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Title: Mosses from an old manse

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Release date: April 1, 1996 [eBook #512]
Most recently updated: November 9, 2022

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/512

Credits: Charles Keller

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MOSSES FROM
AN OLD MANSE ***

Mosses from an Old Manse

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Contents

The Old Manse
The Birthmark
A Select Party
Young Goodman Brown
Rappaccini’s Daughter
Mrs. Bullfrog
Fire Worship
Buds and Bird Voices
Monsieur du Miroir
The Hall of Fantasy
The Celestial Railroad
The Procession of Life
Feathertop: A Moralized Legend
The New Adam and Eve
Egotism; or, The Bosom Serpent
The Christmas Banquet
Drowne’s Wooden Image
The Intelligence Office
Roger Malvin’s Burial
P.’s Correspondence
Earth’s Holocaust
Passages from a Relinquished Work
Sketches from Memory
The Old Apple Dealer
The Artist of the Beautiful

A Virtuoso’s Collection

THE OLD MANSE

The Author makes the Reader acquainted with his Abode.
Between two tall gate-posts of rough-hewn stone (the gate itself having
fallen from its hinges at some unknown epoch) we beheld the gray front of
the old parsonage, terminating the vista of an avenue of black-ash trees. It
was now a twelvemonth since the funeral procession of the venerable
clergyman, its last inhabitant, had turned from that gateway towards the
village burying-ground. The wheel-track leading to the door, as well as the
whole breadth of the avenue, was almost overgrown with grass, affording
dainty mouthfuls to two or three vagrant cows and an old white horse who
had his own living to pick up along the roadside. The glimmering shadows
that lay half asleep between the door of the house and the public highway
were a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which the edifice had not
quite the aspect of belonging to the material world. Certainly it had little in
common with those ordinary abodes which stand so imminent upon the
road that every passer-by can thrust his head, as it were, into the domestic
circle. From these quiet windows the figures of passing travellers looked
too remote and dim to disturb the sense of privacy. In its near retirement
and accessible seclusion, it was the very spot for the residence of a
clergyman,—a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped, in the
midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. It was
worthy to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England, in
which, through many generations, a succession of holy occupants pass from
youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to pervade the
house and hover over it as with an atmosphere.
Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant
until that memorable summer afternoon when I entered it as my home. A
priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men from time
to time had dwelt in it; and children born in its chambers had grown up to

assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect how many sermons
must have been written there. The latest inhabitant alone—he by whose
translation to paradise the dwelling was left vacant—had penned nearly
three thousand discourses, besides the better, if not the greater, number that
gushed living from his lips. How often, no doubt, had he paced to and fro
along the avenue, attuning his meditations to the sighs and gentle murmurs
and deep and solemn peals of the wind among the lofty tops of the trees! In
that variety of natural utterances he could find something accordant with
every passage of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The
boughs over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as well as
with rustling leaves. I took shame to myself for having been so long a writer
of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend upon me
with the falling leaves of the avenue, and that I should light upon an
intellectual treasure in the Old Manse well worth those hoards of long-
hidden gold which people seek for in moss-grown houses. Profound
treatises of morality; a layman’s unprofessional, and therefore unprejudiced,
views of religion; histories (such as Bancroft might have written had he
taken up his abode here, as he once purposed) bright with picture, gleaming
over a depth of philosophic thought,—these were the works that might fitly
have flowed from such a retirement. In the humblest event, I resolved at
least to achieve a novel that should evolve some deep lesson, and should
possess physical substance enough to stand alone.
In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not
fulfilling it, there was in the rear of the house the most delightful little nook
of a study that ever afforded its snug seclusion to a scholar. It was here that
Emerson wrote Nature; for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and
used to watch the Assyrian dawn and Paphian sunset and moonrise from the
summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the room, its walls were
blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by
the grim prints of Puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies
looked strangely like bad angels, or at least like men who had wrestled so
continually and so sternly with the Devil that somewhat of his sooty
fierceness had been imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished
now; a cheerful coat of paint and golden-tinted paper-hangings lighted up
the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree that swept against
the overhanging eaves atempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of
the grim prints there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael’s

Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The only
other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and a bronze
one containing graceful ferns. My books (few, and by no means choice; for
they were chiefly such waifs as chance had thrown in my way) stood in
order about the room, seldom to be disturbed.
The study had three windows, set with little, old-fashioned panes of
glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side looked, or
rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the orchard, with
glimpses of the river through the trees. The third, facing northward,
commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot where its hitherto obscure
waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was at this window that the
clergyman who then dwelt in the Manse stood watching the outbreak of a
long and deadly struggle between two nations; he saw the irregular array of
his parishioners on the farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the
British on the hither bank. He awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of
the musketry. It came; and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the
battle-smoke around this quiet house.
Perhaps the reader, whom I cannot help considering as my guest in the
Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy in the way of sight-showing,—
perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the memorable spot. We
stand now on the river’s brink. It may well be called the Concord,—the
river of peace and quietness; for it is certainly the most unexcitable and
sluggish stream that ever loitered imperceptibly towards its eternity,—the
sea. Positively I had lived three weeks beside it before it grew quite clear to
my perception which way the current flowed. It never has a vivacious
aspect, except when a northwestern breeze is vexing its surface on a
sunshiny day. From the incurable indolence of its nature, the stream is
happily incapable of becoming the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate
of so many a wild, free mountain torrent. While all things else are
compelled to subserve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away in
lazy liberty, without turning a solitary spindle or affording even water-
power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks. The torpor of its
movement allows it nowhere a bright, pebbly shore, nor so much as a
narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course. It slumbers
between broad prairies, kissing the long meadow grass, and bathes the
overhanging boughs of elder-bushes and willows, or the roots of elms and
ash-trees and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes grow along its plashy

shore; the yellow water-lily spreads its broad, flat leaves on the margin; and
the fragrant white pond-lily abounds, generally selecting a position just so
far from the river’s brink that it cannot be grasped save at the hazard of
plunging in.
It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and
perfume, springing as it does from the black mud over which the river
sleeps, and where lurk the slimy eel, and speckled frog, and the mud-turtle,
whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same black mud out
of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. Thus we
see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and
evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful
results—the fragrance of celestial flowers—to the daily life of others.
The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike
towards our slumberous stream. In the light of a calm and golden sunset it
becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the quietude that so
well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after blustering all day
long, usually hushes itself to rest. Each tree and rock and every blade of
grass is distinctly imaged, and, however unsightly in reality, assumes ideal
beauty in the reflection. The minutest things of earth and the broad aspect of
the firmament are pictured equally without effort and with the same felicity
of success. All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float
through the unruffled bosom of the stream like heavenly thoughts through a
peaceful heart. We will not, then, malign our river as gross and impure
while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the heaven that
broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the muddiness of its
bed, let it be a symbol that the earthiest human soul has an infinite spiritual
capacity and may contain the better world within its depths. But, indeed, the
same lesson might be drawn out of any mud-puddle in the streets of a city;
and, being taught us everywhere, it must be true.
Come, we have pursued a somewhat devious track in our walk to the
battle-ground. Here we are, at the point where the river was crossed by the
old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of the contest.
On the hither side grow two or three elms, throwing a wide circumference
of shade, but which must have been planted at some period within the
threescore years and ten that have passed since the battle-day. On the farther
shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes, we discern the stone abutment

of the bridge. Looking down into the river, I once discovered some heavy
fragments of the timbers, all green with half a century’s growth of water-
moss; for during that length of time the tramp of horses and human
footsteps have ceased along this ancient highway. The stream has here
about the breadth of twenty strokes of a swimmer’s arm,—a space not too
wide when the bullets were whistling across. Old people who dwell
hereabouts will point out, the very spots on the western bank where our
countrymen fell down and died; and on this side of the river an obelisk of
granite has grown up from the soil that was fertilized with British blood.
The monument, not more than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted
the inhabitants of a village to erect in illustration of a matter of local interest
rather than what was suitable to commemorate an epoch of national history.
Still, by the fathers of the village this famous deed was done; and their
descendants might rightfully claim the privilege of building a memorial.
A humbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the granite
obelisk, may be seen close under the stone wall which separates the battle-
ground from the precincts of the parsonage. It is the grave,—marked by a
small, mossgrown fragment of stone at the head and another at the foot,—
the grave of two British soldiers who were slain in the skirmish, and have
ever since slept peacefully where Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis
buried them. Soon was their warfare ended; a weary night-march from
Boston, a rattling volley of musketry across the river, and then these many
years of rest. In the long procession of slain invaders who passed into
eternity from the battle-fields of the Revolution, these two nameless
soldiers led the way.
Lowell, the poet, as we were once standing over this grave, told me a
tradition in reference to one of the inhabitants below. The story has
something deeply impressive, though its circumstances cannot altogether be
reconciled with probability. A youth in the service of the clergyman
happened to be chopping wood, that April morning, at the back door of the
Manse; and when the noise of battle rang from side to side of the bridge, he
hastened across the intervening field to see what might be going forward. It
is rather strange, by the way, that this lad should have been so diligently at
work when the whole population of town and country were startled out of
their customary business by the advance of the British troops. Be that as it
might, the tradition, says that the lad now left his task and hurried to the
battle-field with the axe still in his hand. The British had by this time

retreated; the Americans were in pursuit; and the late scene of strife was
thus deserted by both parties. Two soldiers lay on the ground,—one was a
corpse; but, as the young New-Englander drew nigh, the other Briton raised
himself painfully upon his hands and knees and gave a ghastly stare into his
face. The boy,—it must have been a nervous impulse, without purpose,
without thought, and betokening a sensitive and impressible nature rather
than a hardened one,—the boy uplifted his axe and dealt the wounded
soldier a fierce and fatal blow upon the head.
I could wish that the grave might be opened; for I would fain know
whether either of the skeleton soldiers has the mark of an axe in his skull.
The story comes home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and
moral exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his
subsequent career and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain,
contracted as it had been before the long custom of war had robbed human
life of its sanctity and while it still seemed murderous to slay a brother man.
This one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells
us of the fight.
Many strangers come in the summer-time to view the battle-ground. For
my own part, I have never found my imagination much excited by this or
any other scene of historic celebrity; nor would the placid margin of the
river have lost any of its charm for me, had men never fought and died
there. There is a wilder interest in the tract of land-perhaps a hundred yards
in breadth—which extends between the battle-field and the northern face of
our Old Manse, with its contiguous avenue and orchard. Here, in some
unknown age, before the white man came, stood an Indian village,
convenient to the river, whence its inhabitants must have drawn so large a
part of their substance. The site is identified by the spear and arrow-heads,
the chisels, and other implements of war, labor, and the chase, which the
plough turns up from the soil. You see a splinter of stone, half hidden
beneath a sod; it looks like nothing worthy of note; but, if you have faith
enough to pick it up, behold a relic! Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of
finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set me on the search;
and I afterwards enriched myself with some very perfect specimens, so
rudely wrought that it seemed almost as if chance had fashioned them.
Their great charm consists in this rudeness and in the individuality of each
article, so different from the productions of civilized machinery, which
shapes everything on one pattern. There is exquisite delight, too, in picking

up for one’s self an arrow-head that was dropped centuries ago and has
never been handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand
of the red hunter, who purposed to shoot it at his game or at an enemy. Such
an incident builds up again the Indian village and its encircling forest, and
recalls to life the painted chiefs and warriors, the squaws at their household
toil, and the children sporting among the wigwams, while the little wind-
rocked pappose swings from the branch of a tree. It can hardly be told
whether it is a joy or a pain, after such a momentary vision, to gaze around
in the broad daylight of reality and see stone fences, white houses, potato-
fields, and men doggedly hoeing in their shirt-sleeves and homespun
pantaloons. But this is nonsense. The Old Manse is better than a thousand
wigwams.
The Old Manse! We had almost forgotten it, but will return thither
through the orchard. This was set out by the last clergyman, in the decline
of his life, when the neighbors laughed at the hoary-headed man for
planting trees from which he could have no prospect of gathering fruit.
Even had that been the case, there was only so much the better motive for
planting them, in the pure and unselfish hope of benefiting his successors,
—an end so seldom achieved by more ambitious efforts. But the old
minister, before reaching his patriarchal age of ninety, ate the apples from
this orchard during many years, and added silver and gold to his annual
stipend by disposing of the superfluity. It is pleasant to think of him
walking among the trees in the quiet afternoons of early autumn and
picking up here and there a windfall, while he observes how heavily the
branches are weighed down, and computes the number of empty flour-
barrels that will be filled by their burden. He loved each tree, doubtless, as
if it had been his own child. An orchard has a relation to mankind, and
readily connects itself with matters of the heart. The trees possess a
domestic character; they have lost the wild nature of their forest kindred,
and have grown humanized by receiving the care of man as well as by
contributing to his wants. There, is so much individuality of character, too,
among apple trees, that it gives them all additional claim to be the objects of
human interest. One is harsh and crabbed in its manifestations; another
gives us fruit as mild as charity. One is churlish and illiberal, evidently
grudging the few apples that it bears; another exhausts itself in free-hearted
benevolence. The variety of grotesque shapes into which apple, trees
contort themselves has its effect on those who get acquainted with them:

they stretch out their crooked branches, and take such hold of the
imagination, that we remember them as humorists and odd fellows. And
what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot
where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined
chimney rising out of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit
to every wayfarer,—apples that are bitter sweet with the moral of Time’s
vicissitude.
I have met with no other such pleasant trouble in the world as that of
finding myself, with only the two or three mouths which it was my
privilege to feed, the sole inheritor of the old clergyman’s wealth of fruits.
Throughout the summer there were cherries and currants; and then came
Autumn, with his immense burden of apples, dropping them continually
from his over-laden shoulders as he trudged along. In the stillest afternoon,
if I listened, the thump of a great apple was audible, falling without a breath
of wind, from the mere necessity of perfect ripeness. And, besides, there
were pear-trees, that flung down bushels upon bushels of heavy pears; and
peach-trees, which, in a good year, tormented me with peaches, neither to
be eaten nor kept, nor, without labor and perplexity, to be given away. The
idea of an infinite generosity and exhaustless bounty on the part of our
Mother Nature was well worth obtaining through such cares as these. That
feeling can be enjoyed in perfection only by the natives of summer islands,
where the bread-fruit, the cocoa, the palm, and the orange grow
spontaneously and hold forth the ever-ready meal; but likewise almost as
well by a man long habituated to city life, who plunges into such a solitude
as that of the Old Manse, where he plucks the fruit of trees that he did not
plant, and which therefore, to my heterodox taste, bear the closest
resemblance to those that grew in Eden. It has been an apothegm these five
thousand years, that toil sweetens the bread it earns. For my part (speaking
from hard experience, acquired while belaboring the rugged furrows of
Brook Farm), I relish best the free gifts of Providence.
Not that it can be disputed that the light toil requisite to cultivate a
moderately sized garden imparts such zest to kitchen vegetables as is never
found in those of the market-gardener. Childless men, if they would know
something of the bliss of paternity, should plant a seed,—be it squash, bean,
Indian corn, or perhaps a mere flower or worthless weed,—should plant it
with their own hands, and nurse it from infancy to maturity altogether by
their own care. If there be not too many of them, each individual plant

becomes an object of separate interest. My garden, that skirted the avenue
of the Manse, was of precisely the right extent. An hour or two of morning
labor was all that it required. But I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times
a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a
love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the
process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to
observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a row of early peas just
peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green. Later in the
season the humming-birds were attracted by the blossoms of a peculiar
variety of bean; and they were a joy to me, those little spiritual visitants, for
deigning to sip airy food out of my nectar-cups. Multitudes of bees used to
bury themselves in the yellow blossoms of the summer-squashes. This, too,
was a deep satisfaction; although, when they had laden themselves with
sweets, they flew away to some unknown hive, which would give back
nothing in requital of what my garden had contributed. But I was glad thus
to fling a benefaction upon the passing breeze with the certainty that
somebody must profit by it and that there would be a little more honey in
the world to allay the sourness and bitterness which mankind is always
complaining of. Yes, indeed; my life was the sweeter for that honey.
Speaking of summer-squashes, I must say a word of their beautiful and
varied forms. They presented an endless diversity of urns and vases,
shallow or deep, scalloped or plain, moulded in patterns which a sculptor
would do well to copy, since Art has never invented anything more
graceful. A hundred squashes in the garden were worth, in my eyes at least,
of being rendered indestructible in marble. If ever Providence (but I know it
never will) should assign me a superfluity of gold, part of it shall be
expended for a service of plate, or most delicate porcelain, to be wrought
into the shapes of summer-squashes gathered from vines which I will plant
with my own hands. As dishes for containing vegetables, they would be
peculiarly appropriate.
But not merely the squeamish love of the beautiful was gratified by my
toil in the kitchen-garden. There was a hearty enjoyment, likewise, in
observing the growth of the crook-necked winter-squashes from the first
little bulb, with the withered blossom adhering to it, until they lay strewn
upon the soil, big, round fellows, hiding their heads beneath the leaves, but
turning up their great yellow rotundities to the noontide sun. Gazing at
them, I felt that by my agency something worth living for had been done. A

new substance was born into the world. They were real and tangible
existences, which the mind could seize hold of and rejoice in. A cabbage,
too,—especially the early Dutch cabbage, which swells to a monstrous
circumference, until its ambitious heart often bursts asunder,—is a matter to
be proud of when we can claim a share with the earth and sky in producing
it. But, after all, the hugest pleasure is reserved until these vegetable
children of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal
of them.
What with the river, the battle-field, the orchard, and the garden, the
reader begins to despair of finding his way back into the Old Manse. But, in
agreeable weather, it is the truest hospitality to keep him out of doors. I
never grew quite acquainted with my habitation till a long spell of sulky
rain had confined me beneath its roof. There could not be a more sombre
aspect of external nature than as then seen from the windows of my study.
The great willow-tree had caught and retained among its leaves a whole
cataract of water, to be shaken down at intervals by the frequent gusts of
wind. All day long, and for a week together, the rain was drip-drip-dripping
and splash-splash-splashing from the eaves and bubbling and foaming into
the tubs beneath the spouts. The old, unpainted shingles of the house and
outbuildings were black with moisture; and the mosses of ancient growth
upon the walls looked green and fresh, as if they were the newest things and
afterthought of Time. The usually mirrored surface of the river was blurred
by an infinity of raindrops; the whole landscape had a completely water-
soaked appearance, conveying the impression that the earth was wet
through like a sponge; while the summit of a wooded hill, about a mile
distant, was enveloped in a dense mist, where the demon of the tempest
seemed to have his abiding-place and to be plotting still direr inclemencies.
Nature has no kindness, no hospitality, during a rain. In the fiercest beat
of sunny days she retains a secret mercy, and welcomes the wayfarer to
shady nooks of the woods whither the sun cannot penetrate; but she
provides no shelter against her storms. It makes us shiver to think of those
deep, umbrageous recesses, those overshadowing banks, where we found
such enjoyment during the sultry afternoons. Not a twig of foliage there but
would dash a little shower into our faces. Looking reproachfully towards
the impenetrable sky,—if sky there be above that dismal uniformity of
cloud,—we are apt to murmur against the whole system of the universe,
since it involves the extinction of so many summer days in so short a life by

the hissing and spluttering rain. In such spells of weather,—and it is to be
supposed such weather came,—Eve’s bower in paradise must have been but
a cheerless and aguish kind of shelter, nowise comparable to the old
parsonage, which had resources of its own to beguile the week’s
imprisonment. The idea of sleeping on a couch of wet roses!
Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret,
stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has left
behind it from a period before the Revolution. Our garret was an arched
hall, dimly illuminated through small and dusty windows; it was but a
twilight at the best; and there were nooks, or rather caverns, of deep
obscurity, the secrets of which I never learned, being too reverent of their
dust and cobwebs. The beams and rafters, roughly hewn and with strips of
bark still on them, and the rude masonry of the chimneys, made the garret
look wild and uncivilized, an aspect unlike what was seen elsewhere in the
quiet and decorous old house. But on one side there was a little
whitewashed apartment, which bore the traditionary title of the Saint’s
Chamber, because holy men in their youth had slept, and studied, and
prayed there. With its elevated retirement, its one window, its small
fireplace, and its closet convenient for an oratory, it was the very spot where
a young man might inspire himself with solemn enthusiasm and cherish
saintly dreams. The occupants, at various epochs, had left brief records and
ejaculations inscribed upon the walls. There, too, hung a tattered and
shrivelled roll of canvas, which on inspection proved to be the forcibly
wrought picture of a clergyman, in wig, band, and gown, holding a Bible in
his hand. As I turned his face towards the light, he eyed me with an air of
authority such as men of his profession seldom assume in our days. The
original had been pastor of the parish more than a century ago, a friend of
Whitefield, and almost his equal in fervid eloquence. I bowed before the
effigy of the dignified divine, and felt as if I had now met face to face with
the ghost by whom, as there was reason to apprehend, the Manse was
haunted.
Houses of any antiquity in New England are so invariably possessed with
spirits that the matter seems hardly worth alluding to. Our ghost used to
heave deep sighs in a particular corner of the parlor, and sometimes rustled
paper, as if he were turning over a sermon in the long upper entry,—where
nevertheless he was invisible, in spite of the bright moonshine that fell
through the eastern window. Not improbably he wished me to edit and

publish a selection from a chest full of manuscript discourses that stood in
the garret. Once, while Hillard and other friends sat talking with us in the
twilight, there came a rustling noise as of a minister’s silk gown, sweeping
through the very midst of the company, so closely as almost to brush
against the chairs. Still there was nothing visible. A yet stranger business
was that of a ghostly servant-maid, who used to be heard in the kitchen at
deepest midnight, grinding coffee, cooking, ironing,—performing, in short,
all kinds of domestic labor,—although no traces of anything accomplished
could be detected the next morning. Some neglected duty of her servitude,
some ill-starched ministerial band, disturbed the poor damsel in her grave
and kept her at work without any wages.
But to return from this digression. A part of my predecessor’s library was
stored in the garret,—no unfit receptacle indeed for such dreary trash as
comprised the greater number of volumes. The old books would have been
worth nothing at an auction. In this venerable garret, however, they
possessed an interest, quite apart from their literary value, as heirlooms,
many of which had been transmitted down through a series of consecrated
hands from the days of the mighty Puritan divines. Autographs of famous
names were to be seen in faded ink on some of their fly-leaves; and there
were marginal observations or interpolated pages closely covered with
manuscript in illegible shorthand, perhaps concealing matter of profound
truth and wisdom. The world will never be the better for it. A few of the
books were Latin folios, written by Catholic authors; others demolished
Papistry, as with a sledge-hammer, in plain English. A dissertation on the
Book of Job—which only Job himself could have had patience to read—
filled at least a score of small, thick-set quartos, at the rate of two or three
volumes to a chapter. Then there was a vast folio body of divinity,—too
corpulent a body, it might be feared, to comprehend the spiritual element of
religion. Volumes of this form dated back two hundred years or more, and
were generally bound in black leather, exhibiting precisely such an
appearance as we should attribute to books of enchantment. Others equally
antique were of a size proper to be carried in the large waistcoat pockets of
old times,—diminutive, but as black as their bulkier brethren, and
abundantly interfused with Greek and Latin quotations. These little old
volumes impressed me as if they had been intended for very large ones, but
had been unfortunately blighted at an early stage of their growth.

The rain pattered upon the roof and the sky gloomed through the dusty
garret-windows while I burrowed among these venerable books in search of
any living thought which should burn like a coal of fire or glow like an
inextinguishable gem beneath the dead trumpery that had long hidden it.
But I found no such treasure; all was dead alike; and I could not but muse
deeply and wonderingly upon the humiliating fact that the works of man’s
intellect decay like those of his hands. Thought grows mouldy. What was
good and nourishing food for the spirits of one generation affords no
sustenance for the next. Books of religion, however, cannot be considered a
fair test of the enduring and vivacious properties of human thought, because
such books so seldom really touch upon their ostensible subject, and have,
therefore, so little business to be written at all. So long as an unlettered soul
can attain to saving grace there would seem to be no deadly error in holding
theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most part, stupendous
impertinence.
Many of the books had accrued in the latter years of the last clergyman’s
lifetime. These threatened to be of even less interest than the elder works a
century hence to any curious inquirer who should then rummage then as I
was doing now. Volumes of the Liberal Preacher and Christian Examiner,
occasional sermons, controversial pamphlets, tracts, and other productions
of a like fugitive nature, took the place of the thick and heavy volumes of
past time. In a physical point of view, there was much the same difference
as between a feather and a lump of lead; but, intellectually regarded, the
specific gravity of old and new was about upon a par. Both also were alike
frigid. The elder books nevertheless seemed to have been earnestly written,
and might be conceived to have possessed warmth at some former period;
although, with the lapse of time, the heated masses had cooled down even
to the freezing-point. The frigidity of the modern productions, on the other
hand, was characteristic and inherent, and evidently had little to do with the
writer’s qualities of mind and heart. In fine, of this whole dusty heap of
literature I tossed aside all the sacred part, and felt myself none the less a
Christian for eschewing it. There appeared no hope of either mounting to
the better world on a Gothic staircase of ancient folios or of flying thither
on the wings of a modern tract.
Nothing, strange to say, retained any sap except what had been written
for the passing day and year, without the remotest pretension or idea of
permanence. There were a few old newspapers, and still older almanacs,

which reproduced to my mental eye the epochs when they had issued from
the press with a distinctness that was altogether unaccountable. It was as if I
had found bits of magic looking-glass among the books with the images of
a vanished century in them. I turned my eyes towards the tattered picture
above mentioned, and asked of the austere divine wherefore it was that he
and his brethren, after the most painful rummaging and groping into their
minds, had been able to produce nothing half so real as these newspaper
scribblers and almanac-makers had thrown off in the effervescence of a
moment. The portrait responded not; so I sought an answer for myself. It is
the age itself that writes newspapers and almanacs, which therefore have a
distinct purpose and meaning at the time, and a kind of intelligible truth for
all times; whereas most other works—being written by men who, in the
very act, set themselves apart from their age—are likely to possess little
significance when new, and none at all when old. Genius, indeed, melts
many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a
similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is
but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.
Lightly as I have spoken of these old books, there yet lingers with me a
superstitious reverence for literature of all kinds. A bound volume has a
charm in my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for the good
Mussulman. He imagines that those wind-wafted records are perhaps
hallowed by some sacred verse; and I, that every new book or antique one
may contain the “open sesame,”—the spell to disclose treasures hidden in
some unsuspected cave of Truth. Thus it was not without sadness that I
turned away from the library of the Old Manse.
Blessed was the sunshine when it came again at the close of another
stormy day, beaming from the edge of the western horizon; while the
massive firmament of clouds threw down all the gloom it could, but served
only to kindle the golden light into a more brilliant glow by the strongly
contrasted shadows. Heaven smiled at the earth, so long unseen, from
beneath its heavy eyelid. To-morrow for the hill-tops and the woodpaths.
Or it might be that Ellery Charming came up the avenue to join me in a
fishing excursion on the river. Strange and happy times were those when we
cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced habitudes and delivered
ourselves up to the free air, to live like the Indians or any less conventional
race during one bright semicircle of the sun. Rowing our boat against the

current, between wide meadows, we turned aside into the Assabeth. A more
lovely stream than this, for a mile above its junction with the Concord, has
never flowed on earth, nowhere, indeed, except to lave the interior regions
of a poet’s imagination. It is sheltered from the breeze by woods and a
hillside; so that elsewhere there might be a hurricane, and here scarcely a
ripple across the shaded water. The current lingers along so gently that the
mere force of the boatman’s will seems sufficient to propel his craft against
it. It comes flowing softly through the midmost privacy and deepest heart of
a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while the stream whispers back again
from its sedgy borders, as if river and wood were hushing one another to
sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its course and dreams of the sky and of the
clustering foliage, amid which fall showers of broken sunlight, imparting
specks of vivid cheerfulness, in contrast with the quiet depth of the
prevailing tint. Of all this scene, the slumbering river has a dream-picture in
its bosom. Which, after all, was the most real,—the picture, or the original?
—the objects palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the
stream beneath? Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to
the soul. But both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm;
and, had it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied that this river
had strayed forth out of the rich scenery of my companion’s inner world;
only the vegetation along its banks should then have had an Oriental
character.
Gentle and unobtrusive as the river is, yet the tranquil woods seem hardly
satisfied to allow it passage. The trees are rooted on the very verge of the
water, and dip their pendent branches into it. At one spot there is a lofty
bank, on the slope of which grow some hemlocks, declining across the
stream with outstretched arms, as if resolute to take the plunge. In other
places the banks are almost on a level with the water; so that the quiet
congregation of trees set their feet in the flood, and are Fringed with foliage
down to the surface. Cardinal-flowers kindle their spiral flames and
illuminate the dark nooks among the shrubbery. The pond-lily grows
abundantly along the margin,—that delicious flower which, as Thoreau tells
me, opens its virgin bosom to the first sunlight and perfects its being
through the magic of that genial kiss. He has beheld beds of them unfolding
in due succession as the sunrise stole gradually from flower to flower,—a
sight not to be hoped for unless when a poet adjusts his inward eye to a
proper focus with the outward organ. Grapevines here and there twine

themselves around shrub and tree and hang their clusters over the water
within reach of the boatman’s hand. Oftentimes they unite two trees of alien
race in an inextricable twine, marrying the hemlock and the maple against
their will and enriching them with a purple offspring of which neither is the
parent. One of these ambitious parasites has climbed into the upper
branches of a tall white-pine, and is still ascending from bough to bough,
unsatisfied till it shall crown the tree’s airy summit with a wreath of its
broad foliage and a cluster of its grapes.
The winding course of the stream continually shut out the scene behind
us and revealed as calm and lovely a one before. We glided from depth to
depth, and breathed new seclusion at every turn. The shy kingfisher flew
from the withered branch close at hand to another at a distance, uttering a
shrill cry of anger or alarm. Ducks that had been floating there since the
preceding eve were startled at our approach and skimmed along the glassy
river, breaking its dark surface with a bright streak. The pickerel leaped
from among the lilypads. The turtle, sunning itself upon a rock or at the root
of a tree, slid suddenly into the water with a plunge. The painted Indian who
paddled his canoe along the Assabeth three hundred years ago could hardly
have seen a wilder gentleness displayed upon its banks and reflected in its
bosom than we did. Nor could the same Indian have prepared his noontide
meal with more simplicity. We drew up our skiff at some point where the
overarching shade formed a natural bower, and there kindled a fire with the
pine cones and decayed branches that lay strewn plentifully around. Soon
the smoke ascended among the trees, impregnated with a savory incense,
not heavy, dull, and surfeiting, like the steam of cookery within doors, but
sprightly and piquant. The smell of our feast was akin to the woodland
odors with which it mingled: there was no sacrilege committed by our
intrusion there: the sacred solitude was hospitable, and granted us free leave
to cook and eat in the recess that was at once our kitchen and banqueting-
hall. It is strange what humble offices may be performed in a beautiful
scene without destroying its poetry. Our fire, red gleaming among the trees,
and we beside it, busied with culinary rites and spreading out our meal on a
mossgrown log, all seemed in unison with the river gliding by and the
foliage rustling over us. And, what was strangest, neither did our mirth
seem to disturb the propriety of the solemn woods; although the hobgoblins
of the old wilderness and the will-of-the-wisps that glimmered in the
marshy places might have come trooping to share our table-talk and have

added their shrill laughter to our merriment. It was the very spot in which to
utter the extremest nonsense or the profoundest wisdom, or that ethereal
product of the mind which partakes of both, and may become one or the
other, in correspondence with the faith and insight of the auditor.
So, amid sunshine and shadow, rustling leaves and sighing waters, up
gushed our talk like the babble of a fountain. The evanescent spray was
Ellery’s; and his, too, the lumps of golden thought that lay glimmering in
the fountain’s bed and brightened both our faces by the reflection. Could he
have drawn out that virgin gold, and stamped it with the mint-mark that
alone gives currency, the world might have had the profit, and he the fame.
My mind was the richer merely by the knowledge that it was there. But the
chief profit of those wild days, to him and me, lay not in any definite idea,
not in any angular or rounded truth, which we dug out of the shapeless mass
of problematical stuff, but in the freedom which we thereby won from all
custom and conventionalism and fettering influences of man on man. We
were so free to-day that it was impossible to be slaves again to-morrow.
When we crossed the threshold of the house or trod the thronged pavements
of a city, still the leaves of the trees that overhang the Assabeth were
whispering to us, “Be free! be free!” Therefore along that shady river-bank
there are spots, marked with a heap of ashes and half-consumed brands,
only less sacred in my remembrance than the hearth of a household fire.
And yet how sweet, as we floated homeward adown the golden river at
sunset,—how sweet was it to return within the system of human society, not
as to a dungeon and a chain, but as to a stately edifice, whence we could go
forth at will into state—her simplicity! How gently, too, did the sight of the
Old Manse, best seen from the river, overshadowed with its willow and all
environed about with the foliage of its orchard and avenue,—how gently
did its gray, homely aspect rebuke the speculative extravagances of the day!
It had grown sacred in connection with the artificial life against which we
inveighed; it had been a home for many years, in spite of all; it was my
home too; and, with these thoughts, it seemed to me that all the artifice and
conventionalism of life was but an impalpable thinness upon its surface,
and that the depth below was none the worse for it. Once, as we turned our
boat to the bank, there was a cloud, in the shape of an immensely gigantic
figure of a hound, couched above the house, as if keeping guard over it.
Gazing at this symbol, I prayed that the upper influences might long protect
the institutions that had grown out of the heart of mankind.

If ever my readers should decide to give up civilized life, cities, houses,
and whatever moral or material enormities in addition to these the perverted
ingenuity of our race has contrived, let it be in the early autumn. Then
Nature will love him better than at any other season, and will take him to
her bosom with a more motherly tenderness. I could scarcely endure the
roof of the old house above me in those first autumnal days. How early in
the summer, too, the prophecy of autumn comes! Earlier in some years than
in others; sometimes even in the first weeks of July. There is no other
feeling like what is caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception—if it
be not rather a foreboding—of the year’s decay, so blessedly sweet and sad
in the same breath.
Did I say that there was no feeling like it? Ah, but there is a half-
acknowledged melancholy like to this when we stand in the perfected vigor
of our life and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the
next work of his never-idle fingers must be to steal them one by one away.
I have forgotten whether the song of the cricket be not as early a token of
autumn’s approach as any other,—that song which may be called an audible
stillness; for though very loud and heard afar, yet the mind does not take
note of it as a sound, so completely is its individual existence merged
among the accompanying characteristics of the season. Alas for the pleasant
summertime! In August the grass is still verdant on the hills and in the
valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense as ever and as green; the flowers
gleam forth in richer abundance along the margin of the river and by the
stone walls and deep among the woods; the days, too, are as fervid now as
they were a month ago; and yet in every breath of wind and in every beam
of sunshine we hear the whispered farewell and behold the parting smile of
a dear friend. There is a coolness amid all the heat, a mildness in the blazing
noon. Not a breeze can stir but it thrills us with the breath of autumn. A
pensive glory is seen in the far, golden gleams, among the shadows of the
trees. The flowers—even the brightest of them, and they are the most
gorgeous of the year—have this gentle sadness wedded to their pomp, and
typify the character of the delicious time each within itself. The brilliant
cardinal-flower has never seemed gay to me.
Still later in the season Nature’s tenderness waxes stronger. It is
impossible not to be fond of our mother now; for she is so fond of us! At
other periods she does not make this impression on me, or only at rare

intervals; but in those genial days of autumn, when she has perfected her
harvests and accomplished every needful thing that was given her to do,
then she overflows with a blessed superfluity of love. She has leisure to
caress her children now. It is good to be alive and at such times. Thank
Heaven for breath—yes, for mere breath—when it is made up of a heavenly
breeze like this! It comes with a real kiss upon our cheeks; it would linger
fondly around us if it might; but, since it must be gone, it embraces us with
its whole kindly heart and passes onward to embrace likewise the next thing
that it meets. A blessing is flung abroad and scattered far and wide over the
earth, to be gathered up by all who choose. I recline upon the still
unwithered grass and whisper to myself, “O perfect day! O beautiful world!
O beneficent God!” And it is the promise of a blessed eternity; for our
Creator would never have made such lovely days and have given us the
deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were
meant to be immortal. This sunshine is the golden pledge thereof. It beams
through the gates of paradise and shows us glimpses far inward.
By and by, in a little time, the outward world puts on a drear austerity. On
some October morning there is a heavy hoarfrost on the grass and along the
tops of the fences; and at sunrise the leaves fall from the trees of our
avenue, without a breath of wind, quietly descending by their own weight.
All summer long they have murmured like the noise of waters; they have
roared loudly while the branches were wrestling with the thunder-gust; they
have made music both glad and solemn; they have attuned my thoughts by
their quiet sound as I paced to and fro beneath the arch of intermingling
boughs. Now they can only rustle under my feet. Henceforth the gray
parsonage begins to assume a larger importance, and draws to its fireside,—
for the abomination of the air-tight stove is reserved till wintry weather,—
draws closer and closer to its fireside the vagrant impulses that had gone
wandering about through the summer.
When summer was dead and buried the Old Manse became as lonely as a
hermitage. Not that ever—in my time at least—it had been thronged with
company; but, at no rare intervals, we welcomed some friend out of the
dusty glare and tumult of the world, and rejoiced to share with him the
transparent obscurity that was floating over us. In one respect our precincts
were like the Enchanted Ground through which the pilgrim travelled on his
way to the Celestial City. The guests, each and all, felt a slumberous
influence upon them; they fell asleep in chairs, or took a more deliberate

siesta on the sofa, or were seen stretched among the shadows of the orchard,
looking up dreamily through the boughs. They could not have paid a more
acceptable compliment to my abode nor to my own qualities as a host. I
held it as a proof that they left their cares behind them as they passed
between the stone gate-posts at the entrance of our avenue, and that the so
powerful opiate was the abundance of peace and quiet within and all around
us. Others could give them pleasure and amusement or instruction,—these
could be picked up anywhere; but it was for me to give them rest,—rest in a
life of trouble. What better could be done for those weary and world-worn
spirits?—for him whose career of perpetual action was impeded and
harassed by the rarest of his powers and the richest of his acquirements?—
for another who had thrown his ardent heart from earliest youth into the
strife of politics, and now, perchance, began to suspect that one lifetime is
too brief for the accomplishment of any lofty aim?—for her oil whose
feminine nature had been imposed the heavy gift of intellectual power, such
as a strong man might have staggered under, and with it the necessity to act
upon the world?—in a word, not to multiply instances, what better could be
done for anybody who came within our magic circle than to throw the spell
of a tranquil spirit over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then
we dismissed him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been
dreaming of us.
Were I to adopt a pet idea as so many people do, and fondle it in my
embraces to the exclusion of all others, it would be, that the great want
which mankind labors under at this present period is sleep. The world
should recline its vast head on the first convenient pillow and take an age-
long nap. It has gone distracted through a morbid activity, and, while
preternaturally wide awake, is nevertheless tormented by visions that seem
real to it now, but would assume their true aspect and character were all
things once set right by an interval of sound repose. This is the only method
of getting rid of old delusions and avoiding new ones; of regenerating our
race, so that it might in due time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber; of
restoring to us the simple perception of what is right and the single-hearted
desire to achieve it, both of which have long been lost in consequence of
this weary activity of brain and torpor or passion of the heart that now
afflict the universe. Stimulants, the only mode of treatment hitherto
attempted, cannot quell the disease; they do but heighten the delirium.

Let not the above paragraph ever be quoted against the author; for,
though tinctured with its modicum of truth, it is the result and expression of
what he knew, while he was writing, to be but a distorted survey of the state
and prospects of mankind. There were circumstances around me which
made it difficult to view the world precisely as it exists; for, severe and
sober as was the Old Manse, it was necessary to go but a little way beyond
its threshold before meeting with stranger moral shapes of men than might
have been encountered elsewhere in a circuit of a thousand miles.
These hobgoblins of flesh and blood were attracted thither by the
widespreading influence of a great original thinker, who had his earthly
abode at the opposite extremity of our village. His mind acted upon other
minds of a certain constitution with wonderful magnetism, and drew many
men upon long pilgrimages to speak with him face to face. Young
visionaries—to whom just so much of insight had been imparted as to make
life all a labyrinth around them—came to seek the clew that should guide
them out of their self-involved bewilderment. Gray-headed theorists—
whose systems, at first air, had finally imprisoned them in an iron
framework—travelled painfully to his door, not to ask deliverance, but to
invite the free spirit into their own thraldom. People that had lighted on a
new thought or a thought that they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the
finder of a glittering gem hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and
value. Uncertain, troubled, earnest wanderers through the midnight of the
moral world beheld his intellectual fire as a beacon burning on a hill-top,
and, climbing the difficult ascent, looked forth into the surrounding
obscurity more hopefully than hitherto. The light revealed objects unseen
before,—mountains, gleaming lakes, glimpses of a creation among the
chaos; but also, as was unavoidable, it attracted bats and owls and the whole
host of night birds, which flapped their dusky wings against the gazer’s
eyes, and sometimes were mistaken for fowls of angelic feather. Such
delusions always hover nigh whenever a beacon-fire of truth is kindled.
For myself, there bad been epochs of my life when I, too, might have
asked of this prophet the master word that should solve me the riddle of the
universe; but now, being happy, I felt as if there were no question to be put,
and therefore admired Emerson as a poet, of deep beauty and austere
tenderness, but sought nothing from him as a philosopher. It was good,
nevertheless, to meet him in the woodpaths, or sometimes in our avenue,
with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence like the

garment of a shining one; and be, so quiet, so simple, so without pretension,
encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he could
impart. And, in truth, the heart of many an ordinary man had, perchance,
inscriptions which he could not read. But it was impossible to dwell in his
vicinity without inhaling more or less the mountain atmosphere of his lofty
thought, which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness,
—new truth being as heady as new wine. Never was a poor little country
village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly
behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important
agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water.
Such, I imagine, is the invariable character of persons who crowd so closely
about an original thinker as to draw in his unuttered breath and thus become
imbued with a false originality. This triteness of novelty is enough to make
any man of common-sense blaspheme at all ideas of less than a century’s
standing, and pray that the world may be petrified and rendered immovable
in precisely the worst moral and physical state that it ever yet arrived at,
rather than be benefited by such schemes of such philosophers.
And now I begin to feel—and perhaps should have sooner felt—that we
have talked enough of the Old Manse. Mine honored reader, it may be, will
vilify the poor author as an egotist for babbling through so many pages
about a mossgrown country parsonage, and his life within its walls, and on
the river, and in the woods, and the influences that wrought upon him from
all these sources. My conscience, however, does not reproach me with
betraying anything too sacredly individual to be revealed by a human spirit
to its brother or sister spirit. How narrow-how shallow and scanty too—is
the stream of thought that has been flowing from my pen, compared with
the broad tide of dim emotions, ideas, and associations which swell around
me from that portion of my existence! How little have I told! and of that
little, how almost nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it
exclusively my own! Has the reader gone wandering, hand in hand with me,
through the inner passages of my being? and have we groped together into
all its chambers and examined their treasures or their rubbish? Not so. We
have been standing on the greensward, but just within the cavern’s mouth,
where the common sunshine is free to penetrate, and where every footstep
is therefore free to come. I have appealed to no sentiment or sensibilities
save such as are diffused among us all. So far as I am a man of really
individual attributes I veil my face; nor am I, nor have I ever been, one of

those supremely hospitable people who serve up their own hearts, delicately
fried, with brain sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public.
Glancing back over what I have written, it seems but the scattered
reminiscences of a single summer. In fairyland there is no measurement of
time; and, in a spot so sheltered from the turmoil of life’s ocean, three years
hastened away with a noiseless flight, as the breezy sunshine chases the
cloud-shadows across the depths of a still valley. Now came hints, growing
more and more distinct, that the owner of the old house was pining for his
native air. Carpenters next, appeared, making a tremendous racket among
the outbuildings, strewing the green grass with pine shavings and chips of
chestnut joists, and vexing the whole antiquity of the place with their
discordant renovations. Soon, moreover, they divested our abode of the veil
of woodbine which had crept over a large portion of its southern face. All
the aged mosses were cleared unsparingly away; and there were horrible
whispers about brushing up the external walls with a coat of paint,—a
purpose as little to my taste as might be that of rouging the venerable
cheeks of one’s grandmother. But the hand that renovates is always more
sacrilegious than that which destroys. In fine, we gathered up our household
goods, drank a farewell cup of tea in our pleasant little breakfast-room,—
delicately fragrant tea, an unpurchasable luxury, one of the many angel gifts
that had fallen like dew upon us,—and passed forth between the tall stone
gate-posts as uncertain as the wandering Arabs where our tent might next be
pitched. Providence took me by the hand, and—an oddity of dispensation
which, I trust, there is no irreverence in smiling at—has led me, as the
newspapers announce while I am writing, from the Old Manse into a
custom-house. As a story-teller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes
for my imaginary personages, but none like this.
The treasure of intellectual gold which I hoped to find in our secluded
dwelling had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics, no
philosophic history, no novel even, that could stand unsupported on its
edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these, few tales and
essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm summer of my
heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of my friend of
many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else. With these idle
weeds and withering blossoms I have intermixed some that were produced
long ago,—old, faded things, reminding me of flowers pressed between the
leaves of a book,—and now offer the bouquet, such as it is, to any whom it

may please. These fitful sketches, with so little of external life about them,
yet claiming no profundity of purpose,—so reserved, even while they
sometimes seem so frank,—often but half in earnest, and never, even when
most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image,
—such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation.
Nevertheless, the public—if my limited number of readers, whom I venture
to regard rather as a circle of friends, may be termed a public—will receive
them the more kindly, as the last offering, the last collection of this nature
which it is my purpose ever to put forth. Unless I could do better, I have
done enough in this kind. For myself the book will always retain one charm,
—as reminding me of the river, with its delightful solitudes, and of the
avenue, the garden, and the orchard, and especially the dear Old Manse,
with the little study on its western side, and the sunshine glimmering
through the willow branches while I wrote.
Let the reader, if he will do me so much honor, imagine himself my
guest, and that, having seen whatever may be worthy of notice within and
about the Old Manse, he has finally been ushered into my study. There,
after seating him in an antique elbow-chair, an heirloom of the house, I take
forth a roll of manuscript and entreat his attention to the following tales,—
an act of personal inhospitality, however, which I never was guilty of, nor
ever will be, even to my worst enemy.

THE BIRTHMARK

In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an
eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long
before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual affinity more
attractive than any chemical one. He had left his laboratory to the care of an
assistant, cleared his fine countenance from the furnace smoke, washed the
stain of acids from his fingers, and persuaded a beautiful woman to become
his wife. In those days when the comparatively recent discovery of
electricity and other kindred mysteries of Nature seemed to open paths into
the region of miracle, it was not unusual for the love of science to rival the
love of woman in its depth and absorbing energy. The higher intellect, the
imagination, the spirit, and even the heart might all find their congenial
aliment in pursuits which, as some of their ardent votaries believed, would
ascend from one step of powerful intelligence to another, until the
philosopher should lay his hand on the secret of creative force and perhaps
make new worlds for himself. We know not whether Aylmer possessed this
degree of faith in man’s ultimate control over Nature. He had devoted
himself, however, too unreservedly to scientific studies ever to be weaned
from them by any second passion. His love for his young wife might prove
the stronger of the two; but it could only be by intertwining itself with his
love of science, and uniting the strength of the latter to his own.
Such a union accordingly took place, and was attended with truly
remarkable consequences and a deeply impressive moral. One day, very
soon after their marriage, Aylmer sat gazing at his wife with a trouble in his
countenance that grew stronger until he spoke.
“Georgiana,” said he, “has it never occurred to you that the mark upon
your cheek might be removed?”
“No, indeed,” said she, smiling; but perceiving the seriousness of his
manner, she blushed deeply. “To tell you the truth it has been so often called
a charm that I was simple enough to imagine it might be so.”

