[THE company looked a little flustered one morning when I came in,
- so much so, that I inquired of my neighbor, the divinity-
student,) what had been going on. It appears that the young fellow
whom they call John had taken advantage of my being a little late
(I having been rather longer than usual dressing that morning) to
circulate several questions involving a quibble or play upon words,
- in short, containing that indignity to the human understanding,
condemned in the passages from the distinguished moralist of the
last century and the illustrious historian of the present, which I
cited on a former occasion, and known as a PUN. After breakfast,
one of the boarders handed me a small roll of paper containing some
of the questions and their answers. I subjoin two or three of
them, to show what a tendency there is to frivolity and meaningless
talk in young persons of a certain sort, when not restrained by the
presence of more reflective natures. - It was asked, "Why tertian
and quartan fevers were like certain short-lived insects." Some
interesting physiological relation would be naturally suggested.
The inquirer blushes to find that the answer is in the paltry
equivocation, that they SKIP a day or two. - "Why an Englishman
must go to the Continent to weaken his grog or punch." The answer
proves to have no relation whatever to the temperance-movement, as
no better reason is given than that island- (or, as it is absurdly
written, ILE AND) water won't mix. - But when I came to the next
question and its answer, I felt that patience ceased to be a
virtue. "Why an onion is like a piano" is a query that a person of
sensibility would be slow to propose; but that in an educated
community an individual could be found to answer it in these words,
- "Because it smell odious," QUASI, it's melodious, - is not
credible, but too true. I can show you the paper.
Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeating such things. I know
most conversations reported in books are altogether above such
trivial details, but folly will come up at every table as surely as
purslain and chickweed and sorrel will come up in gardens. This
young fellow ought to have talked philosophy, I know perfectly
well; but he didn't, - he made jokes.]
I am willing, - I said, - to exercise your ingenuity in a rational
and contemplative manner. - No, I do not proscribe certain forms of
philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd
or the ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio
of the Reverend Father Thomas Sanchez, in his famous Disputations,
"De Sancto Matrimonio." I will therefore turn this levity of yours
to profit by reading you a rhymed problem, wrought out by my friend
the Professor.
THE DEACON'S MASTERPIECE:
OR THE WONDERFUL "ONE-HOSS-SHAY."
A LOGICAL STORY.
HAVE you heard of the wonderful one-shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it - ah, but stay,
I'll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits, -
Have you ever heard of that, I say?
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
GEORGIUS SECUNDUS was then alive, -
Snuffy old drone from the German hive.
That was the year when Lisbon-town
Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock's army was done so brown,
Left without a scalp to its crown.
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.
Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,
There is always SOMEWHERE a weakest spot, -
In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,
In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace, - lurking still
Find it somewhere you must and will, -
Above or below, or within or without, -
And that's the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise BREASTS DOWN, but doesn't WEAR OUT.
But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an "I dew vum," or an "I tell YEOU,")
He would build one shay to beat the taown
'n' the keounty 'n' all the kentry raoun';
It should be so built that it COULDN' break daown -
- "Fur," said the Deacon, "'t's mighty plain
Thut the weakes' place mus' stan the strain;
'n' the way t' fix it, uz I maintain,
Is only jest
T' make that place uz strong uz the rest."
So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn't be split nor bent nor broke, -
That was for spokes and floor and sills;
He sent for lancewood to make the thills;
The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees;
The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,
But lasts like iron for things like these;
The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum," -
Last of its timber, - they couldn't sell 'em,
Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips,
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;
Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,
Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died.
That was the way he "put her through." -
"There!" said the Deacon, "naow she'll dew."
Do! I tell you, I father guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less!
Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grand-children - where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED; - it came and found
The Deacon's Masterpiece strong and sound.
Eighteen hundred increased by ten; -
"Hahnsum kerridge" they called it then.
Eighteen hundred and twenty came; -
Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and FIFTY-FIVE.
Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there's nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large;
Take it. - You're welcome. - No extra charge.)
FIRST OF NOVEMBER, - the Earthquake-day. -
There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay.
A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn't be, - for the Deacon's art
Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn't a chance for one to start.
