[SPRING has come. You will find some verses to that effect at the
end of these notes. If you are an impatient reader, skip to them
at once. In reading aloud, omit, if you please, the sixth and
seventh verses. These are parenthetical and digressive, and,
unless your audience is of superior intelligence, will confuse
them. Many people can ride on horseback who find it hard to get on
and to get off without assistance. One has to dismount from an
idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.]
- The old gentleman who sits opposite, finding that spring had
fairly come, mounted a white hat one day, and walked into the
street. It seems to have been a premature or otherwise
exceptionable exhibition, not unlike that commemorated by the late
Mr. Bayly. When the old gentleman came home, he looked very red in
the face, and complained that he had been "made sport of." By
sympathizing questions, I learned from him that a boy had called
him "old daddy," and asked him when he had his hat whitewashed.
This incident led me to make some observations at table the next
morning, which I here repeat for the benefit of the readers of this
record.
- The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument. I
learned this in early boyhood. I was once equipped in a hat of
Leghorn straw, having a brim of much wider dimensions than were
usual at that time, and sent to school in that portion of my native
town which lies nearest to this metropolis. On my way I was met by
a "Port-chuck," as we used to call the young gentlemen of that
locality, and the following dialogue ensued.
THE PORT-CHUCK. Hullo, You-sir, joo know th' wuz gon-to be a race
to-morrah?
MYSELF. No. Who's gon-to run, 'n' wher's't gon-to be?
THE PORT-CHUCK. Squire Mico 'n' Doctor Wiliams, round the brim o'
your hat.
These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at
that time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question,
the Port-chuck also winking and thrusting his tongue into his
cheek, I perceived that I had been trifled with, and the effect has
been to make me sensitive and observant respecting this article of
dress ever since. Here is an axiom or two relating to it.
A hat which has been POPPED, or exploded by being sat down upon, is
never itself again afterwards.
It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the
contrary.
Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There
is always an unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome
gloss, suggestive of a wet brush.
The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its
dilapidated castor. The hat is the ULTIMUM MORIENS of
"respectability."
- The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very
pleasantly, saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his
French except the word for potatoes, - PUMMIES DE TARE. - ULTIMUM
MORIENS, I told him, is old Italian, and signifies LAST THING TO
DIE. With this explanation he was well contented, and looked quite
calm when I saw him afterwards in the entry with a black hat on his
head and the white one in his hand.
- I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for
my intimates. We are so much together, that we no doubt think and
talk a good deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects
individual and peculiar. You know me well enough by this time. I
have not talked with you so long for nothing and therefore I don't
think it necessary to draw my own portrait. But let me say a word
or two about my friends.
The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful
and worthy kind of drudge. I think he has a pride in his small
technicalities. I know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and
though I suspect he laughs a little inwardly at times at the grand
airs "Science" puts on, as she stands marking time, but not getting
on, while the trumpets are blowing and the big drums beating, - yet
I am sure he has a liking for his specially, and a respect for its
cultivators.
But I'll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other
day. - My boy, said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you,
because I keep all my goods in the lower story. You have to hoist
yours into the upper chambers of the brain, and let them down again
to your customers. I take mine in at the level of the ground, and
send them off from my doorstep almost without lifting. I tell you,
the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought before he
works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle.
Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary
man to have a profession.
- Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the
other. After a while I get tired of both. When a fit of
intellectual disgust comes over me, I will tell you what I have
found admirable as a diversion, in addition to boating and other
amusements which I have spoken of, - that is, working at my
carpenter's-bench. Some mechanical employment is the greatest
possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to
tire. When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I got to work
immediately at carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a stick,
and got so interested in it, that when we were set loose, I
"regained my freedom with a sigh," because my toy was unfinished.
There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and
others when I give myself wholly up to the Poet. Now that my
winter's work is over and spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn
to the Poet's company. I don't know anybody more alive to life
than he is. The passion of poetry seizes on him every spring, he
says, - yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he feels most, he
can sing least.
Then a fit of despondency comes over him. - I feel ashamed,
sometimes, - said he, the other day, - to think how far my worst
songs fall below my best. It sometimes seems to me, as I know it
does to others who have told me so, that they ought to be ALL BEST,
- if not in actual execution, at least in plan and motive. I am
grateful - he continued - for all such criticisms. A man is always
pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the highest
aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.
Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must
change their key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or
losing their voices. You know, I suppose, - he said, - what is
meant by complementary colors? You know the effect, too, which the
prolonged impression of any one color has on the retina. If you
close your eyes after looking steadily at a RED object, you see a
GREEN image.
It is so with many minds, - I will not say with all. After looking
at one aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or
truth, when they turn away, the COMPLEMENTARY aspect of the same
object stamps itself irresistibly and automatically upon the mind.
Shall they give expression to this secondary mental state, or not?
When I contemplate - said my friend, the Poet - the infinite
largeness of comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence,
how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and
ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to
change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest
condition, - never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon
what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a
chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second
floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their
splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their
holiday, and the cotton velvet and the thin-skinned jewelry -
simple adornments, but befitting the station of those who wear them
- show themselves to the crowd, who think them beautiful, as they
ought to, though the people up stairs know that they are cheap and
perishable?
- I don't know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or
other, and let him speak for himself. Still I think I can tell you
what he says quite as well as he could do it. - Oh, - he said to
me, one day, - I am but a hand-organ man, - say rather, a hand-
organ. Life turns the winch, and fancy or accident pulls out the
stops. I come under your windows, some fine spring morning, and
play you one of my ADAGIO movements, and some of you say, - This is
good, - play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did not change
the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust
in another. How easily this or that tune flows! - you say, - there
must be no end of just such melodies in him. - I will open the poor
machine for you one moment, and you shall look. - Ah! Every note
marks where a spur of steel has been driven in. It is easy to
grind out the song, but to plant these bristling points which make
it was the painful task of time.
I don't like to say it, - he continued, - but poets commonly have
no larger stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them
piping up under your window, you know pretty well what to expect.
The more stops, the better. Do let them all be pulled out in their
turn!
So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest
songs, and after it a gay CHANSON, and then a string of epigrams.
All true, - he said, - all flowers of his soul; only one with the
corolla spread, and another with its disk half opened, and the
third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a petal or two
showing its tip through the calyx. The water-lily is the type of
the poet's soul, - he told me.
- What do you think, Sir, - said the divinity-student, - opens the
souls of poets most fully?
Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus.
Neither is enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark,
and a fern will not flower anywhere.
What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet's corolla?
- I don't like to say. They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at
least they shine on a good many that never come to anything.
Who are THEY? - said the schoolmistress.
Women. Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his
best reward.
The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased. - Did I
really think so? - I do think so; I never feel safe until I have
pleased them; I don't think they are the first to see one's
defects, but they are the first to catch the color and fragrance of
a true poem. Fit the same intellect to a man and it is a bow-
string, - to a woman and it is a harp-string. She is vibratile and
resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of
the air about her. - Ah, me! - said my friend, the Poet, to me, the
other day, - what color would it not have given to my thoughts, and
what thrice-washed whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women's
praises! I should have grown like Marvell's fawn, -
"Lilies without; roses within!"
But then, - he added, - we all think, IF so and so, we should have
been this or that, as you were saying the other day, in those
rhymes of yours.
- I don't think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but
of those sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in
soft and melodious words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and
sorrows, every literature is full. Nature carves with her own
hands the brain which holds the creative imagination, but she casts
the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the same mould.
There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of
blondes. [Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table. -
Please to tell us about those blondes, said the schoolmistress.]
Why, there are blondes who are such simply by deficiency of
coloring matter, - NEGATIVE or WASHED blondes, arrested by Nature
on the way to become albinesses. There are others that are shot
through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various
degree, - POSITIVE or STAINED blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams,
and as unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is
unlike a snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil
and a sensitive retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an
opaline fire in her clear eye, which the brunette can hardly match
with her quick glittering glances.
Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations,
and a far more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of
moonlight-genius given them to compensate for their imperfection of
nature. Their want of mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive
to those impressions which stronger minds neglect or never feel at
all. Many of them die young, and all of them are tinged with
melancholy. There is no more beautiful illustration of the
principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than
the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest
songs are the growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for
the rougher duties of life. When one reads the life of Cowper, or
of Keats, or of Lucretia and Margaret Davidson, - of so many
gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness, and mostly dying before
their time, - one cannot help thinking that the human race dies out
singing, like the swan in the old story. The French poet, Gilbert,
who died at the Hotel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine, - (killed by
a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in
consequence of a fall,) - this poor fellow was a very good example
of the poet by excess of sensibility. I found, the other day, that
some of my literary friends had never heard of him, though I
suppose few educated Frenchmen do not know the lines which he
wrote, a week before his death, upon a mean bed in the great
hospital of Paris.
"Au banquet de la vie, infortune convive,
J'apparus un jour, et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, ou lentement j'arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs."
At life's gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,
One day I pass, then disappear;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest
No friend shall come to shed a tear.
You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke
White's poems. It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all
these sweet albino-poets. "I shall die and be forgotten, and the
world will go on just as if I had never been; - and yet how I have
loved! how I have longed! how I have aspired!" And so singing,
their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their features thinner
and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and,
still singing, they drop it and pass onward.
- Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them
up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the
hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.
Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop
them; they cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness
only makes them go faster; death alone can break into the case,
and, seizing the ever-swinging pendulum, which we call the heart,
silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have
carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.
If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count
the dead beats of thought after thought and image after image
jarring through the overtired organ! Will nobody block those
wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut the string that holds those
weights, blow up the infernal machine with gunpowder? What a
passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest! - that this
dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time,
embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but
one brief holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off
from beams in hempen lassos? - that they jump off from parapets
into the swift and gurgling waters beneath? - that they take
counsel of the grim friend who has but to utter his one peremptory
monosyllable and the restless machine is shivered as a vase that is
dashed upon a marble floor? Under that building which we pass
every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook, nor bar,
nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a sharp fragment may
be shattered, shall by any chance be seen. There is nothing for
it, when the brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but
to spring against the stone wall and silence them with one crash.
Ah, they remembered that, - the kind city fathers, - and the walls
are nicely padded, so that one can take such exercise as he likes
without damaging himself on the very plain and serviceable
upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a lever
that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton
and check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world
give for the discovery?
- From half a dime to a dime, according to the style of the place
and the quality of the liquor, - said the young fellow whom they
call John.
You speak trivially, but not unwisely, - I said. Unless the will
maintain a certain control over these movements, which it cannot
stop, but can to some extent regulate, men are very apt to try to
get at the machine by some indirect system of leverage or other.
They clap on the brakes by means of opium; they change the
maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of fermented liquors. It
is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch its movement
directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any crevice,
by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of
going for a while, and at last spoil the machine.
Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of the mind which work
independently of the will, - poets and artists, for instance, who
follow their imagination in their creative moments, instead of
keeping it in hand as your logicians and practical men do with
their reasoning faculty, - such men are too apt to call in the
mechanical appliances to help them govern their intellects.
- He means they get drunk, - said the young fellow already alluded
to by name.
Do you think men of true genius are apt to indulge in the use of
inebriating fluids? said the divinity-student.
If you think you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,
- I replied, - I will talk to you about this. But mind, now, these
are the things that some foolish people call DANGEROUS subjects, -
as if these vices which burrow into people's souls, as the Guinea-
worm burrows into the naked feet of West-Indian slaves, would be
more mischievous when seen than out of sight. Now the true way to
deal with those obstinate animals, which are a dozen feet long,
some of them, and no bigger than a horse hair, is to get a piece of
silk round their HEADS, and pull them out very cautiously. If you
only break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill
the person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them. Whence it
is plain that the first thing to do is to find out where the head
lies.
Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of
intemperance. What is the head of it, and where does it lie? For
you may depend upon it, there is not one of these vices that has
not a head of its own, - an intelligence, - a meaning, - a certain
virtue, I was going to say, - but that might, perhaps, sound
paradoxical. I have heard an immense number of moral physicians
lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority
of them would always insist that the creature had no head at all,
but was all body and tail. So I have found a very common result of
their method to be that the string slipped, or that a piece only of
the creature was broken off, and the worm soon grew again, as bad
as ever. The truth is, if the Devil could only appear in church by
attorney, and make the best statement that the facts would bear him
out in doing on behalf of his special virtues, (what we commonly
call vices,) the influence of good teachers would be much greater
than it is. For the arguments by which the Devil prevails are
precisely the ones that the Devil-queller most rarely answers. The
way to argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it, - to say
that it has no attractions, when everybody knows that it has, - but
rather to let it make out its case just as it certainly will in the
moment of temptation, and then meet it with the weapons furnished
by the Divine armory. Ithuriel did not spit the toad on his spear,
you remember, but touched him with it, and the blasted angel took
the sad glories of his true shape. If he had shown fight then, the
fair spirits would have known how to deal with him.
That all spasmodic cerebral action is an evil is not perfectly
clear. Men get fairly intoxicated with music, with poetry, with
religious excitement, oftenest with love. Ninon de l'Enclos said
she was so easily excited that her soup intoxicated her, and
convalescents have been made tipsy by a beef-steak.
There are forms and stages of alcoholic exaltation which, in
themselves, and without regard to their consequences, might be
considered as positive improvements of the persons affected. When
the sluggish intellect is roused, the slow speech quickened, the
cold nature warmed, the latent sympathy developed, the flagging
spirit kindled, - before the trains of thought become confused or
the will perverted, or the muscles relaxed, - just at the moment
when the whole human zoophyte flowers out like a full-blown rose,
and is ripe for the subscription-paper or the contribution-box, -
it would be hard to say that a man was, at that very time, worse,
or less to be loved, than when driving a hard bargain with all his
meaner wits about him. The difficulty is, that the alcoholic
virtues don't wash; but until the water takes their colors out, the
tints are very much like those of the true celestial stuff.
[Here I was interrupted by a question which I am very unwilling to
report, but have confidence enough in those friends who examine
these records to commit to their candor.
A PERSON at table asked me whether I "went in for rum as a steady
drink?" - His manner made the question highly offensive, but I
restrained myself, and answered thus:-]
Rum I take to be the name which unwashed moralists apply alike to
the product distilled from molasses and the noblest juices of the
vineyard. Burgundy "in all its sunset glow" is rum. Champagne,
"the foaming wine of Eastern France," in rum. Hock, which our
friend, the Poet, speaks of as
"The Rhine's breastmilk, gushing cold and bright,
Pale as the moon, and maddening as her light,"
is rum. Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to
the first miracle wrought by the Founder of our religion! I
address myself to the company. - I believe in temperance, nay,
almost in abstinence, as a rule for healthy people. I trust that I
practice both. But let me tell you, there are companies of men of
genius into which I sometimes go, where the atmosphere of intellect
and sentiment is so much more stimulating than alcohol, that, if I
thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.
Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by
drinking. My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined
before they became drunkards. The habit of drinking is often a
vice, no doubt, - sometimes a misfortune, - as when an almost
irresistible hereditary propensity exists to indulge in it, - but
oftenest of all a PUNISHMENT.
Empty heads, - heads without ideas in wholesome variety and
sufficient number to furnish food for the mental clockwork, - ill-
regulated heads, where the faculties are not under the control of
the will, - these are the ones that hold the brains which their
owners are so apt to tamper with, by introducing the appliances we
have been talking about. Now, when a gentleman's brain is empty or
ill-regulated, it is, to a great extent, his own fault; and so it
is simple retribution, that, while he lies slothfully sleeping or
aimlessly dreaming, the fatal habit settles on him like a vampyre,
and sucks his blood, fanning him all the while with its hot wings
into deeper slumber or idler dreams! I am not such a hard-souled
being as to apply this to the neglected poor, who have had no
chance to fill their heads with wholesome ideas, and to be taught
the lesson of self-government. I trust the tariff of Heaven has an
AD VALOREM scale for them - and all of us.
But to come back to poets and artists; - if they really are more
prone to the abuse of stimulants, - and I fear that this is true, -
the reason of it is only too clear. A man abandons himself to a
fine frenzy, and the power which flows through him, as I once
explained to you, makes him the medium of a great poem or a great
picture. The creative action is not voluntary at all, but
automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and
wait for the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it.