“Ah, upon another face perhaps it might,” replied her husband; “but
never on yours. No, dearest Georgiana, you came so nearly perfect from the
hand of Nature that this slightest possible defect, which we hesitate whether
to term a defect or a beauty, shocks me, as being the visible mark of earthly
imperfection.”
“Shocks you, my husband!” cried Georgiana, deeply hurt; at first
reddening with momentary anger, but then bursting into tears. “Then why
did you take me from my mother’s side? You cannot love what shocks
you!”
To explain this conversation it must be mentioned that in the centre of
Georgiana’s left cheek there was a singular mark, deeply interwoven, as it
were, with the texture and substance of her face. In the usual state of her
complexion—a healthy though delicate bloom—the mark wore a tint of
deeper crimson, which imperfectly defined its shape amid the surrounding
rosiness. When she blushed it gradually became more indistinct, and finally
vanished amid the triumphant rush of blood that bathed the whole cheek
with its brilliant glow. But if any shifting motion caused her to turn pale
there was the mark again, a crimson stain upon the snow, in what Aylmer
sometimes deemed an almost fearful distinctness. Its shape bore not a little
similarity to the human hand, though of the smallest pygmy size.
Georgiana’s lovers were wont to say that some fairy at her birth hour had
laid her tiny hand upon the infant’s cheek, and left this impress there in
token of the magic endowments that were to give her such sway over all
hearts. Many a desperate swain would have risked life for the privilege of
pressing his lips to the mysterious hand. It must not be concealed, however,
that the impression wrought by this fairy sign manual varied exceedingly,
according to the difference of temperament in the beholders. Some
fastidious persons—but they were exclusively of her own sex—affirmed
that the bloody hand, as they chose to call it, quite destroyed the effect of
Georgiana’s beauty, and rendered her countenance even hideous. But it
would be as reasonable to say that one of those small blue stains which
sometimes occur in the purest statuary marble would convert the Eve of
Powers to a monster. Masculine observers, if the birthmark did not heighten
their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world
might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the
semblance of a flaw. After his marriage,—for he thought little or nothing of
the matter before,—Aylmer discovered that this was the case with himself.

Had she been less beautiful,—if Envy’s self could have found aught else
to sneer at,—he might have felt his affection heightened by the prettiness of
this mimic hand, now vaguely portrayed, now lost, now stealing forth again
and glimmering to and fro with every pulse of emotion that throbbed within
her heart; but seeing her otherwise so perfect, he found this one defect grow
more and more intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was
the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamps
ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary
and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain. The
crimson hand expressed the ineludible gripe in which mortality clutches the
highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the
lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return
to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife’s liability to
sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer’s sombre imagination was not long in
rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and
horror than ever Georgiana’s beauty, whether of soul or sense, had given
him delight.
At all the seasons which should have been their happiest, he invariably
and without intending it, nay, in spite of a purpose to the contrary, reverted
to this one disastrous topic. Trifling as it at first appeared, it so connected
itself with innumerable trains of thought and modes of feeling that it
became the central point of all. With the morning twilight Aylmer opened
his eyes upon his wife’s face and recognized the symbol of imperfection;
and when they sat together at the evening hearth his eyes wandered
stealthily to her cheek, and beheld, flickering with the blaze of the wood
fire, the spectral hand that wrote mortality where he would fain have
worshipped. Georgiana soon learned to shudder at his gaze. It needed but a
glance with the peculiar expression that his face often wore to change the
roses of her cheek into a deathlike paleness, amid which the crimson hand
was brought strongly out, like a bass-relief of ruby on the whitest marble.
Late one night when the lights were growing dim, so as hardly to betray
the stain on the poor wife’s cheek, she herself, for the first time, voluntarily
took up the subject.
“Do you remember, my dear Aylmer,” said she, with a feeble attempt at a
smile, “have you any recollection of a dream last night about this odious
hand?”

“None! none whatever!” replied Aylmer, starting; but then he added, in a
dry, cold tone, affected for the sake of concealing the real depth of his
emotion, “I might well dream of it; for before I fell asleep it had taken a
pretty firm hold of my fancy.”
“And you did dream of it?” continued Georgiana, hastily; for she dreaded
lest a gush of tears should interrupt what she had to say. “A terrible dream! I
wonder that you can forget it. Is it possible to forget this one expression?
—‘It is in her heart now; we must have it out!’ Reflect, my husband; for by
all means I would have you recall that dream.”
The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine
her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break
forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a
deeper one. Aylmer now remembered his dream. He had fancied himself
with his servant Aminadab, attempting an operation for the removal of the
birthmark; but the deeper went the knife, the deeper sank the hand, until at
length its tiny grasp appeared to have caught hold of Georgiana’s heart;
whence, however, her husband was inexorably resolved to cut or wrench it
away.
When the dream had shaped itself perfectly in his memory, Aylmer sat in
his wife’s presence with a guilty feeling. Truth often finds its way to the
mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising
directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-
deception during our waking moments. Until now he had not been aware of
the tyrannizing influence acquired by one idea over his mind, and of the
lengths which he might find in his heart to go for the sake of giving himself
peace.
“Aylmer,” resumed Georgiana, solemnly, “I know not what may be the
cost to both of us to rid me of this fatal birthmark. Perhaps its removal may
cause cureless deformity; or it may be the stain goes as deep as life itself.
Again: do we know that there is a possibility, on any terms, of unclasping
the firm gripe of this little hand which was laid upon me before I came into
the world?”
“Dearest Georgiana, I have spent much thought upon the subject,” hastily
interrupted Aylmer. “I am convinced of the perfect practicability of its
removal.”

“If there be the remotest possibility of it,” continued Georgiana, “let the
attempt be made at whatever risk. Danger is nothing to me; for life, while
this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust,—life is a
burden which I would fling down with joy. Either remove this dreadful
hand, or take my wretched life! You have deep science. All the world bears
witness of it. You have achieved great wonders. Cannot you remove this
little, little mark, which I cover with the tips of two small fingers? Is this
beyond your power, for the sake of your own peace, and to save your poor
wife from madness?”
“Noblest, dearest, tenderest wife,” cried Aylmer, rapturously, “doubt not
my power. I have already given this matter the deepest thought—thought
which might almost have enlightened me to create a being less perfect than
yourself. Georgiana, you have led me deeper than ever into the heart of
science. I feel myself fully competent to render this dear cheek as faultless
as its fellow; and then, most beloved, what will be my triumph when I shall
have corrected what Nature left imperfect in her fairest work! Even
Pygmalion, when his sculptured woman assumed life, felt not greater
ecstasy than mine will be.”
“It is resolved, then,” said Georgiana, faintly smiling. “And, Aylmer,
spare me not, though you should find the birthmark take refuge in my heart
at last.”
Her husband tenderly kissed her cheek—her right cheek—not that which
bore the impress of the crimson hand.
The next day Aylmer apprised his wife of a plan that he had formed
whereby he might have opportunity for the intense thought and constant
watchfulness which the proposed operation would require; while
Georgiana, likewise, would enjoy the perfect repose essential to its success.
They were to seclude themselves in the extensive apartments occupied by
Aylmer as a laboratory, and where, during his toilsome youth, he had made
discoveries in the elemental powers of Nature that had roused the
admiration of all the learned societies in Europe. Seated calmly in this
laboratory, the pale philosopher had investigated the secrets of the highest
cloud region and of the profoundest mines; he had satisfied himself of the
causes that kindled and kept alive the fires of the volcano; and had
explained the mystery of fountains, and how it is that they gush forth, some
so bright and pure, and others with such rich medicinal virtues, from the

dark bosom of the earth. Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the
wonders of the human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by
which Nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and
from the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The
latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling recognition
of the truth—against which all seekers sooner or later stumble—that our
great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the
broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in
spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results. She permits
us, indeed, to mar, but seldom to mend, and, like a jealous patentee, on no
account to make. Now, however, Aylmer resumed these half-forgotten
investigations; not, of course, with such hopes or wishes as first suggested
them; but because they involved much physiological truth and lay in the
path of his proposed scheme for the treatment of Georgiana.
As he led her over the threshold of the laboratory, Georgiana was cold
and tremulous. Aylmer looked cheerfully into her face, with intent to
reassure her, but was so startled with the intense glow of the birthmark upon
the whiteness of her cheek that he could not restrain a strong convulsive
shudder. His wife fainted.
“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the
floor.
Forthwith there issued from an inner apartment a man of low stature, but
bulky frame, with shaggy hair hanging about his visage, which was grimed
with the vapors of the furnace. This personage had been Aylmer’s
underworker during his whole scientific career, and was admirably fitted for
that office by his great mechanical readiness, and the skill with which,
while incapable of comprehending a single principle, he executed all the
details of his master’s experiments. With his vast strength, his shaggy hair,
his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted him, he
seemed to represent man’s physical nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure,
and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element.
“Throw open the door of the boudoir, Aminadab,” said Aylmer, “and burn
a pastil.”
“Yes, master,” answered Aminadab, looking intently at the lifeless form
of Georgiana; and then he muttered to himself, “If she were my wife, I’d
never part with that birthmark.”

When Georgiana recovered consciousness she found herself breathing an
atmosphere of penetrating fragrance, the gentle potency of which had
recalled her from her deathlike faintness. The scene around her looked like
enchantment. Aylmer had converted those smoky, dingy, sombre rooms,
where he had spent his brightest years in recondite pursuits, into a series of
beautiful apartments not unfit to be the secluded abode of a lovely woman.
The walls were hung with gorgeous curtains, which imparted the
combination of grandeur and grace that no other species of adornment can
achieve; and as they fell from the ceiling to the floor, their rich and
ponderous folds, concealing all angles and straight lines, appeared to shut in
the scene from infinite space. For aught Georgiana knew, it might be a
pavilion among the clouds. And Aylmer, excluding the sunshine, which
would have interfered with his chemical processes, had supplied its place
with perfumed lamps, emitting flames of various hue, but all uniting in a
soft, impurpled radiance. He now knelt by his wife’s side, watching her
earnestly, but without alarm; for he was confident in his science, and felt
that he could draw a magic circle round her within which no evil might
intrude.
“Where am I? Ah, I remember,” said Georgiana, faintly; and she placed
her hand over her cheek to hide the terrible mark from her husband’s eyes.
“Fear not, dearest!” exclaimed he. “Do not shrink from me! Believe me,
Georgiana, I even rejoice in this single imperfection, since it will be such a
rapture to remove it.”
“Oh, spare me!” sadly replied his wife. “Pray do not look at it again. I
never can forget that convulsive shudder.”
In order to soothe Georgiana, and, as it were, to release her mind from
the burden of actual things, Aylmer now put in practice some of the light
and playful secrets which science had taught him among its profounder
lore. Airy figures, absolutely bodiless ideas, and forms of unsubstantial
beauty came and danced before her, imprinting their momentary footsteps
on beams of light. Though she had some indistinct idea of the method of
these optical phenomena, still the illusion was almost perfect enough to
warrant the belief that her husband possessed sway over the spiritual world.
Then again, when she felt a wish to look forth from her seclusion,
immediately, as if her thoughts were answered, the procession of external
existence flitted across a screen. The scenery and the figures of actual life

were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching, yet indescribable
difference which always makes a picture, an image, or a shadow so much
more attractive than the original. When wearied of this, Aylmer bade her
cast her eyes upon a vessel containing a quantity of earth. She did so, with
little interest at first; but was soon startled to perceive the germ of a plant
shooting upward from the soil. Then came the slender stalk; the leaves
gradually unfolded themselves; and amid them was a perfect and lovely
flower.
“It is magical!” cried Georgiana. “I dare not touch it.”
“Nay, pluck it,” answered Aylmer,—“pluck it, and inhale its brief
perfume while you may. The flower will wither in a few moments and leave
nothing save its brown seed vessels; but thence may be perpetuated a race
as ephemeral as itself.”
But Georgiana had no sooner touched the flower than the whole plant
suffered a blight, its leaves turning coal-black as if by the agency of fire.
“There was too powerful a stimulus,” said Aylmer, thoughtfully.
To make up for this abortive experiment, he proposed to take her portrait
by a scientific process of his own invention. It was to be effected by rays of
light striking upon a polished plate of metal. Georgiana assented; but, on
looking at the result, was affrighted to find the features of the portrait
blurred and indefinable; while the minute figure of a hand appeared where
the cheek should have been. Aylmer snatched the metallic plate and threw it
into a jar of corrosive acid.
Soon, however, he forgot these mortifying failures. In the intervals of
study and chemical experiment he came to her flushed and exhausted, but
seemed invigorated by her presence, and spoke in glowing language of the
resources of his art. He gave a history of the long dynasty of the alchemists,
who spent so many ages in quest of the universal solvent by which the
golden principle might be elicited from all things vile and base. Aylmer
appeared to believe that, by the plainest scientific logic, it was altogether
within the limits of possibility to discover this long-sought medium; “but,”
he added, “a philosopher who should go deep enough to acquire the power
would attain too lofty a wisdom to stoop to the exercise of it.” Not less
singular were his opinions in regard to the elixir vitae. He more than
intimated that it was at his option to concoct a liquid that should prolong
life for years, perhaps interminably; but that it would produce a discord in

Nature which all the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum,
would find cause to curse.
“Aylmer, are you in earnest?” asked Georgiana, looking at him with
amazement and fear. “It is terrible to possess such power, or even to dream
of possessing it.”
“Oh, do not tremble, my love,” said her husband. “I would not wrong
either you or myself by working such inharmonious effects upon our lives;
but I would have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is the skill
requisite to remove this little hand.”
At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as usual, shrank as if a
redhot iron had touched her cheek.
Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She could hear his voice in
the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab, whose harsh,
uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response, more like the grunt or
growl of a brute than human speech. After hours of absence, Aylmer
reappeared and proposed that she should now examine his cabinet of
chemical products and natural treasures of the earth. Among the former he
showed her a small vial, in which, he remarked, was contained a gentle yet
most powerful fragrance, capable of impregnating all the breezes that blow
across a kingdom. They were of inestimable value, the contents of that little
vial; and, as he said so, he threw some of the perfume into the air and filled
the room with piercing and invigorating delight.
“And what is this?” asked Georgiana, pointing to a small crystal globe
containing a gold-colored liquid. “It is so beautiful to the eye that I could
imagine it the elixir of life.”
“In one sense it is,” replied Aylmer; “or, rather, the elixir of immortality.
It is the most precious poison that ever was concocted in this world. By its
aid I could apportion the lifetime of any mortal at whom you might point
your finger. The strength of the dose would determine whether he were to
linger out years, or drop dead in the midst of a breath. No king on his
guarded throne could keep his life if I, in my private station, should deem
that the welfare of millions justified me in depriving him of it.”
“Why do you keep such a terrific drug?” inquired Georgiana in horror.
“Do not mistrust me, dearest,” said her husband, smiling; “its virtuous
potency is yet greater than its harmful one. But see! here is a powerful

cosmetic. With a few drops of this in a vase of water, freckles may be
washed away as easily as the hands are cleansed. A stronger infusion would
take the blood out of the cheek, and leave the rosiest beauty a pale ghost.”
“Is it with this lotion that you intend to bathe my cheek?” asked
Georgiana, anxiously.
“Oh, no,” hastily replied her husband; “this is merely superficial. Your
case demands a remedy that shall go deeper.”
In his interviews with Georgiana, Aylmer generally made minute
inquiries as to her sensations and whether the confinement of the rooms and
the temperature of the atmosphere agreed with her. These questions had
such a particular drift that Georgiana began to conjecture that she was
already subjected to certain physical influences, either breathed in with the
fragrant air or taken with her food. She fancied likewise, but it might be
altogether fancy, that there was a stirring up of her system—a strange,
indefinite sensation creeping through her veins, and tingling, half painfully,
half pleasurably, at her heart. Still, whenever she dared to look into the
mirror, there she beheld herself pale as a white rose and with the crimson
birthmark stamped upon her cheek. Not even Aylmer now hated it so much
as she.
To dispel the tedium of the hours which her husband found it necessary
to devote to the processes of combination and analysis, Georgiana turned
over the volumes of his scientific library. In many dark old tomes she met
with chapters full of romance and poetry. They were the works of
philosophers of the middle ages, such as Albertus Magnus, Cornelius
Agrippa, Paracelsus, and the famous friar who created the prophetic Brazen
Head. All these antique naturalists stood in advance of their centuries, yet
were imbued with some of their credulity, and therefore were believed, and
perhaps imagined themselves to have acquired from the investigation of
Nature a power above Nature, and from physics a sway over the spiritual
world. Hardly less curious and imaginative were the early volumes of the
Transactions of the Royal Society, in which the members, knowing little of
the limits of natural possibility, were continually recording wonders or
proposing methods whereby wonders might be wrought.
But to Georgiana the most engrossing volume was a large folio from her
husband’s own hand, in which he had recorded every experiment of his
scientific career, its original aim, the methods adopted for its development,

and its final success or failure, with the circumstances to which either event
was attributable. The book, in truth, was both the history and emblem of his
ardent, ambitious, imaginative, yet practical and laborious life. He handled
physical details as if there were nothing beyond them; yet spiritualized them
all, and redeemed himself from materialism by his strong and eager
aspiration towards the infinite. In his grasp the veriest clod of earth assumed
a soul. Georgiana, as she read, reverenced Aylmer and loved him more
profoundly than ever, but with a less entire dependence on his judgment
than heretofore. Much as he had accomplished, she could not but observe
that his most splendid successes were almost invariably failures, if
compared with the ideal at which he aimed. His brightest diamonds were
the merest pebbles, and felt to be so by himself, in comparison with the
inestimable gems which lay hidden beyond his reach. The volume, rich with
achievements that had won renown for its author, was yet as melancholy a
record as ever mortal hand had penned. It was the sad confession and
continual exemplification of the shortcomings of the composite man, the
spirit burdened with clay and working in matter, and of the despair that
assails the higher nature at finding itself so miserably thwarted by the
earthly part. Perhaps every man of genius in whatever sphere might
recognize the image of his own experience in Aylmer’s journal.
So deeply did these reflections affect Georgiana that she laid her face
upon the open volume and burst into tears. In this situation she was found
by her husband.
“It is dangerous to read in a sorcerer’s books,” said he with a smile,
though his countenance was uneasy and displeased. “Georgiana, there are
pages in that volume which I can scarcely glance over and keep my senses.
Take heed lest it prove as detrimental to you.”
“It has made me worship you more than ever,” said she.
“Ah, wait for this one success,” rejoined he, “then worship me if you
will. I shall deem myself hardly unworthy of it. But come, I have sought
you for the luxury of your voice. Sing to me, dearest.”
So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his
spirit. He then took his leave with a boyish exuberance of gayety, assuring
her that her seclusion would endure but a little longer, and that the result
was already certain. Scarcely had he departed when Georgiana felt
irresistibly impelled to follow him. She had forgotten to inform Aylmer of a

symptom which for two or three hours past had begun to excite her
attention. It was a sensation in the fatal birthmark, not painful, but which
induced a restlessness throughout her system. Hastening after her husband,
she intruded for the first time into the laboratory.
The first thing that struck her eye was the furnace, that hot and feverish
worker, with the intense glow of its fire, which by the quantities of soot
clustered above it seemed to have been burning for ages. There was a
distilling apparatus in full operation. Around the room were retorts, tubes,
cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research. An electrical
machine stood ready for immediate use. The atmosphere felt oppressively
close, and was tainted with gaseous odors which had been tormented forth
by the processes of science. The severe and homely simplicity of the
apartment, with its naked walls and brick pavement, looked strange,
accustomed as Georgiana had become to the fantastic elegance of her
boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was the
aspect of Aylmer himself.
He was pale as death, anxious and absorbed, and hung over the furnace
as if it depended upon his utmost watchfulness whether the liquid which it
was distilling should be the draught of immortal happiness or misery. How
different from the sanguine and joyous mien that he had assumed for
Georgiana’s encouragement!
“Carefully now, Aminadab; carefully, thou human machine; carefully,
thou man of clay!” muttered Aylmer, more to himself than his assistant.
“Now, if there be a thought too much or too little, it is all over.”
“Ho! ho!” mumbled Aminadab. “Look, master! look!”
Aylmer raised his eyes hastily, and at first reddened, then grew paler than
ever, on beholding Georgiana. He rushed towards her and seized her arm
with a gripe that left the print of his fingers upon it.
“Why do you come hither? Have you no trust in your husband?” cried he,
impetuously. “Would you throw the blight of that fatal birthmark over my
labors? It is not well done. Go, prying woman, go!”
“Nay, Aylmer,” said Georgiana with the firmness of which she possessed
no stinted endowment, “it is not you that have a right to complain. You
mistrust your wife; you have concealed the anxiety with which you watch
the development of this experiment. Think not so unworthily of me, my

husband. Tell me all the risk we run, and fear not that I shall shrink; for my
share in it is far less than your own.”
“No, no, Georgiana!” said Aylmer, impatiently; “it must not be.”
“I submit,” replied she calmly. “And, Aylmer, I shall quaff whatever
draught you bring me; but it will be on the same principle that would induce
me to take a dose of poison if offered by your hand.”
“My noble wife,” said Aylmer, deeply moved, “I knew not the height and
depth of your nature until now. Nothing shall be concealed. Know, then,
that this crimson hand, superficial as it seems, has clutched its grasp into
your being with a strength of which I had no previous conception. I have
already administered agents powerful enough to do aught except to change
your entire physical system. Only one thing remains to be tried. If that fail
us we are ruined.”
“Why did you hesitate to tell me this?” asked she.
“Because, Georgiana,” said Aylmer, in a low voice, “there is danger.”
“Danger? There is but one danger—that this horrible stigma shall be left
upon my cheek!” cried Georgiana. “Remove it, remove it, whatever be the
cost, or we shall both go mad!”
“Heaven knows your words are too true,” said Aylmer, sadly. “And now,
dearest, return to your boudoir. In a little while all will be tested.”
He conducted her back and took leave of her with a solemn tenderness
which spoke far more than his words how much was now at stake. After his
departure Georgiana became rapt in musings. She considered the character
of Aylmer, and did it completer justice than at any previous moment. Her
heart exulted, while it trembled, at his honorable love—so pure and lofty
that it would accept nothing less than perfection nor miserably make itself
contented with an earthlier nature than he had dreamed of. She felt how
much more precious was such a sentiment than that meaner kind which
would have borne with the imperfection for her sake, and have been guilty
of treason to holy love by degrading its perfect idea to the level of the
actual; and with her whole spirit she prayed that, for a single moment, she
might satisfy his highest and deepest conception. Longer than one moment
she well knew it could not be; for his spirit was ever on the march, ever
ascending, and each instant required something that was beyond the scope
of the instant before.

The sound of her husband’s footsteps aroused her. He bore a crystal
goblet containing a liquor colorless as water, but bright enough to be the
draught of immortality. Aylmer was pale; but it seemed rather the
consequence of a highly-wrought state of mind and tension of spirit than of
fear or doubt.
“The concoction of the draught has been perfect,” said he, in answer to
Georgiana’s look. “Unless all my science have deceived me, it cannot fail.”
“Save on your account, my dearest Aylmer,” observed his wife, “I might
wish to put off this birthmark of mortality by relinquishing mortality itself
in preference to any other mode. Life is but a sad possession to those who
have attained precisely the degree of moral advancement at which I stand.
Were I weaker and blinder it might be happiness. Were I stronger, it might
be endured hopefully. But, being what I find myself, methinks I am of all
mortals the most fit to die.”
“You are fit for heaven without tasting death!” replied her husband “But
why do we speak of dying? The draught cannot fail. Behold its effect upon
this plant.”
On the window seat there stood a geranium diseased with yellow
blotches, which had overspread all its leaves. Aylmer poured a small
quantity of the liquid upon the soil in which it grew. In a little time, when
the roots of the plant had taken up the moisture, the unsightly blotches
began to be extinguished in a living verdure.
“There needed no proof,” said Georgiana, quietly. “Give me the goblet I
joyfully stake all upon your word.”
“Drink, then, thou lofty creature!” exclaimed Aylmer, with fervid
admiration. “There is no taint of imperfection on thy spirit. Thy sensible
frame, too, shall soon be all perfect.”
She quaffed the liquid and returned the goblet to his hand.
“It is grateful,” said she with a placid smile. “Methinks it is like water
from a heavenly fountain; for it contains I know not what of unobtrusive
fragrance and deliciousness. It allays a feverish thirst that had parched me
for many days. Now, dearest, let me sleep. My earthly senses are closing
over my spirit like the leaves around the heart of a rose at sunset.”
She spoke the last words with a gentle reluctance, as if it required almost
more energy than she could command to pronounce the faint and lingering

syllables. Scarcely had they loitered through her lips ere she was lost in
slumber. Aylmer sat by her side, watching her aspect with the emotions
proper to a man the whole value of whose existence was involved in the
process now to be tested. Mingled with this mood, however, was the
philosophic investigation characteristic of the man of science. Not the
minutest symptom escaped him. A heightened flush of the cheek, a slight
irregularity of breath, a quiver of the eyelid, a hardly perceptible tremor
through the frame,—such were the details which, as the moments passed,
he wrote down in his folio volume. Intense thought had set its stamp upon
every previous page of that volume, but the thoughts of years were all
concentrated upon the last.
While thus employed, he failed not to gaze often at the fatal hand, and
not without a shudder. Yet once, by a strange and unaccountable impulse he
pressed it with his lips. His spirit recoiled, however, in the very act, and
Georgiana, out of the midst of her deep sleep, moved uneasily and
murmured as if in remonstrance. Again Aylmer resumed his watch. Nor was
it without avail. The crimson hand, which at first had been strongly visible
upon the marble paleness of Georgiana’s cheek, now grew more faintly
outlined. She remained not less pale than ever; but the birthmark with every
breath that came and went, lost somewhat of its former distinctness. Its
presence had been awful; its departure was more awful still. Watch the stain
of the rainbow fading out the sky, and you will know how that mysterious
symbol passed away.
“By Heaven! it is well-nigh gone!” said Aylmer to himself, in almost
irrepressible ecstasy. “I can scarcely trace it now. Success! success! And
now it is like the faintest rose color. The lightest flush of blood across her
cheek would overcome it. But she is so pale!”
He drew aside the window curtain and suffered the light of natural day to
fall into the room and rest upon her cheek. At the same time he heard a
gross, hoarse chuckle, which he had long known as his servant Aminadab’s
expression of delight.
“Ah, clod! ah, earthly mass!” cried Aylmer, laughing in a sort of frenzy,
“you have served me well! Matter and spirit—earth and heaven—have both
done their part in this! Laugh, thing of the senses! You have earned the right
to laugh.”

These exclamations broke Georgiana’s sleep. She slowly unclosed her
eyes and gazed into the mirror which her husband had arranged for that
purpose. A faint smile flitted over her lips when she recognized how barely
perceptible was now that crimson hand which had once blazed forth with
such disastrous brilliancy as to scare away all their happiness. But then her
eyes sought Aylmer’s face with a trouble and anxiety that he could by no
means account for.
“My poor Aylmer!” murmured she.
“Poor? Nay, richest, happiest, most favored!” exclaimed he. “My peerless
bride, it is successful! You are perfect!”
“My poor Aylmer,” she repeated, with a more than human tenderness,
“you have aimed loftily; you have done nobly. Do not repent that with so
high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best the earth could offer.
Aylmer, dearest Aylmer, I am dying!”
Alas! it was too true! The fatal hand had grappled with the mystery of
life, and was the bond by which an angelic spirit kept itself in union with a
mortal frame. As the last crimson tint of the birthmark—that sole token of
human imperfection—faded from her cheek, the parting breath of the now
perfect woman passed into the atmosphere, and her soul, lingering a
moment near her husband, took its heavenward flight. Then a hoarse,
chuckling laugh was heard again! Thus ever does the gross fatality of earth
exult in its invariable triumph over the immortal essence which, in this dim
sphere of half development, demands the completeness of a higher state.
Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung
away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame
texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for
him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once
for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

A SELECT PARTY

The man of fancy made an entertainment at one of his castles in the air,
and invited a select number of distinguished personages to favor him with
their presence. The mansion, though less splendid than many that have been
situated in the same region, was nevertheless of a magnificence such as is
seldom witnessed by those acquainted only with terrestrial architecture. Its
strong foundations and massive walls were quarried out of a ledge of heavy
and sombre clouds which had hung brooding over the earth, apparently as
dense and ponderous as its own granite, throughout a whole autumnal day.
Perceiving that the general effect was gloomy,—so that the airy castle
looked like a feudal fortress, or a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a state
prison of our own times, rather than the home of pleasure and repose which
he intended it to be,—the owner, regardless of expense, resolved to gild the
exterior from top to bottom. Fortunately, there was just then a flood of
evening sunshine in the air. This being gathered up and poured abundantly
upon the roof and walls, imbued them with a kind of solemn cheerfulness;
while the cupolas and pinnacles were made to glitter with the purest gold,
and all the hundred windows gleamed with a glad light, as if the edifice
itself were rejoicing in its heart.
And now, if the people of the lower world chanced to be looking upward
out of the turmoil of their petty perplexities, they probably mistook the
castle in the air for a heap of sunset clouds, to which the magic of light and
shade had imparted the aspect of a fantastically constructed mansion. To
such beholders it was unreal, because they lacked the imaginative faith. Had
they been worthy to pass within its portal, they would have recognized the
truth, that the dominions which the spirit conquers for itself among
unrealities become a thousand times more real than the earth whereon they
stamp their feet, saying, “This is solid and substantial; this may be called a
fact.”

At the appointed hour, the host stood in his great saloon to receive the
company. It was a vast and noble room, the vaulted ceiling of which was
supported by double rows of gigantic pillars that had been hewn entire out
of masses of variegated clouds. So brilliantly were they polished, and so
exquisitely wrought by the sculptor’s skill, as to resemble the finest
specimens of emerald, porphyry, opal, and chrysolite, thus producing a
delicate richness of effect which their immense size rendered not
incompatible with grandeur. To each of these pillars a meteor was
suspended. Thousands of these ethereal lustres are continually wandering
about the firmament, burning out to waste, yet capable of imparting a useful
radiance to any person who has the art of converting them to domestic
purposes. As managed in the saloon, they are far more economical than
ordinary lamplight. Such, however, was the intensity of their blaze that it
had been found expedient to cover each meteor with a globe of evening
mist, thereby muffling the too potent glow and soothing it into a mild and
comfortable splendor. It was like the brilliancy of a powerful yet chastened
imagination,—a light which seemed to hide whatever was unworthy to be
noticed and give effect to every beautiful and noble attribute. The guests,
therefore, as they advanced up the centre of the saloon, appeared to better
advantage than ever before in their lives.
The first that entered, with old-fashioned punctuality, was a venerable
figure in the costume of bygone days, with his white hair flowing down
over his shoulders and a reverend beard upon his breast. He leaned upon a
staff, the tremulous stroke of which, as he set it carefully upon the floor, re-
echoed through the saloon at every footstep. Recognizing at once this
celebrated personage, whom it had cost him a vast deal of trouble and
research to discover, the host advanced nearly three fourths of the distance
down between the pillars to meet and welcome him.
“Venerable sir,” said the Man of Fancy, bending to the floor, “the honor
of this visit would never be forgotten were my term of existence to be as
happily prolonged as your own.”
The old gentleman received the compliment with gracious
condescension. He then thrust up his spectacles over his forehead and
appeared to take a critical survey of the saloon.
“Never within my recollection,” observed he, “have I entered a more
spacious and noble hall. But are you sure that it is built of solid materials

and that the structure will be permanent?”
“O, never fear, my venerable friend,” replied the host. “In reference to a
lifetime like your own, it is true my castle may well be called a temporary
edifice. But it will endure long enough to answer all the purposes for which
it was erected.”
But we forget that the reader has not yet been made acquainted with the
guest. It was no other than that universally accredited character so
constantly referred to in all seasons of intense cold or heat; he that,
remembers the hot Sunday and the cold Friday; the witness of a past age
whose negative reminiscences find their way into every newspaper, yet
whose antiquated and dusky abode is so overshadowed by accumulated
years and crowded back by modern edifices that none but the Man of Fancy
could have discovered it; it was, in short, that twin brother of Time, and
great-grandsire of mankind, and hand-and-glove associate of all forgotten
men and things,—the Oldest Inhabitant. The host would willingly have
drawn him into conversation, but succeeded only in eliciting a few remarks
as to the oppressive atmosphere of this present summer evening compared
with one which the guest had experienced about fourscore years ago. The
old gentleman, in fact, was a good deal overcome by his journey among the
clouds, which, to a frame so earth-incrusted by long continuance in a lower
region, was unavoidably more fatiguing than to younger spirits. He was
therefore conducted to an easy-chair, well cushioned and stuffed with
vaporous softness, and left to take a little repose.
The Man of Fancy now discerned another guest, who stood so quietly in
the shadow of one of the pillars that he might easily have been overlooked.
“My dear sir,” exclaimed the host, grasping him warmly by the hand,
“allow me to greet you as the hero of the evening. Pray do not take it as an
empty compliment; for, if there were not another guest in my castle, it
would be entirely pervaded with your presence.”
“I thank you,” answered the unpretending stranger; “but, though you
happened to overlook me, I have not just arrived. I came very early; and,
with your permission, shall remain after the rest of the company have
retired.”
And who does the reader imagine was this unobtrusive guest? It was the
famous performer of acknowledged impossibilities,—a character of
superhuman capacity and virtue, and, if his enemies are to be credited, of no

less remarkable weaknesses and defects. With a generosity with which he
alone sets us an example, we will glance merely at his nobler attributes. He
it is, then, who prefers the interests of others to his own and a humble
station to an exalted one. Careless of fashion, custom, the opinions of men,
and the influence of the press, he assimilates his life to the standard of ideal
rectitude, and thus proves himself the one independent citizen of our free
country. In point of ability, many people declare him to be the only
mathematician capable of squaring the circle; the only mechanic acquainted
with the principle of perpetual motion; the only scientific philosopher who
can compel water to run up hill; the only writer of the age whose genius is
equal to the production of an epic poem; and, finally, so various are his
accomplishments, the only professor of gymnastics who has succeeded in
jumping down his own throat. With all these talents, however, he is so far
from being considered a member of good society, that it is the severest
censure of any fashionable assemblage to affirm that this remarkable
individual was present. Public orators, lecturers, and theatrical performers
particularly eschew his company. For especial reasons, we are not at liberty
to disclose his name, and shall mention only one other trait,—a most
singular phenomenon in natural philosophy,—that, when he happens to cast
his eyes upon a looking-glass, he beholds Nobody reflected there!
Several other guests now made their appearance; and among them,
chattering with immense volubility, a brisk little gentleman of universal
vogue in private society, and not unknown in the public journals under the
title of Monsieur On-Dit. The name would seem to indicate a Frenchman;
but, whatever be his country, he is thoroughly versed in all the languages of
the day, and can express himself quite as much to the purpose in English as
in any other tongue. No sooner were the ceremonies of salutation over than
this talkative little person put his mouth to the host’s ear and whispered
three secrets of state, an important piece of commercial intelligence, and a
rich item of fashionable scandal. He then assured the Man of Fancy that he
would not fail to circulate in the society of the lower world a minute
description of this magnificent castle in the air and of the festivities at
which he had the honor to be a guest. So saying, Monsieur On-Dit made his
bow and hurried from one to another of the company, with all of whom he
seemed to be acquainted and to possess some topic of interest or
amusement for every individual. Coming at last to the Oldest Inhabitant,

who was slumbering comfortably in the easy-chair, he applied his mouth to
that venerable ear.
“What do you say?” cried the old gentleman, starting from his nap and
putting up his hand to serve the purpose of an ear-trumpet.
Monsieur On-Dit bent forward again and repeated his communication.
“Never within my memory,” exclaimed the Oldest Inhabitant, lifting his
hands in astonishment, “has so remarkable an incident been heard of.”
Now came in the Clerk of the Weather, who had been invited out of
deference to his official station, although the host was well aware that his
conversation was likely to contribute but little to the general enjoyment. He
soon, indeed, got into a corner with his acquaintance of long ago, the Oldest
Inhabitant, and began to compare notes with him in reference to the great
storms, gales of wind, and other atmospherical facts that had occurred
during a century past. It rejoiced the Man of Fancy that his venerable and
much-respected guest had met with so congenial an associate. Entreating
them both to make themselves perfectly at home, he now turned to receive
the Wandering Jew. This personage, however, had latterly grown so
common, by mingling in all sorts of society and appearing at the beck of
every entertainer, that he could hardly be deemed a proper guest in a very
exclusive circle. Besides, being covered with dust from his continual
wanderings along the highways of the world, he really looked out of place
in a dress party; so that the host felt relieved of an incommodity when the
restless individual in question, after a brief stay, took his departure on a
ramble towards Oregon.
The portal was now thronged by a crowd of shadowy people with whom
the Man of Fancy had been acquainted in his visionary youth. He had
invited them hither for the sake of observing how they would compare,
whether advantageously or otherwise, with the real characters to whom his
maturer life had introduced him. They were beings of crude imagination,
such as glide before a young man’s eye and pretend to be actual inhabitants
of the earth; the wise and witty with whom he would hereafter hold
intercourse; the generous and heroic friends whose devotion would be
requited with his own; the beautiful dream-woman who would become the
helpmate of his human toils and sorrows and at once the source and
partaker of his happiness. Alas! it is not good for the full-grown man to look
too closely at these old acquaintances, but rather to reverence them at a

distance through the medium of years that have gathered duskily between.
There was something laughably untrue in their pompous stride and
exaggerated sentiment; they were neither human nor tolerable likenesses of
humanity, but fantastic maskers, rendering heroism and nature alike
ridiculous by the grave absurdity of their pretensions to such attributes; and
as for the peerless dream-lady, behold! there advanced up the saloon, with a
movement like a jointed doll, a sort of wax-figure of an angel, a creature as
cold as moonshine, an artifice in petticoats, with an intellect of pretty
phrases and only the semblance of a heart, yet in all these particulars the
true type of a young man’s imaginary mistress. Hardly could the host’s
punctilious courtesy restrain a smile as he paid his respects to this unreality
and met the sentimental glance with which the Dream sought to remind him
of their former love passages.
“No, no, fair lady,” murmured he betwixt sighing and smiling; “my taste
is changed; I have learned to love what Nature makes better than my own
creations in the guise of womanhood.”
“Ah, false one,” shrieked the dream-lady, pretending to faint, but
dissolving into thin air, out of which came the deplorable murmur of her
voice, “your inconstancy has annihilated me.”
“So be it,” said the cruel Man of Fancy to himself; “and a good riddance
too.”
Together with these shadows, and from the same region, there came an
uninvited multitude of shapes which at any time during his life had
tormented the Man of Fancy in his moods of morbid melancholy or had
haunted him in the delirium of fever. The walls of his castle in the air were
not dense enough to keep them out, nor would the strongest of earthly
architecture have availed to their exclusion. Here were those forms of dim
terror which had beset him at the entrance of life, waging warfare with his
hopes; here were strange uglinesses of earlier date, such as haunt children in
the night-time. He was particularly startled by the vision of a deformed old
black woman whom he imagined as lurking in the garret of his native home,
and who, when he was an infant, had once come to his bedside and grinned
at him in the crisis of a scarlet fever. This same black shadow, with others
almost as hideous, now glided among the pillars of the magnificent saloon,
grinning recognition, until the man shuddered anew at the forgotten terrors
of his childhood. It amused him, however, to observe the black woman,

with the mischievous caprice peculiar to such beings, steal up to the chair of
the Oldest Inhabitant and peep into his half-dreamy mind.
“Never within my memory,” muttered that venerable personage, aghast,
“did I see such a face.”
Almost immediately after the unrealities just described, arrived a number
of guests whom incredulous readers may be inclined to rank equally among
creatures of imagination. The most noteworthy were an incorruptible
Patriot; a Scholar without pedantry; a Priest without worldly ambition; and
a Beautiful Woman without pride or coquetry; a Married Pair whose life
had never been disturbed by incongruity of feeling; a Reformer
untrammelled by his theory; and a Poet who felt no jealousy towards other
votaries of the lyre. In truth, however, the host was not one of the cynics
who consider these patterns of excellence, without the fatal flaw, such
rarities in the world; and he had invited them to his select party chiefly out
of humble deference to the judgment of society, which pronounces them
almost impossible to be met with.
“In my younger days,” observed the Oldest Inhabitant, “such characters
might be seen at the corner of every street.”
Be that as it might, these specimens of perfection proved to be not half so
entertaining companions as people with the ordinary allowance of faults.
But now appeared a stranger, whom the host had no sooner recognized
than, with an abundance of courtesy unlavished on any other, he hastened
down the whole length of the saloon in order to pay him emphatic honor.
Yet he was a young man in poor attire, with no insignia of rank or
acknowledged eminence, nor anything to distinguish him among the crowd
except a high, white forehead, beneath which a pair of deep-set eyes were
glowing with warm light. It was such a light as never illuminates the earth
save when a great heart burns as the household fire of a grand intellect. And
who was he?—who but the Master Genius for whom our country is looking
anxiously into the mist of Time, as destined to fulfil the great mission of
creating an American literature, hewing it, as it were, out of the unwrought
granite of our intellectual quarries? From him, whether moulded in the form
of an epic poem or assuming a guise altogether new as the spirit itself may
determine, we are to receive our first great original work, which shall do all
that remains to be achieved for our glory among the nations. How this child
of a mighty destiny had been discovered by the Man of Fancy it is of little

consequence to mention. Suffice it that he dwells as yet unhonored among
men, unrecognized by those who have known him from his cradle; the
noble countenance which should be distinguished by a halo diffused around
it passes daily amid the throng of people toiling and troubling themselves
about the trifles of a moment, and none pay reverence to the worker of
immortality. Nor does it matter much to him, in his triumph over all the
ages, though a generation or two of his own times shall do themselves the
wrong to disregard him.
By this time Monsieur On-Dit had caught up the stranger’s name and
destiny and was busily whispering the intelligence among the other guests.
“Pshaw!” said one. “There can never be an American genius.”
“Pish!” cried another. “We have already as good poets as any in the
world. For my part, I desire to see no better.”
And the Oldest Inhabitant, when it was proposed to introduce him to the
Master Genius, begged to be excused, observing that a man who had been
honored with the acquaintance of Dwight, and Freneau, and Joel Barlow,
might be allowed a little austerity of taste.
The saloon was now fast filling up by the arrival of other remarkable
characters, among whom were noticed Davy Jones, the distinguished
nautical personage, and a rude, carelessly dressed, harum-scarum sort of
elderly fellow, known by the nickname of Old Harry. The latter, however,
after being shown to a dressing-room, reappeared with his gray hair nicely
combed, his clothes brushed, a clean dicky on his neck, and altogether so
changed in aspect as to merit the more respectful appellation of Venerable
Henry. Joel Doe and Richard Roe came arm in arm, accompanied by a Man
of Straw, a fictitious indorser, and several persons who had no existence
except as voters in closely contested elections. The celebrated Seatsfield,
who now entered, was at first supposed to belong to the same brotherhood,
until he made it apparent that he was a real man of flesh and blood and had
his earthly domicile in Germany. Among the latest comers, as might
reasonably be expected, arrived a guest from the far future.
“Do you know him? do you know him?” whispered Monsieur On-Dit,
who seemed to be acquainted with everybody. “He is the representative of
Posterity,—the man of an age to come.”
“And how came he here?” asked a figure who was evidently the
prototype of the fashion-plate in a magazine, and might be taken to

represent the vanities of the passing moment. “The fellow infringes upon
our rights by coming before his time.”
“But you forget where we are,” answered the Man of Fancy, who
overheard the remark. “The lower earth, it is true, will be forbidden ground
to him for many long years hence; but a castle in the air is a sort of no-
man’s-land, where Posterity may make acquaintance with us on equal
terms.”
No sooner was his identity known than a throng of guests gathered about
Posterity, all expressing the most generous interest in his welfare, and many
boasting of the sacrifices which they had made, or were willing to make, in
his behalf. Some, with as much secrecy as possible, desired his judgment
upon certain copies of verses or great manuscript rolls of prose; others
accosted him with the familiarity of old friends, taking it for granted that he
was perfectly cognizant of their names and characters. At length, finding
himself thus beset, Posterity was put quite beside his patience.
“Gentlemen, my good friends,” cried he, breaking loose from a misty
poet who strove to hold him by the button, “I pray you to attend to your
own business, and leave me to take care of mine! I expect to owe you
nothing, unless it be certain national debts, and other encumbrances and
impediments, physical and moral, which I shall find it troublesome enough
to remove from my path. As to your verses, pray read them to your
contemporaries. Your names are as strange to me as your faces; and even
were it otherwise,—let me whisper you a secret,—the cold, icy memory
which one generation may retain of another is but a poor recompense to
barter life for. Yet, if your heart is set on being known to me, the surest, the
only method is, to live truly and wisely for your own age, whereby, if the
native force be in you, you may likewise live for posterity.”
“It is nonsense,” murmured the Oldest Inhabitant, who, as a man of the
past, felt jealous that all notice should be withdrawn from himself to be
lavished on the future, “sheer nonsense, to waste so much thought on what
only is to be.”
To divert the minds of his guests, who were considerably abashed by this
little incident, the Man of Fancy led them through several apartments of the
castle, receiving their compliments upon the taste and varied magnificence
that were displayed in each. One of these rooms was filled with moonlight,
which did not enter through the window, but was the aggregate of all the

moonshine that is scattered around the earth on a summer night while no
eyes are awake to enjoy its beauty. Airy spirits had gathered it up, wherever
they found it gleaming on the broad bosom of a lake, or silvering the
meanders of a stream, or glimmering among the wind-stirred boughs of a
wood, and had garnered it in this one spacious hall. Along the walls,
illuminated by the mild intensity of the moonshine, stood a multitude of
ideal statues, the original conceptions of the great works of ancient or
modern art, which the sculptors did but imperfectly succeed in putting into
marble; for it is not to be supposed that the pure idea of an immortal
creation ceases to exist; it is only necessary to know where they are
deposited in order to obtain possession of them.—In the alcoves of another
vast apartment was arranged a splendid library, the volumes of which were
inestimable, because they consisted, not of actual performances, but of the
works which the authors only planned, without ever finding the happy
season to achieve them. To take familiar instances, here were the untold
tales of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims; the unwritten cantos of the Fairy
Queen; the conclusion of Coleridge’s Christabel; and the whole of Dryden’s
projected epic on the subject of King Arthur. The shelves were crowded; for
it would not be too much to affirm that every author has imagined and
shaped out in his thought more and far better works than those which
actually proceeded from his pen. And here, likewise, where the unrealized
conceptions of youthful poets who died of the very strength of their own
genius before the world had caught one inspired murmur from their lips.
When the peculiarities of the library and statue-gallery were explained to
the Oldest Inhabitant, he appeared infinitely perplexed, and exclaimed, with
more energy than usual, that he had never heard of such a thing within his
memory, and, moreover, did not at all understand how it could be.
“But my brain, I think,” said the good old gentleman, “is getting not so
clear as it used to be. You young folks, I suppose, can see your way through
these strange matters. For my part, I give it up.”
“And so do I,” muttered the Old Harry. “It is enough to puzzle the—
Ahem!”
Making as little reply as possible to these observations, the Man of Fancy
preceded the company to another noble saloon, the pillars of which were
solid golden sunbeams taken out of the sky in the first hour in the morning.
Thus, as they retained all their living lustre, the room was filled with the

most cheerful radiance imaginable, yet not too dazzling to be borne with
comfort and delight. The windows were beautifully adorned with curtains
made of the many-colored clouds of sunrise, all imbued with virgin light,
and hanging in magnificent festoons from the ceiling to the floor. Moreover,
there were fragments of rainbows scattered through the room; so that the
guests, astonished at one another, reciprocally saw their heads made
glorious by the seven primary hues; or, if they chose,—as who would not?
—they could grasp a rainbow in the air and convert it to their own apparel
and adornment. But the morning light and scattered rainbows were only a
type and symbol of the real wonders of the apartment. By an influence akin
to magic, yet perfectly natural, whatever means and opportunities of joy are
neglected in the lower world had been carefully gathered up and deposited
in the saloon of morning sunshine. As may well be conceived, therefore,
there was material enough to supply, not merely a joyous evening, but also
a happy lifetime, to more than as many people as that spacious apartment
could contain. The company seemed to renew their youth; while that pattern
and proverbial standard of innocence, the Child Unborn, frolicked to and
fro among them, communicating his own unwrinkled gayety to all who had
the good fortune to witness his gambols.
“My honored friends,” said the Man of Fancy, after they had enjoyed
themselves awhile, “I am now to request your presence in the banqueting-
hall, where a slight collation is awaiting you.”
“Ah, well said!” ejaculated a cadaverous figure, who had been invited for
no other reason than that he was pretty constantly in the habit of dining with
Duke Humphrey. “I was beginning to wonder whether a castle in the air
were provided with a kitchen.”
It was curious, in truth, to see how instantaneously the guests were
diverted from the high moral enjoyments which they had been tasting with
so much apparent zest by a suggestion of the more solid as well as liquid
delights of the festive board. They thronged eagerly in the rear of the host,
who now ushered them into a lofty and extensive hall, from end to end of
which was arranged a table, glittering all over with innumerable dishes and
drinking-vessels of gold. It is an uncertain point whether these rich articles
of plate were made for the occasion out of molten sunbeams, or recovered
from the wrecks of Spanish galleons that had lain for ages at the bottom of
the sea. The upper end of the table was overshadowed by a canopy, beneath

which was placed a chair of elaborate magnificence, which the host himself
declined to occupy, and besought his guests to assign it to the worthiest
among them. As a suitable homage to his incalculable antiquity and eminent
distinction, the post of honor was at first tendered to the Oldest Inhabitant.
He, however, eschewed it, and requested the favor of a bowl of gruel at a
side table, where he could refresh himself with a quiet nap. There was some
little hesitation as to the next candidate, until Posterity took the Master
Genius of our country by the hand and led him to the chair of state beneath
the princely canopy. When once they beheld him in his true place, the
company acknowledged the justice of the selection by a long thunder-roll of
vehement applause.
Then was served up a banquet, combining, if not all the delicacies of the
season, yet all the rarities which careful purveyors had met with in the flesh,
fish, and vegetable markets of the land of Nowhere. The bill of fare being
unfortunately lost, we can only mention a phoenix, roasted in its own
flames, cold potted birds of paradise, ice-creams from the Milky-Way, and
whip syllabubs and flummery from the Paradise of Fools, whereof there
was a very great consumption. As for drinkables, the temperance people
contented themselves with water as usual; but it was the water of the
Fountain of Youth; the ladies sipped Nepenthe; the lovelorn, the careworn,
and the sorrow-stricken were supplied with brimming goblets of Lethe; and
it was shrewdly conjectured that a certain golden vase, from which only the
more distinguished guests were invited to partake, contained nectar that had
been mellowing ever since the days of classical mythology. The cloth being
removed, the company, as usual, grew eloquent over their liquor and
delivered themselves of a succession of brilliant speeches,—the task of
reporting which we resign to the more adequate ability of Counsellor Gill,
whose indispensable co-operation the Man of Fancy had taken the
precaution to secure.
When the festivity of the banquet was at its most ethereal point, the Clerk
of the Weather was observed to steal from the table and thrust his head
between the purple and golden curtains of one of the windows.
“My fellow-guests,” he remarked aloud, after carefully noting the signs
of the night, “I advise such of you as live at a distance to be going as soon
as possible; for a thunder-storm is certainly at hand.”

