[AQUI ESTA ENCERRADA EL ALMA DEL LICENCIADO PEDRO GARCIAS.
If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I
hope you are not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the
above sentence for a motto on the title-page. But I want it now,
and must use it. I need not say to you that the words are Spanish,
nor that they are to be found in the short Introduction to "Gil
Blas," nor that they mean, "Here lies buried the soul of the
licentiate Pedro Garcias."
I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes
referring to old age. I must be equally fair with old people now.
They are earnestly requested to leave this paper to young persons
from the age of twelve to that of fourscore years and ten, at which
latter period of life I am sure that I shall have at least one
youthful reader. You know well enough what I mean by youth and
age; - something in the soul, which has no more to do with the
color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with
the grass a thousand feet above it.
I am growing bolder as I write. I think it requires not only
youth, but genius, to read this paper. I don't mean to imply that
it required any whatsoever to talk what I have here written down.
It did demand a certain amount of memory, and such command of the
English tongue as is given by a common school education. So much I
do claim. But here I have related, at length, a string of
trivialities. You must have the imagination of a poet to
transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the
windows of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull
and meaningless spots of color; seen from within, they are
glorified shapes with empurpled wings and sunbright aureoles.
My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come
bearing flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this
poor, brown, homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And
yet - and yet - it is something better than flowers; it is a SEED-
CAPSULE. Many a gardener will cut you a bouquet of his choicest
blossoms for small fee, but he does not love to let the seeds of
his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.
It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very
probably mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it
not for individual experiences which differ from those of others
only in details seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty
thousands of times, and felt, with Pindar, that water was the best
of things. I alone, as I think, of all mankind, remember one
particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-pine of which
the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one Edmund, a
red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a
fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and
little full-blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low-
"studded" school-room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled
over young children, many of whom are old ghosts now, and have
known Abraham for twenty or thirty years of our mortal time.
Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that
white-pine pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and
just so of my special relationships with other things and with my
rice. One could never remember himself in eternity by the mere
fact of having loved or hated any more than by that of having
thirsted; love and hate have no more individuality in them than
single waves in the ocean; - but the accidents or trivial marks
which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their memory
our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.
Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause
at the threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself
seriously whether you are fit to read such revelations as are to
follow. For observe, you have here no splendid array of petals
such as poets offer you, - nothing but a dry shell, containing, if
you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of poems. You
may laugh at them, if you like. I shall never tell you what I
think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the heart of
these things, in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear
to your soul, then you are neither more nor less than a POET, and
can afford to write no more verses during the rest of your natural
life, - which abstinence I take to be one of the surest marks of
your meriting the divine name I have just bestowed upon you.
May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your
own imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which
it does not lay claim to without your kind assistance, - may I beg
of you, I say, to pay particular attention to the BRACKETS which
enclose certain paragraphs? I want my "asides," you see, to
whisper loud to you who read my notes, and sometimes I talk a page
or two to you without pretending that I said a word of it to our
boarders. You will find a very long "aside" to you almost as soon
as you begin to read. And so, dear young friend, fall to at once,
taking such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn
them, by the aid of your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet,
why, then, peace be with you, and a summer by the still waters of
some quiet river, or by some yellow beach, where, as my friend the
Professor, says, you can sit with Nature's wrist in your hand and
count her ocean-pulses.]
I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating
especially to my early life, if I thought you would like to hear
them.
[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her
face directed partly towards me. - Half-mourning now; - purple
ribbon. That breastpin she wears has GRAY hair in it; her
mother's, no doubt; - I remember our landlady's daughter telling
me, soon after the schoolmistress came to board with us, that she
had lately "buried a payrent." That's what made her look so pale,
- kept the poor dying thing alive with her own blood. Ah! long
illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two after
one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young
creature at one's bedside! Well, souls grow white, as well as
cheeks, in these holy duties one that goes in a nurse may come out
an angel. - God bless all good women! - to their soft hands and
pitying hearts we must all come at last! - The schoolmistress has a
better color than when she came. - Too late! "It might have been."