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
And the floor was just as strong as the sills,
And the panels just as strong as the floor,
And the whippletree neither less nor more,
And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,
And spring and axle and hub ENCORE.
And yet, AS A WHOLE, it is past a doubt
In another hour it will be WORN OUT!
First of November, 'Fifty-five!
This morning the parson takes a drive.
Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay,
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
"Huddup!" said the parson. - Off went they.
The parson was working his Sunday's text, -
Had got to FIFTHLY, and stopped perplexed
At what the - Moses - was coming next.
All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet'n-house on the hill.
- First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill, -
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet'n-house clock, -
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
- What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you're not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once, -
All at once, and nothing first, -
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic. That's all I say.
- I think there is one habit, - I said to our company a day or two
afterwards - worse than that of punning. It is the gradual
substitution of cant or flash terms for words which truly
characterize their objects. I have known several very genteel
idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into some half dozen
expressions. All things fell into one of two great categories, -
FAST or SLOW. Man's chief end was to be a BRICK. When the great
calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken
of as being a GOOD DEAL CUT UP. Nine-tenths of human existence
were summed up in the single word, BORE. These expressions come to
be the algebraic symbols of minds which have grown too weak or
indolent to discriminate. They are the blank checks of
intellectual bankruptcy; - you may fill them up with what idea you
like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in the
treasury upon which they are drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing
smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi
spring up most luxuriantly. Don't think I undervalue the proper
use and application of a cant word or phrase. It adds piquancy to
conversation, as a mushroom does to a sauce. But it is no better
than a toadstool, odious to the sense and poisonous to the
intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and
youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear flash
phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of
English dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a three-
volume novel which had sopped it up, or decanted from the pictured
urn of Mr. Verdant Green, and diluted to suit the provincial
climate.
- The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was
"rum" to hear me "pitchin' into fellers" for "goin' it in the slang
line," when I used all the flash words myself just when I pleased.
- I replied with my usual forbearance. - Certainly, to give up the
algebraic symbol, because A or B is often a cover for ideal
nihility, would be unwise. I have heard a child laboring to
express a certain condition, involving a hitherto undescribed
sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have been
sufficiently explained by the participle - BORED. I have seen a
country-clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse
vocabulary, who has consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely,
in developing an opinion of a brother-minister's discourse which
would have been abundantly characterized by a peach-down-lipped
sophomore in the one word - SLOW. Let us discriminate, and be shy
of absolute proscription. I am omniverbivorous by nature and
training. Passing by such words as are poisonous, I can swallow
most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.
Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something.
They invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank
checks or counters just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists
may sometimes find it worth their while to borrow of them. They
are useful, too, in keeping up the standard of dress, which, but
for them, would deteriorate, and become, what some old fools would
have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and art. Yes, I
like dandies well enough, - on one condition.
- What is that, Sir? - said the divinity-student.
- That they have pluck. I find that lies at the bottom of all true
dandyism. A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger
in his mouth and takes to crying, if other boys make fun of him,
looks very silly. But if he turns red in the face and knotty in
the fists, and makes an example of the biggest of his assailants,
throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned jacket, if
necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery
takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened
Astyanax. You remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were
his best officers. The "Sunday blood," the super-superb sartorial
equestrian of our annual Fast-day, is not imposing or dangerous.
But such fellows as Brummel and D'Orsay and Byron are not to be
snubbed quite so easily. Look out for "la main de fer sous le gant
de velours," (which I printed in English the other day without
quotation-marks, thinking whether any SCARABAEUS CRITICUS would add
this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers, -
which he didn't do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London
language, and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the
same.) A good many powerful and dangerous people have had a
decided dash of dandyism about them. There was Alcibiades, the
"curled son of Clinias," an accomplished young man, but what would
be called a "swell" in these days. There was Aristoteles, a very
distinguished writer, of whom you have heard, - a philosopher, in
short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn, and
is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again.
Regular dandy, he was. So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost
his game, he played for big stakes, and it wasn't his dandyism that
spoiled his chance. Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar
or a poet, but he was one of the same sort. So was Sir Humphrey
Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly, if I am not forgetful.
