert voice, yet with
somewhat of good breeding in his tone and pronun
ciation. Now he has caught my eye, and skips across
the room with a pretty pertness which I should like to
correct with a box on the ear. " Any cake, sir ? any
candy ? "

No, none for me, my lad. I did but glance at your
brisk figure in order to catch a reflected light and
throw it upon your old rival yonder.

Again, in order to invest my conception of the old
man with a more decided sense of reality, I look at
him in the very moment of intensest bustle, on the
arrival of the cars. The shriek of the engine as it
rushes into the car-house is the utterance of the steam
fiend, whom man has subdued by magic spells and
compels to serve as a beast of burden. He has
Bkimmed rivers in his headlong rush, dashed through

502 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

forests, plunged into the hearts of mountains, and
glanced from the city to the desert-place, and again
to a far-off city, with a meteoric progress, seen and
out of sight, while his reverberating roar still fills
the ear. The travellers swarm forth from the cars.
All are full of the momentum which they have caught
from their mode of conveyance. It seems as if the
whole world, both morally and physically, were de
tached from its old standfasts and set in rapid motion.
And, in the midst of this terrible activity, there sits
the old man of gingerbread ; so subdued, so hopeless,
so without a stake in life, and yet not positively miser
able," — there he sits, the forlorn old creature, one chill
and sombre day after another, gathering scanty cop
pers for his cakes, apples, and candy, — there sits the
old apple dealer, in his threadbare suit of snuff color
and gray and his grizzly stubble beard. See ! he folds
his lean arms around his lean figure with that quiet
sigh and that scarcely perceptible shiver which are
the tokens of his inward state. I have him now. He
and the steam fiend are each other's antipodes ; the
latter 's the type of all that go ahead, and the old man
the representative of that melancholy class who, by
some sad witchcraft, are doomed never to share in the
world's exulting progress. Thus the contrast between
mankind and this desolate brother becomes picturesque,
and even sublime.

And now farewell, old friend ! Little do you sus
pect that a student of human life has made your char
acter the theme of more than one solitary and thought
ful hour. Many would say that you have hardly in
dividuality enough to be the object of your own self-
love. How, then, can a stranger's eye detect anything
in your mind and heart to study and to wonder at?

THE OLD APPLE DEALER. 503

5Tet, coiild I read but a tithe of what is written there, "W
it would be a volume of deeper and more compre
hensive import than all that the wisest mortals have
given to the world ; for the soundless depths of the
human soul and of eternity have an opening through
your breast. God be praised, were it only for your
sake, that the present shapes of human existence are
not cast in iron nor hewn in everlasting adamant, but
moulded of the vapors that vanish away while the es
sence flits upward to the Infinite. There is a spiritual
essence in this gray and lean old shape that shall flit
upward too. Yes ; doubtless there is a region where
the lifelong shiver will pass away from his being, and
that quiet sigh, which it has taken him so many years
to breathe, will be brought to a close for good and all

THE AETIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL.

elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his
arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from
the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that
fell across the pavement from the window of a small
shap. It was a projecting window ; and on the inside
were suspended a variety of watches, pinchbeck, silver,
and one or two of gold, all with their faces turned
from the streets, as if churlishly disinclined to inform
the wayfarers what o'clock it was. Seated within the
shop, sidelong to the window, with his pale face bent
earnestly over some delicate piece of mechanism on
which was thrown the concentrated lustre of a shade
lamp, appeared a young man.

" What can Owen Warland be about ? " muttered
old Peter Hovenden, himself a retired watchmaker,
and the former master of this same young man whose
occupation he was now wondering at. "What can
the fellow be about? These six months past I have
never come by his shop without seeing him just as
steadily at work as now. It would be a flight beyond
his usual foolery to seek for the perpetual motion ;
and yet I know enough of my old business to be cer
tain that what he is now so busy with is no part of the
machinery of a watch."

"Perhaps, father," said Annie, without showing
much interest in the question, " Owen is inventing a
new kind of timekeeper. I am sure he has ingenuity

-ough."

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 505

" Poh, child ! He has not the sort of ingenuity to
invent anything better than a Dutch toy," answered
her father, who had formerly been put to much vex
ation by Owen Warland's irregular genius. " A
plague on such ingenuity ! All the effect that ever I
knew of it was to spoil the accuracy of some of the
best watches in my shop. He would turn the sun out
of its orbit and derange the whole course of time, if,
as I said before, his ingenuity could grasp anything
bigger than a child's toy ! "

" Hush, father ! He hears you ! " whispered Annie,
pressing the old man's arm. " His ears are as delicate
as his feelings ; and you know how easily disturbed
they are. Do let us move on."

So Peter Hovenden and his daughter Annie plodded
on without further conversation, until in a by-street of
the town they found themselves passing the open door
of a blacksmith's shop. Within was seen the forge,
now blazing up and illuminating the high and dusky
roof, and now confining its lustre to a narrow precinct
of the coal-strewn floor, according as the breath of the
bellows was puffed forth or again inhaled into its vast
leathern lungs. In the intervals of brightness it was
easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of the
shop and the horseshoes that hung upon the wall ; in
the momentary gloom the fire seemed to be glimmer
ing amidst the vagueness of unenclosed space. Mov
ing about in this red glare and alternate dusk was the
figure of the blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in
so picturesque an aspect of light and shade, where the
bright blaze struggled with the black night, as if each
would have snatched his comely strength from the
other. Anon he drew a white-hot bar of iron from
the coals, laid it on the anvil, uplifted his arm

506 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

might, and was soon enveloped in the myriads of
sparks which the strokes of his hammer scattered into
the surrounding gloom.

" Now, that is a pleasant sight," said the old watch
maker. "I know what it is to work in gold; but
give me the worker in iron after all is said and done.
He spends his labor upon a reality. What say you,
daughter Annie ? "

"Pray don't speak so loud, father," whispered
Annie, " Robert Danf orth will hear you."

" And what if he should hear me ? " said Peter Ho-
venden. " I say again, it is a good and a wholesome
thing to depend upon main strength and reality, and
to earns one's bread with the bare and brawny arm of
a blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled
by his wheels within a wheel, or loses his health or the
nicety of his eyesight, as was my case, and finds him
self at middle age, or a little after, past labor at his
own trade and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live
at his ease. So I say once again, give me main
•strength for my money. And then, how it takes the
nonsense out of a man ! Did you ever hear of a black
smith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder ? "

" Well said, uncle Hovenden ! " shouted Robert
Danforth from the forge, in a full, deep, merry voice,
that made the roof reecho. "And what says Miss
Annie to that doctrine ? She, I suppose, will think
it a genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than
to forge a horseshoe or make a gridiron."

Annie drew her father onward without giving him
time for reply.

But we must return to Owen Warland's shop, and
spend more meditation upon his history and character
than either Peter Hovenden, or probably his daughter

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 507

Annie, or Owen's old school-fellow, Robert Danforth,
would have thought due to so slight a subject. From
the time that his little fingers could grasp a penknife,
Owen had been remarkable for a delicate ingenuity,
which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, prin
cipally figures of flowers and birds, and sometimes
seemed to aim at the hidden mysteries of mechanism.
But it was always for purposes of grace, and never
with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the
crowd of school-boy artisans, construct little windmills
on the angle of a barn or watermills across the neigh
boring brook. Those who discovered such peculiarity
in the boy as to think it worth their while to observe
him closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he
was attempting to imitate the beautiful movements of
Nature as exemplified in the flight of birds or the ac
tivity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new de
velopment of the Iqve of the beautiful, such as might
have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and
which was as completely refined from all utilitarian
coarseness as it could have been in either of the fine
arts. He looked with singular distaste at the stiff and
regular processes of ordinary machinery. . Being once
carried to see a steam-engine, in the expectation that
his intuitive comprehension of mechanical principles
would be gratified, he turned pale and grew sick, as if
something monstrous and unnatural had been presented
to him. This horror was partly owing to the size and
terrible energy of the iron laborer,; for the character
of Owen's mind was microscopic, and tended naturally
to the minute, in accordance with his diminutive frame
and the marvellous smallness and delicate power of his
fingers. Not that his sense of beauty was thereby di
minished into a sense of prettiness. The beautiful idea

508 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

( has no relation to size, and may be as perfectly devel
I oped in a space too minute for any but microscopic in-
vestigation as within the ample verge that is measured
by the arc of the rainbow. But, at all events, this char
acteristic minuteness in his objects and accomplish
ments made the world even more incapable than it
might otherwise have been of appreciating Owen War-
land's genius. The boy's relatives saw nothing better
to be done — as perhaps there was not — than to bind
him apprentice to a watchmaker, hoping that his
strange ingenuity might thus be regulated and put to
utilitarian purposes.

Peter Hovenden's opinion of his apprentice has al
ready been expressed. He could make nothing of the
lad. Owen's apprehension of the professional myste
ries, it is true, was inconceivably quick ; but he alto
gether forgot or despised the grand object of a watch
maker's business, and cared no more for the measure
ment of time than if it had been merged into eternity.
So long, however, as he remained under his old mas
ter's care, Owen's lack of sturdiness made it possible,
by strict injunctions and sharp oversight, to restrain
his creative eccentricity within bounds ; but when his
apprenticeship was served out, and he had taken the
little shop which Peter Hovenden's failing eyesight
compelled him to relinquish, then did people recognize
how unfit a person was Owen Warland to lead old
blind Father Time along his daily course. One of his
most rational projects was to connect a musical opera
tion with the machinery of his watches, so that all the
harsh dissonances of life might be rendered tuneful,
and each flitting moment fall into the abyss of the past
in golden drops of harmony. If a family clock was in
trusted to him for repair, — one of those tall, ancient

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 509

clocks that have grown nearly allied to human nature
by measuring out the lifetime of many generations, —
he would take upon himself to arrange a dance or
funeral procession of figures across its venerable face5
representing twelve mirthful or melancholy hours.
Several freaks of this kind quite destroyed the young \
watchmaker's credit with that steady and matter - of - /
fact class of people who hold the opinion that time is
not to be trifled with, whether considered as the me-!
dium of advancement and prosperity in this world or
preparation for the next. His custom rapidly dimin
ished — a misfortune, however, that was probably reck-_i
oned among his better accidents by Owen Warland,
who was becoming more and more absorbed in a secret
occupation which drew all his science and manual dex
terity into itself, and likewise gave full employment
to the characteristic tendencies of his genius. This
pursuit had already consumed many months.