“Mercy on me!” cried Mother Carey, who had left her brood of chickens
and come hither in gossamer drapery, with pink silk stockings. “How shall I
ever get home?”
All now was confusion and hasty departure, with but little superfluous
leave-taking. The Oldest Inhabitant, however, true to the rule of those long
past days in which his courtesy had been studied, paused on the threshold of
the meteor-lighted hall to express his vast satisfaction at the entertainment.
“Never, within my memory,” observed the gracious old gentleman, “has
it been my good fortune to spend a pleasanter evening or in more select
society.”
The wind here took his breath away, whirled his three-cornered hat into
infinite space, and drowned what further compliments it had been his
purpose to bestow. Many of the company had bespoken will-o’-the-wisps to
convoy them home; and the host, in his general beneficence, had engaged
the Man in the Moon, with an immense horn-lantern, to be the guide of
such desolate spinsters as could do no better for themselves. But a blast of
the rising tempest blew out all their lights in the twinkling of an eye. How,
in the darkness that ensued, the guests contrived to get back to earth, or
whether the greater part of them contrived to get back at all, or are still
wandering among clouds, mists, and puffs of tempestuous wind, bruised by
the beams and rafters of the overthrown castle in the air, and deluded by all
sorts of unrealities, are points that concern themselves much more than the
writer or the public. People should think of these matters before they trust
themselves on a pleasure-party into the realm of Nowhere.

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN

Young Goodman Brown came forth at sunset into the street at Salem
village; but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a
parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named,
thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink
ribbons of her cap while she called to Goodman Brown.
“Dearest heart,” whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips
were close to his ear, “prithee put off your journey until sunrise and sleep in
your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and
such thoughts that she’s afeard of herself sometimes. Pray tarry with me this
night, dear husband, of all nights in the year.”
“My love and my Faith,” replied young Goodman Brown, “of all nights
in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou
callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ’twixt now and sunrise.
What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already, and we but three
months married?”
“Then God bless you!” said Faith, with the pink ribbons; “and may you
find all well when you come back.”
“Amen!” cried Goodman Brown. “Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to
bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.”
So they parted; and the young man pursued his way until, being about to
turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked back and saw the head of
Faith still peeping after him with a melancholy air, in spite of her pink
ribbons.
“Poor little Faith!” thought he, for his heart smote him. “What a wretch
am I to leave her on such an errand! She talks of dreams, too. Methought as
she spoke there was trouble in her face, as if a dream had warned her what
work is to be done tonight. But no, no; ’twould kill her to think it. Well,

she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night I’ll cling to her skirts
and follow her to heaven.”
With this excellent resolve for the future, Goodman Brown felt himself
justified in making more haste on his present evil purpose. He had taken a
dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely
stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately
behind. It was all as lonely as could be; and there is this peculiarity in such
a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the
innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely
footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.
“There may be a devilish Indian behind every tree,” said Goodman
Brown to himself; and he glanced fearfully behind him as he added, “What
if the devil himself should be at my very elbow!”
His head being turned back, he passed a crook of the road, and, looking
forward again, beheld the figure of a man, in grave and decent attire, seated
at the foot of an old tree. He arose at Goodman Brown’s approach and
walked onward side by side with him.
“You are late, Goodman Brown,” said he. “The clock of the Old South
was striking as I came through Boston, and that is full fifteen minutes
agone.”
“Faith kept me back a while,” replied the young man, with a tremor in his
voice, caused by the sudden appearance of his companion, though not
wholly unexpected.
It was now deep dusk in the forest, and deepest in that part of it where
these two were journeying. As nearly as could be discerned, the second
traveller was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank of life as
Goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though
perhaps more in expression than features. Still they might have been taken
for father and son. And yet, though the elder person was as simply clad as
the younger, and as simple in manner too, he had an indescribable air of one
who knew the world, and who would not have felt abashed at the
governor’s dinner table or in King William’s court, were it possible that his
affairs should call him thither. But the only thing about him that could be
fixed upon as remarkable was his staff, which bore the likeness of a great
black snake, so curiously wrought that it might almost be seen to twist and

wriggle itself like a living serpent. This, of course, must have been an
ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light.
“Come, Goodman Brown,” cried his fellow-traveller, “this is a dull pace
for the beginning of a journey. Take my staff, if you are so soon weary.”
“Friend,” said the other, exchanging his slow pace for a full stop, “having
kept covenant by meeting thee here, it is my purpose now to return whence
I came. I have scruples touching the matter thou wot’st of.”
“Sayest thou so?” replied he of the serpent, smiling apart. “Let us walk
on, nevertheless, reasoning as we go; and if I convince thee not thou shalt
turn back. We are but a little way in the forest yet.”
“Too far! too far!” exclaimed the goodman, unconsciously resuming his
walk. “My father never went into the woods on such an errand, nor his
father before him. We have been a race of honest men and good Christians
since the days of the martyrs; and shall I be the first of the name of Brown
that ever took this path and kept—”
“Such company, thou wouldst say,” observed the elder person,
interpreting his pause. “Well said, Goodman Brown! I have been as well
acquainted with your family as with ever a one among the Puritans; and
that’s no trifle to say. I helped your grandfather, the constable, when he
lashed the Quaker woman so smartly through the streets of Salem; and it
was I that brought your father a pitch-pine knot, kindled at my own hearth,
to set fire to an Indian village, in King Philip’s war. They were my good
friends, both; and many a pleasant walk have we had along this path, and
returned merrily after midnight. I would fain be friends with you for their
sake.”
“If it be as thou sayest,” replied Goodman Brown, “I marvel they never
spoke of these matters; or, verily, I marvel not, seeing that the least rumor of
the sort would have driven them from New England. We are a people of
prayer, and good works to boot, and abide no such wickedness.”
“Wickedness or not,” said the traveller with the twisted staff, “I have a
very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a
church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen of divers
towns make me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General
Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too—But
these are state secrets.”

“Can this be so?” cried Goodman Brown, with a stare of amazement at
his undisturbed companion. “Howbeit, I have nothing to do with the
governor and council; they have their own ways, and are no rule for a
simple husbandman like me. But, were I to go on with thee, how should I
meet the eye of that good old man, our minister, at Salem village? Oh, his
voice would make me tremble both Sabbath day and lecture day.”
Thus far the elder traveller had listened with due gravity; but now burst
into a fit of irrepressible mirth, shaking himself so violently that his snake-
like staff actually seemed to wriggle in sympathy.
“Ha! ha! ha!” shouted he again and again; then composing himself,
“Well, go on, Goodman Brown, go on; but, prithee, don’t kill me with
laughing.”
“Well, then, to end the matter at once,” said Goodman Brown,
considerably nettled, “there is my wife, Faith. It would break her dear little
heart; and I’d rather break my own.”
“Nay, if that be the case,” answered the other, “e’en go thy ways,
Goodman Brown. I would not for twenty old women like the one hobbling
before us that Faith should come to any harm.”
As he spoke he pointed his staff at a female figure on the path, in whom
Goodman Brown recognized a very pious and exemplary dame, who had
taught him his catechism in youth, and was still his moral and spiritual
adviser, jointly with the minister and Deacon Gookin.
“A marvel, truly, that Goody Cloyse should be so far in the wilderness at
nightfall,” said he. “But with your leave, friend, I shall take a cut through
the woods until we have left this Christian woman behind. Being a stranger
to you, she might ask whom I was consorting with and whither I was
going.”
“Be it so,” said his fellow-traveller. “Betake you to the woods, and let me
keep the path.”
Accordingly the young man turned aside, but took care to watch his
companion, who advanced softly along the road until he had come within a
staff’s length of the old dame. She, meanwhile, was making the best of her
way, with singular speed for so aged a woman, and mumbling some
indistinct words—a prayer, doubtless—as she went. The traveller put forth
his staff and touched her withered neck with what seemed the serpent’s tail.

“The devil!” screamed the pious old lady.
“Then Goody Cloyse knows her old friend?” observed the traveller,
confronting her and leaning on his writhing stick.
“Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship indeed?” cried the good dame.
“Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, Goodman Brown,
the grandfather of the silly fellow that now is. But—would your worship
believe it?—my broomstick hath strangely disappeared, stolen, as I suspect,
by that unhanged witch, Goody Cory, and that, too, when I was all anointed
with the juice of smallage, and cinquefoil, and wolf’s bane.”
“Mingled with fine wheat and the fat of a new-born babe,” said the shape
of old Goodman Brown.
“Ah, your worship knows the recipe,” cried the old lady, cackling aloud.
“So, as I was saying, being all ready for the meeting, and no horse to ride
on, I made up my mind to foot it; for they tell me there is a nice young man
to be taken into communion to-night. But now your good worship will lend
me your arm, and we shall be there in a twinkling.”
“That can hardly be,” answered her friend. “I may not spare you my arm,
Goody Cloyse; but here is my staff, if you will.”
So saying, he threw it down at her feet, where, perhaps, it assumed life,
being one of the rods which its owner had formerly lent to the Egyptian
magi. Of this fact, however, Goodman Brown could not take cognizance.
He had cast up his eyes in astonishment, and, looking down again, beheld
neither Goody Cloyse nor the serpentine staff, but his fellow-traveller alone,
who waited for him as calmly as if nothing had happened.
“That old woman taught me my catechism,” said the young man; and
there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.
They continued to walk onward, while the elder traveller exhorted his
companion to make good speed and persevere in the path, discoursing so
aptly that his arguments seemed rather to spring up in the bosom of his
auditor than to be suggested by himself. As they went, he plucked a branch
of maple to serve for a walking stick, and began to strip it of the twigs and
little boughs, which were wet with evening dew. The moment his fingers
touched them they became strangely withered and dried up as with a week’s
sunshine. Thus the pair proceeded, at a good free pace, until suddenly, in a

gloomy hollow of the road, Goodman Brown sat himself down on the
stump of a tree and refused to go any farther.
“Friend,” said he, stubbornly, “my mind is made up. Not another step
will I budge on this errand. What if a wretched old woman do choose to go
to the devil when I thought she was going to heaven: is that any reason why
I should quit my dear Faith and go after her?”
“You will think better of this by and by,” said his acquaintance,
composedly. “Sit here and rest yourself a while; and when you feel like
moving again, there is my staff to help you along.”
Without more words, he threw his companion the maple stick, and was as
speedily out of sight as if he had vanished into the deepening gloom. The
young man sat a few moments by the roadside, applauding himself greatly,
and thinking with how clear a conscience he should meet the minister in his
morning walk, nor shrink from the eye of good old Deacon Gookin. And
what calm sleep would be his that very night, which was to have been spent
so wickedly, but so purely and sweetly now, in the arms of Faith! Amidst
these pleasant and praiseworthy meditations, Goodman Brown heard the
tramp of horses along the road, and deemed it advisable to conceal himself
within the verge of the forest, conscious of the guilty purpose that had
brought him thither, though now so happily turned from it.
On came the hoof tramps and the voices of the riders, two grave old
voices, conversing soberly as they drew near. These mingled sounds
appeared to pass along the road, within a few yards of the young man’s
hiding-place; but, owing doubtless to the depth of the gloom at that
particular spot, neither the travellers nor their steeds were visible. Though
their figures brushed the small boughs by the wayside, it could not be seen
that they intercepted, even for a moment, the faint gleam from the strip of
bright sky athwart which they must have passed. Goodman Brown
alternately crouched and stood on tiptoe, pulling aside the branches and
thrusting forth his head as far as he durst without discerning so much as a
shadow. It vexed him the more, because he could have sworn, were such a
thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minister and Deacon
Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to
some ordination or ecclesiastical council. While yet within hearing, one of
the riders stopped to pluck a switch.

“Of the two, reverend sir,” said the voice like the deacon’s, “I had rather
miss an ordination dinner than to-night’s meeting. They tell me that some of
our community are to be here from Falmouth and beyond, and others from
Connecticut and Rhode Island, besides several of the Indian powwows,
who, after their fashion, know almost as much deviltry as the best of us.
Moreover, there is a goodly young woman to be taken into communion.”
“Mighty well, Deacon Gookin!” replied the solemn old tones of the
minister. “Spur up, or we shall be late. Nothing can be done, you know,
until I get on the ground.”
The hoofs clattered again; and the voices, talking so strangely in the
empty air, passed on through the forest, where no church had ever been
gathered or solitary Christian prayed. Whither, then, could these holy men
be journeying so deep into the heathen wilderness? Young Goodman Brown
caught hold of a tree for support, being ready to sink down on the ground,
faint and overburdened with the heavy sickness of his heart. He looked up
to the sky, doubting whether there really was a heaven above him. Yet there
was the blue arch, and the stars brightening in it.
“With heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the
devil!” cried Goodman Brown.
While he still gazed upward into the deep arch of the firmament and had
lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across
the zenith and hid the brightening stars. The blue sky was still visible,
except directly overhead, where this black mass of cloud was sweeping
swiftly northward. Aloft in the air, as if from the depths of the cloud, came a
confused and doubtful sound of voices. Once the listener fancied that he
could distinguish the accents of towns-people of his own, men and women,
both pious and ungodly, many of whom he had met at the communion table,
and had seen others rioting at the tavern. The next moment, so indistinct
were the sounds, he doubted whether he had heard aught but the murmur of
the old forest, whispering without a wind. Then came a stronger swell of
those familiar tones, heard daily in the sunshine at Salem village, but never
until now from a cloud of night There was one voice of a young woman,
uttering lamentations, yet with an uncertain sorrow, and entreating for some
favor, which, perhaps, it would grieve her to obtain; and all the unseen
multitude, both saints and sinners, seemed to encourage her onward.

“Faith!” shouted Goodman Brown, in a voice of agony and desperation;
and the echoes of the forest mocked him, crying, “Faith! Faith!” as if
bewildered wretches were seeking her all through the wilderness.
The cry of grief, rage, and terror was yet piercing the night, when the
unhappy husband held his breath for a response. There was a scream,
drowned immediately in a louder murmur of voices, fading into far-off
laughter, as the dark cloud swept away, leaving the clear and silent sky
above Goodman Brown. But something fluttered lightly down through the
air and caught on the branch of a tree. The young man seized it, and beheld
a pink ribbon.
“My Faith is gone!” cried he, after one stupefied moment. “There is no
good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world
given.”
And, maddened with despair, so that he laughed loud and long, did
Goodman Brown grasp his staff and set forth again, at such a rate that he
seemed to fly along the forest path rather than to walk or run. The road
grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length,
leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with
the instinct that guides mortal man to evil. The whole forest was peopled
with frightful sounds—the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts,
and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant
church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all
Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of
the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.
“Ha! ha! ha!” roared Goodman Brown when the wind laughed at him.
“Let us hear which will laugh loudest. Think not to frighten me with your
deviltry. Come witch, come wizard, come Indian powwow, come devil
himself, and here comes Goodman Brown. You may as well fear him as he
fear you.”
In truth, all through the haunted forest there could be nothing more
frightful than the figure of Goodman Brown. On he flew among the black
pines, brandishing his staff with frenzied gestures, now giving vent to an
inspiration of horrid blasphemy, and now shouting forth such laughter as set
all the echoes of the forest laughing like demons around him. The fiend in
his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus
sped the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he saw a

red light before him, as when the felled trunks and branches of a clearing
have been set on fire, and throw up their lurid blaze against the sky, at the
hour of midnight. He paused, in a lull of the tempest that had driven him
onward, and heard the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from
a distance with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a
familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse died
heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human voices, but of
all the sounds of the benighted wilderness pealing in awful harmony
together. Goodman Brown cried out, and his cry was lost to his own ear by
its unison with the cry of the desert.
In the interval of silence he stole forward until the light glared full upon
his eyes. At one extremity of an open space, hemmed in by the dark wall of
the forest, arose a rock, bearing some rude, natural resemblance either to an
altar or a pulpit, and surrounded by four blazing pines, their tops aflame,
their stems untouched, like candles at an evening meeting. The mass of
foliage that had overgrown the summit of the rock was all on fire, blazing
high into the night and fitfully illuminating the whole field. Each pendent
twig and leafy festoon was in a blaze. As the red light arose and fell, a
numerous congregation alternately shone forth, then disappeared in shadow,
and again grew, as it were, out of the darkness, peopling the heart of the
solitary woods at once.
“A grave and dark-clad company,” quoth Goodman Brown.
In truth they were such. Among them, quivering to and fro between
gloom and splendor, appeared faces that would be seen next day at the
council board of the province, and others which, Sabbath after Sabbath,
looked devoutly heavenward, and benignantly over the crowded pews, from
the holiest pulpits in the land. Some affirm that the lady of the governor was
there. At least there were high dames well known to her, and wives of
honored husbands, and widows, a great multitude, and ancient maidens, all
of excellent repute, and fair young girls, who trembled lest their mothers
should espy them. Either the sudden gleams of light flashing over the
obscure field bedazzled Goodman Brown, or he recognized a score of the
church members of Salem village famous for their especial sanctity. Good
old Deacon Gookin had arrived, and waited at the skirts of that venerable
saint, his revered pastor. But, irreverently consorting with these grave,
reputable, and pious people, these elders of the church, these chaste dames

and dewy virgins, there were men of dissolute lives and women of spotted
fame, wretches given over to all mean and filthy vice, and suspected even
of horrid crimes. It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the
wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints. Scattered also among
their pale-faced enemies were the Indian priests, or powwows, who had
often scared their native forest with more hideous incantations than any
known to English witchcraft.
“But where is Faith?” thought Goodman Brown; and, as hope came into
his heart, he trembled.
Another verse of the hymn arose, a slow and mournful strain, such as the
pious love, but joined to words which expressed all that our nature can
conceive of sin, and darkly hinted at far more. Unfathomable to mere
mortals is the lore of fiends. Verse after verse was sung; and still the chorus
of the desert swelled between like the deepest tone of a mighty organ; and
with the final peal of that dreadful anthem there came a sound, as if the
roaring wind, the rushing streams, the howling beasts, and every other voice
of the unconcerted wilderness were mingling and according with the voice
of guilty man in homage to the prince of all. The four blazing pines threw
up a loftier flame, and obscurely discovered shapes and visages of horror on
the smoke wreaths above the impious assembly. At the same moment the
fire on the rock shot redly forth and formed a glowing arch above its base,
where now appeared a figure. With reverence be it spoken, the figure bore
no slight similitude, both in garb and manner, to some grave divine of the
New England churches.
“Bring forth the converts!” cried a voice that echoed through the field
and rolled into the forest.
At the word, Goodman Brown stepped forth from the shadow of the trees
and approached the congregation, with whom he felt a loathful brotherhood
by the sympathy of all that was wicked in his heart. He could have well-
nigh sworn that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance,
looking downward from a smoke wreath, while a woman, with dim features
of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. Was it his mother? But he
had no power to retreat one step, nor to resist, even in thought, when the
minister and good old Deacon Gookin seized his arms and led him to the
blazing rock. Thither came also the slender form of a veiled female, led
between Goody Cloyse, that pious teacher of the catechism, and Martha

Carrier, who had received the devil’s promise to be queen of hell. A rampant
hag was she. And there stood the proselytes beneath the canopy of fire.
“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure, “to the communion of
your race. Ye have found thus young your nature and your destiny. My
children, look behind you!”
They turned; and flashing forth, as it were, in a sheet of flame, the fiend
worshippers were seen; the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every
visage.
“There,” resumed the sable form, “are all whom ye have reverenced from
youth. Ye deemed them holier than yourselves, and shrank from your own
sin, contrasting it with their lives of righteousness and prayerful aspirations
heavenward. Yet here are they all in my worshipping assembly. This night it
shall be granted you to know their secret deeds: how hoary-bearded elders
of the church have whispered wanton words to the young maids of their
households; how many a woman, eager for widows’ weeds, has given her
husband a drink at bedtime and let him sleep his last sleep in her bosom;
how beardless youths have made haste to inherit their fathers’ wealth; and
how fair damsels—blush not, sweet ones—have dug little graves in the
garden, and bidden me, the sole guest to an infant’s funeral. By the
sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—
whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has
been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt,
one mighty blood spot. Far more than this. It shall be yours to penetrate, in
every bosom, the deep mystery of sin, the fountain of all wicked arts, and
which inexhaustibly supplies more evil impulses than human power—than
my power at its utmost—can make manifest in deeds. And now, my
children, look upon each other.”
They did so; and, by the blaze of the hell-kindled torches, the wretched
man beheld his Faith, and the wife her husband, trembling before that
unhallowed altar.
“Lo, there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and solemn
tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature
could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon one another’s
hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye
undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only
happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”

“Welcome,” repeated the fiend worshippers, in one cry of despair and
triumph.
And there they stood, the only pair, as it seemed, who were yet hesitating
on the verge of wickedness in this dark world. A basin was hollowed,
naturally, in the rock. Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or
was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame? Herein did the shape of evil dip
his hand and prepare to lay the mark of baptism upon their foreheads, that
they might be partakers of the mystery of sin, more conscious of the secret
guilt of others, both in deed and thought, than they could now be of their
own. The husband cast one look at his pale wife, and Faith at him. What
polluted wretches would the next glance show them to each other,
shuddering alike at what they disclosed and what they saw!
“Faith! Faith!” cried the husband, “look up to heaven, and resist the
wicked one.”
Whether Faith obeyed he knew not. Hardly had he spoken when he found
himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind which
died heavily away through the forest. He staggered against the rock, and felt
it chill and damp; while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire,
besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew.
The next morning young Goodman Brown came slowly into the street of
Salem village, staring around him like a bewildered man. The good old
minister was taking a walk along the graveyard to get an appetite for
breakfast and meditate his sermon, and bestowed a blessing, as he passed,
on Goodman Brown. He shrank from the venerable saint as if to avoid an
anathema. Old Deacon Gookin was at domestic worship, and the holy
words of his prayer were heard through the open window. “What God doth
the wizard pray to?” quoth Goodman Brown. Goody Cloyse, that excellent
old Christian, stood in the early sunshine at her own lattice, catechizing a
little girl who had brought her a pint of morning’s milk. Goodman Brown
snatched away the child as from the grasp of the fiend himself. Turning the
corner by the meeting-house, he spied the head of Faith, with the pink
ribbons, gazing anxiously forth, and bursting into such joy at sight of him
that she skipped along the street and almost kissed her husband before the
whole village. But Goodman Brown looked sternly and sadly into her face,
and passed on without a greeting.

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

RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER

A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the
more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of
Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his pocket,
took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice which looked
not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which, in fact,
exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings of a family long since
extinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his
country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an
occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of
the immortal agonies of his Inferno. These reminiscences and associations,
together with the tendency to heartbreak natural to a young man for the first
time out of his native sphere, caused Giovanni to sigh heavily as he looked
around the desolate and ill-furnished apartment.
“Holy Virgin, signor!” cried old Dame Lisabetta, who, won by the
youth’s remarkable beauty of person, was kindly endeavoring to give the
chamber a habitable air, “what a sigh was that to come out of a young man’s
heart! Do you find this old mansion gloomy? For the love of Heaven, then,
put your head out of the window, and you will see as bright sunshine as you
have left in Naples.”
Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not
quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that of
southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden beneath the
window and expended its fostering influences on a variety of plants, which
seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.
“Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni.
“Heaven forbid, signor, unless it were fruitful of better pot herbs than any
that grow there now,” answered old Lisabetta. “No; that garden is cultivated
by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous doctor, who, I

warrant him, has been heard of as far as Naples. It is said that he distils
these plants into medicines that are as potent as a charm. Oftentimes you
may see the signor doctor at work, and perchance the signora, his daughter,
too, gathering the strange flowers that grow in the garden.”
The old woman had now done what she could for the aspect of the
chamber; and, commending the young man to the protection of the saints,
took her departure.
Giovanni still found no better occupation than to look down into the
garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one of
those botanic gardens which were of earlier date in Padua than elsewhere in
Italy or in the world. Or, not improbably, it might once have been the
pleasure-place of an opulent family; for there was the ruin of a marble
fountain in the centre, sculptured with rare art, but so wofully shattered that
it was impossible to trace the original design from the chaos of remaining
fragments. The water, however, continued to gush and sparkle into the
sunbeams as cheerfully as ever. A little gurgling sound ascended to the
young man’s window, and made him feel as if the fountain were an
immortal spirit that sung its song unceasingly and without heeding the
vicissitudes around it, while one century imbodied it in marble and another
scattered the perishable garniture on the soil. All about the pool into which
the water subsided grew various plants, that seemed to require a plentiful
supply of moisture for the nourishment of gigantic leaves, and in some
instances, flowers gorgeously magnificent. There was one shrub in
particular, set in a marble vase in the midst of the pool, that bore a profusion
of purple blossoms, each of which had the lustre and richness of a gem; and
the whole together made a show so resplendent that it seemed enough to
illuminate the garden, even had there been no sunshine. Every portion of
the soil was peopled with plants and herbs, which, if less beautiful, still
bore tokens of assiduous care, as if all had their individual virtues, known to
the scientific mind that fostered them. Some were placed in urns, rich with
old carving, and others in common garden pots; some crept serpent-like
along the ground or climbed on high, using whatever means of ascent was
offered them. One plant had wreathed itself round a statue of Vertumnus,
which was thus quite veiled and shrouded in a drapery of hanging foliage,
so happily arranged that it might have served a sculptor for a study.

While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a rustling behind a screen
of leaves, and became aware that a person was at work in the garden. His
figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no common
laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking man, dressed in a
scholar’s garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of life, with gray
hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked with intellect and
cultivation, but which could never, even in his more youthful days, have
expressed much warmth of heart.
Nothing could exceed the intentness with which this scientific gardener
examined every shrub which grew in his path: it seemed as if he was
looking into their inmost nature, making observations in regard to their
creative essence, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape and
another in that, and wherefore such and such flowers differed among
themselves in hue and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of this deep
intelligence on his part, there was no approach to intimacy between himself
and these vegetable existences. On the contrary, he avoided their actual
touch or the direct inhaling of their odors with a caution that impressed
Giovanni most disagreeably; for the man’s demeanor was that of one
walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly
snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license,
would wreak upon him some terrible fatality. It was strangely frightful to
the young man’s imagination to see this air of insecurity in a person
cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils, and
which had been alike the joy and labor of the unfallen parents of the race.
Was this garden, then, the Eden of the present world? And this man, with
such a perception of harm in what his own hands caused to grow,—was he
the Adam?
The distrustful gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or pruning
the too luxuriant growth of the shrubs, defended his hands with a pair of
thick gloves. Nor were these his only armor. When, in his walk through the
garden, he came to the magnificent plant that hung its purple gems beside
the marble fountain, he placed a kind of mask over his mouth and nostrils,
as if all this beauty did but conceal a deadlier malice; but, finding his task
still too dangerous, he drew back, removed the mask, and called loudly, but
in the infirm voice of a person affected with inward disease, “Beatrice!
Beatrice!”

“Here am I, my father. What would you?” cried a rich and youthful voice
from the window of the opposite house—a voice as rich as a tropical sunset,
and which made Giovanni, though he knew not why, think of deep hues of
purple or crimson and of perfumes heavily delectable. “Are you in the
garden?”
“Yes, Beatrice,” answered the gardener, “and I need your help.”
Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young
girl, arrayed with as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the
flowers, beautiful as the day, and with a bloom so deep and vivid that one
shade more would have been too much. She looked redundant with life,
health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and
compressed, as it were and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin
zone. Yet Giovanni’s fancy must have grown morbid while he looked down
into the garden; for the impression which the fair stranger made upon him
was as if here were another flower, the human sister of those vegetable
ones, as beautiful as they, more beautiful than the richest of them, but still
to be touched only with a glove, nor to be approached without a mask. As
Beatrice came down the garden path, it was observable that she handled and
inhaled the odor of several of the plants which her father had most
sedulously avoided.
“Here, Beatrice,” said the latter, “see how many needful offices require to
be done to our chief treasure. Yet, shattered as I am, my life might pay the
penalty of approaching it so closely as circumstances demand. Henceforth, I
fear, this plant must be consigned to your sole charge.”
“And gladly will I undertake it,” cried again the rich tones of the young
lady, as she bent towards the magnificent plant and opened her arms as if to
embrace it. “Yes, my sister, my splendour, it shall be Beatrice’s task to
nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with thy kisses and
perfumed breath, which to her is as the breath of life.”
Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly
expressed in her words, she busied herself with such attentions as the plant
seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his lofty window, rubbed his eyes and
almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her favorite flower, or one
sister performing the duties of affection to another. The scene soon
terminated. Whether Dr. Rappaccini had finished his labors in the garden, or
that his watchful eye had caught the stranger’s face, he now took his

daughter’s arm and retired. Night was already closing in; oppressive
exhalations seemed to proceed from the plants and steal upward past the
open window; and Giovanni, closing the lattice, went to his couch and
dreamed of a rich flower and beautiful girl. Flower and maiden were
different, and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either
shape.
But there is an influence in the light of morning that tends to rectify
whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during
the sun’s decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less
wholesome glow of moonshine. Giovanni’s first movement, on starting
from sleep, was to throw open the window and gaze down into the garden
which his dreams had made so fertile of mysteries. He was surprised and a
little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact an affair it proved to be,
in the first rays of the sun which gilded the dew-drops that hung upon leaf
and blossom, and, while giving a brighter beauty to each rare flower,
brought everything within the limits of ordinary experience. The young man
rejoiced that, in the heart of the barren city, he had the privilege of
overlooking this spot of lovely and luxuriant vegetation. It would serve, he
said to himself, as a symbolic language to keep him in communion with
Nature. Neither the sickly and thoughtworn Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, it is
true, nor his brilliant daughter, were now visible; so that Giovanni could not
determine how much of the singularity which he attributed to both was due
to their own qualities and how much to his wonder-working fancy; but he
was inclined to take a most rational view of the whole matter.
In the course of the day he paid his respects to Signor Pietro Baglioni,
professor of medicine in the university, a physician of eminent repute to
whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction. The professor was an
elderly personage, apparently of genial nature, and habits that might almost
be called jovial. He kept the young man to dinner, and made himself very
agreeable by the freedom and liveliness of his conversation, especially
when warmed by a flask or two of Tuscan wine. Giovanni, conceiving that
men of science, inhabitants of the same city, must needs be on familiar
terms with one another, took an opportunity to mention the name of Dr.
Rappaccini. But the professor did not respond with so much cordiality as he
had anticipated.

“Ill would it become a teacher of the divine art of medicine,” said
Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, “to withhold
due and well-considered praise of a physician so eminently skilled as
Rappaccini; but, on the other hand, I should answer it but scantily to my
conscience were I to permit a worthy youth like yourself, Signor Giovanni,
the son of an ancient friend, to imbibe erroneous ideas respecting a man
who might hereafter chance to hold your life and death in his hands. The
truth is, our worshipful Dr. Rappaccini has as much science as any member
of the faculty—with perhaps one single exception—in Padua, or all Italy;
but there are certain grave objections to his professional character.”
“And what are they?” asked the young man.
“Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so
inquisitive about physicians?” said the professor, with a smile. “But as for
Rappaccini, it is said of him—and I, who know the man well, can answer
for its truth—that he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His
patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment.
He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else
was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard
seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.”
“Methinks he is an awful man indeed,” remarked Guasconti, mentally
recalling the cold and purely intellectual aspect of Rappaccini. “And yet,
worshipful professor, is it not a noble spirit? Are there many men capable of
so spiritual a love of science?”
“God forbid,” answered the professor, somewhat testily; “at least, unless
they take sounder views of the healing art than those adopted by
Rappaccini. It is his theory that all medicinal virtues are comprised within
those substances which we term vegetable poisons. These he cultivates with
his own hands, and is said even to have produced new varieties of poison,
more horribly deleterious than Nature, without the assistance of this learned
person, would ever have plagued the world withal. That the signor doctor
does less mischief than might be expected with such dangerous substances
is undeniable. Now and then, it must be owned, he has effected, or seemed
to effect, a marvellous cure; but, to tell you my private mind, Signor
Giovanni, he should receive little credit for such instances of success,—
they being probably the work of chance,—but should be held strictly
accountable for his failures, which may justly be considered his own work.”

The youth might have taken Baglioni’s opinions with many grains of
allowance had he known that there was a professional warfare of long
continuance between him and Dr. Rappaccini, in which the latter was
generally thought to have gained the advantage. If the reader be inclined to
judge for himself, we refer him to certain black-letter tracts on both sides,
preserved in the medical department of the University of Padua.
“I know not, most learned professor,” returned Giovanni, after musing on
what had been said of Rappaccini’s exclusive zeal for science,—“I know
not how dearly this physician may love his art; but surely there is one object
more dear to him. He has a daughter.”
“Aha!” cried the professor, with a laugh. “So now our friend Giovanni’s
secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men in
Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had the good hap
to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice save that Rappaccini is
said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and that, young and
beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a professor’s
chair. Perchance her father destines her for mine! Other absurd rumors there
be, not worth talking about or listening to. So now, Signor Giovanni, drink
off your glass of lachryma.”
Guasconti returned to his lodgings somewhat heated with the wine he had
quaffed, and which caused his brain to swim with strange fantasies in
reference to Dr. Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his way,
happening to pass by a florist’s, he bought a fresh bouquet of flowers.
Ascending to his chamber, he seated himself near the window, but within
the shadow thrown by the depth of the wall, so that he could look down into
the garden with little risk of being discovered. All beneath his eye was a
solitude. The strange plants were basking in the sunshine, and now and then
nodding gently to one another, as if in acknowledgment of sympathy and
kindred. In the midst, by the shattered fountain, grew the magnificent shrub,
with its purple gems clustering all over it; they glowed in the air, and
gleamed back again out of the depths of the pool, which thus seemed to
overflow with colored radiance from the rich reflection that was steeped in
it. At first, as we have said, the garden was a solitude. Soon, however,—as
Giovanni had half hoped, half feared, would be the case,—a figure
appeared beneath the antique sculptured portal, and came down between the
rows of plants, inhaling their various perfumes as if she were one of those

beings of old classic fable that lived upon sweet odors. On again beholding
Beatrice, the young man was even startled to perceive how much her beauty
exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, so vivid, was its character, that
she glowed amid the sunlight, and, as Giovanni whispered to himself,
positively illuminated the more shadowy intervals of the garden path. Her
face being now more revealed than on the former occasion, he was struck
by its expression of simplicity and sweetness,—qualities that had not
entered into his idea of her character, and which made him ask anew what
manner of mortal she might be. Nor did he fail again to observe, or imagine,
an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its
gemlike flowers over the fountain,—a resemblance which Beatrice seemed
to have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening, both by the arrangement
of her dress and the selection of its hues.
Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, as with a passionate
ardor, and drew its branches into an intimate embrace—so intimate that her
features were hidden in its leafy bosom and her glistening ringlets all
intermingled with the flowers.
“Give me thy breath, my sister,” exclaimed Beatrice; “for I am faint with
common air. And give me this flower of thine, which I separate with
gentlest fingers from the stem and place it close beside my heart.”
With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of the
richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about to fasten it in her bosom. But
now, unless Giovanni’s draughts of wine had bewildered his senses, a
singular incident occurred. A small orange-colored reptile, of the lizard or
chameleon species, chanced to be creeping along the path, just at the feet of
Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni,—but, at the distance from which he
gazed, he could scarcely have seen anything so minute,—it appeared to
him, however, that a drop or two of moisture from the broken stem of the
flower descended upon the lizard’s head. For an instant the reptile contorted
itself violently, and then lay motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed
this remarkable phenomenon and crossed herself, sadly, but without
surprise; nor did she therefore hesitate to arrange the fatal flower in her
bosom. There it blushed, and almost glimmered with the dazzling effect of a
precious stone, adding to her dress and aspect the one appropriate charm
which nothing else in the world could have supplied. But Giovanni, out of

the shadow of his window, bent forward and shrank back, and murmured
and trembled.
“Am I awake? Have I my senses?” said he to himself. “What is this
being? Beautiful shall I call her, or inexpressibly terrible?”
Beatrice now strayed carelessly through the garden, approaching closer
beneath Giovanni’s window, so that he was compelled to thrust his head
quite out of its concealment in order to gratify the intense and painful
curiosity which she excited. At this moment there came a beautiful insect
over the garden wall; it had, perhaps, wandered through the city, and found
no flowers or verdure among those antique haunts of men until the heavy
perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini’s shrubs had lured it from afar. Without
alighting on the flowers, this winged brightness seemed to be attracted by
Beatrice, and lingered in the air and fluttered about her head. Now, here it
could not be but that Giovanni Guasconti’s eyes deceived him. Be that as it
might, he fancied that, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish
delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet; its bright wings shivered; it was
dead—from no cause that he could discern, unless it were the atmosphere of
her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she bent
over the dead insect.
An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There
she beheld the beautiful head of the young man—rather a Grecian than an
Italian head, with fair, regular features, and a glistening of gold among his
ringlets—gazing down upon her like a being that hovered in mid air.
Scarcely knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet which he
had hitherto held in his hand.
“Signora,” said he, “there are pure and healthful flowers. Wear them for
the sake of Giovanni Guasconti.”
“Thanks, signor,” replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that came forth as
it were like a gush of music, and with a mirthful expression half childish
and half woman-like. “I accept your gift, and would fain recompense it with
this precious purple flower; but if I toss it into the air it will not reach you.
So Signor Guasconti must even content himself with my thanks.”
She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then, as if inwardly ashamed
at having stepped aside from her maidenly reserve to respond to a stranger’s
greeting, passed swiftly homeward through the garden. But few as the
moments were, it seemed to Giovanni, when she was on the point of

vanishing beneath the sculptured portal, that his beautiful bouquet was
already beginning to wither in her grasp. It was an idle thought; there could
be no possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at so
great a distance.
For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that
looked into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, as if something ugly and monstrous
would have blasted his eyesight had he been betrayed into a glance. He felt
conscious of having put himself, to a certain extent, within the influence of
an unintelligible power by the communication which he had opened with
Beatrice. The wisest course would have been, if his heart were in any real
danger, to quit his lodgings and Padua itself at once; the next wiser, to have
accustomed himself, as far as possible, to the familiar and daylight view of
Beatrice—thus bringing her rigidly and systematically within the limits of
ordinary experience. Least of all, while avoiding her sight, ought Giovanni
to have remained so near this extraordinary being that the proximity and
possibility even of intercourse should give a kind of substance and reality to
the wild vagaries which his imagination ran riot continually in producing.
Guasconti had not a deep heart—or, at all events, its depths were not
sounded now; but he had a quick fancy, and an ardent southern
temperament, which rose every instant to a higher fever pitch. Whether or
no Beatrice possessed those terrible attributes, that fatal breath, the affinity
with those so beautiful and deadly flowers which were indicated by what
Giovanni had witnessed, she had at least instilled a fierce and subtle poison
into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to
him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same
baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild
offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like
one and shivered like the other. Giovanni knew not what to dread; still less
did he know what to hope; yet hope and dread kept a continual warfare in
his breast, alternately vanquishing one another and starting up afresh to
renew the contest. Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It
is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of
the infernal regions.
Sometimes he endeavored to assuage the fever of his spirit by a rapid
walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its gates: his footsteps kept
time with the throbbings of his brain, so that the walk was apt to accelerate
itself to a race. One day he found himself arrested; his arm was seized by a

portly personage, who had turned back on recognizing the young man and
expended much breath in overtaking him.
“Signor Giovanni! Stay, my young friend!” cried he. “Have you forgotten
me? That might well be the case if I were as much altered as yourself.”
It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their first
meeting, from a doubt that the professor’s sagacity would look too deeply
into his secrets. Endeavoring to recover himself, he stared forth wildly from
his inner world into the outer one and spoke like a man in a dream.
“Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now
let me pass!”
“Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,” said the professor,
smiling, but at the same time scrutinizing the youth with an earnest glance.
“What! did I grow up side by side with your father? and shall his son pass
me like a stranger in these old streets of Padua? Stand still, Signor
Giovanni; for we must have a word or two before we part.”
“Speedily, then, most worshipful professor, speedily,” said Giovanni,
with feverish impatience. “Does not your worship see that I am in haste?”
Now, while he was speaking there came a man in black along the street,
stooping and moving feebly like a person in inferior health. His face was all
overspread with a most sickly and sallow hue, but yet so pervaded with an
expression of piercing and active intellect that an observer might easily
have overlooked the merely physical attributes and have seen only this
wonderful energy. As he passed, this person exchanged a cold and distant
salutation with Baglioni, but fixed his eyes upon Giovanni with an
intentness that seemed to bring out whatever was within him worthy of
notice. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar quietness in the look, as if taking
merely a speculative, not a human interest, in the young man.
“It is Dr. Rappaccini!” whispered the professor when the stranger had
passed. “Has he ever seen your face before?”
“Not that I know,” answered Giovanni, starting at the name.
“He HAS seen you! he must have seen you!” said Baglioni, hastily. “For
some purpose or other, this man of science is making a study of you. I know
that look of his! It is the same that coldly illuminates his face as he bends
over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in pursuance of some
experiment, he has killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as deep as

Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love. Signor Giovanni, I will
stake my life upon it, you are the subject of one of Rappaccini’s
experiments!”
“Will you make a fool of me?” cried Giovanni, passionately. “THAT,
signor professor, were an untoward experiment.”
“Patience! patience!” replied the imperturbable professor. “I tell thee, my
poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific interest in thee. Thou hast
fallen into fearful hands! And the Signora Beatrice,—what part does she act
in this mystery?”
But Guasconti, finding Baglioni’s pertinacity intolerable, here broke
away, and was gone before the professor could again seize his arm. He
looked after the young man intently and shook his head.
“This must not be,” said Baglioni to himself. “The youth is the son of my
old friend, and shall not come to any harm from which the arcana of
medical science can preserve him. Besides, it is too insufferable an
impertinence in Rappaccini, thus to snatch the lad out of my own hands, as
I may say, and make use of him for his infernal experiments. This daughter
of his! It shall be looked to. Perchance, most learned Rappaccini, I may foil
you where you little dream of it!”
Meanwhile Giovanni had pursued a circuitous route, and at length found
himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed the threshold he was met
by old Lisabetta, who smirked and smiled, and was evidently desirous to
attract his attention; vainly, however, as the ebullition of his feelings had
momentarily subsided into a cold and dull vacuity. He turned his eyes full
upon the withered face that was puckering itself into a smile, but seemed to
behold it not. The old dame, therefore, laid her grasp upon his cloak.
“Signor! signor!” whispered she, still with a smile over the whole breadth
of her visage, so that it looked not unlike a grotesque carving in wood,
darkened by centuries. “Listen, signor! There is a private entrance into the
garden!”
“What do you say?” exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about, as if an
inanimate thing should start into feverish life. “A private entrance into Dr.
Rappaccini’s garden?”
“Hush! hush! not so loud!” whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over
his mouth. “Yes; into the worshipful doctor’s garden, where you may see all

his fine shrubbery. Many a young man in Padua would give gold to be
admitted among those flowers.”
Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.
“Show me the way,” said he.
A surmise, probably excited by his conversation with Baglioni, crossed
his mind, that this interposition of old Lisabetta might perchance be
connected with the intrigue, whatever were its nature, in which the
professor seemed to suppose that Dr. Rappaccini was involving him. But
such a suspicion, though it disturbed Giovanni, was inadequate to restrain
him. The instant that he was aware of the possibility of approaching
Beatrice, it seemed an absolute necessity of his existence to do so. It
mattered not whether she were angel or demon; he was irrevocably within
her sphere, and must obey the law that whirled him onward, in ever-
lessening circles, towards a result which he did not attempt to foreshadow;
and yet, strange to say, there came across him a sudden doubt whether this
intense interest on his part were not delusory; whether it were really of so
deep and positive a nature as to justify him in now thrusting himself into an
incalculable position; whether it were not merely the fantasy of a young
man’s brain, only slightly or not at all connected with his heart.
He paused, hesitated, turned half about, but again went on. His withered
guide led him along several obscure passages, and finally undid a door,
through which, as it was opened, there came the sight and sound of rustling
leaves, with the broken sunshine glimmering among them. Giovanni
stepped forth, and, forcing himself through the entanglement of a shrub that
wreathed its tendrils over the hidden entrance, stood beneath his own
window in the open area of Dr. Rappaccini’s garden.
How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and
dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find
ourselves calm, and even coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which
it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! Fate delights to
thwart us thus. Passion will choose his own time to rush upon the scene,
and lingers sluggishly behind when an appropriate adjustment of events
would seem to summon his appearance. So was it now with Giovanni. Day
after day his pulses had throbbed with feverish blood at the improbable idea
of an interview with Beatrice, and of standing with her, face to face, in this
very garden, basking in the Oriental sunshine of her beauty, and snatching

from her full gaze the mystery which he deemed the riddle of his own
existence. But now there was a singular and untimely equanimity within his
breast. He threw a glance around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her
father were present, and, perceiving that he was alone, began a critical
observation of the plants.
The aspect of one and all of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness
seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. There was hardly an
individual shrub which a wanderer, straying by himself through a forest,
would not have been startled to find growing wild, as if an unearthly face
had glared at him out of the thicket. Several also would have shocked a
delicate instinct by an appearance of artificialness indicating that there had
been such commixture, and, as it were, adultery, of various vegetable
species, that the production was no longer of God’s making, but the
monstrous offspring of man’s depraved fancy, glowing with only an evil
mockery of beauty. They were probably the result of experiment, which in
one or two cases had succeeded in mingling plants individually lovely into
a compound possessing the questionable and ominous character that
distinguished the whole growth of the garden. In fine, Giovanni recognized
but two or three plants in the collection, and those of a kind that he well
knew to be poisonous. While busy with these contemplations he heard the
rustling of a silken garment, and, turning, beheld Beatrice emerging from
beneath the sculptured portal.
Giovanni had not considered with himself what should be his
deportment; whether he should apologize for his intrusion into the garden,
or assume that he was there with the privity at least, if not by the desire, of
Dr. Rappaccini or his daughter; but Beatrice’s manner placed him at his
ease, though leaving him still in doubt by what agency he had gained
admittance. She came lightly along the path and met him near the broken
fountain. There was surprise in her face, but brightened by a simple and
kind expression of pleasure.
“You are a connoisseur in flowers, signor,” said Beatrice, with a smile,
alluding to the bouquet which he had flung her from the window. “It is no
marvel, therefore, if the sight of my father’s rare collection has tempted you
to take a nearer view. If he were here, he could tell you many strange and
interesting facts as to the nature and habits of these shrubs; for he has spent
a lifetime in such studies, and this garden is his world.”