Yes, - a dandy is good for something as such; and dandies such as I
was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle, - aye,
and left it swinging to this day. - Still, if I were you, I
wouldn't go to the tailor's, on the strength of these remarks, and
run up a long bill which will render pockets a superfluity in your
next suit. ELEGANS "NASCITUR, NON FIT." A man is born a dandy, as
he is born a poet. There are heads that can't wear hats; there are
necks that can't fit cravats; there are jaws that can't fill out
collars - (Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier
ambrotypes, if I remember rightly); there are TOURNURES nothing can
humanize, and movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity
or elegant languor or stately serenity which belong to different
styles of dandyism.
We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,
- not a GRATIA-DEI, nor a JUREDIVINO one, - but a DE-FACTO upper
stratum of being, which floats over the turbid waves of common life
like the iridescent film you may have seen spreading over the water
about our wharves, - very splendid, though its origin may have been
tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such unctuous commodities. I say,
then, we are forming an aristocracy; and, transitory as its
individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a
whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe
this. Money kept for two or three generations transforms a race, -
I don't mean merely in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood
and bone. Money buys air and sunshine, in which children grow up
more kindly, of course, than in close, back streets; it buys
country-places to give them happy and healthy summers, good
nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and mutton.
When the spring-chickens come to market - I beg your pardon, - that
is not what I was going to speak of. As the young females of each
successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other
things being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the
expensive luxury of beauty. The physical character of the next
generation rises in consequence. It is plain that certain families
have in this way acquired an elevated type of face and figure, and
that in a small circle of city-connections one may sometimes find
models of both sexes which one of the rural counties would find it
hard to match from all its townships put together. Because there
is a good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life,
among the richer classes, you must not overlook the equally obvious
fact I have just spoken of, - which in one or two generations more
will be, I think, much more patent than just now.
The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded
to in connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its
high-caste gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of its
windows and the more or less legitimate heraldry of its coach-
panels. It is very curious to observe of how small account
military folks are held among our Northern people. Our young men
must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal
division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above
the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element
of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to
count heroism among its virtues. Still I don't believe in any
aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when
the time comes, if it ever does come.
- These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual
GREEN FRUIT of all the places in the world. I think so, at any
rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the
market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like
unripe gooseberries, - get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a
country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial
Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been
buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun
until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such
hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?
Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins
and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among
its fruits. There are literary green-groceries at every corner,
which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple. It
takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and
writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young
people. Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr. -
we won't say who, - editor of the - we won't say what, offered me
the sum of fifty cents PER double-columned quarto page for shaking
my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an
intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have
revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the
FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by
no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.
- Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative
virtues. It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from
all that is sinful or hurtful. But making a business of it leads
to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the
more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.
- I don't believe one word of what you are saying, - spoke up the
angular female in black bombazine.
I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam, - I said, and added softly to
my next neighbor, - but you prove it.
The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student
said, in an undertone, - OPTIME DICTUM.
Your talking Latin, - said I, - reminds me of an odd trick of one
of my old tutors. He read so much of that language, that his
English half turned into it. He got caught in town, one hot
summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a
series of city pastorals. Eclogues he called them, and meant to
have published them by subscription. I remember some of his
verses, if you want to hear them. - You, Sir, (addressing myself to
the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college,
or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will
understand them without a dictionary. The old man had a great deal
to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one
might say, to HIBERNATION. Intramural aestivation, or town-life in
summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or
semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the beginning of the
last week in September. This is what I remember of his poem:-
AESTIVATION.
AN UNPUBLISHED POEM, BY MY LATE LATIN TUTOR
IN candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!
To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,
Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum, -
No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, -
Depart, - be off, - excede, - evade, - erump!
- I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains. - No, I am
not going to say which is best. The one where your place is is the
best for you. But this difference there is: you can domesticate
mountains, but the sea is FERAE NATURAE. You may have a hut, or
know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light half-
way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and
you might share it. You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you
know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in
October, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs
and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that
hang round the walls of your memory's chamber. - The sea remembers
nothing. It is feline. It licks your feet, - its huge flanks purr
very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you,
for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if
nothing had happened. The mountains give their lost children
berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die.