After the old watchmaker and his pretty daughter
had gazed at him out of the obscurity of the street,
Owen Warland was seized with a fluttering of the
nerves, which made his hand tremble too violently to
proceed with such delicate labor as he was now en
gaged upon.

" It was Annie herself ! " murmured he. " I should
have known it, by this throbbing of my heart, before I
heard her father's voice. Ah, how it throbs ! I shall
scarcely be able to work again on this exquisite mech
anism to-night. Annie ! dearest Annie ! thou shouldst
give firmness to my heart and hand, and not shake
them thus ; for if I strive to put the very spirit of
beauty into form and give it motion, it is for thy sake
alone. O throbbing heart, be quiet ! If my labor be
thus thwarted, there will come vague and unsatisfied
dreams which will leave me spiritless to-morrow."

510 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

As he was endeavoring to settle himself again to his
task, the shop door opened and gave admittance to no
other than the stalwart figure which Peter Hovenden
had paused to admire, as seen amid the light and
shadow of the blacksmith's shop. Robert Danforth
had brought a little anvil of his own manufacture, and
peculiarly constructed, which the young artist had re
cently bespoken. Owen examined the article and pro
nounced it fashioned according to his wish.

" Why, yes," said Robert Danforth, his strong voice
filling the shop as with the sound of a bass viol, " I
consider myself equal to anything in the way of my
own trade ; though I should have made but a poor
figure at yours with such a fist as this," added he,
laughing, as he laid his vast hand beside the delicate
one of Owen. " But what then ? I put more main
strength into one blow of my sledge hammer than all
that you have expended since you were a 'prentice.
Is not that the truth ? "

" Very probably," answered the low and slender
voice of Owen. " Strength is an earthly monster. I
make no pretensions to it. My force, whatever there
may be of it, is altogether spiritual."

" Well, but, Owen, what are you about ? " asked his
old school-fellow, still in such a hearty volume of tone
that it made the artist shrink, especially as the ques
tion related to a subject so sacred as the absorbing
dream of his imagination. " Folks do say that you
are trying to discover the perpetual motion."

" The perpetual motion? Nonsense ! " replied Owen
Warland, with a movement of disgust ; for he was full
of little petulances. " It can never be discovered. It
is a dream that may delude men whose brains are
mystified with matter, but not me. Besides, if such a

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 511

discovery were possible, it would not be worth my
while to make it only to have the secret turned to
such purposes as are now effected by steam and water
power. I ain not ambitious to be honored with the
paternity of a new kind of cotton machine."

" That would be droll enough ! " cried the black
smith, breaking out into such an uproar of laughter
that Owen himself and the bell glasses on his work-
board quivered in unison. " No, no, Owen ! No child
of yours will have iron joints and sinews. Well, I
won't hinder you any more. Good night, Owen, and
success, and if you need any assistance, so far as a
downright blow of hammer upon anvil will answer the
purpose, I 'm your man."

And with another laugh the man of main strength
Xeft the shop.

" How strange it is," whispered Owen Warland to
liimself, leaning his head upon his hand, " that all my
musings, my purposes, my passion for the beautiful,
my consciousness of power to create it, — a finer, more
ethereal power, of which this earthly giant can have
no conception, — all, all, look so vain and idle when
ever my path is crossed by Robert Danforth ! He
would drive me mad were I to meet him often. His
hard, brute force darkens and confuses the spiritual
element within me ; but I, too, will be strong in my
own way. I will not yield to him."

He took from beneath a glass a piece of minute ma
chinery, which he set in the condensed light of his
lamp, and, looking intently at it through a magnifying
glass, proceeded to operate with a delicate instrument
of steel. In an instant, however, he fell back in his
chair and clasped his hands, with a look of horror on
his face that made its small features as impressive as
those of a giant would have been.

\

512 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

"Heaven! What have I done?" exclaimed he.
"The vapor, the influence of that brute force, — it
has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I
have made the very stroke — the fatal stroke — that I
have dreaded from the first. It is all over — the toil
of months, the object of my life. I am ruined ! "

And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp
flickered in the socket and left the Artist of the Beau
tiful in darkness.

Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the im
agination and appear so lovely to it and of a value
beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to-
be shattered and annihilated by contact with the prac
tical. It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a
force of character that seems hardly compatible witb
its delicacy ; he must keep his faith in himself while
the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbev
lief; he must stand up against mankind and be his
own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the
objects to which it is directed.

For a time Owen Warland succumbed to this se~
vere but inevitable test. He spent a few sluggish
weeks with his head so continually resting in his
hands that the towns-people had scarcely an oppor
tunity to see his countenance. When at last it was
again uplifted to the light of day, a cold, dull, name
less change was perceptible upon it. In the opinion
of Peter Hovenden, however, and that order of saga
cious understandings who think that life should be
regulated, like clockwork, with leaden weights, the al
teration was entirely for the better. Owen now, in-
deed, applied himself to business with dogged indus
try. It was marvellous to witness the obtuse gravity
with which he would inspect the wheels of a great

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 513

old silver watch; thereby delighting the owner, in
whose fob it had been worn till he deemed it a por
tion of his own life, and was accordingly jealous of its
treatment. In consequence of the good report thus
acquired, Owen Warland was invited by the proper
authorities to regulate the clock in the church steeple.
He succeeded so admirably in this matter of public
interest that the merchants gruffly acknowledged his
merits on 'Change ; the nurse whispered his praises
as she gave the potion in the sick-chamber ; the lover
blessed him at the hour of appointed interview ; and
the town in general thanked Owen for the punctuality
of dinner time. In a word, the heavy weight upon
his spirits kept everything in order, not merely within
his own system, but wheresoever the iron accents of
the church clock were audible. It was a circumstance,
though minute, yet characteristic^)? his present state,
that, when employed to engrave names or initials on
silver spoons, he now wrote the requisite letters in the
plainest possible style, omitting a variety of fanciful
flourishes that had heretofore distinguished his work
in this kind.

One day, during the era of this happy transforma
tion, old Peter Hovenden came to visit his former ap
prentice.

"Well, Owen," said he, "I am glad to hear such
good accounts of you from all quarters, and especially
from the town clock yonder, which speaks in your
commendation every hour of the twenty-four. Only
get rid altogether of your nonsensical trash about the
beautiful, which I nor nobody else, nor yourself to
boot, could ever understand, — only free yourself of
that, and your success in life is as sure as daylight.
Why, if you go on in this way, I sheuld even venture

VOL. ii. 33

614 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

to let you doctor this precious old watch of mine ,
though, except my daughter Annie, I have nothing
else so valuable in the world."

" I should hardly dare touch it, sir," replied Owen,
in a depressed tone ; for he was weighed down by his
old master's presence.

" In time," said the latter, — " in time, you will be
capable of it."

The old watchmaker, with the freedom naturally
consequent on his former authority, went on inspect
ing the work which Owen had in hand at the moment,
together with other matters that were in progress. The
artist, meanwhile, could scarcely lift his head. There
was nothing so antipodal to his nature as this man's
cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact with which
everything was converted into a dream except the
densest matter of the physical world. Owen groaned
in spirit and prayed fervently to be delivered from
him.

" But what is this ? " cried Peter Hovenden ab
ruptly, taking up a dusty bell glass, beneath which ap
peared a mechanical something, as delicate and mi
nute as the system of a butterfly's anatomy. " What
have we here ? Owen ! Owen ! there is witchcraft in
these little chains, and wheels, and paddles. See !
with one pinch of my finger and thumb I am going to
deliver you from all future peril."

" For Heaven's sake," screamed Owen Warland,
springing up with wonderful energy, " as you would
not drive me mad, do not touch it ! The slightest pres
sure of your finger would ruin me forever."

" Aha, young man ! And is it so ? " said the old
watchmaker, looking at him with just enough of pene
tration to torture Owen's soul with the bitterness of

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 515

worldly criticism. " Well, take your own course ; but
I warn you again that in this small piece of mechan
ism lives your evil spirit. Shall I exorcise him ? "

" You are my evil spirit," answered Owen, much ex
cited, — " you and the hard, coarse world ! The leaden
thoughts and the despondency that you fling upon me
are my clogs, else I should long ago have achieved the
task that I was created for."

Peter Hovenden shook his head, with the mixture of
contempt and indignation which mankind, of whom he
was partly a representative, deem themselves entitled
to feel towards all simpletons who seek other prizes
than the dusty one along the highway. He then took
his leave, with an uplifted finger and a sneer upon his
face that haunted the artist's dreams for many a night
afterwards. At the time of his old master's visit, Owen
was probably on the point of taking up the relinquished
task ; but, by this sinister event, he was thrown back
into the state whence he had been slowly emerging.

But the innate tendency of his soul had only been
accumulating fresh vigor during its apparent sluggish
ness. As the summer advanced he almost totally re
linquished his business, and permitted Father Time, so
far as the old gentleman was represented by the clocks
and watches under his control, to stray at random
through human life, making infinite confusion among
the train of bewildered hours. He wasted the sun
shine, as people said, in wandering through the woods
and fields and along the banks of streams. There, like
a child, he found amusement in chasing butterflies or
watching the motions of water insects. There was
something truly mysterious in the intentness with
which he contemplated these living playthings as they
sported on the breeze or examined the structure of an

516 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

imperial insect whom he had imprisoned. .The .chase
of butterflies was an apt emblem of the ideal pursuit in
which he had spent so many golden hours ; but would
the beautiful idea ever be yielded to his hand like the
butterfly that symbolized it ? Sweet, doubtless, were
these days, and congenial to the artist's soul. They
were full of bright conceptions, which gleamed through
his intellectual world as the butterflies gleamed through
the outward atmosphere, and were real to him, for the
instant, without the toil, and perplexity, and many
disappointments of attempting to make them visible
to the sensual eye. Alas that the artist, whether in
poetry, or whatever other material, may not content
himself with the inward enjoyment of the beautiful,
but must chase the flitting mystery beyond the verge
of his ethereal domain, and crush its frail being in
seizing it with a material grasp. Owen Waiiand felt
the impulse to give external reality to his ideas as ir
resistibly as any of the poets or painters who have ar
rayed the world in a dimmer and fainter beauty, im
perfectly copied from the richness of their visions.