- Amen! - How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-beats, sometimes!
There was no long pause after my remark addressed to the company,
but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just
given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the
crooked red streak that springs out of its black sheath like the
creese of a Malay in his death-race, and stabs the earth right and
left in its blind rage.
I don't deny that there was a pang in it, - yes, a stab; but there
was a prayer, too, - the "Amen" belonged to that. - Also, a vision
of a four-story brick house, nicely furnished, - I actually saw
many specific articles, - curtains, sofas, tables, and others, and
could draw the patterns of them at this moment, - a brick house, I
say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor, and books and
busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at the
window, looking on the water, two of us. - "Male and female created
He them." - These two were standing at the window, when a smaller
shape that was playing near them looked up at me with such a look
that I - - poured out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then
continued.]
I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people
commonly never tell, about my early recollections. Should you like
to hear them?
Should we LIKE to hear them? - said the schoolmistress; - no, but
we should love to.
[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very
pleasant in its tone, just then. - The four-story brick house,
which had gone out like a transparency when the light behind it is
quenched, glimmered again for a moment; parlor, books, busts,
flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete, - and the figures as
before.]
We are waiting with eagerness, Sir, - said the divinity-student.
[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had
struck it.]
If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing - I said - is to
know whether I can trust you with them. It is only fair to say
that there are a great many people in the world that laugh at such
things. I think they are fools, but perhaps you don't all agree
with me.
Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable
of understanding Calvin's "Institutes," and nobody has honesty or
sense enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches:
that they are as superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable
spiritual cowards - that is, if they have any imagination - that
they will believe anything which is taught them, and a great deal
more which they teach themselves.
I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books
and those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed
in things temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable
maturity of childhood I believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have
been superhuman beings. The central doctrine of the prevalent
religious faith of Christendom was utterly confused and neutralized
in my mind for years by one of those too common stories of actual
life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper. - Why did I not ask?
you will say. - You don't remember the rosy pudency of sensitive
children. The first instinctive movement of the little creatures
is to make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes,
and terrors. I am uncovering one of these CACHES. Do you think I
was necessarily a greater fool and coward than another?
I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked
frightfully tall, - but they were not so tall as the steeple of our
old yellow meeting-house. At any rate I used to hide my eyes from
the sloops and schooners that were wont to lie at the end of the
bridge, and I confess that traces of this undefined terror lasted
very long. - One other source of alarm had a still more fearful
significance. There was a great wooden HAND, - a glove-maker's
sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a
pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city.
Oh, the dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a
little boy, who would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,
- whose porringer would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his
half-worn shoes wait until his small brother grew to fit them.
As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to
think I must have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but
I now believe that half the children of the same age go through the
same experiences. No Roman soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of
OMENS as I found in the Sibylline leaves of my childhood. That
trick of throwing a stone at a tree and attaching some mighty issue
to hitting or missing, which you will find mentioned in one or more
biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or over certain
particular things or spots - Dr. Johnson's especial weakness I got
the habit of at a very early age. - I won't swear that I have not
some tendency to these not wise practices even at this present
date. [How many of you that read these notes can say the same
thing!]
With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I
would not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to
put a momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help
telling you.
The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at
the place where I was born and lived. "There is a ship of war come
in," they used to say, when they heard them. Of course, I supposed
that such vessels came in unexpectedly, after indefinite years of
absence, - suddenly as falling stones; and that the great guns
roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight of the old
war-ship splitting the bay with her cutwater. Now, the sloop-of-
war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the
Reindeer and the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean,
and was supposed to be lost. But there was no proof of it, and, of
course, for a time, hopes were entertained that she might be heard
from. Long after the last real chance had utterly vanished, I
pleased myself with the fond illusion that somewhere on the waste
of waters she was still floating, and there were YEARS during which
I never heard the sound of the great guns booming inland from the
Navy-yard without saying to myself, "The Wasp has come!" and almost
thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the water
before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and
threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands.