“And yourself, lady,” observed Giovanni, “if fame says true,—you
likewise are deeply skilled in the virtues indicated by these rich blossoms
and these spicy perfumes. Would you deign to be my instructress, I should
prove an apter scholar than if taught by Signor Rappaccini himself.”
“Are there such idle rumors?” asked Beatrice, with the music of a
pleasant laugh. “Do people say that I am skilled in my father’s science of
plants? What a jest is there! No; though I have grown up among these
flowers, I know no more of them than their hues and perfume; and
sometimes methinks I would fain rid myself of even that small knowledge.
There are many flowers here, and those not the least brilliant, that shock
and offend me when they meet my eye. But pray, signor, do not believe
these stories about my science. Believe nothing of me save what you see
with your own eyes.”
“And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” asked
Giovanni, pointedly, while the recollection of former scenes made him
shrink. “No, signora; you demand too little of me. Bid me believe nothing
save what comes from your own lips.”
It would appear that Beatrice understood him. There came a deep flush to
her cheek; but she looked full into Giovanni’s eyes, and responded to his
gaze of uneasy suspicion with a queenlike haughtiness.
“I do so bid you, signor,” she replied. “Forget whatever you may have
fancied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, still it may be false in
its essence; but the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are true from the
depths of the heart outward. Those you may believe.”
A fervor glowed in her whole aspect and beamed upon Giovanni’s
consciousness like the light of truth itself; but while she spoke there was a
fragrance in the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful, though
evanescent, yet which the young man, from an indefinable reluctance,
scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the odor of the flowers.
Could it be Beatrice’s breath which thus embalmed her words with a
strange richness, as if by steeping them in her heart? A faintness passed like
a shadow over Giovanni and flitted away; he seemed to gaze through the
beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent soul, and felt no more doubt or fear.
The tinge of passion that had colored Beatrice’s manner vanished; she
became gay, and appeared to derive a pure delight from her communion
with the youth not unlike what the maiden of a lonely island might have felt

conversing with a voyager from the civilized world. Evidently her
experience of life had been confined within the limits of that garden. She
talked now about matters as simple as the daylight or summer clouds, and
now asked questions in reference to the city, or Giovanni’s distant home, his
friends, his mother, and his sisters—questions indicating such seclusion,
and such lack of familiarity with modes and forms, that Giovanni responded
as if to an infant. Her spirit gushed out before him like a fresh rill that was
just catching its first glimpse of the sunlight and wondering at the
reflections of earth and sky which were flung into its bosom. There came
thoughts, too, from a deep source, and fantasies of a gemlike brilliancy, as if
diamonds and rubies sparkled upward among the bubbles of the fountain.
Ever and anon there gleamed across the young man’s mind a sense of
wonder that he should be walking side by side with the being who had so
wrought upon his imagination, whom he had idealized in such hues of
terror, in whom he had positively witnessed such manifestations of dreadful
attributes,—that he should be conversing with Beatrice like a brother, and
should find her so human and so maidenlike. But such reflections were only
momentary; the effect of her character was too real not to make itself
familiar at once.
In this free intercourse they had strayed through the garden, and now,
after many turns among its avenues, were come to the shattered fountain,
beside which grew the magnificent shrub, with its treasury of glowing
blossoms. A fragrance was diffused from it which Giovanni recognized as
identical with that which he had attributed to Beatrice’s breath, but
incomparably more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it, Giovanni beheld her
press her hand to her bosom as if her heart were throbbing suddenly and
painfully.
“For the first time in my life,” murmured she, addressing the shrub, “I
had forgotten thee.”
“I remember, signora,” said Giovanni, “that you once promised to reward
me with one of these living gems for the bouquet which I had the happy
boldness to fling to your feet. Permit me now to pluck it as a memorial of
this interview.”
He made a step towards the shrub with extended hand; but Beatrice
darted forward, uttering a shriek that went through his heart like a dagger.

She caught his hand and drew it back with the whole force of her slender
figure. Giovanni felt her touch thrilling through his fibres.
“Touch it not!” exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. “Not for thy life! It is
fatal!”
Then, hiding her face, she fled from him and vanished beneath the
sculptured portal. As Giovanni followed her with his eyes, he beheld the
emaciated figure and pale intelligence of Dr. Rappaccini, who had been
watching the scene, he knew not how long, within the shadow of the
entrance.
No sooner was Guasconti alone in his chamber than the image of
Beatrice came back to his passionate musings, invested with all the
witchery that had been gathering around it ever since his first glimpse of
her, and now likewise imbued with a tender warmth of girlish womanhood.
She was human; her nature was endowed with all gentle and feminine
qualities; she was worthiest to be worshipped; she was capable, surely, on
her part, of the height and heroism of love. Those tokens which he had
hitherto considered as proofs of a frightful peculiarity in her physical and
moral system were now either forgotten, or, by the subtle sophistry of
passion transmitted into a golden crown of enchantment, rendering Beatrice
the more admirable by so much as she was the more unique. Whatever had
looked ugly was now beautiful; or, if incapable of such a change, it stole
away and hid itself among those shapeless half ideas which throng the dim
region beyond the daylight of our perfect consciousness. Thus did he spend
the night, nor fell asleep until the dawn had begun to awake the slumbering
flowers in Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, whither Giovanni’s dreams doubtless
led him. Up rose the sun in his due season, and, flinging his beams upon the
young man’s eyelids, awoke him to a sense of pain. When thoroughly
aroused, he became sensible of a burning and tingling agony in his hand—
in his right hand—the very hand which Beatrice had grasped in her own
when he was on the point of plucking one of the gemlike flowers. On the
back of that hand there was now a purple print like that of four small
fingers, and the likeness of a slender thumb upon his wrist.
Oh, how stubbornly does love,—or even that cunning semblance of love
which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into the
heart,—how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes when
it is doomed to vanish into thin mist! Giovanni wrapped a handkerchief

about his hand and wondered what evil thing had stung him, and soon
forgot his pain in a reverie of Beatrice.
After the first interview, a second was in the inevitable course of what we
call fate. A third; a fourth; and a meeting with Beatrice in the garden was no
longer an incident in Giovanni’s daily life, but the whole space in which he
might be said to live; for the anticipation and memory of that ecstatic hour
made up the remainder. Nor was it otherwise with the daughter of
Rappaccini. She watched for the youth’s appearance, and flew to his side
with confidence as unreserved as if they had been playmates from early
infancy—as if they were such playmates still. If, by any unwonted chance,
he failed to come at the appointed moment, she stood beneath the window
and sent up the rich sweetness of her tones to float around him in his
chamber and echo and reverberate throughout his heart: “Giovanni!
Giovanni! Why tarriest thou? Come down!” And down he hastened into that
Eden of poisonous flowers.
But, with all this intimate familiarity, there was still a reserve in
Beatrice’s demeanor, so rigidly and invariably sustained that the idea of
infringing it scarcely occurred to his imagination. By all appreciable signs,
they loved; they had looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret
from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too
sacred to be whispered by the way; they had even spoken love in those
gushes of passion when their spirits darted forth in articulated breath like
tongues of long-hidden flame; and yet there had been no seal of lips, no
clasp of hands, nor any slightest caress such as love claims and hallows. He
had never touched one of the gleaming ringlets of her hair; her garment—so
marked was the physical barrier between them—had never been waved
against him by a breeze. On the few occasions when Giovanni had seemed
tempted to overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, so stern, and withal
wore such a look of desolate separation, shuddering at itself, that not a
spoken word was requisite to repel him. At such times he was startled at the
horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, out of the caverns of his heart
and stared him in the face; his love grew thin and faint as the morning mist,
his doubts alone had substance. But, when Beatrice’s face brightened again
after the momentary shadow, she was transformed at once from the
mysterious, questionable being whom he had watched with so much awe
and horror; she was now the beautiful and unsophisticated girl whom he felt
that his spirit knew with a certainty beyond all other knowledge.

A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni’s last meeting with
Baglioni. One morning, however, he was disagreeably surprised by a visit
from the professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole weeks, and
would willingly have forgotten still longer. Given up as he had long been to
a pervading excitement, he could tolerate no companions except upon
condition of their perfect sympathy with his present state of feeling. Such
sympathy was not to be expected from Professor Baglioni.
The visitor chatted carelessly for a few moments about the gossip of the
city and the university, and then took up another topic.
“I have been reading an old classic author lately,” said he, “and met with
a story that strangely interested me. Possibly you may remember it. It is of
an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the
Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset; but what
especially distinguished her was a certain rich perfume in her breath—
richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander, as was natural to a
youthful conqueror, fell in love at first sight with this magnificent stranger;
but a certain sage physician, happening to be present, discovered a terrible
secret in regard to her.”
“And what was that?” asked Giovanni, turning his eyes downward to
avoid those of the professor.
“That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, with emphasis, “had been
nourished with poisons from her birth upward, until her whole nature was
so imbued with them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in
existence. Poison was her element of life. With that rich perfume of her
breath she blasted the very air. Her love would have been poison—her
embrace death. Is not this a marvellous tale?”
“A childish fable,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his chair.
“I marvel how your worship finds time to read such nonsense among your
graver studies.”
“By the by,” said the professor, looking uneasily about him, “what
singular fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the perfume of your
gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, after all, by no means agreeable.
Were I to breathe it long, methinks it would make me ill. It is like the breath
of a flower; but I see no flowers in the chamber.”
“Nor are there any,” replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the
professor spoke; “nor, I think, is there any fragrance except in your

worship’s imagination. Odors, being a sort of element combined of the
sensual and the spiritual, are apt to deceive us in this manner. The
recollection of a perfume, the bare idea of it, may easily be mistaken for a
present reality.”
“Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks,” said
Baglioni; “and, were I to fancy any kind of odor, it would be that of some
vile apothecary drug, wherewith my fingers are likely enough to be imbued.
Our worshipful friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, tinctures his
medicaments with odors richer than those of Araby. Doubtless, likewise, the
fair and learned Signora Beatrice would minister to her patients with
draughts as sweet as a maiden’s breath; but woe to him that sips them!”
Giovanni’s face evinced many contending emotions. The tone in which
the professor alluded to the pure and lovely daughter of Rappaccini was a
torture to his soul; and yet the intimation of a view of her character opposite
to his own, gave instantaneous distinctness to a thousand dim suspicions,
which now grinned at him like so many demons. But he strove hard to quell
them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover’s perfect faith.
“Signor professor,” said he, “you were my father’s friend; perchance, too,
it is your purpose to act a friendly part towards his son. I would fain feel
nothing towards you save respect and deference; but I pray you to observe,
signor, that there is one subject on which we must not speak. You know not
the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore, estimate the wrong—the
blasphemy, I may even say—that is offered to her character by a light or
injurious word.”
“Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!” answered the professor, with a calm
expression of pity, “I know this wretched girl far better than yourself. You
shall hear the truth in respect to the poisoner Rappaccini and his poisonous
daughter; yes, poisonous as she is beautiful. Listen; for, even should you do
violence to my gray hairs, it shall not silence me. That old fable of the
Indian woman has become a truth by the deep and deadly science of
Rappaccini and in the person of the lovely Beatrice.”
Giovanni groaned and hid his face
“Her father,” continued Baglioni, “was not restrained by natural affection
from offering up his child in this horrible manner as the victim of his insane
zeal for science; for, let us do him justice, he is as true a man of science as
ever distilled his own heart in an alembic. What, then, will be your fate?

Beyond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment.
Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still.
Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science before his eyes, will
hesitate at nothing.”
“It is a dream,” muttered Giovanni to himself; “surely it is a dream.”
“But,” resumed the professor, “be of good cheer, son of my friend. It is
not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly we may even succeed in bringing
back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature, from which
her father’s madness has estranged her. Behold this little silver vase! It was
wrought by the hands of the renowned Benvenuto Cellini, and is well
worthy to be a love gift to the fairest dame in Italy. But its contents are
invaluable. One little sip of this antidote would have rendered the most
virulent poisons of the Borgias innocuous. Doubt not that it will be as
efficacious against those of Rappaccini. Bestow the vase, and the precious
liquid within it, on your Beatrice, and hopefully await the result.”
Baglioni laid a small, exquisitely wrought silver vial on the table and
withdrew, leaving what he had said to produce its effect upon the young
man’s mind.
“We will thwart Rappaccini yet,” thought he, chuckling to himself, as he
descended the stairs; “but, let us confess the truth of him, he is a wonderful
man—a wonderful man indeed; a vile empiric, however, in his practice, and
therefore not to be tolerated by those who respect the good old rules of the
medical profession.”
Throughout Giovanni’s whole acquaintance with Beatrice, he had
occasionally, as we have said, been haunted by dark surmises as to her
character; yet so thoroughly had she made herself felt by him as a simple,
natural, most affectionate, and guileless creature, that the image now held
up by Professor Baglioni looked as strange and incredible as if it were not
in accordance with his own original conception. True, there were ugly
recollections connected with his first glimpses of the beautiful girl; he could
not quite forget the bouquet that withered in her grasp, and the insect that
perished amid the sunny air, by no ostensible agency save the fragrance of
her breath. These incidents, however, dissolving in the pure light of her
character, had no longer the efficacy of facts, but were acknowledged as
mistaken fantasies, by whatever testimony of the senses they might appear
to be substantiated. There is something truer and more real than what we

can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better evidence had
Giovanni founded his confidence in Beatrice, though rather by the
necessary force of her high attributes than by any deep and generous faith
on his part. But now his spirit was incapable of sustaining itself at the
height to which the early enthusiasm of passion had exalted it; he fell down,
grovelling among earthly doubts, and defiled therewith the pure whiteness
of Beatrice’s image. Not that he gave her up; he did but distrust. He
resolved to institute some decisive test that should satisfy him, once for all,
whether there were those dreadful peculiarities in her physical nature which
could not be supposed to exist without some corresponding monstrosity of
soul. His eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard,
the insect, and the flowers; but if he could witness, at the distance of a few
paces, the sudden blight of one fresh and healthful flower in Beatrice’s
hand, there would be room for no further question. With this idea he
hastened to the florist’s and purchased a bouquet that was still gemmed with
the morning dew-drops.
It was now the customary hour of his daily interview with Beatrice.
Before descending into the garden, Giovanni failed not to look at his figure
in the mirror,—a vanity to be expected in a beautiful young man, yet, as
displaying itself at that troubled and feverish moment, the token of a certain
shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He did gaze, however,
and said to himself that his features had never before possessed so rich a
grace, nor his eyes such vivacity, nor his cheeks so warm a hue of
superabundant life.
“At least,” thought he, “her poison has not yet insinuated itself into my
system. I am no flower to perish in her grasp.”
With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had never
once laid aside from his hand. A thrill of indefinable horror shot through his
frame on perceiving that those dewy flowers were already beginning to
droop; they wore the aspect of things that had been fresh and lovely
yesterday. Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood motionless before the
mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at the likeness of something
frightful. He remembered Baglioni’s remark about the fragrance that
seemed to pervade the chamber. It must have been the poison in his breath!
Then he shuddered—shuddered at himself. Recovering from his stupor, he
began to watch with curious eye a spider that was busily at work hanging its

web from the antique cornice of the apartment, crossing and recrossing the
artful system of interwoven lines—as vigorous and active a spider as ever
dangled from an old ceiling. Giovanni bent towards the insect, and emitted
a deep, long breath. The spider suddenly ceased its toil; the web vibrated
with a tremor originating in the body of the small artisan. Again Giovanni
sent forth a breath, deeper, longer, and imbued with a venomous feeling out
of his heart: he knew not whether he were wicked, or only desperate. The
spider made a convulsive gripe with his limbs and hung dead across the
window.
“Accursed! accursed!” muttered Giovanni, addressing himself. “Hast
thou grown so poisonous that this deadly insect perishes by thy breath?”
At that moment a rich, sweet voice came floating up from the garden.
“Giovanni! Giovanni! It is past the hour! Why tarriest thou? Come
down!”
“Yes,” muttered Giovanni again. “She is the only being whom my breath
may not slay! Would that it might!”
He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the bright and
loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his wrath and despair had been so
fierce that he could have desired nothing so much as to wither her by a
glance; but with her actual presence there came influences which had too
real an existence to be at once shaken off: recollections of the delicate and
benign power of her feminine nature, which had so often enveloped him in
a religious calm; recollections of many a holy and passionate outgush of her
heart, when the pure fountain had been unsealed from its depths and made
visible in its transparency to his mental eye; recollections which, had
Giovanni known how to estimate them, would have assured him that all this
ugly mystery was but an earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil
might seem to have gathered over her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly
angel. Incapable as he was of such high faith, still her presence had not
utterly lost its magic. Giovanni’s rage was quelled into an aspect of sullen
insensibility. Beatrice, with a quick spiritual sense, immediately felt that
there was a gulf of blackness between them which neither he nor she could
pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came thus to the marble
fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, in the midst of which grew
the shrub that bore gem-like blossoms. Giovanni was affrighted at the eager

enjoyment—the appetite, as it were—with which he found himself inhaling
the fragrance of the flowers.
“Beatrice,” asked he, abruptly, “whence came this shrub?”
“My father created it,” answered she, with simplicity.
“Created it! created it!” repeated Giovanni. “What mean you, Beatrice?”
“He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of Nature,” replied
Beatrice; “and, at the hour when I first drew breath, this plant sprang from
the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his
earthly child. Approach it not!” continued she, observing with terror that
Giovanni was drawing nearer to the shrub. “It has qualities that you little
dream of. But I, dearest Giovanni,—I grew up and blossomed with the plant
and was nourished with its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a
human affection; for, alas!—hast thou not suspected it?—there was an
awful doom.”
Here Giovanni frowned so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and
trembled. But her faith in his tenderness reassured her, and made her blush
that she had doubted for an instant.
“There was an awful doom,” she continued, “the effect of my father’s
fatal love of science, which estranged me from all society of my kind. Until
Heaven sent thee, dearest Giovanni, oh, how lonely was thy poor Beatrice!”
“Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.
“Only of late have I known how hard it was,” answered she, tenderly.
“Oh, yes; but my heart was torpid, and therefore quiet.”
Giovanni’s rage broke forth from his sullen gloom like a lightning flash
out of a dark cloud.
“Accursed one!” cried he, with venomous scorn and anger. “And, finding
thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me likewise from all the warmth
of life and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!”
“Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his
face. The force of his words had not found its way into her mind; she was
merely thunderstruck.
“Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion.
“Thou hast done it! Thou hast blasted me! Thou hast filled my veins with
poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a

creature as thyself—a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity! Now, if our
breath be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us join our lips in
one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die!”
“What has befallen me?” murmured Beatrice, with a low moan out of her
heart. “Holy Virgin, pity me, a poor heart-broken child!”
“Thou,—dost thou pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish
scorn. “Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere
with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip our fingers in the
holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a
pestilence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will be scattering curses abroad
in the likeness of holy symbols!”
“Giovanni,” said Beatrice, calmly, for her grief was beyond passion,
“why dost thou join thyself with me thus in those terrible words? I, it is
true, am the horrible thing thou namest me. But thou,—what hast thou to
do, save with one other shudder at my hideous misery to go forth out of the
garden and mingle with thy race, and forget there ever crawled on earth
such a monster as poor Beatrice?”
“Dost thou pretend ignorance?” asked Giovanni, scowling upon her.
“Behold! this power have I gained from the pure daughter of Rappaccini.”
There was a swarm of summer insects flitting through the air in search of
the food promised by the flower odors of the fatal garden. They circled
round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him by the
same influence which had drawn them for an instant within the sphere of
several of the shrubs. He sent forth a breath among them, and smiled
bitterly at Beatrice as at least a score of the insects fell dead upon the
ground.
“I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal science! No,
no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! I dreamed only to love thee and be
with thee a little time, and so to let thee pass away, leaving but thine image
in mine heart; for, Giovanni, believe it, though my body be nourished with
poison, my spirit is God’s creature, and craves love as its daily food. But
my father,—he has united us in this fearful sympathy. Yes; spurn me, tread
upon me, kill me! Oh, what is death after such words as thine? But it was
not I. Not for a world of bliss would I have done it.”
Giovanni’s passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips.
There now came across him a sense, mournful, and not without tenderness,

of the intimate and peculiar relationship between Beatrice and himself.
They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would be made none the
less solitary by the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then, the desert
of humanity around them to press this insulated pair closer together? If they
should be cruel to one another, who was there to be kind to them? Besides,
thought Giovanni, might there not still be a hope of his returning within the
limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice, the redeemed Beatrice, by
the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an
earthly union and earthly happiness as possible, after such deep love had
been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s love by Giovanni’s blighting
words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with
that broken heart, across the borders of Time—she must bathe her hurts in
some fount of paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality, and
THERE be well.
But Giovanni did not know it.
“Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as
always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest Beatrice,
our fate is not yet so desperate. Behold! there is a medicine, potent, as a
wise physician has assured me, and almost divine in its efficacy. It is
composed of ingredients the most opposite to those by which thy awful
father has brought this calamity upon thee and me. It is distilled of blessed
herbs. Shall we not quaff it together, and thus be purified from evil?”
“Give it me!” said Beatrice, extending her hand to receive the little silver
vial which Giovanni took from his bosom. She added, with a peculiar
emphasis, “I will drink; but do thou await the result.”
She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the
figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards the
marble fountain. As he drew near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze
with a triumphant expression at the beautiful youth and maiden, as might an
artist who should spend his life in achieving a picture or a group of statuary
and finally be satisfied with his success. He paused; his bent form grew
erect with conscious power; he spread out his hands over them in the
attitude of a father imploring a blessing upon his children; but those were
the same hands that had thrown poison into the stream of their lives.
Giovanni trembled. Beatrice shuddered nervously, and pressed her hand
upon her heart.

“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “thou art no longer lonely in the world.
Pluck one of those precious gems from thy sister shrub and bid thy
bridegroom wear it in his bosom. It will not harm him now. My science and
the sympathy between thee and him have so wrought within his system that
he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride
and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through the world, most
dear to one another and dreadful to all besides!”
“My father,” said Beatrice, feebly,—and still as she spoke she kept her
hand upon her heart,—“wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom
upon thy child?”
“Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost
thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which no
power nor strength could avail an enemy—misery, to be able to quell the
mightiest with a breath—misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful?
Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed
to all evil and capable of none?”
“I would fain have been loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking
down upon the ground. “But now it matters not. I am going, father, where
the evil which thou hast striven to mingle with my being will pass away like
a dream-like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer
taint my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Thy words
of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I
ascend. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in
mine?”
To Beatrice,—so radically had her earthly part been wrought upon by
Rappaccini’s skill,—as poison had been life, so the powerful antidote was
death; and thus the poor victim of man’s ingenuity and of thwarted nature,
and of the fatality that attends all such efforts of perverted wisdom, perished
there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni. Just at that moment Professor
Pietro Baglioni looked forth from the window, and called loudly, in a tone
of triumph mixed with horror, to the thunderstricken man of science,
“Rappaccini! Rappaccini! and is this the upshot of your experiment!”

MRS. BULLFROG

It makes me melancholy to see how like fools some very sensible people
act in the matter of choosing wives. They perplex their judgments by a most
undue attention to little niceties of personal appearance, habits, disposition,
and other trifles which concern nobody but the lady herself. An unhappy
gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and
hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept
them. Now this is the very height of absurdity. A kind Providence has so
skilfully adapted sex to sex and the mass of individuals to each other, that,
with certain obvious exceptions, any male and female may be moderately
happy in the married state. The true rule is to ascertain that the match is
fundamentally a good one, and then to take it for granted that all minor
objections, should there be such, will vanish, if you let them alone. Only put
yourself beyond hazard as to the real basis of matrimonial bliss, and it is
scarcely to be imagined what miracles, in the way of recognizing smaller
incongruities, connubial love will effect.
For my own part I freely confess that, in my bachelorship, I was precisely
such an over-curious simpleton as I now advise the reader not to be. My
early habits had gifted me with a feminine sensibility and too exquisite
refinement. I was the accomplished graduate of a dry goods store, where, by
dint of ministering to the whims of fine ladies, and suiting silken hose to
delicate limbs, and handling satins, ribbons, chintzes calicoes, tapes, gauze,
and cambric needles, I grew up a very ladylike sort of a gentleman. It is not
assuming too much to affirm that the ladies themselves were hardly so
ladylike as Thomas Bullfrog. So painfully acute was my sense of female
imperfection, and such varied excellence did I require in the woman whom
I could love, that there was an awful risk of my getting no wife at all, or of
being driven to perpetrate matrimony with my own image in the looking-
glass. Besides the fundamental principle already hinted at, I demanded the
fresh bloom of youth, pearly teeth, glossy ringlets, and the whole list of

lovely items, with the utmost delicacy of habits and sentiments, a silken
texture of mind, and, above all, a virgin heart. In a word, if a young angel
just from paradise, yet dressed in earthly fashion, had come and offered me
her hand, it is by no means certain that I should have taken it. There was
every chance of my becoming a most miserable old bachelor, when, by the
best luck in the world, I made a journey into another state, and was smitten
by, and smote again, and wooed, won, and married, the present Mrs.
Bullfrog, all in the space of a fortnight. Owing to these extempore
measures, I not only gave my bride credit for certain perfections which have
not as yet come to light, but also overlooked a few trifling defects, which,
however, glimmered on my perception long before the close of the
honeymoon. Yet, as there was no mistake about the fundamental principle
aforesaid, I soon learned, as will be seen, to estimate Mrs. Bullfrog’s
deficiencies and superfluities at exactly their proper value.
The same morning that Mrs. Bullfrog and I came together as a unit, we
took two seats in the stage-coach and began our journey towards my place
of business. There being no other passengers, we were as much alone and as
free to give vent to our raptures as if I had hired a hack for the matrimonial
jaunt. My bride looked charmingly in a green silk calash and riding habit of
pelisse cloth; and whenever her red lips parted with a smile, each tooth
appeared like an inestimable pearl. Such was my passionate warmth that—
we had rattled out of the village, gentle reader, and were lonely as Adam
and Eve in paradise—I plead guilty to no less freedom than a kiss. The
gentle eye of Mrs. Bullfrog scarcely rebuked me for the profanation.
Emboldened by her indulgence, I threw back the calash from her polished
brow, and suffered my fingers, white and delicate as her own, to stray
among those dark and glossy curls which realized my daydreams of rich
hair.
“My love,” said Mrs. Bullfrog tenderly, “you will disarrange my curls.”
“Oh, no, my sweet Laura!” replied I, still playing with the glossy ringlet.
“Even your fair hand could not manage a curl more delicately than mine. I
propose myself the pleasure of doing up your hair in papers every evening
at the same time with my own.”
“Mr. Bullfrog,” repeated she, “you must not disarrange my curls.”
This was spoken in a more decided tone than I had happened to hear,
until then, from my gentlest of all gentle brides. At the same time she put up

her hand and took mine prisoner; but merely drew it away from the
forbidden ringlet, and then immediately released it. Now, I am a fidgety
little man, and always love to have something in my fingers; so that, being
debarred from my wife’s curls, I looked about me for any other plaything.
On the front seat of the coach there was one of those small baskets in which
travelling ladies who are too delicate to appear at a public table generally
carry a supply of gingerbread, biscuits and cheese, cold ham, and other light
refreshments, merely to sustain nature to the journey’s end. Such airy diet
will sometimes keep them in pretty good flesh for a week together. Laying
hold of this same little basket, I thrust my hand under the newspaper with
which it was carefully covered.
“What’s this, my dear?” cried I; for the black neck of a bottle had popped
out of the basket.
“A bottle of Kalydor, Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife, coolly taking the
basket from my hands and replacing it on the front seat.
There was no possibility of doubting my wife’s word; but I never knew
genuine Kalydor, such as I use for my own complexion, to smell so much
like cherry brandy. I was about to express my fears that the lotion would
injure her skin, when an accident occurred which threatened more than a
skin-deep injury. Our Jehu had carelessly driven over a heap of gravel and
fairly capsized the coach, with the wheels in the air and our heels where our
heads should have been. What became of my wits I cannot imagine; they
have always had a perverse trick of deserting me just when they were most
needed; but so it chanced, that in the confusion of our overthrow I quite
forgot that there was a Mrs. Bullfrog in the world. Like many men’s wives,
the good lady served her husband as a steppingstone. I had scrambled out of
the coach and was instinctively settling my cravat, when somebody brushed
roughly by me, and I heard a smart thwack upon the coachman’s ear.
“Take that, you villain!” cried a strange, hoarse voice. “You have ruined
me, you blackguard! I shall never be the woman I have been!”
And then came a second thwack, aimed at the driver’s other ear; but
which missed it, and hit him on the nose, causing a terrible effusion of
blood. Now, who or what fearful apparition was inflicting this punishment
on the poor fellow remained an impenetrable mystery to me. The blows
were given by a person of grisly aspect, with a head almost bald, and
sunken cheeks, apparently of the feminine gender, though hardly to be

classed in the gentler sex. There being no teeth to modulate the voice, it had
a mumbled fierceness, not passionate, but stern, which absolutely made me
quiver like calf’s-foot jelly. Who could the phantom be? The most awful
circumstance of the affair is yet to be told: for this ogre, or whatever it was,
had a riding habit like Mrs. Bullfrog’s, and also a green silk calash dangling
down her back by the strings. In my terror and turmoil of mind I could
imagine nothing less than that the Old Nick, at the moment of our overturn,
had annihilated my wife and jumped into her petticoats. This idea seemed
the most probable, since I could nowhere perceive Mrs. Bullfrog alive, nor,
though I looked very sharply about the coach, could I detect any traces of
that beloved woman’s dead body. There would have been a comfort in
giving her Christian burial.
“Come, sir, bestir yourself! Help this rascal to set up the coach,” said the
hobgoblin to me; then, with a terrific screech at three countrymen at a
distance, “Here, you fellows, ain’t you ashamed to stand off when a poor
woman is in distress?”
The countrymen, instead of fleeing for their lives, came running at full
speed, and laid hold of the topsy-turvy coach. I, also, though a small-sized
man, went to work like a son of Anak. The coachman, too, with the blood
still streaming from his nose, tugged and toiled most manfully, dreading,
doubtless, that the next blow might break his head. And yet, bemauled as
the poor fellow had been, he seemed to glance at me with an eye of pity, as
if my case were more deplorable than his. But I cherished a hope that all
would turn out a dream, and seized the opportunity, as we raised the coach,
to jam two of my fingers under the wheel, trusting that the pain would
awaken me.
“Why, here we are, all to rights again!” exclaimed a sweet voice behind.
“Thank you for your assistance, gentlemen. My dear Mr. Bullfrog, how you
perspire! Do let me wipe your face. Don’t take this little accident too much
to heart, good driver. We ought to be thankful that none of our necks are
broken.”
“We might have spared one neck out of the three,” muttered the driver,
rubbing his ear and pulling his nose, to ascertain whether he had been
cuffed or not. “Why, the woman’s a witch!”
I fear that the reader will not believe, yet it is positively a fact, that there
stood Mrs. Bullfrog, with her glossy ringlets curling on her brow, and two

rows of orient pearls gleaming between her parted lips, which wore a most
angelic smile. She had regained her riding habit and calash from the grisly
phantom, and was, in all respects, the lovely woman who had been sitting
by my side at the instant of our overturn. How she had happened to
disappear, and who had supplied her place, and whence she did now return,
were problems too knotty for me to solve. There stood my wife. That was
the one thing certain among a heap of mysteries. Nothing remained but to
help her into the coach, and plod on, through the journey of the day and the
journey of life, as comfortably as we could. As the driver closed the door
upon us, I heard him whisper to the three countrymen, “How do you
suppose a fellow feels shut up in the cage with a she tiger?”
Of course this query could have no reference to my situation. Yet,
unreasonable as it may appear, I confess that my feelings were not
altogether so ecstatic as when I first called Mrs. Bullfrog mine. True, she
was a sweet woman and an angel of a wife; but what if a Gorgon should
return, amid the transports of our connubial bliss, and take the angel’s place.
I recollected the tale of a fairy, who half the time was a beautiful woman
and half the time a hideous monster. Had I taken that very fairy to be the
wife of my bosom? While such whims and chimeras were flitting across my
fancy I began to look askance at Mrs. Bullfrog, almost expecting that the
transformation would be wrought before my eyes.
To divert my mind, I took up the newspaper which had covered the little
basket of refreshments, and which now lay at the bottom of the coach,
blushing with a deep-red stain and emitting a potent spirituous fume from
the contents of the broken bottle of Kalydor. The paper was two or three
years old, but contained an article of several columns, in which I soon grew
wonderfully interested. It was the report of a trial for breach of promise of
marriage, giving the testimony in full, with fervid extracts from both the
gentleman’s and lady’s amatory correspondence. The deserted damsel had
personally appeared in court, and had borne energetic evidence to her
lover’s perfidy and the strength of her blighted affections. On the
defendant’s part there had been an attempt, though insufficiently sustained,
to blast the plaintiff’s character, and a plea, in mitigation of damages, on
account of her unamiable temper. A horrible idea was suggested by the
lady’s name.

“Madam,” said I, holding the newspaper before Mrs. Bullfrog’s eyes,—
and, though a small, delicate, and thin-visaged man, I feel assured that I
looked very terrific,—“madam,” repeated I, through my shut teeth, “were
you the plaintiff in this cause?”
“Oh, my dear Mr. Bullfrog,” replied my wife, sweetly, “I thought all the
world knew that!”
“Horror! horror!” exclaimed I, sinking back on the seat.
Covering my face with both hands, I emitted a deep and deathlike groan,
as if my tormented soul were rending me asunder—I, the most exquisitely
fastidious of men, and whose wife was to have been the most delicate and
refined of women, with all the fresh dew-drops glittering on her virgin
rosebud of a heart!
I thought of the glossy ringlets and pearly teeth; I thought of the Kalydor;
I thought of the coachman’s bruised ear and bloody nose; I thought of the
tender love secrets which she had whispered to the judge and jury and a
thousand tittering auditors,—and gave another groan!
“Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife.
As I made no reply, she gently took my hands within her own, removed
them from my face, and fixed her eyes steadfastly on mine.
“Mr. Bullfrog,” said she, not unkindly, yet with all the decision of her
strong character, “let me advise you to overcome this foolish weakness, and
prove yourself, to the best of your ability, as good a husband as I will be a
wife. You have discovered, perhaps, some little imperfections in your bride.
Well, what did you expect? Women are not angels. If they were, they would
go to heaven for husbands; or, at least, be more difficult in their choice on
earth.”
“But why conceal those imperfections?” interposed I, tremulously.
“Now, my love, are not you a most unreasonable little man?” said Mrs.
Bullfrog, patting me on the cheek. “Ought a woman to disclose her frailties
earlier than the wedding day? Few husbands, I assure you, make the
discovery in such good season, and still fewer complain that these trifles are
concealed too long. Well, what a strange man you are! Poh! you are
joking.”
“But the suit for breach of promise!” groaned I.

“Ah, and is that the rub?” exclaimed my wife. “Is it possible that you
view that affair in an objectionable light? Mr. Bullfrog, I never could have
dreamed it! Is it an objection that I have triumphantly defended myself
against slander and vindicated my purity in a court of justice? Or do you
complain because your wife has shown the proper spirit of a woman, and
punished the villain who trifled with her affections?”
“But,” persisted I, shrinking into a corner of the coach, however,—for I
did not know precisely how much contradiction the proper spirit of a
woman would endure,—“but, my love, would it not have been more
dignified to treat the villain with the silent contempt he merited?”
“That is all very well, Mr. Bullfrog,” said my wife, slyly; “but, in that
case, where would have been the five thousand dollars which are to stock
your dry goods store?”
“Mrs. Bullfrog, upon your honor,” demanded I, as if my life hung upon
her words, “is there no mistake about those five thousand dollars?”
“Upon my word and honor there is none,” replied she. “The jury gave me
every cent the rascal had; and I have kept it all for my dear Bullfrog.”
“Then, thou dear woman,” cried I, with an overwhelming gush of
tenderness, “let me fold thee to my heart. The basis of matrimonial bliss is
secure, and all thy little defects and frailties are forgiven. Nay, since the
result has been so fortunate, I rejoice at the wrongs which drove thee to this
blessed lawsuit. Happy Bullfrog that I am!”

FIRE WORSHIP

It is a great revolution in social and domestic life, and no less so in the
life of a secluded student, this almost universal exchange of the open
fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove. On such a morning as now
lowers around our old gray parsonage, I miss the bright face of my ancient
friend, who was wont to dance upon the hearth and play the part of more
familiar sunshine. It is sad to turn from the cloudy sky and sombre
landscape; from yonder hill, with its crown of rusty, black pines, the foliage
of which is so dismal in the absence of the sun; that bleak pasture-land, and
the broken surface of the potato-field, with the brown clods partly
concealed by the snowfall of last night; the swollen and sluggish river, with
ice-incrusted borders, dragging its bluish-gray stream along the verge of our
orchard like a snake half torpid with the cold,—it is sad to turn from an
outward scene of so little comfort and find the same sullen influences
brooding within the precincts of my study. Where is that brilliant guest, that
quick and subtle spirit, whom Prometheus lured from heaven to civilize
mankind and cheer them in their wintry desolation; that comfortable inmate,
whose smile, during eight months of the year, was our sufficient consolation
for summer’s lingering advance and early flight? Alas! blindly inhospitable,
grudging the food that kept him cheery and mercurial, we have thrust him
into an iron prison, and compel him to smoulder away his life on a daily
pittance which once would have been too scanty for his breakfast. Without a
metaphor, we now make our fire in an air-tight stove, and supply it with
some half a dozen sticks of wood between dawn and nightfall.
I never shall be reconciled to this enormity. Truly may it be said that the
world looks darker for it. In one way or another, here and there and all
around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the
poetic, and the beautiful out of human life. The domestic fire was a type of
all these attributes, and seemed to bring might and majesty, and wild nature
and a spiritual essence, into our in most home, and yet to dwell with us in

such friendliness that its mysteries and marvels excited no dismay. The
same mild companion that smiled so placidly in our faces was he that
comes roaring out of Ætna and rushes madly up the sky like a fiend
breaking loose from torment and fighting for a place among the upper
angels. He it is, too, that leaps from cloud to cloud amid the crashing
thunder-storm. It was he whom the Gheber worshipped with no unnatural
idolatry; and it was he who devoured London and Moscow and many
another famous city, and who loves to riot through our own dark forests and
sweep across our prairies, and to whose ravenous maw, it is said, the
universe shall one day be given as a final feast. Meanwhile he is the great
artisan and laborer by whose aid men are enabled to build a world within a
world, or, at least, to smooth down the rough creation which Nature flung to
it. He forges the mighty anchor and every lesser instrument; he drives the
steamboat and drags the rail-car; and it was he—this creature of terrible
might, and so many-sided utility and all-comprehensive destructiveness—
that used to be the cheerful, homely friend of our wintry days, and whom
we have made the prisoner of this iron cage.
How kindly he was! and, though the tremendous agent of change, yet
bearing himself with such gentleness, so rendering himself a part of all life-
long and age-coeval associations, that it seemed as if he were the great
conservative of nature. While a man was true to the fireside, so long would
he be true to country and law, to the God whom his fathers worshipped, to
the wife of his youth, and to all things else which instinct or religion has
taught us to consider sacred. With how sweet humility did this elemental
spirit perform all needful offices for the household in which he was
domesticated! He was equal to the concoction of a grand dinner, yet scorned
not to roast a potato or toast a bit of cheese. How humanely did he cherish
the school-boy’s icy fingers, and thaw the old man’s joints with a genial
warmth which almost equalled the glow of youth! And how carefully did he
dry the cowhide boots that had trudged through mud and snow, and the
shaggy outside garment stiff with frozen sleet! taking heed, likewise, to the
comfort of the faithful dog who had followed his master through the storm.
When did he refuse a coal to light a pipe, or even a part of his own
substance to kindle a neighbor’s fire? And then, at twilight, when laborer, or
scholar, or mortal of whatever age, sex, or degree, drew a chair beside him
and looked into his glowing face, how acute, how profound, how
comprehensive was his sympathy with the mood of each and all! He

pictured forth their very thoughts. To the youthful he showed the scenes of
the adventurous life before them; to the aged the shadows of departed love
and hope; and, if all earthly things had grown distasteful, he could gladden
the fireside muser with golden glimpses of a better world. And, amid this
varied communion with the human soul, how busily would the sympathizer,
the deep moralist, the painter of magic pictures, be causing the teakettle to
boil!
Nor did it lessen the charm of his soft, familiar courtesy and helpfulness
that the mighty spirit, were opportunity offered him, would run riot through
the peaceful house, wrap its inmates in his terrible embrace, and leave
nothing of them save their whitened bones. This possibility of mad
destruction only made his domestic kindness the more beautiful and
touching. It was so sweet of him, being endowed with such power, to dwell
day after day, and one long lonesome night after another, on the dusky
hearth, only now and then betraying his wild nature by thrusting his red
tongue out of the chimney-top! True, he had done much mischief in the
world, and was pretty certain to do more; but his warm heart atoned for all.
He was kindly to the race of man; and they pardoned his characteristic
imperfections.
The good old clergyman, my predecessor in this mansion, was well
acquainted with the comforts of the fireside. His yearly allowance of wood,
according to the terms of his settlement, was no less than sixty cords.
Almost an annual forest was converted from sound oak logs into ashes, in
the kitchen, the parlor, and this little study, where now an unworthy
successor, not in the pastoral office, but merely in his earthly abode, sits
scribbling beside an air-tight stove. I love to fancy one of those fireside
days while the good man, a contemporary of the Revolution, was in his
early prime, some five-and-sixty years ago. Before sunrise, doubtless, the
blaze hovered upon the gray skirts of night and dissolved the frostwork that
had gathered like a curtain over the small window-panes. There is
something peculiar in the aspect of the morning fireside; a fresher, brisker
glare; the absence of that mellowness which can be produced only by half-
consumed logs, and shapeless brands with the white ashes on them, and
mighty coals, the remnant of tree-trunks that the hungry, elements have
gnawed for hours. The morning hearth, too, is newly swept, and the brazen
andirons well brightened, so that the cheerful fire may see its face in them.
Surely it was happiness, when the pastor, fortified with a substantial

breakfast, sat down in his arm-chair and slippers and opened the Whole
Body of Divinity, or the Commentary on Job, or whichever of his old folios
or quartos might fall within the range of his weekly sermons. It must have
been his own fault if the warmth and glow of this abundant hearth did not
permeate the discourse and keep his audience comfortable in spite of the
bitterest northern blast that ever wrestled with the church-steeple. He reads
while the heat warps the stiff covers of the volume; he writes without
numbness either in his heart or fingers; and, with unstinted hand, he throws
fresh sticks of wood upon the fire.
A parishioner comes in. With what warmth of benevolence—how should
he be otherwise than warm in any of his attributes?—does the minister bid
him welcome, and set a chair for him in so close proximity to the hearth,
that soon the guest finds it needful to rub his scorched shins with his great
red hands! The melted snow drips from his steaming boots and bubbles
upon the hearth. His puckered forehead unravels its entanglement of
crisscross wrinkles. We lose much of the enjoyment of fireside heat without
such an opportunity of marking its genial effect upon those who have been
looking the inclement weather in the face. In the course of the day our
clergyman himself strides forth, perchance to pay a round of pastoral visits;
or, it may he, to visit his mountain of a wood-pile and cleave the monstrous
logs into billets suitable for the fire. He returns with fresher life to his
beloved hearth. During the short afternoon the western sunshine comes into
the study and strives to stare the ruddy blaze out of countenance but with
only a brief triumph, soon to be succeeded by brighter glories of its rival.
Beautiful it is to see the strengthening gleam, the deepening light that
gradually casts distinct shadows of the human figure, the table, and the
high-backed chairs upon the opposite wall, and at length, as twilight comes
on, replenishes the room with living radiance and makes life all rose-color.
Afar the wayfarer discerns the flickering flame as it dances upon the
windows, and hails it as a beacon-light of humanity, reminding him, in his
cold and lonely path, that the world is not all snow, and solitude, and
desolation. At eventide, probably, the study was peopled with the
clergyman’s wife and family, and children tumbled themselves upon the
hearth-rug, and grave puss sat with her back to the fire, or gazed, with a
semblance of human meditation, into its fervid depths. Seasonably the
plenteous ashes of the day were raked over the mouldering brands, and

from the heap came jets of flame, and an incense of night-long smoke
creeping quietly up the chimney.
Heaven forgive the old clergyman! In his later life, when for almost
ninety winters he had been gladdened by the firelight,—when it had
gleamed upon him from infancy to extreme age, and never without
brightening his spirits as well as his visage, and perhaps keeping him alive
so long,—he had the heart to brick up his chimney-place and bid farewell to
the face of his old friend forever, why did he not take an eternal leave of the
sunshine too? His sixty cords of wood had probably dwindled to a far less
ample supply in modern times; and it is certain that the parsonage had
grown crazy with time and tempest and pervious to the cold; but still it was
one of the saddest tokens of the decline and fall of open fireplaces that, the
gray patriarch should have deigned to warm himself at an air-tight stove.
And I, likewise,—who have found a home in this ancient owl’s-nest since
its former occupant took his heavenward flight,—I, to my shame, have put
up stoves in kitchen and parlor and chamber. Wander where you will about
the house, not a glimpse of the earth-born, heaven-aspiring fiend of Ætna,
—him that sports in the thunder-storm, the idol of the Ghebers, the devourer
of cities, the forest-rioter and prairie-sweeper, the future destroyer of our
earth, the old chimney-corner companion who mingled himself so sociably
with household joys and sorrows,—not a glimpse of this mighty and kindly
one will greet your eyes. He is now an invisible presence. There is his iron
cage. Touch it, and he scorches your fingers. He delights to singe a garment
or perpetrate any other little unworthy mischief; for his temper is ruined by
the ingratitude of mankind, for whom he cherished such warmth of feeling,
and to whom he taught all their arts, even that of making his own prison-
house. In his fits of rage he puffs volumes of smoke and noisome gas
through the crevices of the door, and shakes the iron walls of his dungeon
so as to overthrow the ornamental urn upon its summit. We tremble lest he
should break forth amongst us. Much of his time is spent in sighs, burdened
with unutterable grief, and long drawn through the funnel. He amuses
himself, too, with repeating all the whispers, the moans, and the louder
utterances or tempestuous howls of the wind; so that the stove becomes a
microcosm of the aerial world. Occasionally there are strange combinations
of sounds,—voices talking almost articulately within the hollow chest of
iron,—insomuch that fancy beguiles me with the idea that my firewood
must have grown in that infernal forest of lamentable trees which breathed

their complaints to Dante. When the listener is half asleep he may readily
take these voices for the conversation of spirits and assign them an
intelligible meaning. Anon there is a pattering noise,—drip, drip, drip,—as
if a summer shower were falling within the narrow circumference of the
stove.
These barren and tedious eccentricities are all that the air-tight stove can
bestow in exchange for the invaluable moral influences which we have lost
by our desertion of the open fireplace. Alas! is this world so very bright that
we can afford to choke up such a domestic fountain of gladsomeness, and
sit down by its darkened source without being conscious of a gloom?
It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it has
been, now that we have subtracted from it so important and vivifying an
element as firelight. The effects will be more perceptible on our children
and the generations that shall succeed them than on ourselves, the
mechanism of whose life may remain unchanged, though its spirit be far
other than it was. The sacred trust of the household fire has been transmitted
in unbroken succession from the earliest ages, and faithfully cherished in
spite of every discouragement such as the curfew law of the Norman
conquerors, until in these evil days physical science has nearly succeeded in
extinguishing it. But we at least have our youthful recollections tinged with
the glow of the hearth, and our life-long habits and associations arranged on
the principle of a mutual bond in the domestic fire. Therefore, though the
sociable friend be forever departed, yet in a degree he will be spiritually
present with us; and still more will the empty forms which were once full of
his rejoicing presence continue to rule our manners. We shall draw our
chairs together as we and our forefathers have been wont for thousands of
years back, and sit around some blank and empty corner of the room,
babbling with unreal cheerfulness of topics suitable to the homely fireside.
A warmth from the past—from the ashes of bygone years and the raked-up
embers of long ago—will sometimes thaw the ice about our hearts; but it
must be otherwise with our successors. On the most favorable supposition,
they will be acquainted with the fireside in no better shape than that of the
sullen stove; and more probably they will have grown up amid furnace heat
in houses which might be fancied to have their foundation over the infernal
pit, whence sulphurous steams and unbreathable exhalations ascend through
the apertures of the floor. There will be nothing to attract these poor
children to one centre. They will never behold one another through that

peculiar medium of vision the ruddy gleam of blazing wood or bituminous
coal—-which gives the human spirit so deep an insight into its fellows and
melts all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts. Domestic life, if it may
still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never gather
itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious Jest; the life-
like, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way; the soul of truth
which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word,—will disappear from
earth. Conversation will contract the air of debate, and all mortal
intercourse be chilled with a fatal frost.
In classic times, the exhortation to fight “pro axis et focis,” for the altars
and the hearths, was considered the strongest appeal that could be made to
patriotism. And it seemed an immortal utterance; for all subsequent ages
and people have acknowledged its force and responded to it with the full
portion of manhood that nature had assigned to each. Wisely were the altar
and the hearth conjoined in one mighty sentence; for the hearth, too, had its
kindred sanctity. Religion sat down beside it, not in the priestly robes which
decorated and perhaps disguised her at the altar, but arrayed in a simple
matron’s garb, and uttering her lessons with the tenderness of a mother’s
voice and heart. The holy hearth! If any earthly and material thing, or rather
a divine idea embodied in brick and mortar, might be supposed to possess
the permanence of moral truth, it was this. All revered it. The man who did
not put off his shoes upon this holy ground would have deemed it pastime
to trample upon the altar. It has been our task to uproot the hearth. What
further reform is left for our children to achieve, unless they overthrow the
altar too? And by what appeal hereafter, when the breath of hostile armies
may mingle with the pure, cold breezes of our country, shall we attempt to
rouse up native valor? Fight for your hearths? There will be none
throughout the land. FIGHT FOR YOUR STOVES! Not I, in faith. If in such a
cause I strike a blow, it shall be on the invader’s part; and Heaven grant that
it may shatter the abomination all to pieces!