Thus the true state of creative genius is allied to REVERIE, or
dreaming. If mind and body were both healthy and had food enough
and fair play, I doubt whether any men would be more temperate than
the imaginative classes. But body and mind often flag, - perhaps
they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or ideas,
overworked, or abused in some way. The automatic action, by which
genius wrought its wonders, fails. There is only one thing which
can rouse the machine; not will, - that cannot reach it; nothing
but a ruinous agent, which hurries the wheels awhile and soon eats
out the heart of the mechanism. The dreaming faculties are always
the dangerous ones, because their mode of action can be imitated by
artificial excitement; the reasoning ones are safe, because they
imply continued voluntary effort.
I think you will find it true, that, before any vice can fasten on
a man, body, mind, or moral nature must be debilitated. The mosses
and fungi gather on sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious
parasites which fasten on the human frame choose that which is
already enfeebled. Mr. Walker, the hygeian humorist, declared that
he had such a healthy skin it was impossible for any impurity to
stick to it, and maintained that it was an absurdity to wash a face
which was of necessity always clean. I don't know how much fancy
there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the
lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative
natures in their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds
untrained to labor and discipline, fit the soul and body for the
germination of the seeds of intemperance.
Whenever the wandering demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift, -
no steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its
course, - he steps on board, takes the helm, and steers straight
for the maelstrom.
- I wonder if you know the TERRIBLE SMILE? [The young fellow whom
they call John winked very hard, and made a jocular remark, the
sense of which seemed to depend on some double meaning of the word
SMILE. The company was curious to know what I meant.]
There are persons - I said - who no sooner come within sight of you
than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth,
which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and
thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about
themselves, - and so look at you with a wretched mixture of self-
consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both, which
are betrayed by the cowardly behaviour of the eye and the tell-tale
weakness of the lips that characterize these unfortunate beings.
- Why do you call them unfortunate, Sir? - asked the divinity-
student.
Because it is evident that the consciousness of some imbecility or
other is at the bottom of this extraordinary expression. I don't
think, however, that these persons are commonly fools. I have
known a number, and all of them were intelligent. I think nothing
conveys the idea of UNDERBREEDING more than this self-betraying
smile. Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that of
MEANINGLESS BLUSHING may be fallen into by very good people who met
often, or sit opposite each other at table. A true gentleman's
face is infinitely removed from all such paltriness, - calm-eyed,
firm-mouthed. I think Titian understood the look of a gentleman as
well as anybody that ever lived. The portrait of a young man
holding a glove in his hand, in the Gallery of the Louvre, if any
of you have seen that collection, will remind you of what I mean.
- Do I think these people know the peculiar look they have? - I
cannot say; I hope not; I am afraid they would never forgive me, if
they did. The worst of it is, the trick is catching; when one
meets one of these fellows, he feels a tendency to the same
manifestation. The Professor tells me there is a muscular slip, a
dependence of the PLATYSMA MYOIDES, which is called the RISORIUS
SANTORINI.
- Say that once more, - exclaimed the young fellow mentioned above.
The Professor says there is a little fleshy slip called Santorini's
laughing muscle. I would have it cut out of my face, if I were
born with one of those constitutional grins upon it. Perhaps I am
uncharitable in my judgment of those sour-looking people I told you
of the other day, and of these smiling folks. It may be that they
are born with these looks, as other people are with more generally
recognized deformities. Both are bad enough, but I had rather meet
three of the scowlers than one of the smilers.
- There is another unfortunate way of looking, which is peculiar to
that amiable sex we do not like to find fault with. There are some
very pretty, but, unhappily, very ill-bred women, who don't
understand the law of the road with regard to handsome faces.
Nature and custom would, no doubt, agree in conceding to all males
the right of at least two distinct looks at every comely female
countenance, without any infraction of the rules of courtesy or the
sentiment of respect. The first look is necessary to define the
person of the individual one meets so as to avoid it in passing.
Any unusual attraction detected in a first glance is a sufficient
apology for a second, - not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but
an appreciating homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may
inoffensively yield to a passing image. It is astonishing how
morbidly sensitive some vulgar beauties are to the slightest
demonstration of this kind. When a lady walks the streets, she
leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well
enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces
framed in pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a
right to see them.