The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea
has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie
about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon,
but safe to handle. The sea smooths its silver scales until you
cannot see their joints, - but their shining is that of a snake's
belly, after all. - In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a
difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the
procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity
and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to
eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and
ever.
Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. I should
love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of
my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see
it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its
smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show
its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its
mad, but, to me, harmless fury. - And then, - to look at it with
that inward eye, - who does not love to shuffle off time and its
concerns, at intervals, - to forget who is President and who is
Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which
golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system
is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats
its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of
human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human
chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?
- What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence? -
Constitution, first of all. How much snow could you melt in an
hour, if you were planted in a hogshead of it? Comfort is
essential to enjoyment. All sensitive people should remember that
persons in easy circumstances suffer much more cold in summer -
that is, the warm half of the year - than in winter, or the other
half. You must cut your climate to your constitution, as much as
your clothing to your shape. After this, consult your taste and
convenient. But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry
mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must
have an ocean in your soul. Nature plays at dominos with you; you
must match her piece, or she will never give it up to you.
- The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she
was afraid some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they
took in the Rocky Mountains or the Atlantic.
Have you ever read the little book called "The Stars and the
Earth?" - said I. - Have you seen the Declaration of Independence
photographed in a surface that a fly's foot would cover? The forms
or conditions of Time and Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing
in themselves, - only our way of looking at things. You are right,
I think, however, in recognizing the category of Space as being
quite as applicable to minds as to the outer world. Every man of
reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-defined circle
which is drawn about his intellect. He has a perfectly clear sense
that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of
many other minds of which he is cognizant. He often recognizes
these as manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius.
On the other hand, when we find a portion of an are on the outside
of our own, we say it INTERSECTS ours, but are very slow to confess
or to see that it CIRCUMSCRIBES it. Every now and then a man's
mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks
back to its former dimensions. After looking at the Alps, I felt
that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its
elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I
had to spread these to fit it.
- If I thought I should ever see the Alps! - said the
schoolmistress.
Perhaps you will, some time or other, - I said.
It is not very likely, - she answered. - I have had one or two
opportunities, but I had rather be anything than governess in a
rich family.
[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman! Well, I can't say I
like you any the worse for it. How long will school-keeping take
to kill you? Is it possible the poor thing works with her needle,
too? I don't like those marks on the side of her forefinger.
TABLEAU. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the
foreground; two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of
- oh, - ah, - yes! the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on
his shoulder. - The ingenuous reader will understand that this was
an internal, private, personal, subjective diorama, seen for one
instant on the background of my own consciousness, and abolished
into black nonentity by the first question which recalled me to
actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-blinds (which
I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over some
poor but honest shop-boy's head, just taken off by its sudden and
unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come
down in front of it "by the run."]
- Should you like to hear what moderate wishes life brings one to
at last? I used to be very ambitious, - wasteful, extravagant, and
luxurious in all my fancies. Read too much in the "Arabian
Nights." Must have the lamp, - couldn't do without the ring.
Exercise every morning on the brazen horse. Plump down into
castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of
young sparrows. All love me dearly at once. - Charming idea of
life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all
this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive, - almost,
perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must
not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear
some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires of my
maturity.
CONTENTMENT.
"Man wants but little here below."
LITTLE I ask, my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A VERY PLAIN brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own; -
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.
Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten; -
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank heaven for three. Amen!
I always thought cold victual nice; -
My CHOICE would be vanilla-ice.
I care not much for gold or land; -
Give me a mortgage here and there, -
Some good bank-stock, - some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share; -
I only ask that Fortune send
A LITTLE more than I shall spend.
Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names; -
I would, PERHAPS, be Plenipo, -
But only near St. James; -
I'm very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator's chair.
Jewels are baubles; 'tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things; -
One good-sized diamond in a pin, -
Some, NOT SO LARGE, in rings, -
A ruby and a pearl, or so,
Will do for me; - I laugh at show.
My dame should dress in cheap attire;
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;) -
I own perhaps I MIGHT desire
Some shawls of true cashmere, -
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.