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES

Balmy Spring—weeks later than we expected and months later than we
longed for her—comes at last to revive the moss on the roof and walls of
our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window, inviting me to
throw it open and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture of her
genial breath with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove. As the
casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the innumerable forms of
thought or fancy that have kept me company in the retirement of this little
chamber during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather; visions, gay,
grotesque, and sad; pictures of real life, tinted with nature’s homely gray
and russet; scenes in dreamland, bedizened with rainbow hues which faded
before they were well laid on,—all these may vanish now, and leave me to
mould a fresh existence out of sunshine, Brooding Meditation may flap her
dusky wings and take her owl-like Right, blinking amid the cheerfulness of
noontide. Such companions befit the season of frosted window-panes and
crackling fires, when the blast howls through the black-ash trees of our
avenue and the drifting snow-storm chokes up the wood-paths and fills the
highway from stone wall to stone wall. In the spring and summer time all
sombre thoughts should follow the winter northward with the sombre and
thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again in force; we
live, not to think or to labor, but for the simple end of being happy. Nothing
for the present hour is worthy of man’s infinite capacity save to imbibe the
warm smile of heaven and sympathize with the reviving earth.
The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because Winter
lingered so unconscionably long that with her best diligence she can hardly
retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a fortnight since I
stood on the brink of our swollen river and beheld the accumulated ice of
four frozen months go down the stream. Except in streaks here and there
upon the hillsides, the whole visible universe was then covered with deep
snow, the nethermost layer of which had been deposited by an early

December storm. It was a sight to make the beholder torpid, in the
impossibility of imagining how this vast white napkin was to be removed
from the face of the corpse-like world in less time than had been required to
spread it there. But who can estimate the power of gentle influences,
whether amid material desolation or the moral winter of man’s heart? There
have been no tempestuous rains, even no sultry days, but a constant breath
of southern winds, with now a day of kindly sunshine, and now a no less
kindly mist or a soft descent of showers, in which a smile and a blessing
seemed to have been steeped. The snow has vanished as if by magic;
whatever heaps may be hidden in the woods and deep gorges of the hills,
only two solitary specks remain in the landscape; and those I shall almost
regret to miss when to-morrow I look for them in vain. Never before,
methinks, has spring pressed so closely on the footsteps of retreating winter.
Along the roadside the green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge
of the snow-drifts. The pastures and mowing-fields have not vet assumed a
general aspect of verdure; but neither have they the cheerless-brown tint
which they wear in latter autumn when vegetation has entirely ceased; there
is now a faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into the warm reality.
Some tracts in a happy exposure,—as, for instance, yonder southwestern
slope of an orchard, in front of that old red farm-house beyond the river,—
such patches of land already wear a beautiful and tender green, to which no
future luxuriance can add a charm. It looks unreal; a prophecy, a hope, a
transitory effect of sonic peculiar light, which will vanish with the slightest
motion of the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not these verdant tracts,
but the dark and barren landscape all around them, is a shadow and a
dream. Each moment wins seine portion of the earth from death to life; a
sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope of a bank which
an instant ago was brown and bare. You look again, and behold an
apparition of green grass!
The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already
appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one magic touch
they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the wind which
now sighs through their naked branches might make sudden music amid
innumerable leaves. The mossgrown willow-tree which for forty years past
has overshadowed these western windows will be among the first to put on
its green attire. There are some objections to the willow; it is not a dry and
cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder with an association of sliminess.

No trees, I think, are perfectly agreeable as companions unless they have
glossy leaves, dry bark, and a firm and hard texture of trunk and branches.
But the willow is almost the earliest to gladden us with the promise and
reality of beauty in its graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its
yellow yet scarcely withered leaves upon the ground. All through the
winter, too, its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect, which is not without a
cheering influence even in the grayest and gloomiest day. Beneath a
clouded sky it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our old house would lose
a charm were the willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over the
snow-covered roof and its heap of summer verdure.
The lilac-shrubs under my study-windows are likewise almost in leaf: in
two or three days more I may put forth my hand and pluck the topmost
bough in its freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have lost the
luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart, or the judgment, or the moral
sense, or the taste is dissatisfied with their present aspect. Old age is not
venerable when it embodies itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or any other
ornamental shrub; it seems as if such plants, as they grow only for beauty,
ought to flourish always in immortal youth, or, at least, to die before their
sad decrepitude. Trees of beauty are trees of paradise, and therefore not
subject to decay by their original nature, though they have lost that precious
birthright by being transplanted to an earthly soil. There is a kind of
ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a time-stricken and grandfatherly lilac-
bush. The analogy holds good in human life. Persons who can only be
graceful and ornamental—who can give the world nothing but flowers—
should die young, and never be seen with gray hair and wrinkles, any more
than the flower-shrubs with mossy bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs
under my window. Not that beauty is worthy of less than immortality; no,
the beautiful should live forever,—and thence, perhaps, the sense of
impropriety when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees, on the
other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as long as they may,
and contort themselves into whatever perversity of shape they please, and
deck their withered limbs with a springtime gaudiness of pink blossoms;
still they are respectable, even if they afford us only an apple or two in a
season. Those few apples—or, at all events, the remembrance of apples in
bygone years—are the atonement which utilitarianism inexorably demands
for the privilege of lengthened life. Human flower-shrubs, if they will grow
old on earth, should, besides their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of fruit

that will satisfy earthly appetites, else neither man nor the decorum of
nature will deem it fit that the moss should gather on them.
One of the first things that strikes the attention when the white sheet of
winter is withdrawn is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden beneath it.
Nature is not cleanly according to our prejudices. The beauty of preceding
years, now transformed to brown and blighted deformity, obstructs the
brightening loveliness of the present hour. Our avenue is strewn with the
whole crop of autumn’s withered leaves. There are quantities of decayed
branches which one tempest after another has flung down, black and rotten,
and one or two with the ruin of a bird’s-nest clinging to them. In the garden
are the dried bean-vines, the brown stalks of the asparagus-bed, and
melancholy old cabbages which were frozen into the soil before their
unthrifty cultivator could find time to gather them. How invariably,
throughout all the forms of life, do we find these intermingled memorials of
death! On the soil of thought and in the garden of the heart, as well as in the
sensual world, he withered leaves,—the ideas and feelings that we have
done with. There is no wind strong enough to sweep them away; infinite
space will not garner then from our sight. What mean they? Why may we
not be permitted to live and enjoy, as if this were the first life and our own
the primal enjoyment, instead of treading always on these dry hones and
mouldering relics, from the aged accumulation of which springs all that
now appears so young and new? Sweet must have been the springtime of
Eden, when no earlier year had strewn its decay upon the virgin turf and no
former experience had ripened into summer and faded into autumn in the
hearts of its inhabitants! That was a world worth living in. O then
murmurer, it is out of the very wantonness of such a life that then feignest
these idle lamentations. There is no decay. Each human soul is the first-
created inhabitant of its own Eden. We dwell in an old moss-covered
mansion, and tread in the worn footprints of the past, and have a gray
clergyman’s ghost for our daily and nightly inmate; yet all these outward
circumstances are made less than visionary by the renewing power of the
spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this power,—should the withered leaves,
and the rotten branches, and the moss-covered house, and the ghost of the
gray past ever become its realities, and the verdure and the freshness merely
its faint dream,—then let it pray to be released from earth. It will need the
air of heaven to revive its pristine energies.

What an unlooked-for flight was this from our shadowy avenue of black-
ash and balm of Gilead trees into the infinite! Now we have our feet again
upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so industriously as in this
homely yard, along the base of the stone wall, and in the sheltered nooks of
the buildings, and especially around the southern doorstep,—a locality
which seems particularly favorable to its growth, for it is already tall
enough to bend over and wave in the wind. I observe that several weeds—
and most frequently a plant that stains the fingers with its yellow juice—
have survived and retained their freshness and sap throughout the winter.
One knows not how they have deserved such an exception from the
common lot of their race. They are now the patriarchs of the departed year,
and may preach mortality to the present generation of flowers and weeds.
Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the birds? Even
the crows were welcome as the sable harbingers of a brighter and livelier
race. They visited us before the snow was off, but seem mostly to have
betaken themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they haunt all
summer long. Many a time shall I disturb them there, and feel as if I had
intruded among a company of silent worshippers, as they sit in Sabbath
stillness among the tree-tops. Their voices, when they speak, are in
admirable accordance with the tranquil solitude of a summer afternoon; and
resounding so far above the head, their loud clamor increases the religious
quiet of the scene instead of breaking it. A crow, however, has no real
pretensions to religion, in spite of his gravity of mien and black attire; he is
certainly a thief, and probably an infidel. The gulls are far more respectable,
in a moral point of view. These denizens of seabeaten rocks and haunters of
the lonely beach come up our inland river at this season, and soar high
overhead, flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are among
the most picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest upon the air as
to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imagination has
time to grow acquainted with them; they have not flitted away in a moment.
You go up among the clouds and greet these lofty-flighted gulls, and repose
confidently with them upon the sustaining atmosphere. Duck’s have their
haunts along the solitary places of the river, and alight in flocks upon the
broad bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their flight is too rapid and
determined for the eye to catch enjoyment from it, although it never fails to
stir up the heart with the sportsman’s ineradicable instinct. They have now
gone farther northward, but will visit us again in autumn.

The smaller birds,—the little songsters of the woods, and those that haunt
man’s dwellings and claim human friendship by building their nests under
the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees,—these require a touch
more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to do them justice. Their
outburst of melody is like a brook let loose from wintry chains. We need not
deem it a too high and solemn word to call it a hymn of praise to the
Creator; since Nature, who pictures the reviving year in so many sights of
beauty, has expressed the sentiment of renewed life in no other sound save
the notes of these blessed birds. Their music, however, just now, seems to
be incidental, and not the result of a set purpose. They are discussing the
economy of life and love and the site and architecture of their summer
residences, and have no time to sit on a twig and pour forth solemn hymns,
or overtures, operas, symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious questions are asked;
grave subjects are settled in quick and animated debate; and only by
occasional accident, as from pure ecstasy, does a rich warble roll its tiny
waves of golden sound through the atmosphere. Their little bodies are as
busy as their voices; they are all a constant flutter and restlessness. Even
when two or three retreat to a tree-top to hold council, they wag their tails
and heads all the time with the irrepressible activity of their nature, which
perhaps renders their brief span of life in reality as long as the patriarchal
age of sluggish man. The blackbirds, three species of which consort
together, are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great companies of
them—more than the famous “four-and-twenty” whom Mother Goose has
immortalized—congregate in contiguous treetops and vociferate with all the
clamor and confusion of a turbulent political meeting. Politics, certainly,
must be the occasion of such tumultuous debates; but still, unlike all other
politicians, they instil melody into their individual utterances and produce
harmony as a general effect. Of all bird voices, none are more sweet and
cheerful to my ear than those of swallows, in the dim, sunstreaked interior
of a lofty barn; they address the heart with even a closer sympathy than
robin-redbreast. But, indeed, all these winged people, that dwell in the
vicinity of homesteads, seem to partake of human nature, and possess the
germ, if not the development, of immortal souls. We hear them saying their
melodious prayers at morning’s blush and eventide. A little while ago, in the
deep of night, there came the lively thrill of a bird’s note from a
neighboring tree,—a real song, such as greets the purple dawn or mingles
with the yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean by pouring it forth

at midnight? Probably the music gushed out of the midst of a dream in
which he fancied himself in paradise with his mate, but suddenly awoke on
a cold leafless bough, with a New England mist penetrating through his
feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination for reality.
Insects are among the earliest births of sprung. Multitudes of I know not
what species appeared long ago on the surface of the snow. Clouds of them,
almost too minute for sight, hover in a beam of sunshine, and vanish, as if
annihilated, when they pass into the shade. A mosquito has already been
heard to sound the small horror of his bugle-horn. Wasps infest the sunny
windows of the house. A bee entered one of the chambers with a prophecy
of flowers. Rare butterflies came before the snow was off, flaunting in the
chill breeze, and looking forlorn and all astray, in spite of the magnificence
of their dark velvet cloaks, with golden borders.
The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the wanderer.
In a walk, the other day, I found no violets, nor anemones, nor anything in
the likeness of a flower. It was worth while, however, to ascend our
opposite hill for the sake of gaining a general idea of the advance of spring,
which I had hitherto been studying in its minute developments. The river
lay around me in a semicircle, overflowing all the meadows which give it
its Indian name, and offering a noble breadth to sparkle in the sunbeams.
Along the hither shore a row of trees stood up to their knees in water; and
afar off, on the surface of the stream, tufts of bushes thrust up their heads,
as it were, to breathe. The most striking objects were great solitary trees
here and there, with a mile-wide waste of water all around them. The
curtailment of the trunk, by its immersion in the river, quite destroys the fair
proportions of the tree, and thus makes us sensible of a regularity and
propriety in the usual forms of nature. The flood of the present season—
though it never amounts to a freshet on our quiet stream—has encroached
farther upon the land than any previous one for at least a score of years. It
has overflowed stone fences, and even rendered a portion of the highway
navigable for boats.
The waters, however, are now gradually subsiding; islands become
annexed to the mainland; and other islands emerge, like new creations, from
the watery waste. The scene supplies an admirable image of the receding of
the Nile, except that there is no deposit of black slime; or of Noah’s flood,
only that there is a freshness and novelty in these recovered portions of the

continent which give the impression of a world just made rather than of one
so polluted that a deluge had been requisite to purify it. These upspringing
islands are the greenest spots in the landscape; the first gleam of sunlight
suffices to cover them with verdure.
Thank Providence for spring! The earth—and man himself, by sympathy
with his birthplace would be far other than we find them if life toiled
wearily onward without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit. Will the
world ever be so decayed that spring may not renew its greenness? Can man
be so dismally age stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth may revisit
him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion
brightens into beauty; the good old pastor who once dwelt here renewed his
prime, regained his boyhood, in the genial breezes of his ninetieth spring.
Alas for the worn and heavy soul if, whether in youth or age, it have
outlived its privilege of springtime sprightliness! From such a soul the
world must hope no reformation of its evil, no sympathy with the lofty faith
and gallant struggles of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works in
the present, and thinks not of the future; autumn is a rich conservative;
winter has utterly lost its faith, and clings tremulously to the remembrance
of what has been; but spring, with its outgushing life, is the true type of the
movement.

MONSIEUR DU MIROIR

Than the gentleman above named, there is nobody, in the whole circle of
my acquaintance, whom I have more attentively studied, yet of whom I
have less real knowledge, beneath the surface which it pleases him to
present. Being anxious to discover who and what he really is, and how
connected with me, and what are to be the results to him and to myself of
the joint interest which, without any choice on my part, seems to be
permanently established between us, and incited, furthermore, by the
propensities of a student of human nature, though doubtful whether
Monsieur du Miroir have aught of humanity but the figure,—I have
determined to place a few of his remarkable points before the public,
hoping to be favored with some clew to the explanation of his character.
Nor let the reader condemn any part of the narrative as frivolous, since a
subject of such grave reflection diffuses its importance through the minutest
particulars; and there is no judging beforehand what odd little circumstance
may do the office of a blind man’s dog among the perplexities of this dark
investigation; and however extraordinary, marvellous, preternatural, and
utterly incredible some of the meditated disclosures may appear, I pledge
my honor to maintain as sacred a regard to fact as if my testimony were
given on oath and involved the dearest interests of the personage in
question. Not that there is matter for a criminal accusation against Monsieur
du Miroir, nor am I the man to bring it forward if there were. The chief that
I complain of is his impenetrable mystery, which is no better than nonsense
if it conceal anything good, and much worse in the contrary case.
But, if undue partialities could be supposed to influence me, Monsieur du
Miroir might hope to profit rather than to suffer by them, for in the whole of
our long intercourse we have seldom had the slightest disagreement; and,
moreover, there are reasons for supposing him a near relative of mine, and
consequently entitled to the best word that I can give him. He bears
indisputably a strong personal resemblance to myself, and generally puts on

mourning at the funerals of the family. On the other hand, his name would
indicate a French descent; in which case, infinitely preferring that my blood
should flow from a bold British and pure Puritan source, I beg leave to
disclaim all kindred with Monsieur du Miroir. Some genealogists trace his
origin to Spain, and dub him a knight of the order of the CABALLEROS DE
LOS ESPEJOZ, one of whom was overthrown by Don Quixote. But what says
Monsieur du Miroir himself of his paternity and his fatherland? Not a word
did he ever say about the matter; and herein, perhaps, lies one of his most
especial reasons for maintaining such a vexatious mystery, that he lacks the
faculty of speech to expound it. His lips are sometimes seen to move; his
eyes and countenance are alive with shifting expression, as if corresponding
by visible hieroglyphics to his modulated breath; and anon he will seem to
pause with as satisfied an air as if he had been talking excellent sense. Good
sense or bad, Monsieur du Miroir is the sole judge of his own
conversational powers, never having whispered so much as a syllable that
reached the ears of any other auditor. Is he really dumb? or is all the world
deaf? or is it merely a piece of my friend’s waggery, meant for nothing but
to make fools of us? If so, he has the joke all to himself.
This dumb devil which possesses Monsieur do Miroir is, I am persuaded,
the sole reason that he does not make me the most flattering protestations of
friendship. In many particulars—indeed, as to all his cognizable and not
preternatural points, except that, once in a great while, I speak a word or
two—there exists the greatest apparent sympathy between us. Such is his
confidence in my taste that he goes astray from the general fashion and
copies all his dresses after mine. I never try on a new garment without
expecting to meet, Monsieur du Miroir in one of the same pattern. He has
duplicates of all my waistcoats and cravats, shirt-bosoms of precisely a
similar plait, and an old coat for private wear, manufactured, I suspect, by a
Chinese tailor, in exact imitation of a beloved old coat of mine, with a
facsimile, stitch by stitch, of a patch upon the elbow. In truth, the singular
and minute coincidences that occur, both in the accidents of the passing day
and the serious events of our lives, remind me of those doubtful legends of
lovers, or twin children, twins of fate, who have lived, enjoyed, suffered,
and died in unison, each faithfully repeating the last tremor of the other’s
breath, though separated by vast tracts of sea and land. Strange to say, my
incommodities belong equally to my companion, though the burden is
nowise alleviated by his participation. The other morning, after a night of

torment from the toothache, I met Monsieur du Miroir with such a swollen
anguish in his cheek that my own pangs were redoubled, as were also his, if
I might judge by a fresh contortion of his visage. All the inequalities of my
spirits are communicated to him, causing the unfortunate Monsieur du
Miroir to mope and scowl through a whole summer’s day, or to laugh as
long, for no better reason than the gay or gloomy crotchets of my brain.
Once we were joint sufferers of a three months’ sickness, and met like
mutual ghosts in the first days of convalescence. Whenever I have been in
love, Monsieur du Miroir has looked passionate and tender; and never did
my mistress discard me, but this too susceptible gentleman grew
lackadaisical. His temper, also, rises to blood heat, fever heat, or boiling-
water beat, according to the measure of any wrong which might seem to
have fallen entirely on myself. I have sometimes been calmed down by the
sight of my own inordinate wrath depicted on his frowning brow. Yet,
however prompt in taking up my quarrels, I cannot call to mind that he ever
struck a downright blow in my behalf; nor, in fact, do I perceive that any
real and tangible good has resulted from his constant interference in my
affairs; so that, in my distrustful moods, I am apt to suspect Monsieur du
Miroir’s sympathy to be mere outward show, not a whit better nor worse
than other people’s sympathy. Nevertheless, as mortal man must have
something in the guise of sympathy,—and whether the true metal, or merely
copper-washed, is of less moment,—I choose rather to content myself with
Monsieur du Miroir’s, such as it is, than to seek the sterling coin, and
perhaps miss even the counterfeit.
In my age of vanities I have often seen him in the ballroom, and might
again were I to seek him there. We have encountered each other at the
Tremont Theatre, where, however, he took his seat neither in the dress-
circle, pit, nor upper regions, nor threw a single glance at the stage, though
the brightest star, even Fanny Kemble herself, might be culminating there.
No; this whimsical friend of mine chose to linger in the saloon, near one of
the large looking-glasses which throw back their pictures of the illuminated
room. He is so full of these unaccountable eccentricities that I never like to
notice Monsieur du Miroir, nor to acknowledge the slightest connection
with him, in places of public resort. He, however, has no scruple about
claiming my acquaintance, even when his common-sense, if he had any,
might teach him that I would as willingly exchange a nod with the Old
Nick. It was but the other day that he got into a large brass kettle at the

entrance of a hardware-store, and thrust his head, the moment afterwards,
into a bright, new warming-pan, whence he gave me a most merciless look
of recognition. He smiled, and so did I; but these childish tricks make
decent people rather shy of Monsieur du Miroir, and subject him to more
dead cuts than any other gentleman in town.
One of this singular person’s most remarkable peculiarities is his
fondness for water, wherein he excels any temperance man whatever. His
pleasure, it must be owned, is not so much to drink it (in which respect a
very moderate quantity will answer his occasions) as to souse himself over
head and ears wherever he may meet with it. Perhaps he is a merman, or
born of a mermaid’s marriage with a mortal, and thus amphibious by
hereditary right, like the children which the old river deities, or nymphs of
fountains, gave to earthly love. When no cleaner bathing-place happened to
be at hand, I have seen the foolish fellow in a horse-pond. Some times he
refreshes himself in the trough of a town-pump, without caring what the
people think about him. Often, while carefully picking my way along the
street after a heavy shower, I have been scandalized to see Monsieur du
Miroir, in full dress, paddling from one mud-puddle to another, and
plunging into the filthy depths of each. Seldom have I peeped into a well
without discerning this ridiculous gentleman at the bottom, whence he
gazes up, as through a long telescopic tube, and probably makes discoveries
among the stars by daylight. Wandering along lonesome paths or in pathless
forests, when I have come to virgin fountains of which it would have been
pleasant to deem myself the first discoverer, I have started to find Monsieur
du Miroir there before me. The solitude seemed lonelier for his presence. I
have leaned from a precipice that frowns over Lake George, which the
French call nature’s font of sacramental water, and used it in their log-
churches here and their cathedrals beyond the sea, and seen him far below
in that pure element. At Niagara, too, where I would gladly have forgotten
both myself and him, I could not help observing my companion in the
smooth water on the very verge of the cataract just above the Table Rock.
Were I to reach the sources of the Nile, I should expect to meet him there.
Unless he be another Ladurlad, whose garments the depth of ocean could
not moisten, it is difficult to conceive how he keeps himself in any decent
pickle; though I am bound to confess that his clothes seem always as dry
and comfortable as my own. But, as a friend, I could wish that he would not
so often expose himself in liquor.

All that I have hitherto related may be classed among those little personal
oddities which agreeably diversify the surface of society, and, though they
may sometimes annoy us, yet keep our daily intercourse fresher and livelier
than if they were done away. By an occasional hint, however, I have
endeavored to pave the way for stranger things to come, which, had they
been disclosed at once, Monsieur du Miroir might have been deemed a
shadow, and myself a person of no veracity, and this truthful history a
fabulous legend. But, now that the reader knows me worthy of his
confidence, I will begin to make him stare.
To speak frankly, then, I could bring the most astounding proofs that
Monsieur du Miroir is at least a conjurer, if not one of that unearthly tribe
with whom conjurers deal. He has inscrutable methods of conveying
himself from place to place with the rapidity of the swiftest steamboat or
rail-car. Brick walls and oaken doors and iron bolts are no impediment to
his passage. Here in my chamber, for instance, as the evening deepens into
night, I sit alone,—the key turned and withdrawn from the lock, the keyhole
stuffed with paper to keep out a peevish little blast of wind. Yet, lonely as I
seem, were I to lift one of the lamps and step five paces eastward, Monsieur
du Miroir would be sure to meet me with a lamp also in his hand; and were
I to take the stage-coach to-morrow, without giving him the least hint of my
design, and post onward till the week’s end, at whatever hotel I might find
myself I should expect to share my private apartment with this inevitable
Monsieur du Miroir. Or, out of a mere wayward fantasy, were I to go, by
moonlight, and stand beside the stone Pout of the Shaker Spring at
Canterbury, Monsieur du Miroir would set forth on the same fool’s errand,
and would not fail to meet me there. Shall I heighten the reader’s wonder?
While writing these latter sentences, I happened to glance towards the large,
round globe of one off the brass andirons, and lo! a miniature apparition of
Monsieur du Miroir, with his face widened and grotesquely contorted, as if
he were making fun of my amazement! But he has played so many of these
jokes that they begin to lose their effect. Once, presumptuous that he was,
he stole into the heaven of a young lady’s eyes; so that, while I gazed and
was dreaming only of herself, I found him also in my dream. Years have so
changed him since that he need never hope to enter those heavenly orbs
again.
From these veritable statements it will be readily concluded that, had
Monsieur du Miroir played such pranks in old witch times, matters might

have gone hard with him; at least if the constable and posse comitatus could
have executed a warrant, or the jailer had been cunning enough to keep him.
But it has often occurred to me as a very singular circumstance, and as
betokening either a temperament morbidly suspicious or some weighty
cause of apprehension, that he never trusts himself within the grasp even of
his most intimate friend. If you step forward to meet him, he readily
advances; if you offer him your hand, he extends his own with an air of the
utmost frankness; but, though you calculate upon a hearty shake, you do not
get hold of his little finger. Ah, this Monsieur du Miroir is a slippery fellow!
These truly are matters of special admiration. After vainly endeavoring,
by the strenuous exertion of my own wits, to gain a satisfactory insight into
the character of Monsieur du Miroir, I had recourse to certain wise men, and
also to books of abstruse philosophy, seeking who it was that haunted me,
and why. I heard long lectures and read huge volumes with little profit
beyond the knowledge that many former instances are recorded, in
successive ages, of similar connections between ordinary mortals and
beings possessing the attributes of Monsieur du Miroir. Some now alive,
perhaps, besides myself, have such attendants. Would that Monsieur du
Miroir could be persuaded to transfer his attachment to one of those, and
allow some other of his race to assume the situation that he now holds in
regard to me! If I must needs have so intrusive an intimate, who stares me
in the face in my closest privacy, and follows me even to my bedchamber, I
should prefer—scandal apart—the laughing bloom of a young girl to the
dark and bearded gravity of my present companion. But such desires are
never to be gratified. Though the members of Monsieur du Miroir’s family
have been accused, perhaps justly, of visiting their friends often in splendid
halls, and seldom in darksome dungeons, yet they exhibit a rare constancy
to the objects of their first attachment, however unlovely in person or
unamiable in disposition,—however unfortunate, or even infamous, and
deserted by all the world besides. So will it be with my associate. Our fates
appear inseparably blended. It is my belief, as I find him mingling with my
earliest recollections, that we came into existence together, as my shadow
follows me into the sunshine, and that hereafter, as heretofore, the
brightness or gloom of my fortunes will shine upon, or darken, the face of
Monsieur du Miroir. As we have been young together, and as it is now near
the summer noon with both of us, so, if long life be granted, shall each
count his own wrinkles on the other’s brow and his white hairs on the

other’s head. And when the coffin-lid shall have closed over me and that
face and form, which, more truly than the lover swears it to his beloved, are
the sole light of his existence,—when they shall be laid in that dark
chamber, whither his swift and secret footsteps cannot bring him,—then
what is to become of poor Monsieur du Miroir? Will he have the fortitude,
with my other friends, to take a last look at my pale countenance? Will he
walk foremost in the funeral train? Will he come often and haunt around my
grave, and weed away the nettles, and plant flowers amid the verdure, and
scrape the moss out of the letters of my burial-stone? Will he linger where I
have lived, to remind the neglectful world of one who staked much to win a
name, but will not then care whether he lost or won?
Not thus will he prove his deep fidelity. O, what terror, if this friend of
mine, after our last farewell, should step into the crowded street, or roam
along our old frequented path by the still waters, or sit down in the domestic
circle where our faces are most familiar and beloved! No; but when the rays
of heaven shall bless me no more, nor the thoughtful lamplight gleam upon
my studies, nor the cheerful fireside gladden the meditative man, then, his
task fulfilled, shall this mysterious being vanish from the earth forever. He
will pass to the dark realm of nothingness, but will not find me there.
There is something fearful in bearing such a relation to a creature so
imperfectly known, and in the idea that, to a certain extent, all which
concerns myself will be reflected in its consequences upon him. When we
feel that another is to share the self-same fortune with ourselves we judge
more severely of our prospects, and withhold our confidence from that
delusive magic which appears to shed an infallibility of happiness over our
own pathway. Of late years, indeed, there has been much to sadden my
intercourse with Monsieur de Miroir. Had not our union been a necessary
condition of our life, we must have been estranged ere now. In early youth,
when my affections were warm and free, I loved him well, and could
always spend a pleasant hour in his society, chiefly because it gave me an
excellent opinion of myself. Speechless as he was, Monsieur du Miroir had
then a most agreeable way of calling me a handsome fellow; and I, of
course, returned the compliment; so that, the more we kept each other’s
company, the greater coxcombs we mutually grew. But neither of us need
apprehend any such misfortune now. When we chance to meet,—for it is
chance oftener than design,—each glances sadly at the other’s forehead,
dreading wrinkles there; and at our temples, whence the hair is thinning

away too early; and at the sunken eyes, which no longer shed a gladsome
light over the whole face. I involuntarily peruse him as a record of my
heavy youth, which has been wasted in sluggishness for lack of hope and
impulse, or equally thrown away in toil that had no wise motive and has
accomplished no good end. I perceive that the tranquil gloom of a
disappointed soul has darkened through his countenance, where the
blackness of the future seems to mingle with the shadows of the past, giving
him the aspect of a fated man. Is it too wild a thought that my fate may have
assumed this image of myself, and therefore haunts me with such inevitable
pertinacity, originating every act which it appears to imitate, while it
deludes me by pretending to share the events of which it is merely the
emblem and the prophecy? I must banish this idea, or it will throw too deep
an awe round my companion. At our next meeting, especially if it be at
midnight or in solitude, I fear that I shall glance aside and shudder; in which
case, as Monsieur du Miroir is extremely sensitive to ill-treatment, he also
will avert his eyes and express horror or disgust.
But no; this is unworthy of me. As of old I sought his society for the
bewitching dreams of woman’s love which he inspired, and because I
fancied a bright fortune in his aspect, so now will I hold daily and long
communion with hint for the sake of the stern lessons that he will teach my
manhood. With folded arms we will sit face to face, and lengthen out our
silent converse till a wiser cheerfulness shall have been wrought from the
very texture of despondency. He will say, perhaps indignantly, that it befits
only him to mourn for the decay of outward grace, which, while he
possessed it, was his all. But have not you, he will ask, a treasure in reserve,
to which every year may add far more value than age or death itself can
snatch from that miserable clay? He will tell me that though the bloom of
life has been nipped with a frost, yet the soul must not sit shivering in its
cell, but bestir itself manfully, and kindle a genial warmth from its own
exercise against; the autumnal and the wintry atmosphere. And I, in return,
will bid him be of good cheer, nor take it amiss that I must blanch his locks
and wrinkle him up like a wilted apple, since it shall be my endeavor so to
beautify his face with intellect and mild benevolence that he shall profit
immensely by the change. But here a smile will glimmer somewhat sadly
over Monsieur du Miroir’s visage.
When this subject shall have been sufficiently discussed we may take up
others as important. Reflecting upon his power of following me to the

remotest regions and into the deepest privacy, I will compare the attempt to
escape him to the hopeless race that men sometimes run with memory, or
their own hearts, or their moral selves, which, though burdened with cares
enough to crush an elephant, will never be one step behind. I will be self-
contemplative, as nature bids me, and make him the picture or visible type
of what I muse upon, that my mind may not wander so vaguely as
heretofore, chasing its own shadow through a chaos and catching only the
monsters that abide there. Then will we turn our thoughts to the spiritual
world, of the reality of which my companions shall furnish me an
illustration, if not an argument; for, as we have only the testimony of the
eye to Monsieur du Miroir’s existence, while all the other senses would fail
to inform us that such a figure stands within arm’s-length, wherefore should
there not be beings innumerable close beside us, and filling heaven and
earth with their multitude, yet of whom no corporeal perception can take
cognizance? A blind man might as reasonably deny that Monsieur du Miroir
exists, as we, because the Creator has hitherto withheld the spiritual
perception, can therefore contend that there are no spirits. O, there are! And,
at this moment, when the subject of which I write has grown strong within
me and surrounded itself with those solemn and awful associations which
might have seemed most alien to it, I could fancy that Monsieur du Miroir
himself is a wanderer from the spiritual world, with nothing human except
his delusive garment of visibility. Methinks I should tremble now were his
wizard power of gliding through all impediments in search of me to place
him suddenly before my eyes.
Ha! What is yonder? Shape of mystery, did the tremor of my heartstrings
vibrate to thine own, and call thee from thy home among the dancers of the
northern lights, and shadows flung from departed sunshine, and giant
spectres that appear on clouds at daybreak and affright the climber of the
Alps? In truth it startled me, as I threw a wary glance eastward across the
chamber, to discern an unbidden guest with his eyes bent on mine. The
identical MONSIEUR DU MIROIR! Still there he sits and returns my gaze
with as much of awe and curiosity as if he, too, had spent a solitary evening
in fantastic musings and made me his theme. So inimitably does he
counterfeit that I could almost doubt which of us is the visionary form, or
whether each be not the other’s mystery, and both twin brethren of one fate,
in mutually reflected spheres. O friend, canst thou not hear and answer me?
Break down the barrier between us! Grasp my hand! Speak! Listen! A few

words, perhaps, might satisfy the feverish yearning of my soul for some
master-thought that should guide me through this labyrinth of life, teaching
wherefore I was born, and how to do my task on earth, and what is death.
Alas! Even that unreal image should forget to ape me and smile at these
vain questions. Thus do mortals deify, as it were, a mere shadow of
themselves, a spectre of human reason, and ask of that to unveil the
mysteries which Divine Intelligence has revealed so far as needful to our
guidance, and hid the rest.
Farewell, Monsieur du Miroir. Of you, perhaps, as of many men, it may
be doubted whether you are the wiser, though your whole business is
REFLECTION.

THE HALL OF FANTASY

It has happened to me, on various occasions, to find myself in a certain
edifice which would appear to have some of the characteristics of a public
exchange. Its interior is a spacious hall, with a pavement of white marble.
Overhead is a lofty dome, supported by long rows of pillars of fantastic
architecture, the idea of which was probably taken from the Moorish ruins
of the Alhambra, or perhaps from some enchanted edifice in the Arabian
tales. The windows of this hall have a breadth and grandeur of design and
an elaborateness of workmanship that have nowhere been equalled, except
in the Gothic cathedrals of the Old World. Like their prototypes, too, they
admit the light of heaven only through stained and pictured glass, thus
filling the hall with many-colored radiance and painting its marble floor
with beautiful or grotesque designs; so that its inmates breathe, as it were, a
visionary atmosphere, and tread upon the fantasies of poetic minds. These
peculiarities, combining a wilder mixture of styles than even an American
architect usually recognizes as allowable,—Grecian, Gothic, Oriental, and
nondescript,—cause the whole edifice to give the impression of a dream,
which might be dissipated and shattered to fragments by merely stamping
the foot upon the pavement. Yet, with such modifications and repairs as
successive ages demand, the Hall of Fantasy is likely to endure longer than
the most substantial structure that ever cumbered the earth.
It is not at all times that one can gain admittance into this edifice,
although most persons enter it at some period or other of their lives; if not
in their waking moments, then by the universal passport of a dream. At my
last visit I wandered thither unawares while my mind was busy with an idle
tale, and was startled by the throng of people who seemed suddenly to rise
up around me.
“Bless me! Where am I?” cried I, with but a dim recognition of the place.
“You are in a spot,” said a friend who chanced to be near at hand, “which
occupies in the world of fancy the same position which the Bourse, the

Rialto, and the Exchange do in the commercial world. All who have affairs
in that mystic region, which lies above, below, or beyond the actual, may
here meet and talk over the business of their dreams.”
“It is a noble hall,” observed I.
“Yes,” he replied. “Yet we see but a small portion of the edifice. In its
upper stories are said to be apartments where the inhabitants of earth may
hold converse with those of the moon; and beneath our feet are gloomy
cells, which communicate with the infernal regions, and where monsters
and chimeras are kept in confinement and fed with all unwholesomeness.”
In niches and on pedestals around about the hall stood the statues or busts
of men who in every age have been rulers and demigods in the realms of
imagination and its kindred regions. The grand old countenance of Homer;
the shrunken and decrepit form but vivid face of AEsop; the dark presence
of Dante; the wild Ariosto; Rabelais’s smile of deep-wrought mirth, the
profound, pathetic humor of Cervantes; the all-glorious Shakespeare;
Spenser, meet guest for an allegoric structure; the severe divinity of Milton;
and Bunyan, moulded of homeliest clay, but instinct with celestial fire,—
were those that chiefly attracted my eye. Fielding, Richardson, and Scott
occupied conspicuous pedestals. In an obscure and shadowy niche was
deposited the bust of our countryman, the author of Arthur Mervyn.
“Besides these indestructible memorials of real genius,” remarked my
companion, “each century has erected statues of its own ephemeral
favorites in wood.”
“I observe a few crumbling relics of such,” said I. “But ever and anon, I
suppose, Oblivion comes with her huge broom and sweeps them all from
the marble floor. But such will never be the fate of this fine statue of
Goethe.”
“Nor of that next to it,—Emanuel Swedenborg,” said he. “Were ever two
men of transcendent imagination more unlike?”
In the centre of the hall springs an ornamental fountain, the water of
which continually throws itself into new shapes and snatches the most
diversified lines from the stained atmosphere around. It is impossible to
conceive what a strange vivacity is imparted to the scene by the magic
dance of this fountain, with its endless transformations, in which the
imaginative beholder may discern what form he will. The water is supposed
by some to flow from the same source as the Castalian spring, and is

extolled by others as uniting the virtues of the Fountain of Youth with those
of many other enchanted wells long celebrated in tale and song. Having
never tasted it, I can bear no testimony to its quality.
“Did you ever drink this water?” I inquired of my friend.
“A few sips now and then,” answered he. “But there are men here who
make it their constant beverage,—or, at least, have the credit of doing so. In
some instances it is known to have intoxicating qualities.”
“Pray let us look at these water-drinkers,” said I.
So we passed among the fantastic pillars till we came to a spot where a
number of persons were clustered together in the light of one of the great
stained windows, which seemed to glorify the whole group as well as the
marble that they trod on. Most of them were men of broad foreheads,
meditative countenances, and thoughtful, inward eyes; yet it required but a
trifle to summon up mirth, peeping out from the very midst of grave and
lofty musings. Some strode about, or leaned against the pillars of the hall,
alone and in silence; their faces wore a rapt expression, as if sweet music
were in the air around them, or as if their inmost souls were about to float
away in song. One or two, perhaps, stole a glance at the bystanders, to
watch if their poetic absorption were observed. Others stood talking in
groups, with a liveliness of expression, a ready smile, and a light,
intellectual laughter, which showed how rapidly the shafts of wit were
glancing to and fro among them.
A few held higher converse, which caused their calm and melancholy
souls to beam moonlight from their eyes. As I lingered near them,—for I
felt an inward attraction towards these men, as if the sympathy of feeling, if
not of genius, had united me to their order,—my friend mentioned several
of their names. The world has likewise heard those names; with some it has
been familiar for years; and others are daily making their way deeper into
the universal heart.
“Thank Heaven,” observed I to my companion, as we passed to another
part of the hall, “we have done with this techy, wayward, shy, proud
unreasonable set of laurel-gatherers. I love them in their works, but have
little desire to meet them elsewhere.”
“You have adopted all old prejudice, I see,” replied my friend, who was
familiar with most of these worthies, being himself a student of poetry, and
not without the poetic flame. “But, so far as my experience goes, men of

genius are fairly gifted with the social qualities; and in this age there
appears to be a fellow-feeling among them which had not heretofore been
developed. As men, they ask nothing better than to be on equal terms with
their fellow-men; and as authors, they have thrown aside their proverbial
jealousy, and acknowledge a generous brotherhood.”
“The world does not think so,” answered I. “An author is received in
general society pretty much as we honest citizens are in the Hall of Fantasy.
We gaze at him as if he had no business among us, and question whether he
is fit for any of our pursuits.”
“Then it is a very foolish question,” said he. “Now, here are a class of
men whom we may daily meet on ’Change. Yet what poet in the hall is
more a fool of fancy than the sagest of them?”
He pointed to a number of persons, who, manifest as the fact was, would
have deemed it an insult to be told that they stood in the Hall of Fantasy.
Their visages were traced into wrinkles and furrows, each of which seemed
the record of some actual experience in life. Their eyes had the shrewd,
calculating glance which detects so quickly and so surely all that it concerns
a man of business to know about the characters and purposes of his fellow-
men. Judging them as they stood, they might be honored and trusted
members of the Chamber of Commerce, who had found the genuine secret
of wealth and whose sagacity gave them the command of fortune.
There was a character of detail and matter of fact in their talk which
concealed the extravagance of its purport, insomuch that the wildest
schemes had the aspect of everyday realities. Thus the listener was not
startled at the idea of cities to be built, as if by magic, in the heart of
pathless forests; and of streets to be laid out where now the sea was tossing;
and of mighty rivers to be stayed in their courses in order to turn the
machinery of a cotton-mill. It was only by an effort, and scarcely then, that
the mind convinced itself that such speculations were as much matter of
fantasy as the old dream of Eldorado, or as Mammon’s Cave, or any other
vision of gold ever conjured up by the imagination of needy poet or
romantic adventurer.
“Upon my word,” said I, “it is dangerous to listen to such dreamers as
these. Their madness is contagious.”
“Yes,” said my friend, “because they mistake the Hall of Fantasy for
actual brick and mortar, and its purple atmosphere for unsophisticated

sunshine. But the poet knows his whereabout, and therefore is less likely to
make a fool of himself in real life.”
“Here again,” observed I, as we advanced a little farther, “we see another
order of dreamers, peculiarly characteristic, too, of the genius of our
country.”
These were the inventors of fantastic machines. Models of their
contrivances were placed against some of the pillars of the hall, and
afforded good emblems of the result generally to be anticipated from an
attempt to reduce day-dreams to practice. The analogy may hold in morals
as well as physics; for instance, here was the model of a railroad through
the air and a tunnel under the sea. Here was a machine—stolen, I believe—
for the distillation of heat from moonshine; and another for the
condensation of morning mist into square blocks of granite, wherewith it
was proposed to rebuild the entire Hall of Fantasy. One man exhibited a sort
of lens whereby he had succeeded in making sunshine out of a lady’s smile;
and it was his purpose wholly to irradiate the earth by means of this
wonderful invention.
“It is nothing new,” said I; “for most of our sunshine comes from
woman’s smile already.”
“True,” answered the inventor; “but my machine will secure a constant
supply for domestic use; whereas hitherto it has been very precarious.”
Another person had a scheme for fixing the reflections of objects in a
pool of water, and thus taking the most life-like portraits imaginable; and
the same gentleman demonstrated the practicability of giving a permanent
dye to ladies’ dresses, in the gorgeous clouds of sunset. There were at least
fifty kinds of perpetual motion, one of which was applicable to the wits of
newspaper editors and writers of every description. Professor Espy was
here, with a tremendous storm in a gum-elastic bag. I could enumerate
many more of these Utopian inventions; but, after all, a more imaginative
collection is to be found in the Patent Office at Washington.
Turning from the inventors we took a more general survey of the inmates
of the hall. Many persons were present whose right of entrance appeared to
consist in some crotchet of the brain, which, so long as it might operate,
produced a change in their relation to the actual world. It is singular how
very few there are who do not occasionally gain admittance on such a score,
either in abstracted musings, or momentary thoughts, or bright

anticipations, or vivid remembrances; for even the actual becomes ideal,
whether in hope or memory, and beguiles the dreamer into the Hall of
Fantasy. Some unfortunates make their whole abode and business here, and
contract habits which unfit them for all the real employments of life. Others
—but these are few—possess the faculty, in their occasional visits, of
discovering a purer truth than the world call impart among the lights and
shadows of these pictured windows.
And with all its dangerous influences, we have reason to thank God that
there is such a place of refuge from the gloom and chillness of actual life.
Hither may come the prisoner, escaping from his dark and narrow cell and
cankerous chain, to breathe free air in this enchanted atmosphere. The sick
man leaves his weary pillow, and finds strength to wander hither, though his
wasted limbs might not support him even to the threshold of his chamber.
The exile passes through the Hall of Fantasy to revisit his native soil. The
burden of years rolls down from the old man’s shoulders the moment that
the door uncloses. Mourners leave their heavy sorrows at the entrance, and
here rejoin the lost ones whose faces would else be seen no more, until
thought shall have become the only fact. It may be said, in truth, that there
is but half a life—the meaner and earthier half—for those who never find
their way into the hall. Nor must I fail to mention that in the observatory of
the edifice is kept that wonderful perspective-glass, through which the
shepherds of the Delectable Mountains showed Christian the far-off gleam
of the Celestial City. The eye of Faith still loves to gaze through it.
“I observe some men here,” said I to my friend, “who might set up a
strong claim to be reckoned among the most real personages of the day.”
“Certainly,” he replied. “If a man be in advance of his age, he must be
content to make his abode in this hall until the lingering generations of his
fellow-men come up with him. He can find no other shelter in the universe.
But the fantasies of one day are the deepest realities of a future one.”
“It is difficult to distinguish them apart amid the gorgeous and
bewildering light of this ball,” rejoined I. “The white sunshine of actual life
is necessary in order to test them. I am rather apt to doubt both men and
their reasonings till I meet them in that truthful medium.”
“Perhaps your faith in the ideal is deeper than you are aware,” said my
friend. “You are at least a democrat; and methinks no scanty share of such
faith is essential to the adoption of that creed.”