- When we observe how the same features and style of person and
character descend from generation to generation, we can believe
that some inherited weakness may account for these peculiarities.
Little snapping-turtles snap - so the great naturalist tells us -
before they are out of the egg-shell. I am satisfied, that, much
higher up in the scale of life, character is distinctly shown at
the age of -2 or -3 months.
- My friend, the Professor, has been full of eggs lately. [This
remark excited a burst of hilarity which I did not allow to
interrupt the course of my observations.] He has been reading the
great book where he found the fact about the little snapping-
turtles mentioned above. Some of the things he has told me have
suggested several odd analogies enough.
There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry in their brains the
OVARIAN EGGS of the next generation's or century's civilization.
These eggs are not ready to be laid in the form of books as yet;
some of them are hardly ready to be put into the form of talk. But
as rudimentary ideas or inchoate tendencies, there they are; and
these are what must form the future. A man's general notions are
not good for much, unless he has a crop of these intellectual
ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in the
minds of others. One must be in the HABIT of talking with such
persons to get at these rudimentary germs of thought; for their
development is necessarily imperfect, and they are moulded on new
patterns, which must be long and closely studied. But these are
the men to talk with. No fresh truth ever gets into a book.
- A good many fresh lies get in, anyhow, - said one of the company.
I proceeded in spite of the interruption. - All uttered thought, my
friend, the Professor, says, is of the nature of an excretion. Its
materials have been taken in, and have acted upon the system, and
been reacted on by it; it has circulated and done its office in one
mind before it is given out for the benefit of others. It may be
milk or venom to other minds; but, in either case, it is something
which the producer has had the use of and can part with. A man
instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in
print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it
lies imbedded, a mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his
intellect.
- Where are the brains that are fullest of these ovarian eggs of
thought? - I decline mentioning individuals. The producers of
thought, who are few, the "jobbers" of thought, who are many, and
the retailers of thought, who are numberless, are so mixed up in
the popular apprehension, that it would be hopeless to try to
separate them before opinion has had time to settle. Follow the
course of opinion on the great subjects of human interest for a few
generations or centuries, get its parallax, map out a small arc of
its movement, see where it tends, and then see who is in advance of
it or even with it; the world calls him hard names, probably; but
if you would find the OVA of the future, you must look into the
folds of his cerebral convolutions.
[The divinity-student looked a little puzzled at this suggestion,
as if he did not see exactly where he was to come out, if he
computed his arc too nicely. I think it possible it might cut off
a few corners of his present belief, as it has cut off martyr-
burning and witch-hanging; - but time will show, - time will show,
as the old gentleman opposite says.]
- Oh, - here is that copy of verses I told you about.
SPRING HAS COME.
INTRA MUROS.
The sunbeams, lost for half a year,
Slant through my pane their morning rays
For dry Northwesters cold and clear,
The East blows in its thin blue haze.
And first the snowdrop's bells are seen,
Then close against the sheltering wall
The tulip's horn of dusky green,
The peony's dark unfolding ball.
The golden-chaliced crocus burns;
The long narcissus-blades appear;
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns,
And lights her blue-flamed chandelier.
The willow's whistling lashes, wrung
By the wild winds of gusty March,
With sallow leaflets lightly strung,
Are swaying by the tufted larch.
The elms have robed their slender spray
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf;
Wide o'er the clasping arch of day
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief.
- [See the proud tulip's flaunting cup,
That flames in glory for an hour, -
Behold it withering, - then look up, -
How meek the forest-monarch's flower! -
When wake the violets, Winter dies;
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near;
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
"Bud, little roses! Spring is here!"]
The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,
Pink as Aurora's finger-tips.
Nor less the flood of light that showers
On beauty's changed corolla-shades, -
The walks are gay as bridal bowers
With rows of many-petalled maids.
The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
Creeps homeward from his morning ride.
Here comes the dealer's awkward string,
With neck in rope and tail in knot, -
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
In lazy walk or slouching trot.
- Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills!
I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush's trill, the cat-bird's cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.
Oh for one spot of living green, -
One little spot where leaves can grow, -
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above, to sleep below! |