This was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me
make a clean breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have
outgrown childhood, perhaps to have got far on towards manhood,
when the roar of the cannon has struck suddenly on my ear, I have
started with a thrill of vague expectation and tremulous delight,
and the long-unspoken words have articulated themselves in the
mind's dumb whisper, THE WASP HAS COME!
- Yes, children believe plenty of queer things. I suppose all of
you have had the pocket-book fever when you were little? - What do
I mean? Why, ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that
bank-bills to an immense amount were hidden in them. - So, too, you
must all remember some splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or
other, which fed you with hopes perhaps for years, and which left a
blank in your life which nothing has ever filled up. - O. T.
quitted our household carrying with him the passionate regrets of
the more youthful members. He was an ingenious youngster; wrote
wonderful copies, and carved the two initials given above with
great skill on all available surfaces. I thought, by the way, they
were all gone; but the other day I found them on a certain door
which I will show you some time. How it surprised me to find them
so near the ground! I had thought the boy of no trivial
dimensions. Well, O. T., when he went, made a solemn promise to
two of us. I was to have a ship, and the other a marTIN-house
(last syllable pronounced as in the word TIN). Neither ever came;
but, oh, how many and many a time I have stolen to the corner, -
the cars pass close by it at this time, - and looked up that long
avenue, thinking that he must be coming now, almost sure, as I
turned to look northward, that there he would be, trudging toward
me, the ship in one hand and the marTIN-house in the other!
[You must not suppose that all I am going to say, as well as all I
have said, was told to the whole company. The young fellow whom
they call John was in the yard, sitting on a barrel and smoking a
cheroot, the fumes of which came in, not ungrateful, through the
open window. The divinity-student disappeared in the midst of our
talk. The poor relation in black bombazine, who looked and moved
as if all her articulations were elbow-joints, had gone off to her
chamber, after waiting with a look of soul-subduing decorum at the
foot of the stairs until one of the male sort had passed her and
ascended into the upper regions. This is a famous point of
etiquette in our boarding-house; in fact, between ourselves, they
make such an awful fuss about it, that I, for one, had a great deal
rather have them simple enough not to think of such matters at all.
Our landlady's daughter said, the other evening, that she was going
to "retire"; whereupon the young fellow called John took up a lamp
and insisted on lighting her to the foot of the staircase. Nothing
would induce her to pass by him, until the schoolmistress, saying
in good plain English that it was her bed-time, walked straight by
them both, not seeming to trouble herself about either of them.
I have been led away from what I meant the portion included in
these brackets to inform my readers about. I say, then, most of
the boarders had left the table about the time when I began telling
some of these secrets of mine, - all of them, in fact, but the old
gentleman opposite and the schoolmistress. I understand why a
young woman should like to hear these simple but genuine
experiences of early life, which are, as I have said, the little
brown seeds of what may yet grow to be poems with leaves of azure
and gold; but when the old gentleman pushed up his chair nearer to
me, and slanted round his best ear, and once, when I was speaking
of some trifling, tender reminiscence, drew a long breath, with
such a tremor in it that a little more and it would have been a
sob, why, then I felt there must be something of nature in them
which redeemed their seeming insignificance. Tell me, man or woman
with whom I am whispering, have you not a small store of
recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the
dead leaves of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of
fast-returning winters, - a few such recollections, which, if you
should write them all out, would be swept into some careless
editor's drawer, and might cost a scanty half-hour's lazy reading
to his subscribers, - and yet, if Death should cheat you of them,
you would not know yourself in eternity?]
- I made three acquaintances at a very early period of life, my
introduction to whom was never forgotten. The first unequivocal
act of wrong that has left its trace in my memory was this:
refusing a small favor asked of me, - nothing more than telling
what had happened at school one morning. No matter who asked it;
but there were circumstances which saddened and awed me. I had no
heart to speak; - I faltered some miserable, perhaps petulant
excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost. What
remorse followed I need not tell. Then and there, to the best of
my knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned
my back on Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more
leniently; I do not believe it or any other childish wrong is
infinite, as some have pretended, but infinitely finite. Yet, oh
if I had but won that battle!