The night was now his time for the slow progress of
re-creating the one idea to which all his intellectual ac
tivity referred itself. Always at the approach of dusk
he stole into the town, locked himself within his shop,
and wrought with patient delicacy of touch for many
hours. Sometimes he was startled by the rap of the
watchman, who, when all the world should be asleep,
had caught the gleam of lamplight through the crevices
of Owen Warland's shutters. Daylight, to the morbid
sensibility of his mind, seemed to have an intrusiveness
that interfered with his pursuits. On cloudy and in
clement days, therefore, he sat with his head upon his
hands, muffling, as it were, his sensitive brain in a mist

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 517

of indefinite musings ; for it was a relief to escape *
from the sharp distinctness with which he was com
pelled to shape out his thoughts during his nightly
t6il.

From one of these fits of torpor he was aroused by
the entrance of Annie Hovenden, who came into the
shop with the freedom of a customer, and also with
something of the familiarity of a childish friend. She
had worn a hole through her silver thimble, and wanted
Owen to repair it.

" But I don't know whether you will condescend to
such a task," said she, laughing, " now that you are
so taken up with the notion of putting spirit into ma
chinery."

" Where did you get that idea, Annie ? " said Owen,
starting in surprise. ,

"Oh, out of my own head," answered she, "and
from something that I heard you say, long ago, when
you were but a boy and I a little child. But come ;
will you mend this poor thimble of mine ? "

" Anything for your sake, Annie," said Owen War-
land, — " anything, even were it to work at Robert
Danforth's forge."

" And that would be a pretty sight ! " retorted An
nie, glancing with imperceptible slightness at the art
ist's small and slender frame. "Well; here is the
thimble."

"But that is a strange idea of yours," said Owen, k
" about the spiritualization of matter."

And then the thought stole into his mind that this
young girl possessed the gift to comprehend him bet
ter than all the world besides. And what a help and
Strength would it be to him in his lonely~tdit if ~fae
ftould gain the sympathy of the only being whom he

518 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

loved ! To persons whose pursuits are insulated from
the common business of life — who are either in ad
vance of mankind or apart from it — there often comes
a sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver
as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the
pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the
criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but
separatee! from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might
feel, poor Owen felt.

" Annie," cried he, growing pale as death at the
thought, " how gladly would I tell you the secret of
my pursuit ! You, methinks, would estimate it rightly.
You, I know, would hear it with a reverence that I
must not expect from the harsh, material world."

" Would I not? to be sure I would! " replied Annie
Hovenden, lightly laughing. " Come ; explain to me
quickly what is the meaning of this little whirligig, so
delicately wrought that it might be a plaything for
Queen Mab. See ! I will put it in motion."

" Hold ! " exclaimed Owen, " hold ! "

Annie had but given the slightest possible touch,
with the point of a needle, to the same minute por
tion of complicated machinery which has been more
than once mentioned, when the artist seized her by
the wrist with a force that made her scream aloud.
She was affrighted at the convulsion of intense rage
and anguish that writhed across his features. The
next instant he let his head sink upon his hands.

" Go, Amrie," murmured he ; " I have deceived my
self, and must suffer for it. I yearned for sympathy,
and thought, and fancied, and dreamed that you might

i

give it me; but you lack the talisman, Annie, that
should admit you into my secrets. That touch has
ftndone the toil of months and the thought of a life-

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 519

time! It was not your fault, Annie; but you have
ruined me ! "

Poor Owen Warland ! He had indeed erred, yet
pardonably ; for if any human spirit could have suffi
ciently reverenced the processes so sacred in his eyes,
it must have been a woman's. Even Annie Hoveii-
den, possibly, might not have disappointed him had ^
she been enlightened by the deep intelligence of love.

The artist spent the ensuing winter in a way that
satisfied any persons who had hitherto retained a
hopeful opinion of him that he was, in truth, irrevo
cably doomed to inutility as regarded the world, and
to an evil destiny on his own part. The decease of
a relative had put him in possession of a small in
heritance. Thus freed from the necessity of toil, and
having lost the steadfast influence of a great purpose,
• — great, at least, to him, — he abandoned himself to
habits from which it might have been supposed the
mere delicacy of his organization would have availed
to secure him. But when the ethereal portion of a
man of genius is obscured, the earthly part assumes
an influence the more uncontrollable, because the char
acter is now thrown off the balance to which Provi
dence had so nicely adjusted it, and which, in coarser
natures, is adjusted by some other method. Owen
Warland made proof of whatever show of bliss may
be found in riot. He looked at the world through the
golden medium of wine, and contemplated the visions
that bubble up so gayly around the brim of the glass,
and that people the air with shapes of pleasant mad
ness, which so soon grow ghostly and forlorn. Even
when this dismal and inevitable change had taken
place, the young man might still have continued to
the cup of enchantments, though its vapor did

520 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

but shroud life in gloom and fill the gloom with spec
tres that mocked at him. There was a certain irk-
someness of spirit, which, being real, and the deepest
sensation of which the artist was now conscious, was
more intolerable than any fantastic miseries and hor
rors that the abuse of wine could summon up. In the
latter case he could remember, even out of the midst
of his trouble, that all was but a delusion ; in the
former, the heavy anguish was his actual life.

From this perilous state he was redeemed by an in
cident which more than one person witnessed, but of
which the shrewdest could not explain or conjecture
the operation on Owen Warland's mind. It was very
simple. On a warm afternoon of spring, as the artist
sat among his riotous companions with a glass of wine
before him, a splendid butterfly flew in at the open
window and fluttered about his head.

"Ah," exclaimed Owen, who had drank freely,
" are you alive again, child of the sun and playmate
of the summer breeze, after your dismal winter's nap ?
Then it is time for me to be at work ! "

And, leaving his unemptied glass upon the table,
he departed and was never known to sip another drop
of wine.

And now, again, he resumed his wanderings in the
woods and fields. It might be fancied that the bright
butterfly, which had come so spirit-like into the win
dow as Owen sat with the rude revellers, was indeed
a spirit commissioned to recall him to the pure, ideal
life that had so etherealized him among men. It
might be fancied that he went forth to seek this spirit
in its sunny haunts ; for still, as in the summer time
gone by, he was seen to steal gently up wherever a
butterfly had alighted, and lose himself in contempla-

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 521

tion of it. When it took flight his eyes followed the
winged vision, as if its airy track would show the path
to heaven. But what could be the purpose of the un
seasonable toil, which was again resumed, as the watch
man knew by the lines of lamplight through the crev
ices of Owen Warland's shutters? The towns-people")
had one comprehensive explanation of all these sin- L Q O0
gularities. Owen Warland had gone mad ! How \
universally efficacious — how satisfactory, too, and
soothing to the injured sensibility of narrowness and
dulness — is this easy method of accounting for what
ever lies beyond the world's most ordinary scope !
From St. Paul's days down to our poor little Artist
of the Beautiful, the same talisman had been applied
to the elucidation of all mysteries in the words or
deeds of men who spoke or acted too wisely or too
well. In Owen Warland's case the judgment of his
towns-people may have been correct. Perhaps he was
mad. The lack of sympathy — that contrast between
himself and his neighbors which took away the re
straint of example — was enough to make him so. Or
possibly he had caught just so much of ethereal ra
diance as served to bewilder him, in an earthly sense,
by its intermixture with the common daylight.

One evening, when the artist had returned from a
customary ramble and had just thrown the lustre of
his lamp on the delicate piece of work so often inter
rupted, but still taken up again, as if his fate were
embodied in its mechanism, he was surprised by the
entrance of old Peter Hovenden. Owen never met
this man without a shrinking of the heart. Of all the
world he was most terrible, by reason of a keen un
derstanding which saw so distinctly what it did see,
and disbelieved so uncompromisingly in what it could

522 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

not_see. On this occasion the old watchmaker had
merely a gracious word or two to say.

" Owen, my lad," said he, " we must see you at my
house to-morrow night."

The artist began to mutter some excuse.

" Oh, but it must be so," quoth Peter Hovenden,
" for the sake of the days when you were one of the
household. What, my boy ! don't you know that my
daughter Annie is engaged to Robert Danforth ? We
are making an entertainment, in our humble way, to
celebrate the event."

" Ah J " said Owen.

That little monosyllable was all he uttered ; its tone
seemed cold and unconcerned to an ear like Peter Ho-
venden's ; and yet there was in it the stifled outcry of
the poor artist's heart, which he compressed within him
like a man holding down an evil spirit. One slight
outbreak, however, imperceptible to the old watch
maker, he allowed himself. Raising the instrument
with which he was about to begin his work, he let it
fall upon the little system of machinery that had, anew,
cost him months of thought and toil. It was shattered
by the stroke !

Owen Warland's story would have been no tolerable
representation of the troubled life of those who strive
to create the beautiful, if, amid all other thwarting in
fluences, love had not interposed to steal the cunning
from his hand. Outwardly he had been no ardent or
enterprising lover ; the career of his passion had con
fined its tumults and vicissitudes so entirely within the
artist's imagination that Annie herself had scarcely
more than a woman's intuitive perception of it ; but,
in Owen's view, it covered the whole field of his life.
Forgetful of the time when she had shown herself in-

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 523

capable of any deep response, he had persisted in con
necting all his dreams of artistical success with Annie's
image ; she was the visible shape in which the spiritual
power that he worshipped, and on whose altar he hoped
to lay a not unworthy offering, was made manifest to
him. Of course he had deceived himself ; there were
no such attributes in Annie Hovenden as his imagina
tion had endowed her with. She, in the aspect which
she wore to his inward vision, was as much a creature
of his own as the mysterious piece of mechanism would
be were it ever realized. Had he become convinced of
his mistake through the medium of successful love, —
had he won Annie to his bosom, and there beheld her
fade from angel into ordinary woman, — the disap
pointment might have driven him back, with concen
trated energy, upon his sole remaining object. On the
other hand, had he found Annie what he fancied, his
lot would have been so rich in beauty that out of its
mere redundancy he might have wrought the beautiful
into many a worthier type than he had toiled for ; but
the guise in which his sorrow came to him, the sense
that the angel of his life had been snatched away and
given to a rude man of earth and iron, who could
neither need nor appreciate her ministrations, — this
was the very perversity of fate that makes human ex
istence appear too absurd and contradictory to be the
scene of one other hope or one other fear. There was
nothing left for Owen Warland but to sit down like a
man that had been stunned.