I would not have the horse I drive
So fast that folks must stop and stare
An easy gait - two, forty-five -
Suits me; I do not care; -
Perhaps, for just a SINGLE SPURT,
Some seconds less would do no hurt.
Of pictures, I should like to own
Titians and Raphaels three or four, -
I love so much their style and tone, -
One Turner, and no more, -
(A landscape, - foreground golden dirt
The sunshine painted with a squirt.)
Of books but few, - some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor; -
Some LITTLE luxury THERE
Of red morocco's gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.
Busts, cameos, gems, - such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,
I value for their power to please,
And selfish churls deride; -
ONE Stradivarius, I confess,
TWO Meerschaums, I would fain possess.
Wealth's wasteful tricks I will not learn,
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool; -
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But ALL must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share, -
I ask but ONE recumbent chair.
Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas' golden touch,
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them MUCH, -
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!
MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.
(A PARENTHESIS.)
I can't say just how many walks she and I had taken together before
this one. I found the effect of going out every morning was
decidedly favorable on her health. Two pleasing dimples, the
places for which were just marked when she came, played, shadowy,
in her freshening cheeks when she smiled and nodded good-morning to
me from the school-house-steps.
I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any rate, if
I should try to report all that I said during the first half-dozen
walks we took together, I fear that I might receive a gentle hint
from my friends the publishers, that a separate volume, at my own
risk and expense, would be the proper method of bringing them
before the public.
- I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie
which works from the heart outward, she should be tenderly
chloroformed into a better world, where she can have an angel for a
governess, and feed on strange fruits which will make her all over
again, even to her bones and marrow. - Whether gifted with the
accident of beauty or not, she should have been moulded in the
rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a moving
mortal of her. Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I
think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it
belongs to from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them. - Proud
she may be, in the sense of respecting herself; but pride in the
sense of contemning others less gifted than herself, deserves the
two lowest circles of a vulgar woman's Inferno, where the
punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy. - She who nips off the end
of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to
bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize,
proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of
bad blood. Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people
gracious in proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with
her real equals, she has something about herself or her family she
is ashamed of, or ought to be. Middle, and more than middle-aged
people, who know family histories, generally see through it. An
official of standing was rude to me once. Oh, that is the maternal
grandfather, - said a wise old friend to me, - he was a boor. -
Better too few words, from the woman we love, than too many: while
she is silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is
working for herself. - Love is sparingly soluble in the words of
men; therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman's
speech can dissolve more of it than a man's heart can hold.
- Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress,
or not, - whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon, - whether I
cribbed them from Balzac, - whether I dipped them from the ocean of
Tupperian wisdom, - or whether I have just found them in my head,
laid there by that solemn fowl, Experience, (who, according to my
observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs,) I
cannot say. Wise men have said more foolish things, - and foolish
men, I don't doubt, have said as wise things. Anyhow, the
schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, all of
which I do not feel bound to report.
- You are a stranger to me, Ma'am. - I don't doubt you would like
to know all I said to the schoolmistress. - I sha'n't do it; - I
had rather get the publishers to return the money you have invested
in this. Besides, I have forgotten a good deal of it. I shall
tell only what I like of what I remember.
- My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque
spots which the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes. I
know a good many, and it was a pleasure to look at them in company
with my young friend. There were the shrubs and flowers in the
Franklin-Place front-yards or borders; Commerce is just putting his
granite foot upon them. Then there are certain small seraglio-
gardens, into which one can get a peep through the crevices of high
fences, - one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it, - here and there
one at the North and South Ends. Then the great elms in Essex
Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in
Chambers Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head,
(as I said in my poem the other day,) and look as if they were
whispering, "May grace, mercy, and peace be with you!" - and the
rest of that benediction. Nay, there are certain patches of
ground, which, having lain neglected for a time, Nature, who always
has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her pockets, has
covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life with
each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and
you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have
disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. The
Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street,
which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation,
beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as
ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch-
and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with their teacher at
their head.
But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and
puts everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way
about everything. I hold any man cheap, - he said, - of whom
nothing stronger can be uttered than that all his geese are swans.