The great Destroyer, whose awful shadow it was that had silenced
me, came near me, - but never, so as to be distinctly seen and
remembered, during my tender years. There flits dimly before me
the image of a little girl, whose name even I have forgotten, a
schoolmate, whom we missed one day, and were told that she had
died. But what death was I never had any very distinct idea, until
one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-ground and
mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long,
narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown
loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was
an oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man
seen through an opening at one end of it. When the lid was closed,
and the gravel and stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in
black, who was crying and wringing her hands, went off with the
other mourners, and left him, then I felt that I had seen Death,
and should never forget him.
One other acquaintance I made at an earlier period of life than the
habit of romancers authorizes. - Love, of course. - She was a
famous beauty afterwards. - I am satisfied that many children
rehearse their parts in the drama of life before they have shed all
their milk-teeth. - I think I won't tell the story of the golden
blonde. - I suppose everybody has had his childish fancies; but
sometimes they are passionate impulses, which anticipate all the
tremulous emotions belonging to a later period. Most children
remember seeing and adoring an angel before they were a dozen years
old.
[The old gentleman had left his chair opposite and taken a seat by
the schoolmistress and myself, a little way from the table. - It's
true, it's true, - said the old gentleman. - He took hold of a
steel watch-chain, which carried a large, square gold key at one
end and was supposed to have some kind of time-keeper at the other.
With some trouble he dragged up an ancient-looking, thick, silver,
bull's-eye watch. He looked at it for a moment, - hesitated, -
touched the inner corner of his right eye with the pulp of his
middle finger, - looked at the face of the watch, - said it was
getting into the forenoon, - then opened the watch and handed me
the loose outside case without a word. - The watch-paper had been
pink once, and had a faint tinge still, as if all its tender life
had not yet quite faded out. Two little birds, a flower, and, in
small school-girl letters, a date, - 17 . . - no matter. - Before I
was thirteen years old, - said the old gentleman. - I don't know
what was in that young schoolmistress's head, nor why she should
have done it; but she took out the watch-paper and put it softly to
her lips, as if she were kissing the poor thing that made it so
long ago. The old gentleman took the watch-paper carefully from
her, replaced it, turned away and walked out, holding the watch in
his hand. I saw him pass the window a moment after with that
foolish white hat on his head; he couldn't have been thinking what
he was about when he put it on. So the schoolmistress and I were
left alone. I drew my chair a shade nearer to her, and continued.]
And since I am talking of early recollections, I don't know why I
shouldn't mention some others that still cling to me, - not that
you will attach any very particular meaning to these same images so
full of significance to me, but that you will find something
parallel to them in your own memory. You remember, perhaps, what I
said one day about smells. There were certain SOUNDS also which
had a mysterious suggestiveness to me, - not so intense, perhaps,
as that connected with the other sense, but yet peculiar, and never
to be forgotten.
The first was the creaking of the wood-sleds, bringing their loads
of oak and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen
trailed them along over the complaining snow, in the cold, brown
light of early morning. Lying in bed and listening to their dreary
music had a pleasure in it akin to the Lucretian luxury, or that
which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in looking on at a battle by
one "who hath no friend, no brother there."
There was another sound, in itself so sweet, and so connected with
one of those simple and curious superstitions of childhood of which
I have spoken, that I can never cease to cherish a sad sort of love
for it. - Let me tell the superstitious fancy first. The Puritan
"Sabbath," as everybody knows, began at "sundown" on Saturday
evening. To such observance of it I was born and bred. As the
large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a solemnity, a
somewhat melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for work to
cease, and for playthings to be put away. The world of active life
passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun
should sink again beneath the horizon.
It was in this stillness of the world without and of the soul
within that the pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to
make itself most distinctly heard, - so that I well remember I used
to think that the purring of these little creatures, which mingled
with the batrachian hymns from the neighboring swamp, WAS PECULIAR
TO SATURDAY EVENINGS. I don't know that anything could give a
clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the old habit
of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange,
childish fancy.
Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn
cadences with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was
heard only at times, - a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell,
not loud, but vast, - a whistling boy would have drowned it for his
next neighbor, but it must have been heard over the space of a
hundred square miles. I used to wonder what this might be. Could
it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten thousand
footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the neighboring
city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose and
fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I suppose this
to have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves,
after a high wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant.
I should really like to know whether any observing people living
ten miles, more or less, inland from long beaches, - in such a
town, for instance, as Cantabridge, in the eastern part of the
Territory of the Massachusetts, - have ever observed any such
sound, and whether it was rightly accounted for as above.
Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of
memory, are the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare
intervals. I grieve to say it, but our people, I think, have not
generally agreeable voices. The marrowy organisms, with skins that
shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth surfaces neatly
padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not
so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular
outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous
covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color,
and voices at once thin and strenuous, - acidulous enough to
produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing
duets with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as
sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young
persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great
industrial centres, for instance, - young persons of the female
sex, we will say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud
strident speech, and who, after free discussion, have fixed on two
or more double seats, which having secured, they proceed to eat
apples and hand round daguerreotypes, - I say, I think the
conversational soprano, heard under these circumstances, would not
be among the allurements the old Enemy would put in requisition,
were he getting up a new temptation of St. Anthony.
There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not
musical, it may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet
sweeter to us than any we shall hear until we listen to some
warbling angel in the overture to that eternity of blissful
harmonies we hope to enjoy. - But why should I tell lies? If my
friends love me, it is because I try to tell the truth. I never
heard but two voices in my life that frightened me by their
sweetness.
- Frightened you? - said the schoolmistress. - Yes, frightened me.
They made me feel as if there might be constituted a creature with
such a chord in her voice to some string in another's soul, that,
if she but spoke, he would leave all and follow her, though it were
into the jaws of Erebus. Our only chance to keep our wits is, that
there are so few natural chords between others' voices and this
string in our souls, and that those which at first may have jarred
a little by and by come into harmony with it. - But I tell you this
is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a
fable, but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who
followed him?
- Whose were those two voices that bewitches me so? - They both
belonged to German women. One was a chambermaid, not otherwise
fascinating. The key of my room at a certain great hotel was
missing, and this Teutonic maiden was summoned to give information
respecting it. The simple soul was evidently not long from her
mother-land, and spoke with sweet uncertainty of dialect. But to
hear her wonder and lament and suggest, with soft, liquid
inflexions, and low, sad murmurs, in tones as full of serious
tenderness for the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child
that had strayed from its mother, was so winning, that, had her
features and figure been as delicious as her accents, - if she had
looked like the marble Clytie, for instance, - why, all can say is
-
[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so wide, that I stopped short.]
I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself. For
Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept
asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a
MESALLIANCE, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes
along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of
boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were
only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through
the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you
have hung the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la
Morues, until one came to beings that ate with knives and said
"Haow?") that no person of right feeling could have hesitated for a
single moment.
The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have
said, that of another German woman. - I suppose I shall ruin myself
by saying that such a voice could not have come from any
Americanized human being.
- What was there in it? - said the schoolmistress, - and, upon my
word, her tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had
said three voices instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic
remark above reported. - Oh, I said, it had so much WOMAN in it, -
MULIEBRITY, as well as FEMINEITY; - no self-assertion, such as free
suffrage introduces into every word and movement; large, vigorous
nature, running back to those huge-limbed Germans of Tacitus, but
subdued by the reverential training and tuned by the kindly culture
of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil,
independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things
for the larynx. Still, you hear noble voices among us, - I have
known families famous for them, - but ask the first person you meet
a question, and ten to one there is a hard, sharp, metallic,
matter-of-business clink in the accents of the answer, that
produces the effect of one of those bells which small trades-people
connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your ear with
such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire
at once from the precincts.
- Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard
in a French hospital. Between two and three years old. Fell out
of her chair and snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient,
gentle. Rough students round her, some in white aprons, looking
fearfully business-like; but the child placid, perfectly still. I
spoke to her, and the blessed little creature answered me in a
voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in it
which you have heard in the thrush's even-song, that I hear it at
this moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards. -
C'EST TOUT COMME UN SERIN, said the French student at my side.
These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as
to what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall
enter through one of the twelve gates of pearl. There must be
other things besides aerolites that wander from their own spheres
to ours; and when we speak of celestial sweetness or beauty, we may
be nearer the literal truth than we dream. If mankind generally
are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-Adamitic cataclysm, set
adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make one more
trial to reach the shore, - as some grave theologians have
maintained, - if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead
devils who have "died into life," (to borrow an expression from
Keats,) and walk the earth in a suit of living rags which lasts
three or four score summers, - why, there must have been a few good
spirits sent to keep them company, and these sweet voices I speak
of must belong to them.
- I wish you could once hear my sister's voice, - said the
schoolmistress.
If it is like yours, it must be a pleasant one, - said I.
I never thought mine was anything, - said the schoolmistress.
How should you know? - said I. - People never hear their own
voices, - any more than they see their own faces. There is not
even a looking-glass for the voice. Of course, there is something
audible to us when we speak; but that something is not our own
voice as it is known to all our acquaintances. I think, if an
image spoke to us in our own tones, we should not know them in the
least. - How pleasant it would be, if in another state of being we
could have shapes like our former selves for playthings, - we
standing outside or inside of them, as we liked, and they being to
us just what we used to be to others!
- I wonder if there will be nothing like what we call "play," after
our earthly toys are broken, - said the schoolmistress.
Hush, - said I, - what will the divinity-student say?
[I thought she was hit, that time; - but the shot must have gone
over her, or on one side of her; she did not flinch.]
Oh, - said the schoolmistress, - he must look out for my sister's
heresies; I am afraid he will be too busy with them to take care of
mine.
Do you mean to say, - said I, - that it is YOUR SISTER whom that
student -
[The young fellow commonly known as John, who had been sitting on
the barrel, smoking, jumped off just then, kicked over the barrel,
gave it a push with his foot that set it rolling, and stuck his
saucy-looking face in at the window so as to cut my question off in
the middle; and the schoolmistress leaving the room a few minutes
afterwards, I did not have a chance to finish it.
The young fellow came in and sat down in a chair, putting his heels
on the top of another.
Pooty girl, - said he.
A fine young lady, - I replied.
Keeps a first-rate school, according to accounts, - said he, -
teaches all sorts of things, - Latin and Italian and music. Folks
rich once, - smashed up. She went right ahead as smart as if she'd
been born to work. That's the kind o' girl I go for. I'd marry
her, only two or three other girls would drown themselves, if I
did.
I think the above is the longest speech of this young fellow's
which I have put on record. I do not like to change his peculiar
expressions, for this is one of those cases in which the style is
the man, as M. de Buffon says. The fact is, the young fellow is a
good-hearted creature enough, only too fond of his jokes, - and if
it were not for those heat-lightning winks on one side of his face,
I should not mind his fun much.]
[Some days after this, when the company were together again, I
talked a little.]
- I don't think I have a genuine hatred for anybody. I am well
aware that I differ herein from the sturdy English moralist and the
stout American tragedian. I don't deny that I hate THE SIGHT of
certain people; but the qualities which make me tend to hate the
man himself are such as I am so much disposed to pity, that, except
under immediate aggravation, I feel kindly enough to the worst of
them. It is such a sad thing to be born a sneaking fellow, so much
worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of club-feet, that I
sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I may
use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not
waste on noble natures. One who is born with such congenital
incapacity that nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled,
not to our wrath, but to our profoundest sympathy. But as we
cannot help hating the sight of these people, just as we do that of
physical deformities, we gradually eliminate them from our society,
- we love them, but open the window and let them go. By the time
decent people reach middle age they have weeded their circle pretty
well of these unfortunates, unless they have a taste for such
animals; in which case, no matter what their position may be, there
is something, you may be sure, in their natures akin to that of
their wretched parasites.