He went through a fit of illness. After his recovery
his small and slender frame assumed an obtuser gar
niture of flesh than it had ever before worn. His
thin cheeks became round ; his delicate little hand, so
spiritually fashioned to achieve fairy task-work, grew

524 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

plumper than the hand of a thriving infant. His as
pect had a childishness such as might have induced a
stranger to pat him on the head — pausing, however,
in the act, to wonder what manner of child was here.
It was as if the spirit had gone out of him, leaving the
body to flourish in a sort of vegetable existence. Not
that Owen Warland was idiotic. He could talk, and
not irrationally. Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did
people begin to think him ; for he was apt to discourse
at wearisome length of marvels of mechanism that he
had read about in books, but which he had learned
to consider as absolutely fabulous. Among them he
enumerated the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus
Magnus, and the Brazen Head of Friar Bacon ; and,
coming down to later times, the automata of a little
coach and horses, which it was pretended had been
manufactured for the Dauphin of France ; together
with an insect that buzzed about the ear like a living
fly, and yet was but a contrivance of minute steel
springs. There was a story, too, of a duck that wad
dled, and quacked, and ate ; though, had any honest
citizen purchased it for dinner, he would have found
himself cheated with the mere mechanical apparition
of a duck.

" But all these accounts," said Owen Warland, " I
am now satisfied are mere impositions."

Then, in a mysterious way, he would confess that he
once thought differently. In his idle and dreamy days
he had considered it possible, in a certain sense, to
spiritualize machinery, and to combine with the new
species of life and motion thus produced a beauty that
should attain to the ideal which Nature has proposed
to herself in all her creatures, but has never taken
paii»s to realize. He seemed, however, to retain no

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 525

very distinct perception either of the process of achiev
ing this object or of the design itself.

"I have thrown it all aside now," he would say.
w It was a dream such as young men are always mys
tifying themselves with. Now that I have acquired
a little common sense, it makes me laugh to think
of it."

Poor, poor and fallen Owen Warland ! These were
the symptoms that he had ceased to be an inhabitant
of the better sphere that lies unseen around us. He
had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided him
self, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom
which rejected much that even his eye could see, and
trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could
touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual
part dies out of them and leaves the grosser under
standing to assimilate them more and more to the
things of which alone it can take cognizance ; but in
Owen Warland the spirit was not dead nor passed
away ; it only slept.

How it awoke again is not recorded. Perhaps the
torpid slumber was broken by a convulsive pain. Per
haps, as in a former instance, the butterfly came and
hovered about his head and reinspired him, — as in
deed this creature of the sunshine had always a myste
rious mission for the artist, — reinspired him with the
former purpose of his life. Whether it were pain or
happiness that thrilled through his veins, his first im
pulse was to thank Heaven for rendering him again
the being of thought, imagination, and keenest sensi
bility that he had long ceased to be.

"Now for my task," said he. "Never did I feel
such strength for it as now."

Yet, strong as he felt himself, he was incited to toil

526 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

the more diligently by an anxiety lest death should
surprise him in the midst of his labors. This anxiety,
perhaps, is common to all men who set their hearts
upon anything so high, in their own view of it, that
life becomes of importance only as conditional to its
accomplishment. So long as we love life for itself, we
seldom dread the losing it. When we desire life for
the attainment of an object, we recognize the frailty of
its texture. But, side by side with this sense of inse-

. curity, there is a vital faith in our invulnerability to
the shaft of death while engaged in any task that

\ seems assigned by Providence as our proper thing to
do, and which the world would have cause to mourn
for should we leave it unaccomplished. Can the phi
losopher, big with the inspiration of an idea that is to
reform mankind, believe that he is to be beckoned
from this sensible existence at the very instant when
he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light ?
Should he perish so, the weary ages may pass away —
the world's, whose life sand may fall, drop by drop —
before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth
that might have been uttered then. But history af
fords many an example where the most precious spirit,
at any particular epoch manifested in human shape,
has gone hence untimely, without space allowed him, so
far as mortal judgment could discern, to perform his
mission on the earth. The prophet dies, and the man
of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives on. The jpoet
leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the
scope of mortal ears, in a celestial choir. The painter
— as Allston did — leaves half his conception on the
canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and
goes to picture forth the whole, if it be no irreverence
to say so, in the hues of heaven. But rather such in-

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 527

complete designs of this life will be perfected nowhere.
This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects
must be taken as a proof that the deeds of earth, how
ever etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, K y^
except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit.
In heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more
melodious than Milton's song. Then, would he add
another verse to any strain that he had left unfinished
here?

But to return to Owen Warland. It was his fortune,
good or ill, to achieve the purpose of his life. Pass
we over a long space of intense thought, yearning ef
fort, minute toil, and wasting anxiety, succeeded by an
instant of solitary triumph : let all this be imagined ;
and then behold the artist, on a winter evening, seek
ing admittance to Robert Danforth's fireside circle.
There he found the man of iron, with his massive sub
stance thoroughly warmed and attempered by domes
tic influences. And there was Annie, too, now trans
formed into a matron, with much of her husband's
plain and sturdy nature, but imbued, as Owen War-
land still believed, with a finer grace, that might ena
ble her to be the interpreter between strength and
beauty. It happened, likewise, that old Peter Hoven-
den was a guest this evening at his daughter's fireside ,
and it was his well-remembered expression of keen,
cold criticism that first encountered the artist's glance.

" My old friend Owen ! " cried Robert Danforth,
starting up, and compressing the artist's delicate fin
gers within a hand that was accustomed to gripe bars
of iron. " This is kind and neighborly to come to us
at last. I was afraid your perpetual motion had be
witched you out of the remembrance of old times."

" We are glad to see you," said Annie, while a

628 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE,

blush reddened her matronly cheek. " It was not like
a friend to stay from us so long."

"Well, Owen," inquired the old watchmaker, as his
first greeting, " how comes on the beautiful ? Have
you created it at last ? "

The artist did not immediately reply, being startled
by the apparition of a young child of strength that
was tumbling about on the carpet, — a little personage
who had come mysteriously out of the infinite but
with something so sturdy and real in his composition
that he seemed moulded out of the densest substance
which earth could supply. This hopeful infant crawled
towards the new-comer, and setting himself on end,
as Robert Danforth expressed the posture, stared at
Owen with a look of such sagacious observation that
the mother could not help exchanging a proud glance
with her husband. But the artist was disturbed by the
child's look, as imagining a resemblance between it
and Peter Hovenden's habitual expression. He could
have fancied that the old watchmaker was compressed
into this baby shape, and looking out of those baby
eyes, and repeating, as he now did, the malicious ques
tion: —

" The beautiful, Owen ! How comes on the beau
tiful? Have you succeeded in creating the beauti
ful?"

" I have succeeded," replied the artist, with a mo
mentary light of triumph in his eyes and a smile of
sunshine, yet steeped in such depth of thought that it
was almost sadness. " Yes, my friends, it is the truth.
I have succeeded."

" Indeed ! " cried Annie, a look of maiden mirthful-
ness peeping out of her face again. " And is it lawful,
ttow, to inquire what the secret is ? "

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 529

" Surely ; it is to disclose it that I have come," an
swered Owen Warlaiid. " You shall know, and see,
and touch, and possess the secret ! For, Annie, — if
by that name I may still address the friend of my boy
ish years, — Annie, it is for your bridal gift that I
have wrought this spiritualized mechanism, this har
mony of motion, this mystery of beauty. It comes late,
indeed ; but it is as we go onward in life, when objects
begin to lose their freshness of hue and our souls their
delicacy of perception, that the spirit of beauty is most
needed. If, — forgive me, Annie, — if you know how
to value this gift, it can never come too late."

He produced, as he spoke, what seemed a jewel box.
It was carved richly out of ebony by his own hand, and
inlaid with a fanciful tracery of pearl, representing a
boy in pursuit of a butterfly, which, elsewhere, had be
come a winged spirit, and was flying heavenward;
while the boy, or youth, had found such efficacy in his
strong desire that he ascended from earth to cloud,
and from cloud to celestial atmosphere, to win the
beautiful. This case of ebony the artist opened, and
bade Annie place her finger on its edge. She did so,
but almost screamed as a butterfly fluttered forth, and,
alighting on her finger's tip, sat waving the ample mag
nificence of its purple and gold-speckled wings, as if in
prelude to a flight. It is impossible to express by
words the glory, the splendor, the delicate gorgeous-
ness which were softened into the beauty of this ob
ject. Nature's ideal butterfly was here realized in all
its perfection ; not in the pattern of such faded insects
as flit among earthly flowers, but of those which hover
across the meads of paradise for child-angels and the
spirits of departed infants to disport themselves with.
The rich down was visible upon its wings ; the lustre of

VOL.. IL 34

530 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

its eyes seemed instinct with spirit. The firelight
glimmered around this wonder — the candles gleamed
upon it ; but it glistened apparently by its own radi
ance, and illuminated the finger and outstretched hand
on which it rested with a white gleam like that of pre
cious stones. In its perfect beauty, the consideration
of size was entirely lost. Had. its wings overreached
the firmament, the mind could not have been more
filled or satisfied.

" Beautiful ! beautiful ! " exclaimed Annie. " Is it
alive ? Is it alive ? "

" Alive ? To be sure it is," answered her husband.
" Do you suppose any mortal has skill enough to
make a butterfly, or would put himself to the trouble
of making one, when any child may catch a score of
them in a summer's afternoon ? Alive ? Certainly !
But this pretty box is undoubtedly of our friend
Owen's manufacture ; and really it does him credit."

At this moment the butterfly waved its wings anew,
with a motion so absolutely lifelike that Annie was
startled, and even awestricken ; for, in spite of her
husband's opinion, she could not satisfy herself
whether it was indeed a living creature or a piece of
wondrous mechanism.