Among the characters who had elicited these remarks were most of the
noted reformers of the day, whether in physics, politics, morals, or religion.
There is no surer method of arriving at the Hall of Fantasy than to throw
one’s-self into the current of a theory; for, whatever landmarks of fact may
be set up along the stream, there is a law of nature that impels it thither. And
let it be so; for here the wise head and capacious heart may do their work;
and what is good and true becomes gradually hardened into fact, while error
melts away and vanishes among the shadows of the ball. Therefore may
none who believe and rejoice in the progress of mankind be angry with me
because I recognized their apostles and leaders amid the fantastic radiance
of those pictured windows. I love and honor such men as well as they.
It would be endless to describe the herd of real or self styled reformers
that peopled this place of refuge. They were the representatives of an
unquiet period, when mankind is seeking to cast off the whole tissue of
ancient custom like a tattered garment. Many of then had got possession of
some crystal fragment of truth, the brightness of which so dazzled them that
they could see nothing else in the wide universe. Here were men whose
faith had embodied itself in the form of a potato; and others whose long
beards had a deep spiritual significance. Here was the abolitionist,
brandishing his one idea like an iron flail. In a word, there were a thousand
shapes of good and evil, faith and infidelity, wisdom and nonsense,—a most
incongruous throng.
Yet, withal, the heart of the stanchest conservative, unless he abjured his
fellowship with man, could hardly have helped throbbing in sympathy with
the spirit that pervaded these innumerable theorists. It was good for the man
of unquickened heart to listen even to their folly. Far down beyond the
fathom of the intellect the soul acknowledged that all these varying and
conflicting developments of humanity were united in one sentiment. Be the
individual theory as wild as fancy could make it, still the wiser spirit would
recognize the struggle of the race after a better and purer life than had yet
been realized on earth. My faith revived even while I rejected all their
schemes. It could not be that the world should continue forever what it has
been; a soil where Happiness is so rare a flower and Virtue so often a
blighted fruit; a battle-field where the good principle, with its shield flung
above its head, can hardly save itself amid the rush of adverse influences. In
the enthusiasm of such thoughts I gazed through one of the pictured
windows, and, behold! the whole external world was tinged with the dimly

glorious aspect that is peculiar to the Hall of Fantasy, insomuch that it
seemed practicable at that very instant to realize some plan for the
perfection of mankind. But, alas! if reformers would understand the sphere
in which their lot is cast they must cease to look through pictured windows.
Yet they not only use this medium, but mistake it for the whitest sunshine.
“Come,” said I to my friend, starting from a deep revery, “let us hasten
hence, or I shall be tempted to make a theory, after which there is little hope
of any man.”
“Come hither, then,” answered he. “Here is one theory that swallows up
and annihilates all others.”
He led me to a distant part of the hall where a crowd of deeply attentive
auditors were assembled round an elderly man of plain, honest, trustworthy
aspect. With an earnestness that betokened the sincerest faith in his own
doctrine, he announced that the destruction of the world was close at hand.
“It is Father Miller himself!” exclaimed I.
“No less a man,” said my friend; “and observe how picturesque a contrast
between his dogma and those of the reformers whom we have just glanced
at. They look for the earthly perfection of mankind, and are forming
schemes which imply that the immortal spirit will be connected with a
physical nature for innumerable ages of futurity. On the other hand, here
comes good Father Miller, and with one puff of his relentless theory scatters
all their dreams like so many withered leaves upon the blast.”
“It is, perhaps, the only method of getting mankind out of the various
perplexities into which they have fallen,” I replied. “Yet I could wish that
the world might be permitted to endure until some great moral shall have
been evolved. A riddle is propounded. Where is the solution? The sphinx
did not slay herself until her riddle had been guessed. Will it not be so with
the world? Now, if it should be burned to-morrow morning, I am at a loss to
know what purpose will have been accomplished, or how the universe will
be wiser or better for our existence and destruction.”
“We cannot tell what mighty truths may have been embodied in act
through the existence of the globe and its inhabitants,” rejoined my
companion. “Perhaps it may be revealed to us after the fall of the curtain
over our catastrophe; or not impossibly, the whole drama, in which we are
involuntary actors, may have been performed for the instruction of another
set of spectators. I cannot perceive that our own comprehension of it is at all

essential to the matter. At any rate, while our view is so ridiculously narrow
and superficial it would be absurd to argue the continuance of the world
from the fact that it seems to have existed hitherto in vain.”
“The poor old earth,” murmured I. “She has faults enough, in all
conscience, but I cannot hear to have her perish.”
“It is no great matter,” said my friend. “The happiest of us has been
weary of her many a time and oft.”
“I doubt it,” answered I, pertinaciously; “the root of human nature strikes
down deep into this earthly soil, and it is but reluctantly that we submit to
be transplanted, even for a higher cultivation in heaven. I query whether the
destruction of the earth would gratify any one individual, except perhaps
some embarrassed man of business whose notes fall due a day after the day
of doom.”
Then methought I heard the expostulating cry of a multitude against the
consummation prophesied by Father Miller. The lover wrestled with
Providence for his foreshadowed bliss. Parents entreated that the earth’s
span of endurance might be prolonged by some seventy years, so that their
new-born infant should not be defrauded of his lifetime. A youthful poet
murmured because there would be no posterity to recognize the inspiration
of his song. The reformers, one and all, demanded a few thousand years to
test their theories, after which the universe might go to wreck. A
mechanician, who was busied with an improvement of the steam-engine,
asked merely time to perfect his model. A miser insisted that the world’s
destruction would be a personal wrong to himself, unless he should first be
permitted to add a specified sum to his enormous heap of gold. A little boy
made dolorous inquiry whether the last day would come before Christmas,
and thus deprive him of his anticipated dainties. In short, nobody seemed
satisfied that this mortal scene of things should have its close just now. Yet,
it must be confessed, the motives of the crowd for desiring its continuance
were mostly so absurd, that unless infinite Wisdom had been aware of much
better reasons, the solid earth must have melted away at once.
For my own part, not to speak of a few private and personal ends, I really
desired our old mother’s prolonged existence for her own dear sake.
“The poor old earth!” I repeated. “What I should chiefly regret in her
destruction would be that very earthliness which no other sphere or state of
existence can renew or compensate. The fragrance of flowers and of new-

mown hay; the genial warmth of sunshine, and the beauty of a sunset
among clouds; the comfort and cheerful glow of the fireside; the
deliciousness of fruits and of all good cheer; the magnificence of
mountains, and seas, and cataracts, and the softer charm of rural scenery;
even the fast-falling snow and the gray atmosphere through which it
descends,—all these and innumerable other enjoyable things of earth must
perish with her. Then the country frolics; the homely humor; the broad,
open-mouthed roar of laughter, in which body and soul conjoin so heartily!
I fear that no other world call show its anything just like this. As for purely
moral enjoyments, the good will find them in every state of being. But
where the material and the moral exist together, what is to happen then?
And then our mute four-footed friends and the winged songsters of our
woods! Might it not be lawful to regret them, even in the hallowed groves
of paradise?”
“You speak like the very spirit of earth, imbued with a scent of freshly
turned soil,” exclaimed my friend.
“It is not that I so much object to giving up these enjoyments on my own
account,” continued I, “but I hate to think that they will have been eternally
annihilated from the list of joys.”
“Nor need they be,” he replied. “I see no real force in what you say.
Standing in this Hall of Fantasy, we perceive what even the earth-clogged
intellect of man can do in creating circumstances which, though we call
them shadowy and visionary, are scarcely more so than those that surround
us in actual life. Doubt not then that man’s disembodied spirit may recreate
time and the world for itself, with all their peculiar enjoyments, should
there still be human yearnings amid life eternal and infinite. But I doubt
whether we shall be inclined to play such a poor scene over again.”
“O, you are ungrateful to our mother earth!” rejoined I. “Come what may,
I never will forget her! Neither will it satisfy me to have her exist merely in
idea. I want her great, round, solid self to endure interminably, and still to
be peopled with the kindly race of man, whom I uphold to be much better
than he thinks himself. Nevertheless, I confide the whole matter to
Providence, and shall endeavor so to live that the world may come to an end
at any moment without leaving me at a loss to find foothold somewhere
else.”

“It is an excellent resolve,” said my companion, looking at his watch.
“But come; it is the dinner-hour. Will you partake of my vegetable diet?”
A thing so matter of fact as an invitation to dinner, even when the fare
was to be nothing more substantial than vegetables and fruit, compelled us
forthwith to remove from the Hall of Fantasy. As we passed out of the
portal we met the spirits of several persons who had been sent thither in
magnetic sleep. I looked back among the sculptured pillars and at the
transformations of the gleaming fountain, and almost desired that the whole
of life might be spent in that visionary scene where the actual world, with
its hard angles, should never rub against me, and only be viewed through
the medium of pictured windows. But for those who waste all their days in
the Hall of Fantasy, good Father Miller’s prophecy is already accomplished,
and the solid earth has come to an untimely end. Let us be content,
therefore, with merely an occasional visit, for the sake of spiritualizing the
grossness of this actual life, and prefiguring to ourselves a state in which
the Idea shall be all in all.

THE CELESTIAL RAILROAD

Not a great while ago, passing through the gate of dreams, I visited that
region of the earth in which lies the famous City of Destruction. It
interested me much to learn that by the public spirit of some of the
inhabitants a railroad has recently been established between this populous
and flourishing town and the Celestial City. Having a little time upon my
hands, I resolved to gratify a liberal curiosity by making a trip thither.
Accordingly, one fine morning after paying my bill at the hotel, and
directing the porter to stow my luggage behind a coach, I took my seat in
the vehicle and set out for the station-house. It was my good fortune to
enjoy the company of a gentleman—one Mr. Smooth-it-away—who,
though he had never actually visited the Celestial City, yet seemed as well
acquainted with its laws, customs, policy, and statistics, as with those of the
City of Destruction, of which he was a native townsman. Being, moreover,
a director of the railroad corporation and one of its largest stockholders, he
had it in his power to give me all desirable information respecting that
praiseworthy enterprise.
Our coach rattled out of the city, and at a short distance from its outskirts
passed over a bridge of elegant construction, but somewhat too slight, as I
imagined, to sustain any considerable weight. On both sides lay an
extensive quagmire, which could not have been more disagreeable either to
sight or smell, had all the kennels of the earth emptied their pollution there.
“This,” remarked Mr. Smooth-it-away, “is the famous Slough of Despond
—a disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so easily
be converted into firm ground.”
“I have understood,” said I, “that efforts have been made for that purpose
from time immemorial. Bunyan mentions that above twenty thousand
cartloads of wholesome instructions had been thrown in here without
effect.”

“Very probably! And what effect could be anticipated from such
unsubstantial stuff?” cried Mr. Smooth-it-away. “You observe this
convenient bridge. We obtained a sufficient foundation for it by throwing
into the slough some editions of books of morality, volumes of French
philosophy and German rationalism; tracts, sermons, and essays of modern
clergymen; extracts from Plato, Confucius, and various Hindoo sages
together with a few ingenious commentaries upon texts of Scripture,—all of
which by some scientific process, have been converted into a mass like
granite. The whole bog might be filled up with similar matter.”
It really seemed to me, however, that the bridge vibrated and heaved up
and down in a very formidable manner; and, in spite of Mr. Smooth-it-
away’s testimony to the solidity of its foundation, I should be loath to cross
it in a crowded omnibus, especially if each passenger were encumbered
with as heavy luggage as that gentleman and myself. Nevertheless we got
over without accident, and soon found ourselves at the stationhouse. This
very neat and spacious edifice is erected on the site of the little wicket gate,
which formerly, as all old pilgrims will recollect, stood directly across the
highway, and, by its inconvenient narrowness, was a great obstruction to the
traveller of liberal mind and expansive stomach. The reader of John Bunyan
will be glad to know that Christian’s old friend Evangelist, who was
accustomed to supply each pilgrim with a mystic roll, now presides at the
ticket office. Some malicious persons it is true deny the identity of this
reputable character with the Evangelist of old times, and even pretend to
bring competent evidence of an imposture. Without involving myself in a
dispute I shall merely observe that, so far as my experience goes, the square
pieces of pasteboard now delivered to passengers are much more
convenient and useful along the road than the antique roll of parchment.
Whether they will be as readily received at the gate of the Celestial City I
decline giving an opinion.
A large number of passengers were already at the station-house awaiting
the departure of the cars. By the aspect and demeanor of these persons it
was easy to judge that the feelings of the community had undergone a very
favorable change in reference to the celestial pilgrimage. It would have
done Bunyan’s heart good to see it. Instead of a lonely and ragged man with
a huge burden on his back, plodding along sorrowfully on foot while the
whole city hooted after him, here were parties of the first gentry and most
respectable people in the neighborhood setting forth towards the Celestial

City as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage were merely a summer tour. Among
the gentlemen were characters of deserved eminence—magistrates,
politicians, and men of wealth, by whose example religion could not but be
greatly recommended to their meaner brethren. In the ladies’ apartment, too,
I rejoiced to distinguish some of those flowers of fashionable society who
are so well fitted to adorn the most elevated circles of the Celestial City.
There was much pleasant conversation about the news of the day, topics of
business and politics, or the lighter matters of amusement; while religion,
though indubitably the main thing at heart, was thrown tastefully into the
background. Even an infidel would have heard little or nothing to shock his
sensibility.
One great convenience of the new method of going on pilgrimage I must
not forget to mention. Our enormous burdens, instead of being carried on
our shoulders as had been the custom of old, were all snugly deposited in
the baggage car, and, as I was assured, would be delivered to their
respective owners at the journey’s end. Another thing, likewise, the
benevolent reader will be delighted to understand. It may be remembered
that there was an ancient feud between Prince Beelzebub and the keeper of
the wicket gate, and that the adherents of the former distinguished
personage were accustomed to shoot deadly arrows at honest pilgrims while
knocking at the door. This dispute, much to the credit as well of the
illustrious potentate above mentioned as of the worthy and enlightened
directors of the railroad, has been pacifically arranged on the principle of
mutual compromise. The prince’s subjects are now pretty numerously
employed about the station-house, some in taking care of the baggage,
others in collecting fuel, feeding the engines, and such congenial
occupations; and I can conscientiously affirm that persons more attentive to
their business, more willing to accommodate, or more generally agreeable
to the passengers, are not to be found on any railroad. Every good heart
must surely exult at so satisfactory an arrangement of an immemorial
difficulty.
“Where is Mr. Greatheart?” inquired I. “Beyond a doubt the directors
have engaged that famous old champion to be chief conductor on the
railroad?”
“Why, no,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a dry cough. “He was offered
the situation of brakeman; but, to tell you the truth, our friend Greatheart

has grown preposterously stiff and narrow in his old age. He has so often
guided pilgrims over the road on foot that he considers it a sin to travel in
any other fashion. Besides, the old fellow had entered so heartily into the
ancient feud with Prince Beelzebub that he would have been perpetually at
blows or ill language with some of the prince’s subjects, and thus have
embroiled us anew. So, on the whole, we were not sorry when honest
Greatheart went off to the Celestial City in a huff and left us at liberty to
choose a more suitable and accommodating man. Yonder comes the
engineer of the train. You will probably recognize him at once.”
The engine at this moment took its station in advance of the cars,
looking, I must confess, much more like a sort of mechanical demon that
would hurry us to the infernal regions than a laudable contrivance for
smoothing our way to the Celestial City. On its top sat a personage almost
enveloped in smoke and flame, which, not to startle the reader, appeared to
gush from his own mouth and stomach as well as from the engine’s brazen
abdomen.
“Do my eyes deceive me?” cried I. “What on earth is this! A living
creature? If so, he is own brother to the engine he rides upon!”
“Poh, poh, you are obtuse!” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, with a hearty
laugh. “Don’t you know Apollyon, Christian’s old enemy, with whom he
fought so fierce a battle in the Valley of Humiliation? He was the very
fellow to manage the engine; and so we have reconciled him to the custom
of going on pilgrimage, and engaged him as chief engineer.”
“Bravo, bravo!” exclaimed I, with irrepressible enthusiasm; “this shows
the liberality of the age; this proves, if anything can, that all musty
prejudices are in a fair way to be obliterated. And how will Christian rejoice
to hear of this happy transformation of his old antagonist! I promise myself
great pleasure in informing him of it when we reach the Celestial City.”
The passengers being all comfortably seated, we now rattled away
merrily, accomplishing a greater distance in ten minutes than Christian
probably trudged over in a day. It was laughable, while we glanced along,
as it were, at the tail of a thunderbolt, to observe two dusty foot travellers in
the old pilgrim guise, with cockle shell and staff, their mystic rolls of
parchment in their hands and their intolerable burdens on their backs. The
preposterous obstinacy of these honest people in persisting to groan and
stumble along the difficult pathway rather than take advantage of modern

improvements, excited great mirth among our wiser brotherhood. We
greeted the two pilgrims with many pleasant gibes and a roar of laughter;
whereupon they gazed at us with such woful and absurdly compassionate
visages that our merriment grew tenfold more obstreperous. Apollyon also
entered heartily into the fun, and contrived to flirt the smoke and flame of
the engine, or of his own breath, into their faces, and envelop them in an
atmosphere of scalding steam. These little practical jokes amused us
mightily, and doubtless afforded the pilgrims the gratification of
considering themselves martyrs.
At some distance from the railroad Mr. Smooth-it-away pointed to a
large, antique edifice, which, he observed, was a tavern of long standing,
and had formerly been a noted stopping-place for pilgrims. In Bunyan’s
road-book it is mentioned as the Interpreter’s House.
“I have long had a curiosity to visit that old mansion,” remarked I.
“It is not one of our stations, as you perceive,” said my companion “The
keeper was violently opposed to the railroad; and well he might be, as the
track left his house of entertainment on one side, and thus was pretty certain
to deprive him of all his reputable customers. But the footpath still passes
his door, and the old gentleman now and then receives a call from some
simple traveller, and entertains him with fare as old-fashioned as himself.”
Before our talk on this subject came to a conclusion we were rushing by
the place where Christian’s burden fell from his shoulders at the sight of the
Cross. This served as a theme for Mr. Smooth-it-away, Mr. Livefor-the-
world, Mr. Hide-sin-in-the-heart, Mr. Scaly-conscience, and a knot of
gentlemen from the town of Shun-repentance, to descant upon the
inestimable advantages resulting from the safety of our baggage. Myself,
and all the passengers indeed, joined with great unanimity in this view of
the matter; for our burdens were rich in many things esteemed precious
throughout the world; and, especially, we each of us possessed a great
variety of favorite Habits, which we trusted would not be out of fashion
even in the polite circles of the Celestial City. It would have been a sad
spectacle to see such an assortment of valuable articles tumbling into the
sepulchre. Thus pleasantly conversing on the favorable circumstances of
our position as compared with those of past pilgrims and of narrow-minded
ones at the present day, we soon found ourselves at the foot of the Hill
Difficulty. Through the very heart of this rocky mountain a tunnel has been

constructed of most admirable architecture, with a lofty arch and a spacious
double track; so that, unless the earth and rocks should chance to crumble
down, it will remain an eternal monument of the builder’s skill and
enterprise. It is a great though incidental advantage that the materials from
the heart of the Hill Difficulty have been employed in filling up the Valley
of Humiliation, thus obviating the necessity of descending into that
disagreeable and unwholesome hollow.
“This is a wonderful improvement, indeed,” said I. “Yet I should have
been glad of an opportunity to visit the Palace Beautiful and be introduced
to the charming young ladies—Miss Prudence, Miss Piety, Miss Charity,
and the rest—who have the kindness to entertain pilgrims there.”
“Young ladies!” cried Mr. Smooth-it-away, as soon as he could speak for
laughing. “And charming young ladies! Why, my dear fellow, they are old
maids, every soul of them—prim, starched, dry, and angular; and not one of
them, I will venture to say, has altered so much as the fashion of her gown
since the days of Christian’s pilgrimage.”
“Ah, well,” said I, much comforted, “then I can very readily dispense
with their acquaintance.”
The respectable Apollyon was now putting on the steam at a prodigious
rate, anxious, perhaps, to get rid of the unpleasant reminiscences connected
with the spot where he had so disastrously encountered Christian.
Consulting Mr. Bunyan’s road-book, I perceived that we must now be
within a few miles of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, into which doleful
region, at our present speed, we should plunge much sooner than seemed at
all desirable. In truth, I expected nothing better than to find myself in the
ditch on one side or the Quag on the other; but on communicating my
apprehensions to Mr. Smooth-it-away, he assured me that the difficulties of
this passage, even in its worst condition, had been vastly exaggerated, and
that, in its present state of improvement, I might consider myself as safe as
on any railroad in Christendom.
Even while we were speaking the train shot into the entrance of this
dreaded Valley. Though I plead guilty to some foolish palpitations of the
heart during our headlong rush over the causeway here constructed, yet it
were unjust to withhold the highest encomiums on the boldness of its
original conception and the ingenuity of those who executed it. It was
gratifying, likewise, to observe how much care had been taken to dispel the

everlasting gloom and supply the defect of cheerful sunshine, not a ray of
which has ever penetrated among these awful shadows. For this purpose,
the inflammable gas which exudes plentifully from the soil is collected by
means of pipes, and thence communicated to a quadruple row of lamps
along the whole extent of the passage. Thus a radiance has been created
even out of the fiery and sulphurous curse that rests forever upon the valley
—a radiance hurtful, however, to the eyes, and somewhat bewildering, as I
discovered by the changes which it wrought in the visages of my
companions. In this respect, as compared with natural daylight, there is the
same difference as between truth and falsehood, but if the reader have ever
travelled through the dark Valley, he will have learned to be thankful for
any light that he could get—if not from the sky above, then from the blasted
soil beneath. Such was the red brilliancy of these lamps that they appeared
to build walls of fire on both sides of the track, between which we held our
course at lightning speed, while a reverberating thunder filled the Valley
with its echoes. Had the engine run off the track,—a catastrophe, it is
whispered, by no means unprecedented,—the bottomless pit, if there be any
such place, would undoubtedly have received us. Just as some dismal
fooleries of this nature had made my heart quake there came a tremendous
shriek, careering along the valley as if a thousand devils had burst their
lungs to utter it, but which proved to be merely the whistle of the engine on
arriving at a stopping-place.
The spot where we had now paused is the same that our friend Bunyan—
a truthful man, but infected with many fantastic notions—has designated, in
terms plainer than I like to repeat, as the mouth of the infernal region. This,
however, must be a mistake, inasmuch as Mr. Smooth-it-away, while we
remained in the smoky and lurid cavern, took occasion to prove that Tophet
has not even a metaphorical existence. The place, he assured us, is no other
than the crater of a half-extinct volcano, in which the directors had caused
forges to be set up for the manufacture of railroad iron. Hence, also, is
obtained a plentiful supply of fuel for the use of the engines. Whoever had
gazed into the dismal obscurity of the broad cavern mouth, whence ever and
anon darted huge tongues of dusky flame, and had seen the strange, half-
shaped monsters, and visions of faces horribly grotesque, into which the
smoke seemed to wreathe itself, and had heard the awful murmurs, and
shrieks, and deep, shuddering whispers of the blast, sometimes forming
themselves into words almost articulate, would have seized upon Mr.

Smooth-it-away’s comfortable explanation as greedily as we did. The
inhabitants of the cavern, moreover, were unlovely personages, dark,
smoke-begrimed, generally deformed, with misshapen feet, and a glow of
dusky redness in their eyes as if their hearts had caught fire and were
blazing out of the upper windows. It struck me as a peculiarity that the
laborers at the forge and those who brought fuel to the engine, when they
began to draw short breath, positively emitted smoke from their mouth and
nostrils.
Among the idlers about the train, most of whom were puffing cigars
which they had lighted at the flame of the crater, I was perplexed to notice
several who, to my certain knowledge, had heretofore set forth by railroad
for the Celestial City. They looked dark, wild, and smoky, with a singular
resemblance, indeed, to the native inhabitants, like whom, also, they had a
disagreeable propensity to ill-natured gibes and sneers, the habit of which
had wrought a settled contortion of their visages. Having been on speaking
terms with one of these persons,—an indolent, good-for-nothing fellow,
who went by the name of Take-it-easy,—I called him, and inquired what
was his business there.
“Did you not start,” said I, “for the Celestial City?”
“That’s a fact,” said Mr. Take-it-easy, carelessly puffing some smoke into
my eyes. “But I heard such bad accounts that I never took pains to climb the
hill on which the city stands. No business doing, no fun going on, nothing
to drink, and no smoking allowed, and a thrumming of church music from
morning till night. I would not stay in such a place if they offered me house
room and living free.”
“But, my good Mr. Take-it-easy,” cried I, “why take up your residence
here, of all places in the world?”
“Oh,” said the loafer, with a grin, “it is very warm hereabouts, and I meet
with plenty of old acquaintances, and altogether the place suits me. I hope
to see you back again some day soon. A pleasant journey to you.”
While he was speaking the bell of the engine rang, and we dashed away
after dropping a few passengers, but receiving no new ones. Rattling
onward through the Valley, we were dazzled with the fiercely gleaming gas
lamps, as before. But sometimes, in the dark of intense brightness, grim
faces, that bore the aspect and expression of individual sins, or evil
passions, seemed to thrust themselves through the veil of light, glaring upon

us, and stretching forth a great, dusky hand, as if to impede our progress. I
almost thought that they were my own sins that appalled me there. These
were freaks of imagination—nothing more, certainly-mere delusions, which
I ought to be heartily ashamed of; but all through the Dark Valley I was
tormented, and pestered, and dolefully bewildered with the same kind of
waking dreams. The mephitic gases of that region intoxicate the brain. As
the light of natural day, however, began to struggle with the glow of the
lanterns, these vain imaginations lost their vividness, and finally vanished
from the first ray of sunshine that greeted our escape from the Valley of the
Shadow of Death. Ere we had gone a mile beyond it I could well-nigh have
taken my oath that this whole gloomy passage was a dream.
At the end of the valley, as John Bunyan mentions, is a cavern, where, in
his days, dwelt two cruel giants, Pope and Pagan, who had strown the
ground about their residence with the bones of slaughtered pilgrims. These
vile old troglodytes are no longer there; but into their deserted cave another
terrible giant has thrust himself, and makes it his business to seize upon
honest travellers and fatten them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke,
mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust. He is a German by birth, and
is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his
substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge
miscreant that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been
able to describe them. As we rushed by the cavern’s mouth we caught a
hasty glimpse of him, looking somewhat like an ill-proportioned figure, but
considerably more like a heap of fog and duskiness. He shouted after us, but
in so strange a phraseology that we knew not what he meant, nor whether to
be encouraged or affrighted.
It was late in the day when the train thundered into the ancient city of
Vanity, where Vanity Fair is still at the height of prosperity, and exhibits an
epitome of whatever is brilliant, gay, and fascinating beneath the sun. As I
purposed to make a considerable stay here, it gratified me to learn that there
is no longer the want of harmony between the town’s-people and pilgrims,
which impelled the former to such lamentably mistaken measures as the
persecution of Christian and the fiery martyrdom of Faithful. On the
contrary, as the new railroad brings with it great trade and a constant influx
of strangers, the lord of Vanity Fair is its chief patron, and the capitalists of
the city are among the largest stockholders. Many passengers stop to take
their pleasure or make their profit in the Fair, instead of going onward to the

Celestial City. Indeed, such are the charms of the place that people often
affirm it to be the true and only heaven; stoutly contending that there is no
other, that those who seek further are mere dreamers, and that, if the fabled
brightness of the Celestial City lay but a bare mile beyond the gates of
Vanity, they would not be fools enough to go thither. Without subscribing to
these perhaps exaggerated encomiums, I can truly say that my abode in the
city was mainly agreeable, and my intercourse with the inhabitants
productive of much amusement and instruction.
Being naturally of a serious turn, my attention was directed to the solid
advantages derivable from a residence here, rather than to the effervescent
pleasures which are the grand object with too many visitants. The Christian
reader, if he have had no accounts of the city later than Bunyan’s time, will
be surprised to hear that almost every street has its church, and that the
reverend clergy are nowhere held in higher respect than at Vanity Fair. And
well do they deserve such honorable estimation; for the maxims of wisdom
and virtue which fall from their lips come from as deep a spiritual source,
and tend to as lofty a religious aim, as those of the sagest philosophers of
old. In justification of this high praise I need only mention the names of the
Rev. Mr. Shallow-deep, the Rev. Mr. Stumble-at-truth, that fine old clerical
character the Rev. Mr. This-today, who expects shortly to resign his pulpit
to the Rev. Mr. That-tomorrow; together with the Rev. Mr. Bewilderment,
the Rev. Mr. Clog-the-spirit, and, last and greatest, the Rev. Dr. Wind-of-
doctrine. The labors of these eminent divines are aided by those of
innumerable lecturers, who diffuse such a various profundity, in all subjects
of human or celestial science, that any man may acquire an omnigenous
erudition without the trouble of even learning to read. Thus literature is
etherealized by assuming for its medium the human voice; and knowledge,
depositing all its heavier particles, except, doubtless, its gold becomes
exhaled into a sound, which forthwith steals into the ever-open ear of the
community. These ingenious methods constitute a sort of machinery, by
which thought and study are done to every person’s hand without his
putting himself to the slightest inconvenience in the matter. There is another
species of machine for the wholesale manufacture of individual morality.
This excellent result is effected by societies for all manner of virtuous
purposes, with which a man has merely to connect himself, throwing, as it
were, his quota of virtue into the common stock, and the president and
directors will take care that the aggregate amount be well applied. All these,

and other wonderful improvements in ethics, religion, and literature, being
made plain to my comprehension by the ingenious Mr. Smooth-it-away,
inspired me with a vast admiration of Vanity Fair.
It would fill a volume, in an age of pamphlets, were I to record all my
observations in this great capital of human business and pleasure. There was
an unlimited range of society—the powerful, the wise, the witty, and the
famous in every walk of life; princes, presidents, poets, generals, artists,
actors, and philanthropists,—all making their own market at the fair, and
deeming no price too exorbitant for such commodities as hit their fancy. It
was well worth one’s while, even if he had no idea of buying or selling, to
loiter through the bazaars and observe the various sorts of traffic that were
going forward.
Some of the purchasers, I thought, made very foolish bargains. For
instance, a young man having inherited a splendid fortune, laid out a
considerable portion of it in the purchase of diseases, and finally spent all
the rest for a heavy lot of repentance and a suit of rags. A very pretty girl
bartered a heart as clear as crystal, and which seemed her most valuable
possession, for another jewel of the same kind, but so worn and defaced as
to be utterly worthless. In one shop there were a great many crowns of
laurel and myrtle, which soldiers, authors, statesmen, and various other
people pressed eagerly to buy; some purchased these paltry wreaths with
their lives, others by a toilsome servitude of years, and many sacrificed
whatever was most valuable, yet finally slunk away without the crown.
There was a sort of stock or scrip, called Conscience, which seemed to be in
great demand, and would purchase almost anything. Indeed, few rich
commodities were to be obtained without paying a heavy sum in this
particular stock, and a man’s business was seldom very lucrative unless he
knew precisely when and how to throw his hoard of conscience into the
market. Yet as this stock was the only thing of permanent value, whoever
parted with it was sure to find himself a loser in the long run. Several of the
speculations were of a questionable character. Occasionally a member of
Congress recruited his pocket by the sale of his constituents; and I was
assured that public officers have often sold their country at very moderate
prices. Thousands sold their happiness for a whim. Gilded chains were in
great demand, and purchased with almost any sacrifice. In truth, those who
desired, according to the old adage, to sell anything valuable for a song,
might find customers all over the Fair; and there were innumerable messes

of pottage, piping hot, for such as chose to buy them with their birthrights.
A few articles, however, could not be found genuine at Vanity Fair. If a
customer wished to renew his stock of youth the dealers offered him a set of
false teeth and an auburn wig; if he demanded peace of mind, they
recommended opium or a brandy bottle.
Tracts of land and golden mansions, situate in the Celestial City, were
often exchanged, at very disadvantageous rates, for a few years’ lease of
small, dismal, inconvenient tenements in Vanity Fair. Prince Beelzebub
himself took great interest in this sort of traffic, and sometimes
condescended to meddle with smaller matters. I once had the pleasure to see
him bargaining with a miser for his soul, which, after much ingenious
skirmishing on both sides, his highness succeeded in obtaining at about the
value of sixpence. The prince remarked with a smile, that he was a loser by
the transaction.
Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my manners and
deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants. The place
began to seem like home; the idea of pursuing my travels to the Celestial
City was almost obliterated from my mind. I was reminded of it, however,
by the sight of the same pair of simple pilgrims at whom we had laughed so
heartily when Apollyon puffed smoke and steam into their faces at the
commencement of our journey. There they stood amidst the densest bustle
of Vanity; the dealers offering them their purple and fine linen and jewels,
the men of wit and humor gibing at them, a pair of buxom ladies ogling
them askance, while the benevolent Mr. Smooth-it-away whispered some of
his wisdom at their elbows, and pointed to a newly-erected temple; but
there were these worthy simpletons, making the scene look wild and
monstrous, merely by their sturdy repudiation of all part in its business or
pleasures.
One of them—his name was Stick-to-the-right—perceived in my face, I
suppose, a species of sympathy and almost admiration, which, to my own
great surprise, I could not help feeling for this pragmatic couple. It
prompted him to address me.
“Sir,” inquired he, with a sad, yet mild and kindly voice, “do you call
yourself a pilgrim?”
“Yes,” I replied, “my right to that appellation is indubitable. I am merely
a sojourner here in Vanity Fair, being bound to the Celestial City by the new

railroad.”
“Alas, friend,” rejoined Mr. Stick-to-the-truth, “I do assure you, and
beseech you to receive the truth of my words, that that whole concern is a
bubble. You may travel on it all your lifetime, were you to live thousands of
years, and yet never get beyond the limits of Vanity Fair. Yea, though you
should deem yourself entering the gates of the blessed city, it will be
nothing but a miserable delusion.”
“The Lord of the Celestial City,” began the other pilgrim, whose name
was Mr. Foot-it-to-heaven, “has refused, and will ever refuse, to grant an
act of incorporation for this railroad; and unless that be obtained, no
passenger can ever hope to enter his dominions. Wherefore every man who
buys a ticket must lay his account with losing the purchase money, which is
the value of his own soul.”
“Poh, nonsense!” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, taking my arm and leading
me off, “these fellows ought to be indicted for a libel. If the law stood as it
once did in Vanity Fair we should see them grinning through the iron bars
of the prison window.”
This incident made a considerable impression on my mind, and
contributed with other circumstances to indispose me to a permanent
residence in the city of Vanity; although, of course, I was not simple enough
to give up my original plan of gliding along easily and commodiously by
railroad. Still, I grew anxious to be gone. There was one strange thing that
troubled me. Amid the occupations or amusements of the Fair, nothing was
more common than for a person—whether at feast, theatre, or church, or
trafficking for wealth and honors, or whatever he might be doing, to vanish
like a soap bubble, and be never more seen of his fellows; and so
accustomed were the latter to such little accidents that they went on with
their business as quietly as if nothing had happened. But it was otherwise
with me.
Finally, after a pretty long residence at the Fair, I resumed my journey
towards the Celestial City, still with Mr. Smooth-it-away at my side. At a
short distance beyond the suburbs of Vanity we passed the ancient silver
mine, of which Demas was the first discoverer, and which is now wrought
to great advantage, supplying nearly all the coined currency of the world. A
little further onward was the spot where Lot’s wife had stood forever under
the semblance of a pillar of salt. Curious travellers have long since carried it

away piecemeal. Had all regrets been punished as rigorously as this poor
dame’s were, my yearning for the relinquished delights of Vanity Fair might
have produced a similar change in my own corporeal substance, and left me
a warning to future pilgrims.
The next remarkable object was a large edifice, constructed of moss-
grown stone, but in a modern and airy style of architecture. The engine
came to a pause in its vicinity, with the usual tremendous shriek.
“This was formerly the castle of the redoubted giant Despair,” observed
Mr. Smooth-it-away; “but since his death Mr. Flimsy-faith has repaired it,
and keeps an excellent house of entertainment here. It is one of our
stopping-places.”
“It seems but slightly put together,” remarked I, looking at the frail yet
ponderous walls. “I do not envy Mr. Flimsy-faith his habitation. Some day
it will thunder down upon the heads of the occupants.”
“We shall escape at all events,” said Mr. Smooth-it-away, “for Apollyon
is putting on the steam again.”
The road now plunged into a gorge of the Delectable Mountains, and
traversed the field where in former ages the blind men wandered and
stumbled among the tombs. One of these ancient tombstones had been
thrust across the track by some malicious person, and gave the train of cars
a terrible jolt. Far up the rugged side of a mountain I perceived a rusty iron
door, half overgrown with bushes and creeping plants, but with smoke
issuing from its crevices.
“Is that,” inquired I, “the very door in the hill-side which the shepherds
assured Christian was a by-way to hell?”
“That was a joke on the part of the shepherds,” said Mr. Smooth-itaway,
with a smile. “It is neither more nor less than the door of a cavern which
they use as a smoke-house for the preparation of mutton hams.”
My recollections of the journey are now, for a little space, dim and
confused, inasmuch as a singular drowsiness here overcame me, owing to
the fact that we were passing over the enchanted ground, the air of which
encourages a disposition to sleep. I awoke, however, as soon as we crossed
the borders of the pleasant land of Beulah. All the passengers were rubbing
their eyes, comparing watches, and congratulating one another on the
prospect of arriving so seasonably at the journey’s end. The sweet breezes

of this happy clime came refreshingly to our nostrils; we beheld the
glimmering gush of silver fountains, overhung by trees of beautiful foliage
and delicious fruit, which were propagated by grafts from the celestial
gardens. Once, as we dashed onward like a hurricane, there was a flutter of
wings and the bright appearance of an angel in the air, speeding forth on
some heavenly mission. The engine now announced the close vicinity of the
final station-house by one last and horrible scream, in which there seemed
to be distinguishable every kind of wailing and woe, and bitter fierceness of
wrath, all mixed up with the wild laughter of a devil or a madman.
Throughout our journey, at every stopping-place, Apollyon had exercised
his ingenuity in screwing the most abominable sounds out of the whistle of
the steam-engine; but in this closing effort he outdid himself and created an
infernal uproar, which, besides disturbing the peaceful inhabitants of
Beulah, must have sent its discord even through the celestial gates.
While the horrid clamor was still ringing in our ears we heard an exulting
strain, as if a thousand instruments of music, with height and depth and
sweetness in their tones, at once tender and triumphant, were struck in
unison, to greet the approach of some illustrious hero, who had fought the
good fight and won a glorious victory, and was come to lay aside his
battered arms forever. Looking to ascertain what might be the occasion of
this glad harmony, I perceived, on alighting from the cars, that a multitude
of shining ones had assembled on the other side of the river, to welcome
two poor pilgrims, who were just emerging from its depths. They were the
same whom Apollyon and ourselves had persecuted with taunts, and gibes,
and scalding steam, at the commencement of our journey—the same whose
unworldly aspect and impressive words had stirred my conscience amid the
wild revellers of Vanity Fair.
“How amazingly well those men have got on,” cried I to Mr. Smoothit—
away. “I wish we were secure of as good a reception.”
“Never fear, never fear!” answered my friend. “Come, make haste; the
ferry boat will be off directly, and in three minutes you will be on the other
side of the river. No doubt you will find coaches to carry you up to the city
gates.”
A steam ferry boat, the last improvement on this important route, lay at
the river side, puffing, snorting, and emitting all those other disagreeable
utterances which betoken the departure to be immediate. I hurried on board

with the rest of the passengers, most of whom were in great perturbation:
some bawling out for their baggage; some tearing their hair and exclaiming
that the boat would explode or sink; some already pale with the heaving of
the stream; some gazing affrighted at the ugly aspect of the steersman; and
some still dizzy with the slumberous influences of the Enchanted Ground.
Looking back to the shore, I was amazed to discern Mr. Smooth-it-away
waving his hand in token of farewell.
“Don’t you go over to the Celestial City?” exclaimed I.
“Oh, no!” answered he with a queer smile, and that same disagreeable
contortion of visage which I had remarked in the inhabitants of the Dark
Valley. “Oh, no! I have come thus far only for the sake of your pleasant
company. Good-by! We shall meet again.”
And then did my excellent friend Mr. Smooth-it-away laugh outright, in
the midst of which cachinnation a smoke-wreath issued from his mouth and
nostrils, while a twinkle of lurid flame darted out of either eye, proving
indubitably that his heart was all of a red blaze. The impudent fiend! To
deny the existence of Tophet, when he felt its fiery tortures raging within
his breast. I rushed to the side of the boat, intending to fling myself on
shore; but the wheels, as they began their revolutions, threw a dash of spray
over me so cold—so deadly cold, with the chill that will never leave those
waters until Death be drowned in his own river—that with a shiver and a
heartquake I awoke. Thank Heaven it was a Dream!

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE

Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession. All of us have
our places, and are to move onward under the direction of the Chief
Marshal. The grand difficulty results from the invariably mistaken
principles on which the deputy marshals seek to arrange this immense
concourse of people, so much more numerous than those that train their
interminable length through streets and highways in times of political
excitement. Their scheme is ancient, far beyond the memory of man or even
the record of history, and has hitherto been very little modified by the innate
sense of something wrong, and the dim perception of better methods, that
have disquieted all the ages through which the procession has taken its
march. Its members are classified by the merest external circumstances, and
thus are more certain to be thrown out of their true positions than if no
principle of arrangement were attempted. In one part of the procession we
see men of landed estate or moneyed capital gravely keeping each other
company, for the preposterous reason that they chance to have a similar
standing in the tax-gatherer’s book. Trades and professions march together
with scarcely a more real bond of union. In this manner, it cannot be denied,
people are disentangled from the mass and separated into various classes
according to certain apparent relations; all have some artificial badge which
the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine
characteristic. Fixing our attention on such outside shows of similarity or
difference, we lose sight of those realities by which nature, fortune, fate, or
Providence has constituted for every man a brotherhood, wherein it is one
great office of human wisdom to classify him. When the mind has once
accustomed itself to a proper arrangement of the Procession of Life, or a
true classification of society, even though merely speculative, there is
thenceforth a satisfaction which pretty well suffices for itself without the
aid of any actual reformation in the order of march.