- The divinity-student wished to know what I thought of affinities,
as well as of antipathies; did I believe in love at first sight?
Sir, - said I, - all men love all women. That is the PRIMA-FACIE
aspect of the case. The Court of Nature assumes the law to be,
that all men do so; and the individual man is bound to show cause
why he does not love any particular woman. A man, says one of my
old black-letter law-books, may show divers good reasons, as thus:
He hath not seen the person named in the indictment; she is of
tender age, or the reverse of that; she hath certain personal
disqualifications, - as, for instance, she is a blackamoor, or hath
an ill-favored countenance; or, his capacity of loving being
limited, his affections are engrossed by a previous comer; and so
of other conditions. Not the less is it true that he is bound by
duty and inclined by nature to love each and every woman.
Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons every man to show
cause why he doth not love her. This is not by written document,
or direct speech, for the most part, but by certain signs of silk,
gold, and other materials, which say to all men, - Look on me and
love, as in duty bound. Then the man pleadeth his special
incapacity, whatsoever that may be, - as, for instance,
impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many wives in his household,
or that he is of mean figure, or small capacity; of which reasons
it may be noted, that the first is, according to late decisions, of
chiefest authority. - So far the old law-book. But there is a note
from an older authority, saying that every woman doth also love
each and every man, except there be some good reason to the
contrary; and a very observing friend of mine, a young unmarried
clergyman, tells me, that, so far as his experience goes, he has
reason to think the ancient author had fact to justify his
statement.
I'll tell you how it is with the pictures of women we fall in love
with at first sight.
- We a'n't talking about pictures, - said the landlady's daughter,
- we're talking about women.
I understood that we were speaking of love at sight, - I remarked,
mildly. - Now, as all a man knows about a woman whom he looks at is
just what a picture as big as a copper, or a "nickel," rather, at
the bottom of his eye can teach him, I think I am right in saying
we are talking about the pictures of women. - Well, now, the reason
why a man is not desperately in love with ten thousand women at
once is just that which prevents all our portraits being distinctly
seen upon that wall. They all ARE painted there by reflection from
our faces, but because ALL of them are painted on each spot, and
each on the same surface, and many other objects at the same time,
no one is seen as a picture. But darken a chamber and let a single
pencil of rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on
the wall. We never fall in love with a woman in distinction from
women, until we can get an image of her through a pin-hole; and
then we can see nothing else, and nobody but ourselves can see the
image in our mental camera-obscura.
- My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the
anniversaries come round.
What's the difficulty? - Why, they all want him to get up and make
speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he
doesn't want to do. He is an old story, he says, and hates to show
on these occasions. But they tease him, and coax him, and can't do
without him, and feel all over his poor weak head until they get
their fingers on the FONTANELLE, (the Professor will tell you what
this means, - he says the one at the top of the head always remains
open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft pulsating
spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.
There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before
going to some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one's garden and
clutch up a handful of what grows there, - weeds and violets
together, - not cutting them off, but pulling them up by the roots
with the brown earth they grow in sticking to them. That's his
idea of a post-prandial performance. Look here, now. These verses
I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up by the roots
just in that way, the other day. - Beautiful entertainment, - names
there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as
familiarly as AND or THE; entertainers known wherever good poetry
and fair title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted,
modest, genial, hopeful poet, who sings to the hearts of his
countrymen, the British people, the songs of good cheer which the
better days to come, as all honest souls trust and believe, will
turn into the prose of common life. My friend, the Poet, says you
must not read such a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed
it nicely below, you wouldn't see the roots, he says, and he likes
to keep them, and a little of the soil clinging to them.
This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read to his and our
friend, the Poet:-
A GOOD TIME GOING!