"Is it alive?" she repeated, more earnestly than
before.

"Judge for yourself," said Owen Warland, who
stood gazing in her face with fixed attention.

The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered
round Annie's head, and soared into a distant region
of the parlor, still making itself perceptible to sight
by the starry gleam in which the motion of its wings
enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its
course with his sagacious little eyes. After flying

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 531

about the room, it returned in a spiral curve and set
tied again on Annie's finger.

"But is it alive?" exclaimed she again; and the
finger on which the gorgeous mystery had alighted
was so tremulous that the butterfly was forced to bal
ance himself with his wings. " Tell me if it be alive,
or whether you created it."

"Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?"
replied Owen Warland. "Alive? Yes, Annie; it
may well be said to possess life, for it has absorbed
my own being into itself ; and in the secret of that
butterfly, and in its beauty, — which is not merely
outward, but deep as its whole system, — is repre
sented the intellect, the imagination, the sensibility,
the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful ! Yes ; I cre
ated it. But " — and here his countenance somewhat
changed — "this butterfly is not now to me what it
was when I beheld it afar off in the daydreams of my
youth."

" Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything," said
the blacksmith, grinning with childlike delight. " I
wonder whether it would condescend to alight on such
a great clumsy finger as mine? Hold it hither,
Annie."

By the artist's direction, Annie touched her finger's
tip to that of her husband ; and, after a momentary
delay, the butterfly fluttered from one to the other. It
preluded a second flight by a similar, yet not precisely
the same, waving of wings as in the first experiment ;
then, ascending from the blacksmith's stalwart finger,
it rose in a gradually enlarging curve to the ceiling,
made one wide sweep around the room, and returned
with an undulating movement to the point whence it
bad started.

632 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

" Well, that does beat all nature ! " cried Kobert
Danforth, bestowing the heartiest praise that he could
find expression for ; and, indeed, had he paused there,
a man of finer words and nicer perception could not
easily have said more. " That goes beyond me, I con
fess. But what then ? There is more real use in one
downright blow of my sledge hammer than in the
whole five years' labor that our friend Owen has
wasted on this butterfly."

Here the child clapped his hands and made a great
babble of indistinct utterance, apparently demanding
that the butterfly should be given him for a play
thing.

Owen Warland, meanwhile, glanced sidelong at
Annie, to discover whether she sympathized in her
husband's estimate of the comparative value of the
beautiful and the practical. There was, amid all her
kindness towards himself, amid all the wonder and
admiration with which she contemplated the marvel
lous work of his hands and incarnation of his idea, a
secret scorn — too secret, perhaps, for her own con
sciousness, and perceptible only to such intuitive dis
cernment as that of the artist. But Owen, in the lat
ter stages of his pursuit, had risen out of the region in
which such a discovery might have been torture. He
knew that the world, and Annie as the representative
of the world, whatever praise might be bestowed,
could never say the fitting word nor feel the fitting
sentiment which should be the perfect recompense of
an artist who, symbolizing a lofty moral by a material
trifle, — converting what was earthly to spiritual gold,
— had won the beautiful into his handiwork. Not at
this latest moment was he to learn that the reward of
all high performance must be sought within itself, or

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 533

Bought in vain. There was, however, a view of the
matter which Annie and her husband, and even Peter
Hovenden, might fully have understood, and which
would have satisfied them that the toil of years had
here been worthily bestowed. Owen Warland might
have told them that this butterfly, this plaything, this
bridal gift of a poor watchmaker to a blacksmith's
wife, was, in truth, a gem of art that a monarch
would have purchased with honors and abundant
wealth, and have treasured it among the jewels of
his kingdom as the most unique and wondrous of
them all. But the artist smiled and kept the secret
to himself.

"Father," said Annie, thinking that a word of
praise from the old watchmaker might gratify his for
mer apprentice, " do come and admire this pretty but
terfly."

" Let us see," said Peter Hovenden, rising from his
chair, with a sneer upon his face that always made
people doubt, as he himself did, in everything but a
material existence. " Here is my finger for it to alight
upon. I shall understand it better when once I have
touched it."

But, to the increased astonishment of Annie, when
the tip of her father's finger was pressed against that
of her husband, on which the butterfly still rested, the
insect drooped its wings and seemed on the point of
falling to the floor. Even the bright spots of gold
upon its wings and body, unless her eyes deceived her,
grew dim, and the glowing purple took a dusky hue,
and the starry lustre that gleamed around the black
smith's hand became faint and vanished.

" It is dying ! it is dying ! " cried Annie, in alarm.

** It has been delicately wrought," said the artist,

534 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

calmly. " As I told you, it has imbibed a spiritual es
sence — call it magnetism, or what you will. In an
atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite sus
ceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him who
instilled his own life into it. It has already lost its
beauty ; in a few moments more its mechanism would
be irreparably injured."

" Take away your hand, father ! " entreated Annie,
turning pale. " Here is my child ; let it rest on his
innocent hand. There, perhaps, its life will revive
and its colors grow brighter than ever."

Her father, with an acrid smile, withdrew his finger.
The butterfly then appeared to recover the power of
voluntary motion, while its hues assumed much of their
original lustre, and the gleam of starlight, which was
its most ethereal attribute, again formed a halo round
about it. At first, when transferred from Robert Dan-
forth's hand to the small finger of the child, this radi
ance grew so powerful that it positively threw the little
fellow's shadow back against the wall. He, mean
while, extended his plump hand as he had seen his
father and mother do, and watched the waving of the
insect's wings with infantine delight. Nevertheless,
there was a certain odd expression of sagacity that
made Owen Warland feel as if here were old Peter
Hovenden, partially, and but partially, redeemed from
his hard scepticism into childish faith.

" How wise the little monkey looks ! " whispered
Robert Danforth to his wife.

" I never saw such a look on a child's face," an-
swered Annie, admiring her own infant, and with good
reason, far more than the artistic butterfly. " The
darling knows more of the mystery than we do."

As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of

THE ARTIST OF THE BEAUTIFUL. 536

something not entirely congenial in the child's nature,
it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At length it
arose from the small hand of the infant with an airy
motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort,
as if the ethereal instincts with which its master's spirit
had endowed it impelled this fair vision involuntarily
to a higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction,
it might have soared into the sky and grown immortal.
But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling ; the exquisite
texture of its wings brushed against that earthly me
dium ; and a sparkle or two, as of Stardust, floated
downward and lay glimmering on the carpet. Then
the butterfly came fluttering down, and, instead of re
turning to the infant, was apparently attracted towards
the artist's hand.

" Not so ! not so ! " murmured Owen Warland, as
if his handiwork could have understood him. " Thou
has gone forth out of thy master's heart. There is no
return for thee."

With a wavering movement, and emitting a tremu
lous radiance, the butterfly struggled, as it were, tow
ards the infant, and was about to alight upon his
finger ; but while it still hovered in the air, the little
child of strength, with his grandsire's sharp and shrewd
expression in his face, made a snatch at the marvellous
insect and compressed it in his hand. Annie screamed.
Old Peter Hovenden burst into a cold and scornful
laugh. The blacksmith, by main force, unclosed the
infant's hand, and found within the palm a small heap
of glittering fragments, whence the mystery of beauty
had fled forever. And as for Owen Warland, he
looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's
labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a
far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose

536 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by
which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became
of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed it
self in the enjoyment of the reality.

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION.

THE other day, having a leisure hour at my disposal,
I stepped into a new museum, to which my notice was
casually drawn by a small and unobtrusive sign : " To

BE SEEN HERE, A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION." Such

was the simple, yet not altogether unpromising, an
nouncement that turned my steps aside for a little
while from the sunny sidewalk of our principal thor
oughfare. Mounting a sombre staircase, I pushed open
a door at its summit, and found myself in the pres
ence of a person, who mentioned the moderate sum that
would entitle me to admittance.

" Three shillings, Massachusetts tenor," said he.
" No, I mean half a dollar, as you reckon in these
days."

While searching my pocket for the coin I glanced
at the doorkeeper, the marked character and individual
ity of whose aspect encouraged me to expect something
not quite in the ordinary way. He wore an old-fash
ioned greatcoat, much faded, within which his meagre
person was so completely enveloped that the rest of his
attire was undistinguishable. But his visage was re
markably wind -flushed, sunburnt, and weather-worn,
and had a most unquiet, nervous, and apprehensive
expression. It seemed as if this man had some all-im
portant object in view, some point of deepest interest
to be decided, some momentous question to ask, might
he but hope for a reply. As it was evident, however,
that I could have nothing to do with his private affairs.

538 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

I passed through an open doorway, which admitted me
into the extensive hall of the museum.

Directly in front of the portal was the bronze statue
of a youth with winged feet. He was represented in
the act of flitting away from earth, yet wore such a
look of earnest invitation that it impressed me like a
summons to enter the hall.

"It is the original statue of Opportunity, by the an
cient sculptor Lysippus," said a gentleman who now
approached me. " I place it at the entrance of my
museum, because it is not at all times that one can
gain admittance to such a collection."

The speaker was a middle-aged person, of whom it
was not easy to determine whether he had spent his
life as a scholar or as a man of action ; in truth, all
outward and obvious peculiarities had been worn away
by an extensive and promiscuous intercourse with the
world. There was no mark about him of profession,
individual habits, or scarcely of country ; although his
dark complexion and high features made me conjec
ture that he was a native of some southern clime of
Europe. At all events, he was evidently the virtuoso
in person.

" With your permission," said he, " as we have no
descriptive catalogue, I will accompany you through
the museum and point out whatever may be most
worthy of attention. In the first place, here is a
choice collection of stuffed animals."

Nearest the door stood the outward semblance of a
wolf, exquisitely prepared, it is true, and showing a
very wolfish fierceness in the large glass eyes which
were inserted into its wild and crafty head. Still it
was merely the skin of a wolf, with nothing to distin
guish it from other individuals of that unlovely breed.

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 539

" How does this animal deserve a place in your col
lection ? " inquired I.

" It is the wolf that devoured Little Red Riding-
Hood," answered the virtuoso; "and by his side —
with a milder and more matronly look, as you per
ceive — stands the she-wolf that suckled Komulus and
Remus."