For instance, assuming to myself the power of marshalling the aforesaid
procession, I direct a trumpeter to send forth a blast loud enough to be heard
from hence to China; and a herald, with world-pervading voice, to make
proclamation for a certain class of mortals to take their places. What shall
be their principle of union? After all, an external one, in comparison with
many that might be found, yet far more real than those which the world has
selected for a similar purpose. Let all who are afflicted with like physical
diseases form themselves into ranks.
Our first attempt at classification is not very successful. It may gratify the
pride of aristocracy to reflect that disease, more than any other
circumstance of human life, pays due observance to the distinctions which
rank and wealth, and poverty and lowliness, have established among
mankind. Some maladies are rich and precious, and only to be acquired by
the right of inheritance or purchased with gold. Of this kind is the gout,
which serves as a bond of brotherhood to the purple-visaged gentry, who
obey the herald’s voice, and painfully hobble from all civilized regions of
the globe to take their post in the grand procession. In mercy to their toes,
let us hope that the march may not be long. The Dyspeptics, too, are people
of good standing in the world. For them the earliest salmon is caught in our
eastern rivers, and the shy woodcock stains the dry leaves with his blood in
his remotest haunts, and the turtle comes from the far Pacific Islands to be
gobbled up in soup. They can afford to flavor all their dishes with
indolence, which, in spite of the general opinion, is a sauce more
exquisitely piquant than appetite won by exercise. Apoplexy is another
highly respectable disease. We will rank together all who have the symptom
of dizziness in the brain, and as fast as any drop by the way supply their
places with new members of the board of aldermen.
On the other hand, here come whole tribes of people whose physical lives
are but a deteriorated variety of life, and themselves a meaner species of
mankind; so sad an effect has been wrought by the tainted breath of cities,
scanty and unwholesome food, destructive modes of labor, and the lack of
those moral supports that might partially have counteracted such bad
influences. Behold here a train of house painters, all afflicted with a
peculiar sort of colic. Next in place we will marshal those workmen in
cutlery, who have breathed a fatal disorder into their lungs with the
impalpable dust of steel. Tailors and shoemakers, being sedentary men, will
chiefly congregate into one part of the procession and march under similar

banners of disease; but among them we may observe here and there a sickly
student, who has left his health between the leaves of classic volumes; and
clerks, likewise, who have caught their deaths on high official stools; and
men of genius too, who have written sheet after sheet with pens dipped in
their heart’s blood. These are a wretched quaking, short-breathed set. But
what is this cloud of pale-cheeked, slender girls, who disturb the ear with
the multiplicity of their short, dry coughs? They are seamstresses, who have
plied the daily and nightly needle in the service of master tailors and close-
fisted contractors, until now it is almost time for each to hem the borders of
her own shroud. Consumption points their place in the procession. With
their sad sisterhood are intermingled many youthful maidens who have
sickened in aristocratic mansions, and for whose aid science has
unavailingly searched its volumes, and whom breathless love has watched.
In our ranks the rich maiden and the poor seamstress may walk arm in arm.
We might find innumerable other instances, where the bond of mutual
disease—not to speak of nation-sweeping pestilence—embraces high and
low, and makes the king a brother of the clown. But it is not hard to own
that disease is the natural aristocrat. Let him keep his state, and have his
established orders of rank, and wear his royal mantle of the color of a fever
flush and let the noble and wealthy boast their own physical infirmities, and
display their symptoms as the badges of high station. All things considered,
these are as proper subjects of human pride as any relations of human rank
that men can fix upon.
Sound again, thou deep-breathed trumpeter! and herald, with thy voice of
might, shout forth another summons that shall reach the old baronial castles
of Europe, and the rudest cabin of our western wilderness! What class is
next to take its place in the procession of mortal life? Let it be those whom
the gifts of intellect have united in a noble brotherhood.
Ay, this is a reality, before which the conventional distinctions of society
melt away like a vapor when we would grasp it with the hand. Were Byron
now alive, and Burns, the first would come from his ancestral abbey,
flinging aside, although unwillingly, the inherited honors of a thousand
years, to take the arm of the mighty peasant who grew immortal while he
stooped behind his plough. These are gone; but the hall, the farmer’s
fireside, the hut, perhaps the palace, the counting-room, the workshop, the
village, the city, life’s high places and low ones, may all produce their
poets, whom a common temperament pervades like an electric sympathy.

Peer or ploughman, we will muster them pair by pair and shoulder to
shoulder. Even society, in its most artificial state, consents to this
arrangement. These factory girls from Lowell shall mate themselves with
the pride of drawing-rooms and literary circles, the bluebells in fashion’s
nosegay, the Sapphos, and Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes
of intellect bring together as strange companies. Silk-gowned professor of
languages, give your arm to this sturdy blacksmith, and deem yourself
honored by the conjunction, though you behold him grimy from the anvil.
All varieties of human speech are like his mother tongue to this rare man.
Indiscriminately let those take their places, of whatever rank they come,
who possess the kingly gifts to lead armies or to sway a people—Nature’s
generals, her lawgivers, her kings, and with them also the deep philosophers
who think the thought in one generation that is to revolutionize society in
the next. With the hereditary legislator in whom eloquence is a far-
descended attainment—a rich echo repeated by powerful voices from
Cicero downward—we will match some wondrous backwoodsman, who
has caught a wild power of language from the breeze among his native
forest boughs. But we may safely leave these brethren and sisterhood to
settle their own congenialities. Our ordinary distinctions become so trifling,
so impalpable, so ridiculously visionary, in comparison with a classification
founded on truth, that all talk about the matter is immediately a common
place.
Yet the longer I reflect the less am I satisfied with the idea of forming a
separate class of mankind on the basis of high intellectual power. At best it
is but a higher development of innate gifts common to all. Perhaps,
moreover, he whose genius appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in
nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky
hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly, though unutterably,
conscious. Therefore, though we suffer the brotherhood of intellect to
march onward together, it may be doubted whether their peculiar relation
will not begin to vanish as soon as the procession shall have passed beyond
the circle of this present world. But we do not classify for eternity.
And next, let the trumpet pour forth a funereal wail, and the herald’s
voice give breath in one vast cry to all the groans and grievous utterances
that are audible throughout the earth. We appeal now to the sacred bond of
sorrow, and summon the great multitude who labor under similar afflictions
to take their places in the march.

How many a heart that would have been insensible to any other call has
responded to the doleful accents of that voice! It has gone far and wide, and
high and low, and left scarcely a mortal roof unvisited. Indeed, the principle
is only too universal for our purpose, and, unless we limit it, will quite
break up our classification of mankind, and convert the whole procession
into a funeral train. We will therefore be at some pains to discriminate. Here
comes a lonely rich man: he has built a noble fabric for his dwelling-house,
with a front of stately architecture and marble floors and doors of precious
woods; the whole structure is as beautiful as a dream and as substantial as
the native rock. But the visionary shapes of a long posterity, for whose
home this mansion was intended, have faded into nothingness since the
death of the founder’s only son. The rich man gives a glance at his sable
garb in one of the splendid mirrors of his drawing-room, and descending a
flight of lofty steps instinctively offers his arm to yonder poverty stricken
widow in the rusty black bonnet, and with a check apron over her patched
gown. The sailor boy, who was her sole earthly stay, was washed overboard
in a late tempest. This couple from the palace and the almshouse are but the
types of thousands more who represent the dark tragedy of life and seldom
quarrel for the upper parts. Grief is such a leveller, with its own dignity and
its own humility, that the noble and the peasant, the beggar and the
monarch, will waive their pretensions to external rank without the
officiousness of interference on our part. If pride—the influence of the
world’s false distinctions—remain in the heart, then sorrow lacks the
earnestness which makes it holy and reverend. It loses its reality and
becomes a miserable shadow. On this ground we have an opportunity to
assign over multitudes who would willingly claim places here to other parts
of the procession. If the mourner have anything dearer than his grief he
must seek his true position elsewhere. There are so many unsubstantial
sorrows which the necessity of our mortal state begets on idleness, that an
observer, casting aside sentiment, is sometimes led to question whether
there be any real woe, except absolute physical suffering and the loss of
closest friends. A crowd who exhibit what they deem to be broken hearts—
and among them many lovelorn maids and bachelors, and men of
disappointed ambition in arts or politics, and the poor who were once rich,
or who have sought to be rich in vain—the great majority of these may ask
admittance into some other fraternity. There is no room here. Perhaps we
may institute a separate class where such unfortunates will naturally fall

into the procession. Meanwhile let them stand aside and patiently await
their time.
If our trumpeter can borrow a note from the doomsday trumpet blast, let
him sound it now. The dread alarum should make the earth quake to its
centre, for the herald is about to address mankind with a summons to which
even the purest mortal may be sensible of some faint responding echo in his
breast. In many bosoms it will awaken a still small voice more terrible than
its own reverberating uproar.
The hideous appeal has swept around the globe. Come, all ye guilty ones,
and rank yourselves in accordance with the brotherhood of crime. This,
indeed, is an awful summons. I almost tremble to look at the strange
partnerships that begin to be formed, reluctantly, but by the invincible
necessity of like to like in this part of the procession. A forger from the state
prison seizes the arm of a distinguished financier. How indignantly does the
latter plead his fair reputation upon ’Change, and insist that his operations,
by their magnificence of scope, were removed into quite another sphere of
morality than those of his pitiful companion! But let him cut the connection
if he can. Here comes a murderer with his clanking chains, and pairs
himself—horrible to tell—with as pure and upright a man, in all observable
respects, as ever partook of the consecrated bread and wine. He is one of
those, perchance the most hopeless of all sinners, who practise such an
exemplary system of outward duties, that even a deadly crime may be
hidden from their own sight and remembrance, under this unreal frostwork.
Yet he now finds his place. Why do that pair of flaunting girls, with the
pert, affected laugh and the sly leer at the by-standers, intrude themselves
into the same rank with yonder decorous matron, and that somewhat
prudish maiden? Surely these poor creatures, born to vice as their sole and
natural inheritance, can be no fit associates for women who have been
guarded round about by all the proprieties of domestic life, and who could
not err unless they first created the opportunity. Oh no; it must be merely
the impertinence of those unblushing hussies; and we can only wonder how
such respectable ladies should have responded to a summons that was not
meant for them.
We shall make short work of this miserable class, each member of which
is entitled to grasp any other member’s hand, by that vile degradation
wherein guilty error has buried all alike. The foul fiend to whom it properly

belongs must relieve us of our loathsome task. Let the bond servants of sin
pass on. But neither man nor woman, in whom good predominates, will
smile or sneer, nor bid the Rogues’ March be played, in derision of their
array. Feeling within their breasts a shuddering sympathy, which at least
gives token of the sin that might have been, they will thank God for any
place in the grand procession of human existence, save among those most
wretched ones. Many, however, will be astonished at the fatal impulse that
drags them thitherward. Nothing is more remarkable than the various
deceptions by which guilt conceals itself from the perpetrator’s conscience,
and oftenest, perhaps, by the splendor of its garments. Statesmen, rulers,
generals, and all men who act over an extensive sphere, are most liable to
be deluded in this way; they commit wrong, devastation, and murder, on so
grand a scale, that it impresses them as speculative rather than actual; but in
our procession we find them linked in detestable conjunction with the
meanest criminals whose deeds have the vulgarity of petty details. Here the
effect of circumstance and accident is done away, and a man finds his rank
according to the spirit of his crime, in whatever shape it may have been
developed.
We have called the Evil; now let us call the Good. The trumpet’s brazen
throat should pour heavenly music over the earth, and the herald’s voice go
forth with the sweetness of an angel’s accents, as if to summon each upright
man to his reward. But how is this? Does none answer to the call? Not one:
for the just, the pure, the true, and all who might most worthily obey it,
shrink sadly back, as most conscious of error and imperfection. Then let the
summons be to those whose pervading principle is Love. This classification
will embrace all the truly good, and none in whose souls there exists not
something that may expand itself into a heaven, both of well-doing and
felicity.
The first that presents himself is a man of wealth, who has bequeathed
the bulk of his property to a hospital; his ghost, methinks, would have a
better right here than his living body. But here they come, the genuine
benefactors of their race. Some have wandered about the earth with pictures
of bliss in their imagination, and with hearts that shrank sensitively from the
idea of pain and woe, yet have studied all varieties of misery that human
nature can endure. The prison, the insane asylum, the squalid chamber of
the almshouse, the manufactory where the demon of machinery annihilates
the human soul, and the cotton field where God’s image becomes a beast of

burden; to these and every other scene where man wrongs or neglects his
brother, the apostles of humanity have penetrated. This missionary, black
with India’s burning sunshine, shall give his arm to a pale-faced brother
who has made himself familiar with the infected alleys and loathsome
haunts of vice in one of our own cities. The generous founder of a college
shall be the partner of a maiden lady of narrow substance, one of whose
good deeds it has been to gather a little school of orphan children. If the
mighty merchant whose benefactions are reckoned by thousands of dollars
deem himself worthy, let him join the procession with her whose love has
proved itself by watchings at the sick-bed, and all those lowly offices which
bring her into actual contact with disease and wretchedness. And with those
whose impulses have guided them to benevolent actions, we will rank
others to whom Providence has assigned a different tendency and different
powers. Men who have spent their lives in generous and holy contemplation
for the human race; those who, by a certain heavenliness of spirit, have
purified the atmosphere around them, and thus supplied a medium in which
good and high things may be projected and performed—give to these a
lofty place among the benefactors of mankind, although no deed, such as
the world calls deeds, may be recorded of them. There are some individuals
of whom we cannot conceive it proper that they should apply their hands to
any earthly instrument, or work out any definite act; and others, perhaps not
less high, to whom it is an essential attribute to labor in body as well as
spirit for the welfare of their brethren. Thus, if we find a spiritual sage
whose unseen, inestimable influence has exalted the moral standard of
mankind, we will choose for his companion some poor laborer who has
wrought for love in the potato field of a neighbor poorer than himself.
We have summoned this various multitude—and, to the credit of our
nature, it is a large one—on the principle of Love. It is singular,
nevertheless, to remark the shyness that exists among many members of the
present class, all of whom we might expect to recognize one another by the
freemasonry of mutual goodness, and to embrace like brethren, giving God
thanks for such various specimens of human excellence. But it is far
otherwise. Each sect surrounds its own righteousness with a hedge of
thorns. It is difficult for the good Christian to acknowledge the good Pagan;
almost impossible for the good Orthodox to grasp the hand of the good
Unitarian, leaving to their Creator to settle the matters in dispute, and
giving their mutual efforts strongly and trustingly to whatever right thing is

too evident to be mistaken. Then again, though the heart be large, yet the
mind is often of such moderate dimensions as to be exclusively filled up
with one idea. When a good man has long devoted himself to a particular
kind of beneficence—to one species of reform—he is apt to become
narrowed into the limits of the path wherein he treads, and to fancy that
there is no other good to be done on earth but that self-same good to which
he has put his hand, and in the very mode that best suits his own
conceptions. All else is worthless. His scheme must be wrought out by the
united strength of the whole world’s stock of love, or the world is no longer
worthy of a position in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being the
rich grape juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an intoxicating
quality, when imbibed by any save a powerful intellect, and often, as it
were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups. For such reasons, strange to
say, it is harder to contrive a friendly arrangement of these brethren of love
and righteousness, in the procession of life, than to unite even the wicked,
who, indeed, are chained together by their crimes. The fact is too
preposterous for tears, too lugubrious for laughter.
But, let good men push and elbow one another as they may during their
earthly march, all will be peace among them when the honorable array of
their procession shall tread on heavenly ground. There they will doubtless
find that they have been working each for the other’s cause, and that every
well-delivered stroke, which, with an honest purpose any mortal struck,
even for a narrow object, was indeed stricken for the universal cause of
good. Their own view may be bounded by country, creed, profession, the
diversities of individual character—but above them all is the breadth of
Providence. How many who have deemed themselves antagonists will
smile hereafter, when they look back upon the world’s wide harvest field,
and perceive that, in unconscious brotherhood, they were helping to bind
the selfsame sheaf!
But, come! The sun is hastening westward, while the march of human
life, that never paused before, is delayed by our attempt to rearrange its
order. It is desirable to find some comprehensive principle, that shall render
our task easier by bringing thousands into the ranks where hitherto we have
brought one. Therefore let the trumpet, if possible, split its brazen throat
with a louder note than ever, and the herald summon all mortals, who, from
whatever cause, have lost, or never found, their proper places in the wold.

Obedient to this call, a great multitude come together, most of them with
a listless gait, betokening weariness of soul, yet with a gleam of satisfaction
in their faces, at a prospect of at length reaching those positions which,
hitherto, they have vainly sought. But here will be another disappointment;
for we can attempt no more than merely to associate in one fraternity all
who are afflicted with the same vague trouble. Some great mistake in life is
the chief condition of admittance into this class. Here are members of the
learned professions, whom Providence endowed with special gifts for the
plough, the forge, and the wheelbarrow, or for the routine of unintellectual
business. We will assign to them, as partners in the march, those lowly
laborers and handicraftsmen, who have pined, as with a dying thirst, after
the unattainable fountains of knowledge. The latter have lost less than their
companions; yet more, because they deem it infinite. Perchance the two
species of unfortunates may comfort one another. Here are Quakers with the
instinct of battle in them; and men of war who should have worn the broad
brim. Authors shall be ranked here whom some freak of Nature, making
game of her poor children, had imbued with the confidence of genius and
strong desire of fame, but has favored with no corresponding power; and
others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied with the faculty of
expression, or any of that earthly machinery by which ethereal endowments
must be manifested to mankind. All these, therefore, are melancholy
laughing-stocks. Next, here are honest and well intentioned persons, who by
a want of tact—by inaccurate perceptions—by a distorting imagination—
have been kept continually at cross purposes with the world and bewildered
upon the path of life. Let us see if they can confine themselves within the
line of our procession. In this class, likewise, we must assign places to those
who have encountered that worst of ill success, a higher fortune than their
abilities could vindicate; writers, actors, painters, the pets of a day, but
whose laurels wither unrenewed amid their hoary hair; politicians, whom
some malicious contingency of affairs has thrust into conspicuous station,
where, while the world stands gazing at them, the dreary consciousness of
imbecility makes them curse their birth hour. To such men, we give for a
companion him whose rare talents, which perhaps require a Revolution for
their exercise, are buried in the tomb of sluggish circumstances.
Not far from these, we must find room for one whose success has been of
the wrong kind; the man who should have lingered in the cloisters of a
university, digging new treasures out of the Herculaneum of antique lore,

diffusing depth and accuracy of literature throughout his country, and thus
making for himself a great and quiet fame. But the outward tendencies
around him have proved too powerful for his inward nature, and have
drawn him into the arena of political tumult, there to contend at
disadvantage, whether front to front, or side by side, with the brawny giants
of actual life. He becomes, it may be, a name for brawling parties to bandy
to and fro, a legislator of the Union; a governor of his native state; an
ambassador to the courts of kings or queens; and the world may deem him a
man of happy stars. But not so the wise; and not so himself, when he looks
through his experience, and sighs to miss that fitness, the one invaluable
touch which makes all things true and real. So much achieved, yet how
abortive is his life! Whom shall we choose for his companion? Some weak
framed blacksmith, perhaps, whose delicacy of muscle might have suited a
tailor’s shopboard better than the anvil.
Shall we bid the trumpet sound again? It is hardly worth the while. There
remain a few idle men of fortune, tavern and grog-shop loungers, lazzaroni,
old bachelors, decaying maidens, and people of crooked intellect or temper,
all of whom may find their like, or some tolerable approach to it, in the
plentiful diversity of our latter class. There too, as his ultimate destiny, must
we rank the dreamer, who, all his life long, has cherished the idea that he
was peculiarly apt for something, but never could determine what it was;
and there the most unfortunate of men, whose purpose it has been to enjoy
life’s pleasures, but to avoid a manful struggle with its toil and sorrow. The
remainder, if any, may connect themselves with whatever rank of the
procession they shall find best adapted to their tastes and consciences. The
worst possible fate would be to remain behind, shivering in the solitude of
time, while all the world is on the move towards eternity. Our attempt to
classify society is now complete. The result may be anything but perfect;
yet better—to give it the very lowest praise—than the antique rule of the
herald’s office, or the modern one of the tax-gatherer, whereby the accidents
and superficial attributes with which the real nature of individuals has least
to do, are acted upon as the deepest characteristics of mankind. Our task is
done! Now let the grand procession move!
Yet pause a while! We had forgotten the Chief Marshal.
Hark! That world-wide swell of solemn music, with the clang of a mighty
bell breaking forth through its regulated uproar, announces his approach. He

comes; a severe, sedate, immovable, dark rider, waving his truncheon of
universal sway, as he passes along the lengthened line, on the pale horse of
the Revelation. It is Death! Who else could assume the guidance of a
procession that comprehends all humanity? And if some, among these many
millions, should deem themselves classed amiss, yet let them take to their
hearts the comfortable truth that Death levels us all into one great
brotherhood, and that another state of being will surely rectify the wrong of
this. Then breathe thy wail upon the earth’s wailing wind, thou band of
melancholy music, made up of every sigh that the human heart, unsatisfied,
has uttered! There is yet triumph in thy tones. And now we move! Beggars
in their rags, and Kings trailing the regal purple in the dust; the Warrior’s
gleaming helmet; the Priest in his sable robe; the hoary Grandsire, who has
run life’s circle and come back to childhood; the ruddy School-boy with his
golden curls, frisking along the march; the Artisan’s stuff jacket; the
Noble’s star-decorated coat;—the whole presenting a motley spectacle, yet
with a dusky grandeur brooding over it. Onward, onward, into that dimness
where the lights of Time which have blazed along the procession, are
flickering in their sockets! And whither! We know not; and Death, hitherto
our leader, deserts us by the wayside, as the tramp of our innumerable
footsteps echoes beyond his sphere. He knows not, more than we, our
destined goal. But God, who made us, knows, and will not leave us on our
toilsome and doubtful march, either to wander in infinite uncertainty, or
perish by the way!

FEATHERTOP: A MORALIZED LEGEND

“Dickon,” cried Mother Rigby, “a coal for my pipe!”
The pipe was in the old dame’s mouth when she said these words. She
had thrust it there after filling it with tobacco, but without stooping to light
it at the hearth, where indeed there was no appearance of a fire having been
kindled that morning. Forthwith, however, as soon as the order was given,
there was an intense red glow out of the bowl of the pipe, and a whiff of
smoke came from Mother Rigby’s lips. Whence the coal came, and how
brought thither by an invisible hand, I have never been able to discover.
“Good!” quoth Mother Rigby, with a nod of her head. “Thank ye,
Dickon! And now for making this scarecrow. Be within call, Dickon, in
case I need you again.”
The good woman had risen thus early (for as yet it was scarcely sunrise)
in order to set about making a scarecrow, which she intended to put in the
middle of her corn-patch. It was now the latter week of May, and the crows
and blackbirds had already discovered the little, green, rolledup leaf of the
Indian corn just peeping out of the soil. She was determined, therefore, to
contrive as lifelike a scarecrow as ever was seen, and to finish it
immediately, from top to toe, so that it should begin its sentinel’s duty that
very morning. Now Mother Rigby (as everybody must have heard) was one
of the most cunning and potent witches in New England, and might, with
very little trouble, have made a scarecrow ugly enough to frighten the
minister himself. But on this occasion, as she had awakened in an
uncommonly pleasant humor, and was further dulcified by her pipe tobacco,
she resolved to produce something fine, beautiful, and splendid, rather than
hideous and horrible.
“I don’t want to set up a hobgoblin in my own corn-patch, and almost at
my own doorstep,” said Mother Rigby to herself, puffing out a whiff of
smoke; “I could do it if I pleased, but I’m tired of doing marvellous things,

and so I’ll keep within the bounds of every-day business just for variety’s
sake. Besides, there is no use in scaring the little children for a mile
roundabout, though ’tis true I’m a witch.”
It was settled, therefore, in her own mind, that the scarecrow should
represent a fine gentleman of the period, so far as the materials at hand
would allow. Perhaps it may be as well to enumerate the chief of the articles
that went to the composition of this figure.
The most important item of all, probably, although it made so little show,
was a certain broomstick, on which Mother Rigby had taken many an airy
gallop at midnight, and which now served the scarecrow by way of a spinal
column, or, as the unlearned phrase it, a backbone. One of its arms was a
disabled flail which used to be wielded by Goodman Rigby, before his
spouse worried him out of this troublesome world; the other, if I mistake
not, was composed of the pudding stick and a broken rung of a chair, tied
loosely together at the elbow. As for its legs, the right was a hoe handle, and
the left an undistinguished and miscellaneous stick from the woodpile. Its
lungs, stomach, and other affairs of that kind were nothing better than a
meal bag stuffed with straw. Thus we have made out the skeleton and entire
corporosity of the scarecrow, with the exception of its head; and this was
admirably supplied by a somewhat withered and shrivelled pumpkin, in
which Mother Rigby cut two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth,
leaving a bluish-colored knob in the middle to pass for a nose. It was really
quite a respectable face.
“I’ve seen worse ones on human shoulders, at any rate,” said Mother
Rigby. “And many a fine gentleman has a pumpkin head, as well as my
scarecrow.”
But the clothes, in this case, were to be the making of the man. So the
good old woman took down from a peg an ancient plum-colored coat of
London make, and with relics of embroidery on its seams, cuffs, pocket-
flaps, and button-holes, but lamentably worn and faded, patched at the
elbows, tattered at the skirts, and threadbare all over. On the left breast was
a round hole, whence either a star of nobility had been rent away, or else the
hot heart of some former wearer had scorched it through and through. The
neighbors said that this rich garment belonged to the Black Man’s
wardrobe, and that he kept it at Mother Rigby’s cottage for the convenience
of slipping it on whenever he wished to make a grand appearance at the

governor’s table. To match the coat there was a velvet waistcoat of very
ample size, and formerly embroidered with foliage that had been as brightly
golden as the maple leaves in October, but which had now quite vanished
out of the substance of the velvet. Next came a pair of scarlet breeches,
once worn by the French governor of Louisbourg, and the knees of which
had touched the lower step of the throne of Louis le Grand. The Frenchman
had given these small-clothes to an Indian powwow, who parted with them
to the old witch for a gill of strong waters, at one of their dances in the
forest. Furthermore, Mother Rigby produced a pair of silk stockings and put
them on the figure’s legs, where they showed as unsubstantial as a dream,
with the wooden reality of the two sticks making itself miserably apparent
through the holes. Lastly, she put her dead husband’s wig on the bare scalp
of the pumpkin, and surmounted the whole with a dusty three-cornered hat,
in which was stuck the longest tail feather of a rooster.
Then the old dame stood the figure up in a corner of her cottage and
chuckled to behold its yellow semblance of a visage, with its nobby little
nose thrust into the air. It had a strangely self-satisfied aspect, and seemed
to say, “Come look at me!”
“And you are well worth looking at, that’s a fact!” quoth Mother Rigby,
in admiration at her own handiwork. “I’ve made many a puppet since I’ve
been a witch, but methinks this is the finest of them all. ’Tis almost too
good for a scarecrow. And, by the by, I’ll just fill a fresh pipe of tobacco
and then take him out to the corn-patch.”
While filling her pipe the old woman continued to gaze with almost
motherly affection at the figure in the corner. To say the truth, whether it
were chance, or skill, or downright witchcraft, there was something
wonderfully human in this ridiculous shape, bedizened with its tattered
finery; and as for the countenance, it appeared to shrivel its yellow surface
into a grin—a funny kind of expression betwixt scorn and merriment, as if
it understood itself to be a jest at mankind. The more Mother Rigby looked
the better she was pleased.
“Dickon,” cried she sharply, “another coal for my pipe!”
Hardly had she spoken, than, just as before, there was a red-glowing coal
on the top of the tobacco. She drew in a long whiff and puffed it forth again
into the bar of morning sunshine which struggled through the one dusty
pane of her cottage window. Mother Rigby always liked to flavor her pipe

with a coal of fire from the particular chimney corner whence this had been
brought. But where that chimney corner might be, or who brought the coal
from it,—further than that the invisible messenger seemed to respond to the
name of Dickon,—I cannot tell.
“That puppet yonder,” thought Mother Rigby, still with her eyes fixed on
the scarecrow, “is too good a piece of work to stand all summer in a corn-
patch, frightening away the crows and blackbirds. He’s capable of better
things. Why, I’ve danced with a worse one, when partners happened to be
scarce, at our witch meetings in the forest! What if I should let him take his
chance among the other men of straw and empty fellows who go bustling
about the world?”
The old witch took three or four more whiffs of her pipe and smiled.
“He’ll meet plenty of his brethren at every street corner!” continued she.
“Well; I didn’t mean to dabble in witchcraft to-day, further than the lighting
of my pipe, but a witch I am, and a witch I’m likely to be, and there’s no
use trying to shirk it. I’ll make a man of my scarecrow, were it only for the
joke’s sake!”
While muttering these words, Mother Rigby took the pipe from her own
mouth and thrust it into the crevice which represented the same feature in
the pumpkin visage of the scarecrow.
“Puff, darling, puff!” said she. “Puff away, my fine fellow! your life
depends on it!”
This was a strange exhortation, undoubtedly, to be addressed to a mere
thing of sticks, straw, and old clothes, with nothing better than a shrivelled
pumpkin for a head,—as we know to have been the scarecrow’s case.
Nevertheless, as we must carefully hold in remembrance, Mother Rigby
was a witch of singular power and dexterity; and, keeping this fact duly
before our minds, we shall see nothing beyond credibility in the remarkable
incidents of our story. Indeed, the great difficulty will be at once got over, if
we can only bring ourselves to believe that, as soon as the old dame bade
him puff, there came a whiff of smoke from the scarecrow’s mouth. It was
the very feeblest of whiffs, to be sure; but it was followed by another and
another, each more decided than the preceding one.
“Puff away, my pet! puff away, my pretty one!” Mother Rigby kept
repeating, with her pleasantest smile. “It is the breath of life to ye; and that
you may take my word for.”

Beyond all question the pipe was bewitched. There must have been a
spell either in the tobacco or in the fiercely-glowing coal that so
mysteriously burned on top of it, or in the pungently-aromatic smoke which
exhaled from the kindled weed. The figure, after a few doubtful attempts at
length blew forth a volley of smoke extending all the way from the obscure
corner into the bar of sunshine. There it eddied and melted away among the
motes of dust. It seemed a convulsive effort; for the two or three next whiffs
were fainter, although the coal still glowed and threw a gleam over the
scarecrow’s visage. The old witch clapped her skinny hands together, and
smiled encouragingly upon her handiwork. She saw that the charm worked
well. The shrivelled, yellow face, which heretofore had been no face at all,
had already a thin, fantastic haze, as it were of human likeness, shifting to
and fro across it; sometimes vanishing entirely, but growing more
perceptible than ever with the next whiff from the pipe. The whole figure,
in like manner, assumed a show of life, such as we impart to ill-defined
shapes among the clouds, and half deceive ourselves with the pastime of
our own fancy.
If we must needs pry closely into the matter, it may be doubted whether
there was any real change, after all, in the sordid, wornout worthless, and
ill-jointed substance of the scarecrow; but merely a spectral illusion, and a
cunning effect of light and shade so colored and contrived as to delude the
eyes of most men. The miracles of witchcraft seem always to have had a
very shallow subtlety; and, at least, if the above explanation do not hit the
truth of the process, I can suggest no better.
“Well puffed, my pretty lad!” still cried old Mother Rigby. “Come,
another good stout whiff, and let it be with might and main. Puff for thy
life, I tell thee! Puff out of the very bottom of thy heart, if any heart thou
hast, or any bottom to it! Well done, again! Thou didst suck in that mouthful
as if for the pure love of it.”
And then the witch beckoned to the scarecrow, throwing so much
magnetic potency into her gesture that it seemed as if it must inevitably be
obeyed, like the mystic call of the loadstone when it summons the iron.
“Why lurkest thou in the corner, lazy one?” said she. “Step forth! Thou
hast the world before thee!”
Upon my word, if the legend were not one which I heard on my
grandmother’s knee, and which had established its place among things

credible before my childish judgment could analyze its probability, I
question whether I should have the face to tell it now.
In obedience to Mother Rigby’s word, and extending its arm as if to
reach her outstretched hand, the figure made a step forward—a kind of
hitch and jerk, however, rather than a step—then tottered and almost lost its
balance. What could the witch expect? It was nothing, after all, but a
scarecrow stuck upon two sticks. But the strong-willed old beldam scowled,
and beckoned, and flung the energy of her purpose so forcibly at this poor
combination of rotten wood, and musty straw, and ragged garments, that it
was compelled to show itself a man, in spite of the reality of things. So it
stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood, poor devil of a contrivance
that it was!—with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it,
through which was evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered,
good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon
the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I confess
the truth? At its present point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of
some of the lukewarm and abortive characters, composed of heterogeneous
materials, used for the thousandth time, and never worth using, with which
romance writers (and myself, no doubt, among the rest) have so
overpeopled the world of fiction.
But the fierce old hag began to get angry and show a glimpse of her
diabolic nature (like a snake’s head, peeping with a hiss out of her bosom),
at this pusillanimous behavior of the thing which she had taken the trouble
to put together.
“Puff away, wretch!” cried she, wrathfully. “Puff, puff, puff, thou thing of
straw and emptiness! thou rag or two! thou meal bag! thou pumpkin head!
thou nothing! Where shall I find a name vile enough to call thee by? Puff, I
say, and suck in thy fantastic life with the smoke! else I snatch the pipe
from thy mouth and hurl thee where that red coal came from.”
Thus threatened, the unhappy scarecrow had nothing for it but to puff
away for dear life. As need was, therefore, it applied itself lustily to the
pipe, and sent forth such abundant volleys of tobacco smoke that the small
cottage kitchen became all vaporous. The one sunbeam struggled mistily
through, and could but imperfectly define the image of the cracked and
dusty window pane on the opposite wall. Mother Rigby, meanwhile, with
one brown arm akimbo and the other stretched towards the figure, loomed

grimly amid the obscurity with such port and expression as when she was
wont to heave a ponderous nightmare on her victims and stand at the
bedside to enjoy their agony. In fear and trembling did this poor scarecrow
puff. But its efforts, it must be acknowledged, served an excellent purpose;
for, with each successive whiff, the figure lost more and more of its dizzy
and perplexing tenuity and seemed to take denser substance. Its very
garments, moreover, partook of the magical change, and shone with the
gloss of novelty and glistened with the skilfully embroidered gold that had
long ago been rent away. And, half revealed among the smoke, a yellow
visage bent its lustreless eyes on Mother Rigby.
At last the old witch clinched her fist and shook it at the figure. Not that
she was positively angry, but merely acting on the principle—perhaps
untrue, or not the only truth, though as high a one as Mother Rigby could be
expected to attain—that feeble and torpid natures, being incapable of better
inspiration, must be stirred up by fear. But here was the crisis. Should she
fail in what she now sought to effect, it was her ruthless purpose to scatter
the miserable simulacre into its original elements.
“Thou hast a man’s aspect,” said she, sternly. “Have also the echo and
mockery of a voice! I bid thee speak!”
The scarecrow gasped, struggled, and at length emitted a murmur, which
was so incorporated with its smoky breath that you could scarcely tell
whether it were indeed a voice or only a whiff of tobacco. Some narrators
of this legend hold the opinion that Mother Rigby’s conjurations and the
fierceness of her will had compelled a familiar spirit into the figure, and
that the voice was his.
“Mother,” mumbled the poor stifled voice, “be not so awful with me! I
would fain speak; but being without wits, what can I say?”
“Thou canst speak, darling, canst thou?” cried Mother Rigby, relaxing
her grim countenance into a smile. “And what shalt thou say, quoth-a! Say,
indeed! Art thou of the brotherhood of the empty skull, and demandest of
me what thou shalt say? Thou shalt say a thousand things, and saying them
a thousand times over, thou shalt still have said nothing! Be not afraid, I tell
thee! When thou comest into the world (whither I purpose sending thee
forthwith) thou shalt not lack the wherewithal to talk. Talk! Why, thou shall
babble like a mill-stream, if thou wilt. Thou hast brains enough for that, I
trow!”

“At your service, mother,” responded the figure.
“And that was well said, my pretty one,” answered Mother Rigby. “Then
thou speakest like thyself, and meant nothing. Thou shalt have a hundred
such set phrases, and five hundred to the boot of them. And now, darling, I
have taken so much pains with thee and thou art so beautiful, that, by my
troth, I love thee better than any witch’s puppet in the world; and I’ve made
them of all sorts—clay, wax, straw, sticks, night fog, morning mist, sea
foam, and chimney smoke. But thou art the very best. So give heed to what
I say.”
“Yes, kind mother,” said the figure, “with all my heart!”
“With all thy heart!” cried the old witch, setting her hands to her sides
and laughing loudly. “Thou hast such a pretty way of speaking. With all thy
heart! And thou didst put thy hand to the left side of thy waistcoat as if thou
really hadst one!”
So now, in high good humor with this fantastic contrivance of hers,
Mother Rigby told the scarecrow that it must go and play its part in the
great world, where not one man in a hundred, she affirmed, was gifted with
more real substance than itself. And, that he might hold up his head with the
best of them, she endowed him, on the spot, with an unreckonable amount
of wealth. It consisted partly of a gold mine in Eldorado, and of ten
thousand shares in a broken bubble, and of half a million acres of vineyard
at the North Pole, and of a castle in the air, and a chateau in Spain, together
with all the rents and income therefrom accruing. She further made over to
him the cargo of a certain ship, laden with salt of Cadiz, which she herself,
by her necromantic arts, had caused to founder, ten years before, in the
deepest part of mid-ocean. If the salt were not dissolved, and could be
brought to market, it would fetch a pretty penny among the fishermen. That
he might not lack ready money, she gave him a copper farthing of
Birmingham manufacture, being all the coin she had about her, and likewise
a great deal of brass, which she applied to his forehead, thus making it
yellower than ever.
“With that brass alone,” quoth Mother Rigby, “thou canst pay thy way all
over the earth. Kiss me, pretty darling! I have done my best for thee.”
Furthermore, that the adventurer might lack no possible advantage
towards a fair start in life, this excellent old dame gave him a token by
which he was to introduce himself to a certain magistrate, member of the

council, merchant, and elder of the church (the four capacities constituting
but one man), who stood at the head of society in the neighboring
metropolis. The token was neither more nor less than a single word, which
Mother Rigby whispered to the scarecrow, and which the scarecrow was to
whisper to the merchant.
“Gouty as the old fellow is, he’ll run thy errands for thee, when once
thou hast given him that word in his ear,” said the old witch. “Mother Rigby
knows the worshipful Justice Gookin, and the worshipful Justice knows
Mother Rigby!”
Here the witch thrust her wrinkled face close to the puppet’s, chuckling
irrepressibly, and fidgeting all through her system, with delight at the idea
which she meant to communicate.
“The worshipful Master Gookin,” whispered she, “hath a comely maiden
to his daughter. And hark ye, my pet! Thou hast a fair outside, and a pretty
wit enough of thine own. Yea, a pretty wit enough! Thou wilt think better of
it when thou hast seen more of other people’s wits. Now, with thy outside
and thy inside, thou art the very man to win a young girl’s heart. Never
doubt it! I tell thee it shall be so. Put but a bold face on the matter, sigh,
smile, flourish thy hat, thrust forth thy leg like a dancing-master, put thy
right hand to the left side of thy waistcoat, and pretty Polly Gookin is thine
own!”
All this while the new creature had been sucking in and exhaling the
vapory fragrance of his pipe, and seemed now to continue this occupation
as much for the enjoyment it afforded as because it was an essential
condition of his existence. It was wonderful to see how exceedingly like a
human being it behaved. Its eyes (for it appeared to possess a pair) were
bent on Mother Rigby, and at suitable junctures it nodded or shook its head.
Neither did it lack words proper for the occasion: “Really! Indeed! Pray tell
me! Is it possible! Upon my word! By no means! Oh! Ah! Hem!” and other
such weighty utterances as imply attention, inquiry, acquiescence, or dissent
on the part of the auditor. Even had you stood by and seen the scarecrow
made, you could scarcely have resisted the conviction that it perfectly
understood the cunning counsels which the old witch poured into its
counterfeit of an ear. The more earnestly it applied its lips to the pipe, the
more distinctly was its human likeness stamped among visible realities, the
more sagacious grew its expression, the more lifelike its gestures and

movements, and the more intelligibly audible its voice. Its garments, too,
glistened so much the brighter with an illusory magnificence. The very
pipe, in which burned the spell of all this wonderwork, ceased to appear as
a smoke-blackened earthen stump, and became a meerschaum, with painted
bowl and amber mouthpiece.
It might be apprehended, however, that as the life of the illusion seemed
identical with the vapor of the pipe, it would terminate simultaneously with
the reduction of the tobacco to ashes. But the beldam foresaw the difficulty.
“Hold thou the pipe, my precious one,” said she, “while I fill it for thee
again.”
It was sorrowful to behold how the fine gentleman began to fade back
into a scarecrow while Mother Rigby shook the ashes out of the pipe and
proceeded to replenish it from her tobacco-box.
“Dickon,” cried she, in her high, sharp tone, “another coal for this pipe!”
No sooner said than the intensely red speck of fire was glowing within
the pipe-bowl; and the scarecrow, without waiting for the witch’s bidding,
applied the tube to his lips and drew in a few short, convulsive whiffs,
which soon, however, became regular and equable.
“Now, mine own heart’s darling,” quoth Mother Rigby, “whatever may
happen to thee, thou must stick to thy pipe. Thy life is in it; and that, at
least, thou knowest well, if thou knowest nought besides. Stick to thy pipe, I
say! Smoke, puff, blow thy cloud; and tell the people, if any question be
made, that it is for thy health, and that so the physician orders thee to do.
And, sweet one, when thou shalt find thy pipe getting low, go apart into
some corner, and (first filling thyself with smoke) cry sharply, ‘Dickon, a
fresh pipe of tobacco!’ and, ‘Dickon, another coal for my pipe!’ and have it
into thy pretty mouth as speedily as may be. Else, instead of a gallant
gentleman in a gold-laced coat, thou wilt be but a jumble of sticks and
tattered clothes, and a bag of straw, and a withered pumpkin! Now depart,
my treasure, and good luck go with thee!”
“Never fear, mother!” said the figure, in a stout voice, and sending forth a
courageous whiff of smoke, “I will thrive, if an honest man and a gentleman
may!”
“Oh, thou wilt be the death of me!” cried the old witch, convulsed with
laughter. “That was well said. If an honest man and a gentleman may! Thou

playest thy part to perfection. Get along with thee for a smart fellow; and I
will wager on thy head, as a man of pith and substance, with a brain and
what they call a heart, and all else that a man should have, against any other
thing on two legs. I hold myself a better witch than yesterday, for thy sake.
Did not I make thee? And I defy any witch in New England to make such
another! Here; take my staff along with thee!”
The staff, though it was but a plain oaken stick, immediately took the
aspect of a gold-headed cane.
“That gold head has as much sense in it as thine own,” said Mother
Rigby, “and it will guide thee straight to worshipful Master Gookin’s door.
Get thee gone, my pretty pet, my darling, my precious one, my treasure; and
if any ask thy name, it is Feathertop. For thou hast a feather in thy hat, and I
have thrust a handful of feathers into the hollow of thy head, and thy wig,
too, is of the fashion they call Feathertop,—so be Feathertop thy name!”
And, issuing from the cottage, Feathertop strode manfully towards town.
Mother Rigby stood at the threshold, well pleased to see how the sunbeams
glistened on him, as if all his magnificence were real, and how diligently
and lovingly he smoked his pipe, and how handsomely he walked, in spite
of a little stiffness of his legs. She watched him until out of sight, and threw
a witch benediction after her darling, when a turn of the road snatched him
from her view.
Betimes in the forenoon, when the principal street of the neighboring
town was just at its acme of life and bustle, a stranger of very distinguished
figure was seen on the sidewalk. His port as well as his garments betokened
nothing short of nobility. He wore a richly-embroidered plum-colored coat,
a waistcoat of costly velvet, magnificently adorned with golden foliage, a
pair of splendid scarlet breeches, and the finest and glossiest of white silk
stockings. His head was covered with a peruke, so daintily powdered and
adjusted that it would have been sacrilege to disorder it with a hat; which,
therefore (and it was a gold-laced hat, set off with a snowy feather), he
carried beneath his arm. On the breast of his coat glistened a star. He
managed his gold-headed cane with an airy grace, peculiar to the fine
gentlemen of the period; and, to give the highest possible finish to his
equipment, he had lace ruffles at his wrist, of a most ethereal delicacy,
sufficiently avouching how idle and aristocratic must be the hands which
they half concealed.

It was a remarkable point in the accoutrement of this brilliant personage
that he held in his left hand a fantastic kind of a pipe, with an exquisitely
painted bowl and an amber mouthpiece. This he applied to his lips as often
as every five or six paces, and inhaled a deep whiff of smoke, which, after
being retained a moment in his lungs, might be seen to eddy gracefully
from his mouth and nostrils.
As may well be supposed, the street was all astir to find out the stranger’s
name.
“It is some great nobleman, beyond question,” said one of the
townspeople. “Do you see the star at his breast?”
“Nay; it is too bright to be seen,” said another. “Yes; he must needs be a
nobleman, as you say. But by what conveyance, think you, can his lordship
have voyaged or travelled hither? There has been no vessel from the old
country for a month past; and if he have arrived overland from the
southward, pray where are his attendants and equipage?”
“He needs no equipage to set off his rank,” remarked a third. “If he came
among us in rags, nobility would shine through a hole in his elbow. I never
saw such dignity of aspect. He has the old Norman blood in his veins, I
warrant him.”
“I rather take him to be a Dutchman, or one of your high Germans,” said
another citizen. “The men of those countries have always the pipe at their
mouths.”
“And so has a Turk,” answered his companion. “But, in my judgment,
this stranger hath been bred at the French court, and hath there learned
politeness and grace of manner, which none understand so well as the
nobility of France. That gait, now! A vulgar spectator might deem it stiff—
he might call it a hitch and jerk—but, to my eye, it hath an unspeakable
majesty, and must have been acquired by constant observation of the
deportment of the Grand Monarque. The stranger’s character and office are
evident enough. He is a French ambassador, come to treat with our rulers
about the cession of Canada.”
“More probably a Spaniard,” said another, “and hence his yellow
complexion; or, most likely, he is from the Havana, or from some port on
the Spanish main, and comes to make investigation about the piracies which
our government is thought to connive at. Those settlers in Peru and Mexico
have skins as yellow as the gold which they dig out of their mines.”

“Yellow or not,” cried a lady, “he is a beautiful man!—so tall, so slender!
such a fine, noble face, with so well-shaped a nose, and all that delicacy of
expression about the mouth! And, bless me, how bright his star is! It
positively shoots out flames!”
“So do your eyes, fair lady,” said the stranger, with a bow and a flourish
of his pipe; for he was just passing at the instant. “Upon my honor, they
have quite dazzled me.”
“Was ever so original and exquisite a compliment?” murmured the lady,
in an ecstasy of delight.
Amid the general admiration excited by the stranger’s appearance, there
were only two dissenting voices. One was that of an impertinent cur, which,
after snuffing at the heels of the glistening figure, put its tail between its
legs and skulked into its master’s back yard, vociferating an execrable
howl. The other dissentient was a young child, who squalled at the fullest
stretch of his lungs, and babbled some unintelligible nonsense about a
pumpkin.
Feathertop meanwhile pursued his way along the street. Except for the
few complimentary words to the lady, and now and then a slight inclination
of the head in requital of the profound reverences of the bystanders, he
seemed wholly absorbed in his pipe. There needed no other proof of his
rank and consequence than the perfect equanimity with which he comported
himself, while the curiosity and admiration of the town swelled almost into
clamor around him. With a crowd gathering behind his footsteps, he finally
reached the mansion-house of the worshipful Justice Gookin, entered the
gate, ascended the steps of the front door, and knocked. In the interim,
before his summons was answered, the stranger was observed to shake the
ashes out of his pipe.
“What did he say in that sharp voice?” inquired one of the spectators.
“Nay, I know not,” answered his friend. “But the sun dazzles my eyes
strangely. How dim and faded his lordship looks all of a sudden! Bless my
wits, what is the matter with me?”
“The wonder is,” said the other, “that his pipe, which was out only an
instant ago, should be all alight again, and with the reddest coal I ever saw.
There is something mysterious about this stranger. What a whiff of smoke
was that! Dim and faded did you call him? Why, as he turns about the star
on his breast is all ablaze.”