BRAVE singer of the coming time,
Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
The holly-leaf of Ayrshire's peasant,
Good-bye! Good-bye! - Our hearts and hands,
Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,
Cry, God be with him, till he stands
His feet among the English daisies!
'Tis here we part; - for other eyes
The busy deck, the flattering streamer,
The dripping arms that plunge and rise,
The waves in foam, the ship in tremor,
The kerchiefs waving from the pier,
The cloudy pillar gliding o'er him,
The deep blue desert, lone and drear,
With heaven above and home before him!
His home! - the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it; -
This little speck the British Isles?
'Tis but a freckle, - never mind it! -
He laughs, and all his prairies roll,
Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles,
And ridges stretched from pole to pole
Heave till they crack their iron knuckles!
But memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant:-
"An islet is a world," she said,
"When glory with its dust has blended,
And Britain kept her noble dead
Till earth and seas and skies are rended!"
Beneath each swinging forest-bough
Some arm as stout in death reposes, -
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
Her valor's life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write smiling in their florid pages,
One-half her soil has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages!
Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp,
From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather,
The British oak with rooted grasp
Her slender handful holds together; -
With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
And Ocean narrowing to caress her,
And hills and threaded streams between, -
Our little mother isle, God bless her!
In earth's broad temple where we stand,
Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us,
We hold the missal in our hand,
Bright with the lines our Mother taught us;
Where'er its blazoned page betrays
The glistening links of gilded fetters,
Behold, the half-turned leaf displays
Her rubric stained in crimson letters!
Enough! To speed a parting friend
'Tis vain alike to speak and listen; -
Yet stay, - these feeble accents blend
With rays of light from eyes that glisten.
Good-bye! once more, - and kindly tell
In words of peace the young world's story, -
And say, besides, - we love too well
Our mother's soil, our father's glory!
When my friend, the Professor, found that my friend, the Poet, had
been coming out in this full-blown style, he got a little excited,
as you may have seen a canary, sometimes, when another strikes up.
The Professor says he knows he can lecture, and thinks he can write
verses. At any rate, he has often tried, and now he was determined
to try again. So when some professional friends of his called him
up, one day, after a feast of reason and a regular "freshet" of
soul which had lasted two or three hours, he read them these
verses. He introduced them with a few remarks, he told me, of
which the only one he remembered was this: that he had rather
write a single line which one among them should think worth
remembering than set them all laughing with a string of epigrams.
It was all right, I don't doubt; at any rate, that was his fancy
then, and perhaps another time he may be obstinately hilarious;
however, it may be that he is growing graver, for time is a fact so
long as clocks and watches continue to go, and a cat can't be a
kitten always, as the old gentleman opposite said the other day.
You must listen to this seriously, for I think the Professor was
very much in earnest when he wrote it.
THE TWO ARMIES.
As Life's unending column pours,
Two marshalled hosts are seen,-
Two armies on the trampled shores
That Death flows black between.
One marches to the drum-beat's roll,
The wide-mouthed clarion's bray,
And bears upon a crimson scroll,
"Our glory is to slay."
One moves in silence by the stream,
With sad, yet watchful eyes,
Calm as the patient planet's gleam
That walks the clouded skies.
Along its front no sabres shine,
No blood-red pennons wave;
Its banner bears the single line,
"Our duty is to save."
For those no death-bed's lingering shade;
At Honor's trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
In Glory's arms they fall.
For these no clashing falchions bright,
No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodless stabber calls by night, -
Each answers, "Here am I!"
For those the sculptor's laurelled bust,
The builder's marble piles,
The anthems pealing o'er their dust
Through long cathedral aisles.
For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
That floods the lonely graves,
When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
In flowery-foaming waves.
Two paths lead upward from below,
And angels wait above,
Who count each burning life-drop's flow,
Each falling tear of Love.
Though from the Hero's bleeding breast
Her pulses Freedom drew,
Though the white lilies in her crest
Sprang from that scarlet dew, -
While Valor's haughty champions wait
Till all their scars are shown,
Love walks unchallenged through the gate,
To sit beside the Throne! |