- How is that, Professor? - said I; - I should have set you down
for one of that sort. - Sir, - said he, - I am proud to say, that
Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a duck
without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the
garden of the Luxembourg. And the Professor showed the whites of
his eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many
courses.
I don't know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature
through all the cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap
up a million tons of hewn rocks on a square mile or two of earth
which was green once. The trees look down from the hill-sides and
ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe, - "What are these people
about?" And the small herbs at their feet look up and whisper
back, - "We will go and see." So the small herbs pack themselves
up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to
them at night and whispers, "Come with me." Then they go softly
with it into the great city, - one to a cleft in the pavement, one
to a spout on the roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich
gentleman's bones, and one to the grave without a stone where
nothing but a man is buried, - and there they grow, looking down on
the generations of men from mouldy roofs, looking up from between
the less-trodden pavements, looking out through iron cemetery-
railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other, - "Wait
awhile!" The words run along the telegraph of those narrow green
lines that border the roads leading from the city, until they reach
the slope of the hills, and the trees repeat in low murmurs to each
other, - "Wait awhile!" By-and-by the flow of life in the streets
ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants - the smaller tribes always in
front - saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but very
tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to
be picked out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees
take up their solemn line of march, and never rest until they have
encamped in the market-place. Wait long enough and you will find
an old doting oak hugging a huge worn block in its yellow
underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-House. Oh,
so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!
- Let us cry! -
But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the
schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you something
about them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I
ought to, probably. We never tell our secrets to people that pump
for them.
Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know
something of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat
more learned than she, but I found that the difference between her
reading and mine was like that of a man's and a woman's dusting a
library. The man flaps about with a bunch of feathers; the woman
goes to work softly with a cloth. She does not raise half the
dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it, - but she goes into
all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers. -
Books are the NEGATIVE pictures of thought, and the more sensitive
the mind that receives their images, the more nicely the finest
lines are reproduced. A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after
a man, follows him as Ruth followed the reapers of Boaz, and her
gleanings are often the finest of the wheat.
But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together.
I thought I knew something about that, - that I could speak or
write about it somewhat to the purpose.
To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up
water, - to be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills
its pores lying seven years in a tan-pit, - to have winnowed every
wave of it as a mill-wheel works up the stream that runs through
the flume upon its float-boards, - to have curled up in the keenest
spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors of this breathing-
sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for three or
four score years, - to have fought all the devils and clasped all
the angels of its delirium, - and then, just at the point when the
white-hot passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our
experience into the ice-cold stream of some human language or
other, one might think would end in a rhapsody with something of
spring and temper in it. All this I thought my power and province.
The schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets
with a single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes
before it. As the pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken
eyes and thin fingers, and weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a
balance, so there are meek, slight women who have weighed all which
this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a bauble in the
palm of their slender hands. This was one of them. Fortune had
left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor and the
loneliness of almost friendless city-life were before her. Yet, as
I looked upon her tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness
which was often sprightly, as she became interested in the various
matters we talked about and places we visited, I saw that eye and
lip and every shifting lineament were made for love, - unconscious
of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold aspect of Duty
with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of nothing
less than the Great Passion.
- I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in the
course of these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we talked of
everything but love on that particular morning. There was,
perhaps, a little more timidity and hesitancy on my part than I
have commonly shown among our people at the boarding-house. In
fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-table; but,
somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as usual.
The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer
which was to leave at noon, - with the condition, however, of being
released in case circumstances occurred to detain me. The
schoolmistress knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.
It was on the Common that we were walking. The MALL, or boulevard
of our Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in
different directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy
Street southward across the whole length of the Common to Boylston
Street. We called it the long path, and were fond of it.
I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we
came opposite the head of this path on that morning. I think I
tried to speak twice without making myself distinctly audible. At
last I got out the question, - Will you take the long path with me?
- Certainly, - said the schoolmistress, - with much pleasure. -
Think, - I said, - before you answer; if you take the long path
with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more! -
The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an
arrow had struck her.
One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by, - the one
you may still see close by the Gingko-tree. - Pray, sit down, - I
said. - No, no, she answered, softly, - I will walk the LONG PATH
with you!
- The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm,
about the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly, -
"Good morning, my dears!" |