" Ah, indeed ! " exclaimed I. " And what lovely
lamb is this with the snow-white fleece, which seems
to be of as delicate a texture as innocence itself ? "

" Methinks you have but carelessly read Spenser,"
replied my guide, " or you would at once recognize the
' milk-white lamb ' which Una led. But I set no great
value upon the lamb. The next specimen is better
worth our notice."

" What ! " cried I, " this strange animal, with the
black head of an ox upon the body of a white horse ?
Were it possible to suppose it, I should say that this
was Alexander's steed Bucephalus."

"The same," said the virtuoso. "And can you
likewise give a name to the famous charger that stands
beside him?"

Next to the renowned Bucephalus stood the mere
skeleton of a horse, with the white bones peeping
through his ill-conditioned hide ; but, if my heart had
not warmed towards that pitiful anatomy, I might as
well have quitted the museum at once. Its rarities
had not been collected with pain and torn from the four
quarters of the earth, and from the depths of the sea,
and from the palaces and sepulchres of ages, for those
who could mistake this illustrious steed.

"It is Rosinante ! " exclaimed I, with enthusiasm.

And so it proved. My admiration for the noble
and gallant horse caused me to glance with less inter-

540 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

est at the other animals, although many of them might
have deserved the notice of Cuvier himself. There
was the donkey which Peter Bell cudgelled so soundly,
and a brother of the same species who had suffered
a similar infliction from the ancient prophet Balaam.
Some doubts were entertained, however, as to the au
thenticity of the latter beast. My guide pointed out
the venerable Argus, that faithful dog of Ulysses, and
also another dog (for so the skin bespoke it), which,
though imperfectly preserved, seemed once to have
had three heads. It was Cerberus. I was considera
bly amused at detecting in an obscure corner the fox
that became so famous by the loss of his tail. There
were several stuffed cats, which, as a dear lover of that
comfortable beast, attracted my affectionate regards.
One was Dr. Johnson's cat Hodge ; and in the same
row stood the favorite cats of Mahomet, Gray, and
Walter Scott, together with Puss in Boots, and a cat
of very noble aspect who had once been a deity of an
cient Egypt. Byron's tame bear came next. I must
not forget to mention the Erymanthean boar, the skin
of St. George's dragon, and that of the serpent Python ;
and another skin with beautifully variegated hues,
supposed to have been the garment of the " spirited
sly snake" which tempted Eve. Against the walls
were suspended the horns of the stag that Shakespeare
shot ; and on the floor lay the ponderous shell of the
tortoise which fell upon the head of ^Eschylus. In
one row, as natural as life, stood the sacred bull Apis,
the " cow with the crumpled horn," and a very wild-
looking young heifer, which I guessed to be the cow
that jumped over the moon. She was probably killed
by the rapidity of her descent. As I turned away,
my eyes fell upon an indescribable monster, which
proved to be a griffin.

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 541

" I look in vain," observed I, " for the skin of an
animal which might well deserve the closest study of
a naturalist — the winged horse, Pegasus."

" He is not yet dead," replied the virtuoso ; " but
he is so hard ridden by many young gentlemen of the
day that I hope soon to add his skin and skeleton to
my collection."

We now passed to the next alcove of the hall, in
which was a multitude of stuffed birds. They were
very prettily arranged, some upon the branches of
trees, others brooding upon nests, and others sus
pended by wires so artificially that they seemed in the
very act of flight. Among them was a white dove,
with a withered branch of olive leaves in her mouth.

"Can this be the very dove," inquired I, "that
brought the message of peace and hope to the tempest-
beaten passengers of the ark ? "

" Even so," said my companion.

" And this raven, I suppose," continued I, " is the
game that fed Elijah in the wilderness."

" The raven ? No," said the virtuoso ; " it is a bird
0f modern date. He belonged to one Barnaby Rudge ;
and many people fancied that the devil himself was
disguised under his sable plumage. But poor Grip
has drawn his last cork, and has been forced to ' say
die ' at last. This other raven, hardly less curious, is
that in which the soul of King George I. revisited his
lady love, the Duchess of Kendall."

My guide next pointed out Minerva's owl and the
vulture that preyed upon the liver of Prometheus.
There was likewise the sacred ibis of Egypt, and
one of the Stymphalides which Hercules shot in his
sixth labor. Shelley's skylark, Bryant's water-fowl,
and a pigeon from the belfry of the Old South Church,

542 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

preserved by N. P. Willis, were placed on the same
perch. I could not but shudder on beholding Cole
ridge's albatross, transfixed with the Ancient Mariner's
cross-bow shaft. Beside this bird of awful poesy stood
a gray goose of very ordinary aspect.

" Stuffed goose is no such rarity," observed I. " Why
do you preserve such a specimen in your museum ?"

" It is one of the flock whose cackling saved the
Koman Capitol," answered the virtuoso. " Many
geese have cackled and hissed both before and since ;
but none, like these, have clamored themselves into
immortality."

There seemed to be little else that demanded notice
in this department of the museum, unless we except
Robinson Crusoe's parrot, a live pho3nix, a footless
.bird of paradise, and a splendid peacock, supposed
to be the same that once contained the soul of Py
thagoras. I therefore passed to the next alcove, the
shelves of which were covered with a miscellaneous
collection of curiosities such as are usually found in
similar establishments. One of the first things that
took my eye was a strange-looking cap, woven of some
substance that appeared to be neither woollen, cotton,
nor linen.

" Is this a magician's cap ? " I asked.

"No," replied the virtuoso; "it is merely Dr. Frank,
lin's cap of asbestos. But here is one which, perhaps,
may suit you better. It is the wishing cap of Fortu-
natus. Will you try it on ? "

" By no means," answered I, putting it aside with
my hand. " The day of wild wishes is past with me.
I desire nothing that may not come in the ordinary
course of Providence."

" Then probably," returned the virtuoso, " you will
not be tempted to rub this lamp ? "

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 543

While speaking, he took from the shelf an antique
brass lamp, curiously wrought with embossed figures,
but so covered with verdigris that the sculpture was
almost eaten away.

" It is a thousand years," said he, " since the genius
of this lamp constructed Aladdin's palace in a single
night. But he still retains his power ; and the man
who rubs Aladdin's lamp has but to desire either a
palace or a cottage."

"I might desire a cottage," replied I ; " but I would
have it founded on sure and stable truth, not on
dreams and fantasies. I have learned to look for the
real and the true."

My guide next showed me Prospero's magic wand,
broken into three fragments by the hand of its mighty
master. On the same shelf lay the gold ring of an
cient Gyges, which enabled the wearer to walk invisi
ble. On the other side of the alcove was a tall look
ing-glass in a frame of ebony, but veiled with a curtain
of purple silk, through the rents o$ which the gleam
of the mirror was perceptible.

" This is Cornelius Agrippa's magic glass," observed
the virtuoso. "Draw aside the curtain, and picture
any human form within your mind, and it will be re
flected in the mirror."

" It is enough if I can picture it within my mind,"
answered I. " Why should I wish it to be repeated
in the mirror? But, indeed, these works of magic
have grown wearisome to me. There are so many
greater wonders in the world, to those who keep their
eyes open and their sight undimmed by custom, that
all the delusions of the old sorcerers seem flat and
stale. Unless you can show me something really cu
rious, I care not to look farther into your museum."

544 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

"Ah, well, then," said the virtuoso, composedly,
" perhaps you may deem some of my antiquarian rari
ties deserving of a glance."

He pointed out the iron mask, now corroded with
rust ; and my heart grew sick at the sight of this
dreadful relic, which had shut out a human being
from sympathy with his race. There was nothing
half so terrible in the axe that beheaded King Charles,
nor in the dagger that slew Henry of Navarre, nor in
the arrow that pierced the heart of William Ruf us —
all of which were shown to me. Many of the articles
derived their interest, such as it was, from having been
formerly in the possession of royalty. For instance,
here was Charlemagne's sheepskin cloak, the flowing
wig of Louis Quatorze, the spinning-wheel of Sar-
danapalus, and King Stephen's famous breeches which
cost him but a crown. The heart of the Bloody Mary,
with the word " Calais " worn into its diseased sub
stance, was preserved in a bottle of spirits ; and near
it lay the golden case in which the queen of Gustavus
Adolphus treasured up that hero's heart. Among
these relics and heirlooms of kings I must not forget
the long, hairy ears of Midas, and a piece of bread
which had been changed to gold by the touch of that
unlucky monarch. And as Grecian Helen was a
queen, it may here be mentioned that I was permitted
to take into my hand a lock of her golden hair and
the bowl which a sculptor modelled from the curve of
her perfect breast. Here, likewise, was the robe that
smothered Agamemnon, Nero's fiddle, the Czar Peter's
brandy bottle, the crown of Semiramis, and Canute's
sceptre which he extended over the sea. That my
own land may not deem itself neglected, let me add
that I was favored with a sight of the skull of King

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 545

Philip, the famous Indian chief, whose head the Puri
tans smote off and exhibited upon a pole.

" Show me something else," said I to the virtuoso.
" Kings are in such an artificial position that people
in the ordinary walks of life cannot feel an interest in
their relics. If you could show me the straw hat of
sweet little Nell, I would far rather see it than a king's
golden crown."

"There it is," said my guide, pointing carelessly
with his staff to the straw hat in question. " But, in
deed, you are hard to please. Here are the seven-
league boots. Will you try them on? "

" Our modern railroads have superseded their use,"
answered I ; " and as to these cowhide boots, I could
show you quite as curious a pair at the Transcenden
tal community in Roxbury."

We next examined a collection of swords and other
weapons, belonging to different epochs, but thrown to
gether without much attempt at arrangement. Here
was Arthur's sword Excalibar, and that of the Cid
Campeador, and the sword of Brutus rusted with Cae
sar's blood and his own, and the sword of Joan of Arc,
and that of Horatius, and that with which Virginius
slew his daughter, and the one which Dionysius sus
pended over the head of Damocles. Here also was Ar-
ria's sword, which she plunged into her own breast, in
order to taste of death before her husband. The
crooked blade of Saladin's cimeter next attracted my
notice. I know not by what chance, but so it hap
pened, that the sword of one of our own militia gen
erals was suspended between Don Quixote's lance and
the brown blade of Hudibras. My heart throbbed high
at the sight of the helmet of Miltiades and the spear
that was broken in the breast of Epaminondas. I rec-

VOL. ii. 35

546 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

ognized the shield of Achilles by its resemblance to
the admirable cast in the possession of Professor Fel-
ton. Nothing in this apartment interested me more
than Major Pitcairn's pistol, the discharge of which, at
Lexington, began the War of the Revolution, and was
reverberated in thunder around the land for seven
long years. The bow of Ulysses, though unstrung for
ages, was placed against the wall, together with a
sheaf of Robin Hood's arrows and the rifle of Daniel
Boone.

" Enough of weapons," said I, at length ; " although
I would gladly have seen the sacred shield which fell
from heaven in the time of Numa. And surely you
should obtain the sword which Washington unsheathed
at Cambridge. But the collection does you much cred
it. Let us pass on."

In the next alcove we saw the golden thigh of
Pythagoras, which had so divine a meaning ; and, by
one of the queer analogies to which the virtuoso seemed
to be addicted, this ancient emblem lay on the same
shelf with Peter Stuyvesant's wooden leg, that was
fabled to be of silver. Here was a remnant of the
Golden Fleece, and a sprig of yellow leaves that re
sembled the foliage of a frost-bitten elm, but was duly
authenticated as a portion of the golden branch by
which ^Eneas gained admittance to the realm of Pluto.
Atalanta's golden apple and one of the apples of dis
cord were wrapped in the napkin of gold which Ramp-
sinitus brought from Hades ; and the whole were de
posited in the golden vase of Bias, with its inscription :
u To THE WISEST."

" And how did you obtain this vase ? " said I to the
virtuoso.

" It was given me long ago," replied he, with a

I

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 547

scornful expression in his eye, " because I had learned
to despise all things."

It had not escaped me that, though the virtuoso was
evidently a man of high cultivation, yet he seemed to
lack sympathy with the spiritual, the sublime, and the
tender. Apart from the whim that had led him to
devote so much time, pains, and expense to the collec
tion of this museum, he impressed me as one of the
hardest and coldest men of the world whom I had ever
met.

" To despise all things ! " repeated I. " This, at
best, is the wisdom of the understanding. It is the (
creed of a man whose soul, whose better and diviner
part, has never been awakened, or has died out of \
him." )

" 1 did not think that you were still so young," said /
the virtuoso. " Should you live to my years, you will \
acknowledge that the vase of Bias was not ill be- j
stowed."

Without further discussion of the point, he directed
rny attention to other curiosities. I examined Cinder
ella's little glass slipper, and compared it with one of
Diana's sandals, and with Fanny Elssler's shoe, which
bore testimony to the muscular character of her illus
trious foot. On the same shelf were Thomas the
Rhymer's green velvet shoes, and the brazen shoe of
Empedocles which was thrown out of Mount JEtna.
Anacreon's drinking-cup was placed in apt juxtaposi
tion with one of Tom Moore's wineglasses and Circe's
magic bowl. These were symbols of luxury and riot ;
but near them stood the cup whence Socrates drank
his hemlock, and that which Sir Philip Sidney put
from his death-parched lips to bestow the draught upon
a dying soldier. Next appeared a cluster of tobacco-

548 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

pipes, consisting of Sir Walter Raleigh's, the earliest
on record, Dr. Parr's, Charles Lamb's, and the first
calumet of peace which was ever smoked between a
European and an Indian. Among other musical in
struments, I noticed the lyre of Orpheus and those of
Homer and Sappho, Dr. Franklin's famous whistle,
the trumpet of Anthony Van Corlear, and the flute
which Goldsmith played upon in his rambles through
the French provinces. The staff of Peter the Hermit
stood in a corner with that of good old Bishop Jewel,
and one of ivory, which had belonged to Papirius, the
Roman senator. The ponderous club of Hercules was
close at hand. The virtuoso showed me the chisel of
Phidias, Claude's palette, and the brush of Apelles,
observing that he intended to bestow the former either
011 Greenough, Crawford, or Powers, and the two latter
upon Washington Allston. There was a small vase of
oracular gas from Delphos, which I trust will be sub
mitted to the scientific analysis of Professor Silliman.
I was deeply moved on beholding a vial of the tears
into which Niobe was dissolved ; nor less so on learn
ing that a shapeless fragment of salt was a relic of
that victim of despondency and sinful regrets — Lot's
wife. My companion appeared to set great value upon
some Egyptian darkness in a blacking jug. Several
of the shelves were covered by a collection of coins,
among which, however, I remember none but the
Splendid Shilling, celebrated by Phillips, and a dol
lar's worth of the iron money of Lycurgus, weighing
about fifty pounds.

Walking carelessly onward, I had nearly fallen over
a huge bundle, like a pedlar's pack, done up in sack
cloth and very securely strapped and corded.

" It is Christian's burden of sin," said the virtuoso.

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 549

" Oh, pray let us open it ! " cried I. " For many a
year I have longed to know its contents."

" Look into your own consciousness and memory,"
replied the virtuoso. " You will there find a list of
whatever it contains."

As this was an undeniable truth, I threw a melan
choly look at the burden and passed on. A collection
of old garments, hanging on pegs, was worthy of some
attention, especially the shirt of Nessus, Caesar's mantle,
Joseph's coat of many colors, the Vicar of Bray's cas
sock, Goldsmith's peach-bloom suit, a pair of Presi
dent Jefferson's scarlet breeches, John Randolph's red
baize hunting shirt, the drab smallclothes of the Stout
Gentleman, and the rags of the " man all tattered and
torn." George Fox's hat impressed me with deep rev
erence as a relic of perhaps the truest apostle that
has appeared on earth for these eighteen hundred
years. My eye was next attracted by an old pair of
shears, which I should have taken for a memorial of
some famous tailor, only that the virtuoso pledged his
veracity that they were the identical scissors of Atropos.
He also showed me a broken hour-glass which had been
thrown aside by Father Time, together with the old
gentleman's gray forelock, tastefully braided into a
brooch. In the hour-glass was the handful of sand, the
grains of which had numbered the years of the Cu-
maean sibyl. I think it was in this alcove that I saw
the inkstand which Luther threw at the devil, and the
ring which Essex, while under sentence of death, sent
to Queen Elizabeth. And here was the blood -in-
crusted pen of steel with which Faust signed away his
salvation.

The virtuoso now opened the door of a closet and
showed me a lamp burning, while three others stood

550 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

unlighted by its side. One of the three was the lamp
of Diogenes, another that of Guy Fawkes, and the
third that which Hero set forth to the midnight breeze
in the high tower of Abydos.

" See ! " said the virtuoso, blowing with all his force
at the lighted lamp.

The flame quivered and shrank away from his
breath, but clung to the wick, and resumed its brill
iancy as soon as the blast was exhausted.

" It is an undying lamp from the tomb of Charle
magne," observed my guide. " That flame was kin
dled a thousand years ago."

" How ridiculous to kindle an unnatural light in
tombs ! " exclaimed I. " We should seek to behold
the dead in the light of heaven. But what is the
meaning of this chafing-dish of glowing coals ? "

" That," answered the virtuoso, " is the original fire
which Prometheus stole from heaven. Look stead
fastly into it, and you will discern another curiosity."

I gazed into that fire, — which, symbolically, was
the origin of all that was bright and glorious in the
soul of man, — and in the midst of it, behold, a little
reptile, sporting with evident enjoyment of the fervid
heat ! It was a salamander.

"What a sacrilege!" cried I, with inexpressible
disgust. " Can you find no better use for this ethereal
fire than to cherish a loathsome reptile in it ? Yet
there are men who abuse the sacred fire of their own
souls to as foul and guilty a purpose."

The virtuoso made no answer except by a dry laugh
and an assurance that the salamander was the very
same which Benvenuto Cellini had seen in his fath
er's household fire. He then proceeded to show me
other rarities ; for this closet appeared to be the re-

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 551

oeptacle of what he considered most valuable in his
collection.

" There/' said he, " is the Great Carbuncle of the
White 'Mountains."

I gazed with no little interest at this mighty gem,
which it had been one of the wild projects of my youth
to discover. Possibly it might have looked brighter
to me in those days than now ; at all events, it had not
such brilliancy as to detain me long from the other
articles of the museum. The virtuoso pointed out to
me a crystalline stone which hung by a gold chain
against the wall.

" That is the philosopher's stone," said he.

" And have you the elixir vitae which generally ac
companies it ? " inquired I.

" Even so ; this urn is filled with it," he replied.
" A draught would refresh you. Here is Hebe's cup ;
will you quaff a health from it ? "

My heart thrilled within me at the idea of such a
reviving draught ; for methought I had great need of
it after travelling so far on the dusty road of life. But
I know not whether it were a peculiar glance in the
virtuoso's eye, or the circumstance that this most pre
cious liquid was contained in an antique sepulchral
urn, that made me pause. Then came many a thought
with which, in the calmer and better hours of Kfe, I
had strengthened myself to feel that Death is the very
friend whom, in his due season, even the happiest mor
tal should be willing to embrace.

" No ; I desire not an earthly immortality," said I.
" Were man to live longer on the earth, the spiritual
would die out of him. The spark of ethereal fire
would be choked by the material, the sensual. There
is a celestial something within us that requires, after »

552 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

certain time, the atmosphere of heaven to preserve it
from decay and ruin. I will have none of this liquid.
You do well to keep it in a sepulchral urn ; for it
would produce death while bestowing the sha'dow of
life."

"All this is unintelligible to me," responded my
guide, with indifference. " Life — earthly life — is
the only good. But you refuse the draught ? Well,
it is not likely to be offered twice within one man's
experience. Probably you have griefs which you seek
to forget in death. I can enable you to forget them
in life. Will you take a draught of Lethe ? "

As he spoke, the virtuoso took from the shelf a
crystal vase containing a sable liquor, which caught
no reflected image from the objects around.

" Not for the world ! " exclaimed I, shrinking back.
" I can spare none of my recollections, not even those
of error or sorrow. They are all alike the food of my
spirit. As well never to have lived as to lose them
now."

Without further parley we passed to the next alcove,
the shelves of which were burdened with ancient vol
umes and with those rolls of papyrus in which was
treasured up the eldest wisdom of the earth. Perhaps
the most valuable work in the collection, to a biblio
maniac, was the Book of Hermes. For my part, how
ever, I would have given a higher price for those six
of the Sibyl's books which Tarquin refused to pur
chase, and which, the virtuoso informed me, he had
himself found in the cave of Trophonius. Doubtless
these old volumes contain prophecies of the fate of
Rome, both as respects the decline and fall of her tem
poral empire and the rise of her spiritual one. Not
without value, likewise, was the work of Anaxagoras

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 553

on Nature, hitherto supposed to be irrecoverably lost,
and the missing treatises of Longinus, by which mod
ern criticism might profit, and those books of Livy for
which the classic student has so long sorrowed without
hope. Among these precious tomes I observed the
original manuscript of the Koran, and also that of the
Mormon Bible in Joe Smith's authentic autograph.
Alexander's copy of the Iliad was also there, enclosed
in the jewelled casket of Darius, still fragrant of the
perfumes which the Persian kept in it.

Opening an iron-clasped volume, bound in black
leather, I discovered it to be Cornelius Agrippa's
book of magic ; and it was rendered still more inter
esting by the fact that many flowers, ancient and
modern, were pressed between its leaves. Here was a
rose from Eve's bridal bower, and all those red and
white roses which were plucked in the garden of the
Temple by the partisans of York and Lancaster. Here
was Halleck's Wild Kose of Alloway. Cowper had
contributed a Sensitive Plant, and Wordsworth an
Eglantine, and Burns a Mountain Daisy, and Kirke
White a Star of Bethlehem, and Long-fellow a Sprig
of Fennel, with its yellow flowers. James Russell
Lowell had given a Pressed Flower, but fragrant still,
which had been shadowed in the Rhine. There was
also a sprig from Southey's Holly-Tree. One of the
most beautiful specimens was a Fringed Gentian,
which had been plucked and preserved for immor
tality by Bryant. From Jones Very, a poet whose
voice is scarcely heard among us by reason of its
depth, there was a Wind Flower and a Columbine.

As I closed Cornelius Agrippa's magic volume, an
old, mildewed letter fell upon the floor. It proved to
be an autograph from the Flying Dutchman to his

554 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

wife. I could linger no longer among books ; for the
afternoon was waning, and there was yet much to see.
The bare mention of a few more curiosities must suf
fice. The immense skull of Polyphemus was recog
nizable by the cavernous hollow in the centre of the
forehead where once had blazed the giant's single eye.
The tub of Diogenes, Medea's caldron, and Psyche's
vase of beauty were placed one within another. Pan
dora's box, without the lid, stood next, containing
nothing but the girdle of Venus, which had been care
lessly flung into it. A bundle of birch rods which
had been used by Shenstone's schoolmistress were tied
up with the Countess of Salisbury's garter. I knew
not which to value most, a roc's egg as big as an ordi
nary hogshead, or the shell of the egg which Colum
bus set upon its end. Perhaps the most delicate ar
ticle in the whole museum was Queen Mab's chariot,
which, to guard it from the touch of meddlesome fin
gers, was placed under a glass tumbler.

Several of the shelves were occupied by specimens
of entomology. Feeling but little interest in the sci
ence I noticed only Anacreon's grasshopper, and a
humble bee which had been presented to the virtuoso
by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In the part of the hall which we had now reached I
observed a curtain that descended from the ceiling to
the floor in voluminous folds, of a depth, richness, and
magnificence which I had never seen equalled. It
was not to be doubted that this splendid though dark
and solemn veil concealed a portion of the museum
even richer in wonders than that through which I had
already passed ; but, on my attempting to grasp the
edge of the curtain and draw it aside, it proved to be
an illusive picture.

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 555

"You need not blush," remarked the virtuoso ; "for
that same curtain deceived Zeuxis. It is the celebrated
painting of Parrhasius."

In a range with the curtain there were a number of
other choice pictures by artists of ancient days. Here
was the famous cluster of grapes by Zeuxis, so ad
mirably depicted that it seemed as if the ripe juice
were bursting forth. As to the picture of the old
woman by the same illustrious painter, and which was
so ludicrous that he himself died with laughing at it,
I cannot say that it particularly moved my risibility.
Ancient humor seems to have little power over mod
ern muscles. Here, also, was the horse painted by
Apelles which living horses neighed at ; his first por*
trait of Alexander the Great, and his ' last unfinished
picture of Venus asleep. Each of these works of art%
together with others by Parrhasius, Timanthes, Polyg*
notus, Apollodorus, Pausias, and Pamphilus, required
more time and study than I could bestow for the ade*
quate perception of their merits. I shall therefore
leave them undescribed and uncriticised, nor attempt
to settle the question of superiority between ancient
and modern art.

For the same reason I shall pass lightly over the
specimens of antique sculpture which this indefati
gable and fortunate virtuoso had dug out of the dust
of fallen empires. Here was ^tion's cedar statue of
^Esculapius, much decayed, and Alcon's iron statue of
Hercules, lamentably rusted. Here was the statue
of Victory, six feet high, which the Jupiter Olympus
of Phidias had held in his hand. Here was a fore
finger of the Colossus of Rhodes, seven feet in length.
Here was the Venus Urania of Phidias, and other
images of male and female beauty or grandeur,

556 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

wrought by sculptors who appear never to have de
based their souls by the sight of any meaner forms
than those of gods or godlike mortals. But the deep
simplicity of these great works was not to be compre
hended by a mind excited and disturbed, as mine was,
by the various objects that had recently been presented
to it. I therefore turned away with merely a passing
glance, resolving on some future occasion to brood
over each individual statue and picture until my in
most spirit should feel their excellence. In this de
partment, again, I noticed the tendency to whimsical
combinations and ludicrous analogies which seemed to
influence many of the arrangements of the museum.
The wooden statue so well known as the Palladium of
Troy was placed in close apposition with the wooden
head of General Jackson which was stolen a few years
since from the bows of the frigate Constitution.

We had now completed the circuit of the spacious
hall, and found ourselves again near the door. Feel
ing somewhat wearied with the survey of so many
novelties and antiquities, I sat down upon Cowper's
sofa, while the virtuoso threw himself carelessly into
Rabelais' easy chair. Casting my eyes upon the op
posite wall, I was surprised to perceive the shadow of
a man flickering unsteadily across the wainscot, and
looking as if it were stirred by some breath of air
that found its way through the door or windows. No
substantial figure was visible from which this shadow
might be thrown ; nor, had there been such, was there
,any sunshine that would have caused it to darken upon
the wall.

" It is Peter SchlemihTs shadow," observed the vir
tuoso, " and one of the most valuable articles in my
collection."

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION'. 557

" Methinks a shadow would have made a fitting
door-keeper to such a museum," said I ; " although, in
deed, yonder figure has something strange and fantas
tic about him, which suits well enough with many of
the impressions which I have received here. Pray,
who is he ? "

While speaking, I gazed more scrutinizingly than
before at the antiquated presence of the person who
had admitted me, and who still sat on his bench with
the same restless aspect, and dim, confused question
ing anxiety that I had noticed on my first entrance.
At this moment he looked eagerly towards us, and,
half starting from his seat, addressed me.

" I beseech you, kind sir," said he, in a cracked,
melancholy tone, " have pity on the most unfortunate
man in the world. For Heaven's sake, answer me a
single question ! Is this the town of Boston ? "

" You have recognized him now," said the virtuoso.
" It is Peter Rugg, the missing man. I chanced to
meet him the other day still in search of Boston, and
conducted him hither ; and, as he could not succeed
in finding his friends, I have taken him into my ser
vice as door-keeper. He is somewhat too apt to ram
ble, but otherwise a man of trust and integrity."

" And might I venture to ask," continued I, " to
whom am I indebted for this afternoon's gratifica
tion?"

The virtuoso, before replying, laid his hand upon an
antique dart, or javelin, the rusty steel head of which
seemed to have been 'blunted, as if it had encountered
the resistance of a tempered shield, or breastplate.

" My name has not been without its distinction in
the world for a longer period than that of any other
man alive," answered he. " Yet many doubt of my

558 MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE.

existence ; perhaps you will do so to-morrow. This
dart which I hold in my hand was once grim Death's
own weapon. It served him well for the space of
four thousand years ; but it fell blunted, as you see,
when he directed it against my breast."

These words were spoken with the calm and cold
courtesy of manner that had characterized this singular
personage throughout our interview. I fancied, it is
true, that there was a bitterness indefinably mingled
with his tone, as of one cut off from natural sympa
thies and blasted with a doom that had been inflicted
on no other human being, and by the results of which
he had ceased to be human. Yet, withal, it seemed
one of the most terrible consequences of that doom
that the victim no longer regarded it as a calamity,
but had finally accepted it as the greatest good that
could have befallen him.

" You are the Wandering Jew ! " exclaimed I.

The virtuoso bowed without emotion of any kind ;
for, by centuries of custom, he had almost lost the
sense of strangeness in his fate, and was but imper
fectly conscious of the astonishment and awe with
which it affected such as are capable of death.

" Your doom is indeed a fearful one ! " said I, with
irrepressible feeling and a frankness that afterwards
startled me ; " yet perhaps the ethereal spirit is not en
tirely extinct under all this corrupted or frozen mass
of earthly life. Perhaps the immortal spark may yet
be rekindled by a breath of Heaven. Perhaps you may
yet be permitted to die before it is too late to live eter
nally. You have my prayers for such a consummation.
Farewell."

" Your prayers will be in vain," replied he, with a
smile of cold triumph. " My destiny is linked with

A VIRTUOSO'S COLLECTION. 559

the realities of earth. You are welcome to your vis
ions and shadows of a future state ; but give me what
I can see, and touch, and understand, and I ask no
more."

" It is indeed too late," thought I. " The soul is
dead within him."

Struggling between pity and horror, I extended my
hand, to which the virtuoso gave his own, still with the
habitual courtesy of a man of the world, but without a
single heart throb of human brotherhood. The touch
seemed like ice, yet I know not whether morally or
physically. As I departed, he bade me observe that
the inner door of the hall was constructed with the
ivory leaves of the gateway through which JEneas and
the Sibyl had been dismissed from Hades.

THE END*

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