“It is, indeed,” said his companion; “and it will go near to dazzle pretty
Polly Gookin, whom I see peeping at it out of the chamber window.”
The door being now opened, Feathertop turned to the crowd, made a
stately bend of his body like a great man acknowledging the reverence of
the meaner sort, and vanished into the house. There was a mysterious kind
of a smile, if it might not better be called a grin or grimace, upon his visage;
but, of all the throng that beheld him, not an individual appears to have
possessed insight enough to detect the illusive character of the stranger
except a little child and a cur dog.
Our legend here loses somewhat of its continuity, and, passing over the
preliminary explanation between Feathertop and the merchant, goes in
quest of the pretty Polly Gookin. She was a damsel of a soft, round figure,
with light hair and blue eyes, and a fair, rosy face, which seemed neither
very shrewd nor very simple. This young lady had caught a glimpse of the
glistening stranger while standing on the threshold, and had forthwith put
on a laced cap, a string of beads, her finest kerchief, and her stiffest damask
petticoat in preparation for the interview. Hurrying from her chamber to the
parlor, she had ever since been viewing herself in the large looking-glass
and practising pretty airs-now a smile, now a ceremonious dignity of aspect,
and now a softer smile than the former, kissing her hand likewise, tossing
her head, and managing her fan; while within the mirror an unsubstantial
little maid repeated every gesture and did all the foolish things that Polly
did, but without making her ashamed of them. In short, it was the fault of
pretty Polly’s ability rather than her will if she failed to be as complete an
artifice as the illustrious Feathertop himself; and, when she thus tampered
with her own simplicity, the witch’s phantom might well hope to win her.
No sooner did Polly hear her father’s gouty footsteps approaching the
parlor door, accompanied with the stiff clatter of Feathertop’s high-heeled
shoes, than she seated herself bolt upright and innocently began warbling a
song.
“Polly! daughter Polly!” cried the old merchant. “Come hither, child.”
Master Gookin’s aspect, as he opened the door, was doubtful and
troubled.
“This gentleman,” continued he, presenting the stranger, “is the Chevalier
Feathertop,—nay, I beg his pardon, my Lord Feathertop,—who hath

brought me a token of remembrance from an ancient friend of mine. Pay
your duty to his lordship, child, and honor him as his quality deserves.”
After these few words of introduction, the worshipful magistrate
immediately quitted the room. But, even in that brief moment, had the fair
Polly glanced aside at her father instead of devoting herself wholly to the
brilliant guest, she might have taken warning of some mischief nigh at
hand. The old man was nervous, fidgety, and very pale. Purposing a smile
of courtesy, he had deformed his face with a sort of galvanic grin, which,
when Feathertop’s back was turned, he exchanged for a scowl, at the same
time shaking his fist and stamping his gouty foot—an incivility which
brought its retribution along with it. The truth appears to have been that
Mother Rigby’s word of introduction, whatever it might be, had operated
far more on the rich merchant’s fears than on his good will. Moreover,
being a man of wonderfully acute observation, he had noticed that these
painted figures on the bowl of Feathertop’s pipe were in motion. Looking
more closely he became convinced that these figures were a party of little
demons, each duly provided with horns and a tail, and dancing hand in
hand, with gestures of diabolical merriment, round the circumference of the
pipe bowl. As if to confirm his suspicions, while Master Gookin ushered his
guest along a dusky passage from his private room to the parlor, the star on
Feathertop’s breast had scintillated actual flames, and threw a flickering
gleam upon the wall, the ceiling, and the floor.
With such sinister prognostics manifesting themselves on all hands, it is
not to be marvelled at that the merchant should have felt that he was
committing his daughter to a very questionable acquaintance. He cursed, in
his secret soul, the insinuating elegance of Feathertop’s manners, as this
brilliant personage bowed, smiled, put his hand on his heart, inhaled a long
whiff from his pipe, and enriched the atmosphere with the smoky vapor of a
fragrant and visible sigh. Gladly would poor Master Gookin have thrust his
dangerous guest into the street; but there was a constraint and terror within
him. This respectable old gentleman, we fear, at an earlier period of life,
had given some pledge or other to the evil principle, and perhaps was now
to redeem it by the sacrifice of his daughter.
It so happened that the parlor door was partly of glass, shaded by a silken
curtain, the folds of which hung a little awry. So strong was the merchant’s
interest in witnessing what was to ensue between the fair Polly and the

gallant Feathertop that, after quitting the room, he could by no means
refrain from peeping through the crevice of the curtain.
But there was nothing very miraculous to be seen; nothing—except the
trifles previously noticed—to confirm the idea of a supernatural peril
environing the pretty Polly. The stranger it is true was evidently a thorough
and practised man of the world, systematic and self-possessed, and
therefore the sort of a person to whom a parent ought not to confide a
simple, young girl without due watchfulness for the result. The worthy
magistrate who had been conversant with all degrees and qualities of
mankind, could not but perceive every motion and gesture of the
distinguished Feathertop came in its proper place; nothing had been left
rude or native in him; a well-digested conventionalism had incorporated
itself thoroughly with his substance and transformed him into a work of art.
Perhaps it was this peculiarity that invested him with a species of
ghastliness and awe. It is the effect of anything completely and
consummately artificial, in human shape, that the person impresses us as an
unreality and as having hardly pith enough to cast a shadow upon the floor.
As regarded Feathertop, all this resulted in a wild, extravagant, and
fantastical impression, as if his life and being were akin to the smoke that
curled upward from his pipe.
But pretty Polly Gookin felt not thus. The pair were now promenading
the room: Feathertop with his dainty stride and no less dainty grimace, the
girl with a native maidenly grace, just touched, not spoiled, by a slightly
affected manner, which seemed caught from the perfect artifice of her
companion. The longer the interview continued, the more charmed was
pretty Polly, until, within the first quarter of an hour (as the old magistrate
noted by his watch), she was evidently beginning to be in love. Nor need it
have been witchcraft that subdued her in such a hurry; the poor child’s
heart, it may be, was so very fervent that it melted her with its own warmth
as reflected from the hollow semblance of a lover. No matter what
Feathertop said, his words found depth and reverberation in her ear; no
matter what he did, his action was heroic to her eye. And by this time it is to
be supposed there was a blush on Polly’s cheek, a tender smile about her
mouth and a liquid softness in her glance; while the star kept coruscating on
Feathertop’s breast, and the little demons careered with more frantic
merriment than ever about the circumference of his pipe bowl. O pretty
Polly Gookin, why should these imps rejoice so madly that a silly maiden’s

heart was about to be given to a shadow! Is it so unusual a misfortune, so
rare a triumph?
By and by Feathertop paused, and throwing himself into an imposing
attitude, seemed to summon the fair girl to survey his figure and resist him
longer if she could. His star, his embroidery, his buckles glowed at that
instant with unutterable splendor; the picturesque hues of his attire took a
richer depth of coloring; there was a gleam and polish over his whole
presence betokening the perfect witchery of well-ordered manners. The
maiden raised her eyes and suffered them to linger upon her companion
with a bashful and admiring gaze. Then, as if desirous of judging what
value her own simple comeliness might have side by side with so much
brilliancy, she cast a glance towards the full-length looking-glass in front of
which they happened to be standing. It was one of the truest plates in the
world and incapable of flattery. No sooner did the images therein reflected
meet Polly’s eye than she shrieked, shrank from the stranger’s side, gazed at
him for a moment in the wildest dismay, and sank insensible upon the floor.
Feathertop likewise had looked towards the mirror, and there beheld, not the
glittering mockery of his outside show, but a picture of the sordid
patchwork of his real composition stripped of all witchcraft.
The wretched simulacrum! We almost pity him. He threw up his arms
with an expression of despair that went further than any of his previous
manifestations towards vindicating his claims to be reckoned human, for
perchance the only time since this so often empty and deceptive life of
mortals began its course, an illusion had seen and fully recognized itself.
Mother Rigby was seated by her kitchen hearth in the twilight of this
eventful day, and had just shaken the ashes out of a new pipe, when she
heard a hurried tramp along the road. Yet it did not seem so much the tramp
of human footsteps as the clatter of sticks or the rattling of dry bones.
“Ha!” thought the old witch, “what step is that? Whose skeleton is out of
its grave now, I wonder?”
A figure burst headlong into the cottage door. It was Feathertop! His pipe
was still alight; the star still flamed upon his breast; the embroidery still
glowed upon his garments; nor had he lost, in any degree or manner that
could be estimated, the aspect that assimilated him with our mortal
brotherhood. But yet, in some indescribable way (as is the case with all that

has deluded us when once found out), the poor reality was felt beneath the
cunning artifice.
“What has gone wrong?” demanded the witch. “Did yonder sniffling
hypocrite thrust my darling from his door? The villain! I’ll set twenty fiends
to torment him till he offer thee his daughter on his bended knees!”
“No, mother,” said Feathertop despondingly; “it was not that.”
“Did the girl scorn my precious one?” asked Mother Rigby, her fierce
eyes glowing like two coals of Tophet. “I’ll cover her face with pimples!
Her nose shall be as red as the coal in thy pipe! Her front teeth shall drop
out! In a week hence she shall not be worth thy having!”
“Let her alone, mother,” answered poor Feathertop; “the girl was half
won; and methinks a kiss from her sweet lips might have made me
altogether human. But,” he added, after a brief pause and then a howl of
self-contempt, “I’ve seen myself, mother! I’ve seen myself for the
wretched, ragged, empty thing I am! I’ll exist no longer!”
Snatching the pipe from his mouth, he flung it with all his might against
the chimney, and at the same instant sank upon the floor, a medley of straw
and tattered garments, with some sticks protruding from the heap, and a
shrivelled pumpkin in the midst. The eyeholes were now lustreless; but the
rudely-carved gap, that just before had been a mouth still seemed to twist
itself into a despairing grin, and was so far human.
“Poor fellow!” quoth Mother Rigby, with a rueful glance at the relics of
her ill-fated contrivance. “My poor, dear, pretty Feathertop! There are
thousands upon thousands of coxcombs and charlatans in the world, made
up of just such a jumble of wornout, forgotten, and good-for-nothing trash
as he was! Yet they live in fair repute, and never see themselves for what
they are. And why should my poor puppet be the only one to know himself
and perish for it?”
While thus muttering, the witch had filled a fresh pipe of tobacco, and
held the stem between her fingers, as doubtful whether to thrust it into her
own mouth or Feathertop’s.
“Poor Feathertop!” she continued. “I could easily give him another
chance and send him forth again tomorrow. But no; his feelings are too
tender, his sensibilities too deep. He seems to have too much heart to bustle
for his own advantage in such an empty and heartless world. Well! well! I’ll

make a scarecrow of him after all. ’Tis an innocent and useful vocation, and
will suit my darling well; and, if each of his human brethren had as fit a
one, ’twould be the better for mankind; and as for this pipe of tobacco, I
need it more than he.”
So saying Mother Rigby put the stem between her lips. “Dickon!” cried
she, in her high, sharp tone, “another coal for my pipe!”

THE NEW ADAM AND EVE

We who are born into the world’s artificial system can never adequately
know how little in our present state and circumstances is natural, and how
much is merely the interpolation of the perverted mind and heart of man.
Art has become a second and stronger nature; she is a step-mother, whose
crafty tenderness has taught us to despise the bountiful and wholesome
ministrations of our true parent. It is only through the medium of the
imagination that we can lessen those iron fetters, which we call truth and
reality, and make ourselves even partially sensible what prisoners we are.
For instance, let us conceive good Father Miller’s interpretation of the
prophecies to have proved true. The Day of Doom has burst upon the globe
and swept away the whole race of men. From cities and fields, sea-shore
and midland mountain region, vast continents, and even the remotest
islands of the ocean, each living thing is gone. No breath of a created being
disturbs this earthly atmosphere. But the abodes of man, and all that he has
accomplished, the footprints of his wanderings and the results of his toil,
the visible symbols of his intellectual cultivation and moral progress,—in
short, everything physical that can give evidence of his present position,—
shall remain untouched by the hand of destiny. Then, to inherit and repeople
this waste and deserted earth, we will suppose a new Adam and a new Eve
to have been created, in the full development of mind and heart, but with no
knowledge of their predecessors nor of the diseased circumstances that had
become incrusted around them. Such a pair would at once distinguish
between art and nature. Their instincts and intuitions would immediately
recognize the wisdom and simplicity of the latter; while the former, with its
elaborate perversities, would offer them a continual succession of puzzles.
Let us attempt, in a mood half sportive and half thoughtful, to track these
imaginary heirs of our mortality, through their first day’s experience. No
longer ago than yesterday the flame of human life was extinguished; there

has been a breathless night; and now another morn approaches, expecting to
find the earth no less desolate than at eventide.
It is dawn. The east puts on its immemorial blush, although no human
eye is gazing at it; for all the phenomena of the natural world renew
themselves, in spite of the solitude that now broods around the globe. There
is still beauty of earth, sea, and sky, for beauty’s sake. But soon there are to
be spectators. Just when the earliest sunshine gilds earth’s mountain-tops,
two beings have come into life, not in such an Eden as bloomed to welcome
our first parents, but in the heart of a modern city. They find themselves in
existence, and gazing into one another’s eyes. Their emotion is not
astonishment; nor do they perplex themselves with efforts to discover what,
and whence, and why they are. Each is satisfied to be, because the other
exists likewise; and their first consciousness is of calm and mutual
enjoyment, which seems not to have been the birth of that very moment, but
prolonged from a past eternity. Thus content with an inner sphere which
they inhabit together, it is not immediately that the outward world can
obtrude itself upon their notice.
Soon, however, they feel the invincible necessity of this earthly life, and
begin to make acquaintance with the objects and circumstances that
surround them. Perhaps no other stride so vast remains to be taken as when
they first turn from the reality of their mutual glance to the dreams and
shadows that perplex them everywhere else.
“Sweetest Eve, where are we?” exclaims the new Adam; for speech, or
some equivalent mode of expression, is born with them, and comes just as
natural as breath. “Methinks I do not recognize this place.”
“Nor I, dear Man,” replies the new Eve. “And what a strange place, too!
Let me come closer to thy side and behold thee only; for all other sights
trouble and perplex my spirit.”
“Nay, Eve,” replies Adam, who appears to have the stronger tendency
towards the material world; “it were well that we gain some insight into
these matters. We are in an odd situation here. Let us look about us.”
Assuredly there are sights enough to throw the new inheritors of earth
into a state of hopeless perplexity. The long lines of edifices, their windows
glittering in the yellow sunrise, and the narrow street between, with its
barren pavement tracked and battered by wheels that have now rattled into
an irrevocable past! The signs, with their unintelligible hieroglyphics! The

squareness and ugliness, and regular or irregular deformity of everything
that meets the eye! The marks of wear and tear, and unrenewed decay,
which distinguish the works of man from the growth of nature! What is
there in all this, capable of the slightest significance to minds that know
nothing of the artificial system which is implied in every lamp-post and
each brick of the houses? Moreover, the utter loneliness and silence, in a
scene that originally grew out of noise and bustle, must needs impress a
feeling of desolation even upon Adam and Eve, unsuspicious as they are of
the recent extinction of human existence. In a forest, solitude would be life;
in a city, it is death.
The new Eve looks round with a sensation of doubt and distrust, such as
a city dame, the daughter of numberless generations of citizens, might
experience if suddenly transported to the garden of Eden. At length her
downcast eye discovers a small tuft of grass, just beginning to sprout among
the stones of the pavement; she eagerly grasps it, and is sensible that this
little herb awakens some response within her heart. Nature finds nothing
else to offer her. Adam, after staring up and down the street without
detecting a single object that his comprehension can lay hold of, finally
turns his forehead to the sky. There, indeed, is something which the soul
within him recognizes.
“Look up yonder, mine own Eve,” he cries; “surely we ought to dwell
among those gold-tinged clouds or in the blue depths beyond them. I know
not how nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from our home; for
I see nothing hereabouts that seems to belong to us.”
“Can we not ascend thither?” inquires Eve.
“Why not?” answers Adam, hopefully. “But no; something drags us
down in spite of our best efforts. Perchance we may find a path hereafter.”
In the energy of new life it appears no such impracticable feat to climb
into the sky. But they have already received a woful lesson, which may
finally go far towards reducing them to the level of the departed race, when
they acknowledge the necessity of keeping the beaten track of earth. They
now set forth on a ramble through the city, in the hope of making their
escape from this uncongenial sphere. Already in the fresh elasticity of their
spirits they have found the idea of weariness. We will watch them as they
enter some of the shops and public or private edifices; for every door,

whether of alderman or beggar, church or hall of state, has been flung wide
open by the same agency that swept away the inmates.
It so happens,—and not unluckily for an Adam and Eve who are still in
the costume that might better have befitted Eden,—it so happens that their
first visit is to a fashionable dry-goods store. No courteous and importunate
attendants hasten to receive their orders; no throng of ladies are tossing over
the rich Parisian fabrics. All is deserted; trade is at a stand-still; and not
even an echo of the national watchword, “Go ahead!” disturbs the quiet of
the new customers. But specimens of the latest earthly fashions, silks of
every shade, and whatever is most delicate or splendid for the decoration of
the human form, he scattered around, profusely as bright autumnal leaves in
a forest. Adam looks at a few of the articles, but throws them carelessly
aside with whatever exclamation may correspond to “Pish!” or “Pshaw!” in
the new vocabulary of nature. Eve, however,—be it said without offence to
her native modesty,—examines these treasures of her sex with somewhat
livelier interest. A pair of corsets chance to be upon the counter; she
inspects them curiously, but knows not what to make of them. Then she
handles a fashionable silk with dim yearnings, thoughts that wander hither
and thither, instincts groping in the dark.
“On the whole, I do not like it,” she observes, laying the glossy fabric
upon the counter. “But, Adam, it is very strange. What can these things
mean? Surely I ought to know; yet they put me in a perfect maze.”
“Poh! my dear Eve, why trouble thy little head about such nonsense?”
cries Adam, in a fit of impatience. “Let us go somewhere else. But stay;
how very beautiful! My loveliest Eve, what a charm you have imparted to
that robe by merely throwing it over your shoulders!”
For Eve, with the taste that nature moulded into her composition, has
taken a remnant of exquisite silver gauze and drawn it around her forms,
with an effect that gives Adam his first idea of the witchery of dress. He
beholds his spouse in a new light and with renewed admiration; yet is
hardly reconciled to any other attire than her own golden locks. However,
emulating Eve’s example, he makes free with a mantle of blue velvet, and
puts it on so picturesquely that it might seem to have fallen from heaven
upon his stately figure. Thus garbed they go in search of new discoveries.
They next wander into a Church, not to make a display of their fine
clothes, but attracted by its spire pointing upwards to the sky, whither they

have already yearned to climb. As they enter the portal, a clock, which it
was the last earthly act of the sexton to wind up, repeats the hour in deep
reverberating tones; for Time has survived his former progeny, and, with the
iron tongue that man gave him, is now speaking to his two grandchildren.
They listen, but understand him not. Nature would measure time by the
succession of thoughts and acts which constitute real life, and not by hours
of emptiness. They pass up the church-aisle, and raise their eyes to the
ceiling. Had our Adam and Eve become mortal in some European city, and
strayed into the vastness and sublimity of an old cathedral, they might have
recognized the purpose for which the deep-souled founders reared it. Like
the dim awfulness of an ancient forest, its very atmosphere would have
incited them to prayer. Within the snug walls of a metropolitan church there
can be no such influence.
Yet some odor of religion is still lingering here, the bequest of pious
souls, who had grace to enjoy a foretaste of immortal life. Perchance they
breathe a prophecy of a better world to their successors, who have become
obnoxious to all their own cares and calamities in the present one.
“Eve, something impels me to look upward,” says Adam; “but it troubles
me to see this roof between us and the sky. Let us go forth, and perhaps we
shall discern a Great Face looking down upon us.”
“Yes; a Great Face, with a beam of love brightening over it, like
sunshine,” responds Eve. “Surely we have seen such a countenance
somewhere.”
They go out of the church, and kneeling at its threshold give way to the
spirit’s natural instinct of adoration towards a beneficent Father. But, in
truth, their life thus far has been a continual prayer. Purity and simplicity
hold converse at every moment with their Creator.
We now observe them entering a Court of Justice. But what remotest
conception can they attain of the purposes of such an edifice? How should
the idea occur to them that human brethren, of like nature with themselves,
and originally included in the same law of love which is their only rule of
life, should ever need an outward enforcement of the true voice within their
souls? And what, save a woful experience, the dark result of many
centuries, could teach them the sad mysteries of crime? O Judgment Seat,
not by the pure in heart vast thou established, nor in the simplicity of

nature; but by hard and wrinkled men, and upon the accumulated heap of
earthly wrong. Thou art the very symbol of man’s perverted state.
On as fruitless an errand our wanderers next visit a Hall of Legislature,
where Adam places Eve in the Speaker’s chair, unconscious of the moral
which he thus exemplifies. Man’s intellect, moderated by Woman’s
tenderness and moral sense! Were such the legislation of the world there
would be no need of State Houses, Capitols, Halls of Parliament, nor even
of those little assemblages of patriarchs beneath the shadowy trees, by
whom freedom was first interpreted to mankind on our native shores.
Whither go they next? A perverse destiny seems to perplex them with one
after another of the riddles which mankind put forth to the wandering
universe, and left unsolved in their own destruction. They enter an edifice
of stern gray stone standing insulated in the midst of others, and gloomy
even in the sunshine, which it barely suffers to penetrate through its iron
grated windows. It is a prison. The jailer has left his post at the summons of
a stronger authority than the sheriff’s. But the prisoners? Did the messenger
of fate, when he shook open all the doors, respect the magistrate’s warrant
and the judge’s sentence, and leave the inmates of the dungeons to be
delivered by due course of earthly law? No; a new trial has been granted in
a higher court, which may set judge, jury, and prisoner at its bar all in a row,
and perhaps find one no less guilty than another. The jail, like the whole
earth, is now a solitude, and has thereby lost something of its dismal gloom.
But here are the narrow cells, like tombs, only drearier and deadlier,
because in these the immortal spirit was buried with the body. Inscriptions
appear on the walls, scribbled with a pencil or scratched with a rusty nail;
brief words of agony, perhaps, or guilt’s desperate defiance to the world, or
merely a record of a date by which the writer strove to keep up with the
march of life. There is not a living eye that could now decipher these
memorials.
Nor is it while so fresh from their Creator’s hand that the new denizens of
earth—no, nor their descendants for a thousand years—could discover that
this edifice was a hospital for the direst disease which could afflict their
predecessors. Its patients bore the outward marks of that leprosy with which
all were more or less infected. They were sick-and so were the purest of
their brethren—with the plague of sin. A deadly sickness, indeed! Feeling
its symptoms within the breast, men concealed it with fear and shame, and

were only the more cruel to those unfortunates whose pestiferous sores
were flagrant to the common eye. Nothing save a rich garment could ever
hide the plague-spot. In the course of the world’s lifetime, every remedy
was tried for its cure and extirpation, except the single one, the flower that
grew in Heaven and was sovereign for all the miseries of earth. Man never
had attempted to cure sin by LOVE! Had he but once made the effort, it
might well have happened that there would have been no more need of the
dark lazar-house into which Adam and Eve have wandered. Hasten forth
with your native innocence, lest the damps of these still conscious walls
infect you likewise, and thus another fallen race be propagated!
Passing from the interior of the prison into the space within its outward
wall, Adam pauses beneath a structure of the simplest contrivance, yet
altogether unaccountable to him. It consists merely of two upright posts,
supporting a transverse beam, from which dangles a cord.
“Eve, Eve!” cries Adam, shuddering with a nameless horror. “What can
this thing be?”
“I know not,” answers Eve; “but, Adam, my heart is sick! There seems to
be no more sky,—no more sunshine!”
Well might Adam shudder and poor Eve be sick at heart; for this
mysterious object was the type of mankind’s whole system in regard to the
great difficulties which God had given to be solved,—a system of fear and
vengeance, never successful, yet followed to the last. Here, on the morning
when the final summons came, a criminal—one criminal, where none were
guiltless—had died upon the gallows. Had the world heard the footfall of its
own approaching doom, it would have been no inappropriate act thus to
close the record of its deeds by one so characteristic.
The two pilgrims now hurry from the prison. Had they known how the
former inhabitants of earth were shut up in artificial error and cramped and
chained by their perversions, they might have compared the whole moral
world to a prison-house, and have deemed the removal of the race a general
jail-delivery.
They next enter, unannounced, but they might have rung at the door in
vain, a private mansion, one of the stateliest in Beacon Street. A wild and
plaintive strain of music is quivering through the house, now rising like a
solemn organ-peal, and now dying into the faintest murmur, as if some
spirit that had felt an interest in the departed family were bemoaning itself

in the solitude of hall and chamber. Perhaps a virgin, the purest of mortal
race, has been left behind to perform a requiem for the whole kindred of
humanity. Not so. These are the tones of an Eolian harp, through which
Nature pours the harmony that lies concealed in her every breath, whether
of summer breeze or tempest. Adam and Eve are lost in rapture, unmingled
with surprise. The passing wind, that stirred the harp-strings, has been
hushed, before they can think of examining the splendid furniture, the
gorgeous carpets, and the architecture of the rooms. These things amuse
their unpractised eyes, but appeal to nothing within their hearts. Even the
pictures upon the walls scarcely excite a deeper interest; for there is
something radically artificial and deceptive in painting with which minds in
the primal simplicity cannot sympathize. The unbidden guests examine a
row of family portraits, but are too dull to recognize them as men and
women, beneath the disguise of a preposterous garb, and with features and
expression debased, because inherited through ages of moral and physical
decay.
Chance, however, presents them with pictures of human beauty, fresh
from the hand of Nature. As they enter a magnificent apartment they are
astonished, but not affrighted, to perceive two figures advancing to meet
them. Is it not awful to imagine that any life, save their own, should remain
in the wide world?
“How is this?” exclaims Adam. “My beautiful Eve, are you in two places
at once?”
“And you, Adam!” answers Eve, doubtful, yet delighted. “Surely that
noble and lovely form is yours. Yet here you are by my side. I am content
with one,—methinks there should not be two.”
This miracle is wrought by a tall looking-glass, the mystery of which
they soon fathom, because Nature creates a mirror for the human face in
every pool of water, and for her own great features in waveless lakes.
Pleased and satisfied with gazing at themselves, they now discover the
marble statue of a child in a corner of the room so exquisitely idealized that
it is almost worthy to be the prophetic likeness of their first-born. Sculpture,
in its highest excellence, is more genuine than painting, and might seem to
be evolved from a natural germ, by the same law as a leaf or flower. The
statue of the child impresses the solitary pair as if it were a companion; it
likewise hints at secrets both of the past and future.

“My husband!” whispers Eve.
“What would you say, dearest Eve?” inquires Adam.
“I wonder if we are alone in the world,” she continues, “with a sense of
something like fear at the thought of other inhabitants. This lovely little
form! Did it ever breathe? Or is it only the shadow of something real, like
our pictures in the mirror?”
“It is strange!” replies Adam, pressing his hand to his brow. “There are
mysteries all around us. An idea flits continually before me,—would that I
could seize it! Eve, Eve, are we treading in the footsteps of beings that bore
a likeness to ourselves? If so, whither are they gone?—and why is their
world so unfit for our dwelling-place?”
“Our great Father only knows,” answers Eve. “But something tells me
that we shall not always be alone. And how sweet if other beings were to
visit us in the shape of this fair image!”
Then they wander through the house, and everywhere find tokens of
human life, which now, with the idea recently suggested, excite a deeper
curiosity in their bosoms. Woman has here left traces of her delicacy and
refinement, and of her gentle labors. Eve ransacks a work-basket and
instinctively thrusts the rosy tip of her finger into a thimble. She takes up a
piece of embroidery, glowing with mimic flowers, in one of which a fair
damsel of the departed race has left her needle. Pity that the Day of Doom
should have anticipated the completion of such a useful task! Eve feels
almost conscious of the skill to finish it. A pianoforte has been left open.
She flings her hand carelessly over the keys, and strikes out a sudden
melody, no less natural than the strains of the AEolian harp, but joyous with
the dance of her yet unburdened life. Passing through a dark entry they find
a broom behind the door; and Eve, who comprises the whole nature of
womanhood, has a dim idea that it is an instrument proper for her hand. In
another apartment they behold a canopied bed, and all the appliances of
luxurious repose. A heap of forest-leaves would be more to the purpose.
They enter the nursery, and are perplexed with the sight of little gowns and
caps, tiny slices, and a cradle, amid the drapery of which is still to be seen
the impress of a baby’s form. Adam slightly notices these trifles; but Eve
becomes involved in a fit of mute reflection from which it is hardly possible
to rouse her.

By a most unlucky arrangement there was to have been a grand dinner-
party in this mansion on the very day when the whole human family,
including the invited guests, were summoned to the unknown regions of
illimitable space. At the moment of fate, the table was actually spread, and
the company on the point of sitting down. Adam and Eve come unbidden to
the banquet; it has now been some time cold, but otherwise furnishes them
with highly favorable specimens of the gastronomy of their predecessors.
But it is difficult to imagine the perplexity of the unperverted couple, in
endeavoring to find proper food for their first meal, at a table where the
cultivated appetites of a fashionable party were to have been gratified. Will
Nature teach them the mystery of a plate of turtle-soup? Will she embolden
them to attack a haunch of venison? Will she initiate them into the merits of
a Parisian pasty, imported by the last steamer that ever crossed the Atlantic?
Will she not, rather, bid them turn with disgust from fish, fowl, and flesh,
which, to their pure nostrils, steam with a loathsome odor of death and
corruption?—Food? The bill of fare contains nothing which they recognize
as such.
Fortunately, however, the dessert is ready upon a neighboring table.
Adam, whose appetite and animal instincts are quicker than those of Eve,
discovers this fitting banquet.
“Here, dearest Eve,” he exclaims,—“here is food.”
“Well,” answered she, with the germ of a housewife stirring within her,
“we have been so busy to-day, that a picked-up dinner must serve.”
So Eve comes to the table and receives a red-cheeked apple from her
husband’s hand in requital of her predecessor’s fatal gift to our common
grandfather. She eats it without sin, and, let us hope, with no disastrous
consequences to her future progeny. They make a plentiful, yet temperate,
meal of fruit, which, though not gathered in paradise, is legitimately derived
from the seeds that were planted there. Their primal appetite is satisfied.
“What shall we drink, Eve?” inquires Adam.
Eve peeps among some bottles and decanters, which, as they contain
fluids, she naturally conceives must be proper to quench thirst. But never
before did claret, hock, and madeira, of rich and rare perfume, excite such
disgust as now.
“Pah!” she exclaims, after smelling at various wines. “What stuff is here?
The beings who have gone before us could not have possessed the same

nature that we do; for neither their hunger nor thirst were like our own.”
“Pray hand me yonder bottle,” says Adam. “If it be drinkable by any
manner of mortal, I must moisten my throat with it.”
After some remonstrances, she takes up a champagne bottle, but is
frightened by the sudden explosion of the cork, and drops it upon the floor.
There the untasted liquor effervesces. Had they quaffed it they would have
experienced that brief delirium whereby, whether excited by moral or
physical causes, man sought to recompense himself for the calm, life-long
joys which he had lost by his revolt from nature. At length, in a refrigerator,
Eve finds a glass pitcher of water, pure, cold, and bright as ever gushed
from a fountain among the hills. Both drink; and such refreshment does it
bestow, that they question one another if this precious liquid be not identical
with the stream of life within them.
“And now,” observes Adam, “we must again try to discover what sort of
a world this is, and why we have been sent hither.”
“Why? to love one another,” cries Eve. “Is not that employment
enough?”
“Truly is it,” answers Adam, kissing her; “but still—I know not—
something tells us there is labor to be done. Perhaps our allotted task is no
other than to climb into the sky, which is so much more beautiful than
earth.”
“Then would we were there now,” murmurs Eve, “that no task or duty
might come between us!”
They leave the hospitable mansion, and we next see them passing down
State Street. The clock on the old State House points to high noon, when the
Exchange should be in its glory and present the liveliest emblem of what
was the sole business of life, as regarded a multitude of the foregone
worldlings. It is over now. The Sabbath of eternity has shed its stillness
along the street. Not even a newsboy assails the two solitary passers-by
with an extra penny-paper from the office of the Times or Mail, containing
a full account of yesterday’s terrible catastrophe. Of all the dull times that
merchants and speculators have known, this is the very worst; for, so far as
they were concerned, creation itself has taken the benefit of the Bankrupt
Act. After all, it is a pity. Those mighty capitalists who had just attained the
wished-for wealth! Those shrewd men of traffic who had devoted so many
years to the most intricate and artificial of sciences, and had barely

mastered it when the universal bankruptcy was announced by peal of
trumpet! Can they have been so incautious as to provide no currency of the
country whither they have gone, nor any bills of exchange, or letters of
credit from the needy on earth to the cash-keepers of heaven?
Adam and Eve enter a Bank. Start not, ye whose funds are treasured
there! You will never need them now. Call not for the police. The stones of
the street and the coin of the vaults are of equal value to this simple pair.
Strange sight! They take up the bright gold in handfuls and throw it
sportively into the air for the sake of seeing the glittering worthlessness
descend again in a shower. They know not that each of those small yellow
circles was once a magic spell, potent to sway men’s hearts and mystify
their moral sense. Here let them pause in the investigation of the past. They
have discovered the mainspring, the life, the very essence of the system that
had wrought itself into the vitals of mankind, and choked their original
nature in its deadly gripe. Yet how powerless over these young inheritors of
earth’s hoarded wealth! And here, too, are huge, packages of back-notes,
those talismanic slips of paper which once had the efficacy to build up
enchanted palaces like exhalations, and work all kinds of perilous wonders,
yet were themselves but the ghosts of money, the shadows of a shade. How
like is this vault to a magician’s cave when the all-powerful wand is broken,
and the visionary splendor vanished, and the floor strewn with fragments of
shattered spells, and lifeless shapes, once animated by demons!
“Everywhere, my dear Eve,” observes Adam, “we find heaps of rubbish
of one kind or another. Somebody, I am convinced, has taken pains to
collect them, but for what purpose? Perhaps, hereafter, we shall be moved
to do the like. Can that be our business in the world?”
“O no, no, Adam!” answers Eve. “It would be better to sit down quietly
and look upward to tine sky.”
They leave the Bank, and in good time; for had they tarried later they
would probably have encountered some gouty old goblin of a capitalist,
whose soul could not long be anywhere save in the vault with his treasure.
Next they drop into a jeweller’s shop. They are pleased with the glow of
gems; and Adam twines a string of beautiful pearls around the head of Eve,
and fastens his own mantle with a magnificent diamond brooch. Eve thanks
him, and views herself with delight, in the nearest looking-glass. Shortly
afterward, observing a bouquet of roses and other brilliant flowers in a vase

of water, she flings away the inestimable pearls, and adorns herself with
these lovelier gems of nature. They charm her with sentiment as well as
beauty.
“Surely they are living beings,” she remarks to Adam.
“I think so,” replies Adam, “and they seem to be as little at home in the
world as ourselves.”
We must not attempt to follow every footstep of these investigators
whom their Creator has commissioned to pass unconscious judgment upon
the works and ways of the vanished race. By this time, being endowed with
quick and accurate perceptions, they begin to understand the purpose of the
many things around them. They conjecture, for instance, that the edifices of
the city were erected, not by the immediate hand that made the world, but
by beings somewhat similar to themselves, for shelter and convenience. But
how will they explain the magnificence of one habitation as compared with
the squalid misery of another? Through what medium can the idea of
servitude enter their minds? When will they comprehend the great and
miserable fact—the evidences of which appeal to their senses everywhere—
that one portion of earth’s lost inhabitants was rolling in luxury while the
multitude was toiling for scanty food? A wretched change, indeed, must be
wrought in their own hearts ere they can conceive the primal decree of Love
to have been so completely abrogated, that a brother should ever want what
his brother had. When their intelligence shah have reached so far, Earth’s
new progeny will have little reason to exult over her old rejected one.
Their wanderings have now brought them into the suburbs of the city,
They stand on a grassy brow of a hill at the foot of a granite obelisk which
points its great finger upwards, as if the human family had agreed, by a
visible symbol of age-long endurance, to offer some high sacrifice of
thanksgiving or supplication. The solemn height of the monument, its deep
simplicity, and the absence of any vulgar and practical use, all strengthen its
effect upon Adam and Eve, and leave them to interpret it by a purer
sentiment than the builders thought of expressing.
“Eve, it is a visible prayer,” observed Adam.
“And we will pray too,” she replies.
Let us pardon these poor children of neither father nor mother for so
absurdly mistaking the purport of the memorial which man founded and
woman finished on far-famed Bunker Hill. The idea of war is not native to

their souls. Nor have they sympathies for the brave defenders of liberty,
since oppression is one of their unconjectured mysteries. Could they guess
that the green sward on which they stand so peacefully was once strewn
with human corpses and purple with their blood, it would equally amaze
them that one generation of men should perpetrate such carnage, and that a
subsequent generation should triumphantly commemorate it.
With a sense of delight they now stroll across green fields and along the
margin of a quiet river. Not to track them too closely, we next find the
wanderers entering a Gothic edifice of gray stone, where the bygone world
has left whatever it deemed worthy of record, in the rich library of Harvard
University.
No student ever yet enjoyed such solitude and silence as now broods
within its deep alcoves. Little do the present visitors understand what
opportunities are thrown away upon them. Yet Adam looks anxiously at the
long rows of volumes, those storied heights of human lore, ascending one
above another from floor to ceiling. He takes up a bulky folio. It opens in
his hands as if spontaneously to impart the spirit of its author to the yet
unworn and untainted intellect of the fresh-created mortal. He stands poring
over the regular columns of mystic characters, seemingly in studious mood;
for the unintelligible thought upon the page has a mysterious relation to his
mind, and makes itself felt as if it were a burden flung upon him. He is even
painfully perplexed, and grasps vainly at he knows not what. O Adam, it is
too soon, too soon by at least five thousand years, to put on spectacles and
bury yourself in the alcoves of a library!
“What can this be?” he murmurs at last. “Eve, methinks nothing is so
desirable as to find out the mystery of this big and heavy object with its
thousand thin divisions. See! it stares me in the face as if it were about to
speak!”
Eve, by a feminine instinct, is dipping into a volume of fashionable
poetry, the production certainly the most fortunate of earthly bards, since
his lay continues in vogue when all the great masters of the lyre have
passed into oblivion. But let not, his ghost be too exultant! The world’s one
lady tosses the book upon the floor and laughs merrily at her husband’s
abstracted mien.
“My dear Adam,” cries she, “you look pensive and dismal. Do fling
down that stupid thing; for even if it should speak it would not be worth

attending to. Let us talk with one another, and with the sky, and the green
earth, and its trees and flowers. They will teach us better knowledge than
we can find here.”
“Well, Eve, perhaps you are right,” replies Adam, with a sort of sigh.
“Still I cannot help thinking that the interpretation of the riddles amid which
we have been wandering all day long might here be discovered.”
“It may be better not to seek the interpretation,” persists Eve. “For my
part, the air of this place does not suit me. If you love me, come away!”
She prevails, and rescues him from the mysterious perils of the library.
Happy influence of woman! Had he lingered there long enough to obtain a
clew to its treasures,—as was not impossible, his intellect being of human
structure, indeed, but with an untransmitted vigor and acuteness,—had he
then and there become a student, the annalist of our poor world would soon
have recorded the downfall of a second Adam. The fatal apple of another
Tree of knowledge would have been eaten. All the perversions, and
sophistries, and false wisdom so aptly mimicking the true,—all the narrow
truth, so partial that it becomes more deceptive than falsehood,—all the
wrong principles and worse practice, the pernicious examples and mistaken
rules of life,—all the specious theories which turn earth into cloudland and
men into shadows,—all the sad experience which it took mankind so many
ages to accumulate, and from which they never drew a moral for their
future guidance, the whole heap of this disastrous lore would have tumbled
at once upon Adam’s head. There would have been nothing left for him but
to take up the already abortive experiment of life where he had dropped it,
and toil onward with it a little farther.
But, blessed in his ignorance, he may still enjoy a new world in our
worn-out one. Should he fall short of good, even as far as we did, he has at
least the freedom—no worthless one—to make errors for himself. And his
literature, when the progress of centuries shall create it, will be no
interminably repeated echo of our own poetry and reproduction of the
images that were moulded by our great fathers of song and fiction, but a
melody never yet heard on earth, and intellectual forms unbreathed upon by
our conceptions. Therefore let the dust of ages gather upon the volumes of
the library, and in due season the roof of the edifice crumble down upon the
whole. When the second Adam’s descendants shall have collected as much

rubbish of their own, it will be time enough to dig into our ruins and
compare the literary advancement of two independent races.
But we are looking forward too far. It seems to be the vice of those who
have a long past behind them. We will return to the new Adam and Eve,
who, having no reminiscences save dim and fleeting visions of a pre-
existence, are content to live and be happy in the present.
The day is near its close when these pilgrims, who derive their being
from no dead progenitors, reach the cemetery of Mount Auburn. With light
hearts—for earth and sky now gladden each other with beauty—they tread
along the winding paths, among marble pillars, mimic temples, urns,
obelisks, and sarcophagi, sometimes pausing to contemplate these fantasies
of human growth, and sometimes to admire the flowers wherewith nature
converts decay to loveliness. Can Death, in the midst of his old triumphs,
make them sensible that they have taken up the heavy burden of mortality
which a whole species had thrown down? Dust kindred to their own has
never lain in the grave. Will they then recognize, and so soon, that Time and
the elements have an indefeasible claim upon their bodies? Not improbably
they may. There must have been shadows enough, even amid the primal
sunshine of their existence, to suggest the thought of the soul’s incongruity
with its circumstances. They have already learned that something is to be
thrown aside. The idea of Death is in them, or not far off. But, were they to
choose a symbol for him, it would be the butterfly soaring upward, or the
bright angel beckoning them aloft, or the child asleep, with soft dreams
visible through her transparent purity.
Such a Child, in whitest marble, they have found among the monuments
of Mount Auburn.
“Sweetest Eve,” observes Adam, while hand in hand they contemplate
this beautiful object, “yonder sun has left us, and the whole world is fading
from our sight. Let us sleep as this lovely little figure is sleeping. Our
Father only knows whether what outward things we have possessed to-day
are to be snatched from us forever. But should our earthly life be leaving us
with the departing light, we need not doubt that another morn will find us
somewhere beneath the smile of God. I feel that he has imparted the boon
of existence never to be resumed.”
“And no matter where we exist,” replies Eve, “for we shall always be
together.”

EGOTISM; OR, THE BOSOM SERPENT

“Here he comes!” shouted the boys along the street. “Here comes the
man with a snake in his bosom!”
This outcry, saluting Herkimer’s ears as he was about to enter the iron
gate of the Elliston mansion, made him pause. It was not without a shudder
that he found himself on the point of meeting his former acquaintance,
whom he had known in the glory of youth, and whom now after an interval
of five years, he was to find the victim either of a diseased fancy or a
horrible physical misfortune.
“A snake in his bosom!” repeated the young sculptor to himself. “It must
be he. No second man on earth has such a bosom friend. And now, my poor
Rosina, Heaven grant me wisdom to discharge my errand aright! Woman’s
faith must be strong indeed since thine has not yet failed.”
Thus musing, he took his stand at the entrance of the gate and waited
until the personage so singularly announced should make his appearance.
After an instant or two he beheld the figure of a lean man, of unwholesome
look, with glittering eyes and long black hair, who seemed to imitate the
motion of a snake; for, instead of walking straight forward with open front,
he undulated along the pavement in a curved line. It may be too fanciful to
say that something, either in his moral or material aspect, suggested the idea
that a miracle had been wrought by transforming a serpent into a man, but
so imperfectly that the snaky nature was yet hidden, and scarcely hidden,
under the mere outward guise of humanity. Herkimer remarked that his
complexion had a greenish tinge over its sickly white, reminding him of a
species of marble out of which he had once wrought a head of Envy, with
her snaky locks.
The wretched being approached the gate, but, instead of entering, stopped
short and fixed the glitter of his eye full upon the compassionate yet steady
countenance of the sculptor.

“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” he exclaimed.
And then there was an audible hiss, but whether it came from the
apparent lunatic’s own lips, or was the real hiss of a serpent, might admit of
a discussion. At all events, it made Herkimer shudder to his heart’s core.
“Do you know me, George Herkimer?” asked the snake-possessed.
Herkimer did know him; but it demanded all the intimate and practical
acquaintance with the human face, acquired by modelling actual likenesses
in clay, to recognize the features of Roderick Elliston in the visage that now
met the sculptor’s gaze. Yet it was he. It added nothing to the wonder to
reflect that the once brilliant young man had undergone this odious and
fearful change during the no more than five brief years of Herkimer’s abode
at Florence. The possibility of such a transformation being granted, it was
as easy to conceive it effected in a moment as in an age. Inexpressibly
shocked and startled, it was still the keenest pang when Herkimer
remembered that the fate of his cousin Rosina, the ideal of gentle
womanhood, was indissolubly interwoven with that of a being whom
Providence seemed to have unhumanized.
“Elliston! Roderick!” cried he, “I had heard of this; but my conception
came far short of the truth. What has befallen you? Why do I find you
thus?”
“Oh, ’tis a mere nothing! A snake! A snake! The commonest thing in the
world. A snake in the bosom—that’s all,” answered Roderick Elliston. “But
how is your own breast?” continued he, looking the sculptor in the eye with
the most acute and penetrating glance that it had ever been his fortune to
encounter. “All pure and wholesome? No reptile there? By my faith and
conscience, and by the devil within me, here is a wonder! A man without a
serpent in his bosom!”
“Be calm, Elliston,” whispered George Herkimer, laying his hand upon
the shoulder of the snake-possessed. “I have crossed the ocean to meet you.
Listen! Let us be private. I bring a message from Rosina—from your wife!”
“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!” muttered Roderick.
With this exclamation, the most frequent in his mouth, the unfortunate
man clutched both hands upon his breast as if an intolerable sting or torture
impelled him to rend it open and let out the living mischief, even should it
be intertwined with his own life. He then freed himself from Herkimer’s

grasp by a subtle motion, and, gliding through the gate, took refuge in his
antiquated family residence. The sculptor did not pursue him. He saw that
no available intercourse could be expected at such a moment, and was
desirous, before another meeting, to inquire closely into the nature of
Roderick’s disease and the circumstances that had reduced him to so
lamentable a condition. He succeeded in obtaining the necessary
information from an eminent medical gentleman.
Shortly after Elliston’s separation from his wife—now nearly four years
ago—his associates had observed a singular gloom spreading over his daily
life, like those chill, gray mists that sometimes steal away the sunshine from
a summer’s morning. The symptoms caused them endless perplexity. They
knew not whether ill health were robbing his spirits of elasticity, or whether
a canker of the mind was gradually eating, as such cankers do, from his
moral system into the physical frame, which is but the shadow of the
former. They looked for the root of this trouble in his shattered schemes of
domestic bliss,—wilfully shattered by himself,—but could not be satisfied
of its existence there. Some thought that their once brilliant friend was in an
incipient stage of insanity, of which his passionate impulses had perhaps
been the forerunners; others prognosticated a general blight and gradual
decline. From Roderick’s own lips they could learn nothing. More than
once, it is true, he had been heard to say, clutching his hands convulsively
upon his breast,—“It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”—but, by different auditors,
a great diversity of explanation was assigned to this ominous expression.
What could it be that gnawed the breast of Roderick Elliston? Was it
sorrow? Was it merely the tooth of physical disease? Or, in his reckless
course, often verging upon profligacy, if not plunging into its depths, had he
been guilty of some deed which made his bosom a prey to the deadlier
fangs of remorse? There was plausible ground for each of these conjectures;
but it must not be concealed that more than one elderly gentleman, the
victim of good cheer and slothful habits, magisterially pronounced the
secret of the whole matter to be Dyspepsia!
Meanwhile, Roderick seemed aware how generally he had become the
subject of curiosity and conjecture, and, with a morbid repugnance to such
notice, or to any notice whatsoever, estranged himself from all
companionship. Not merely the eye of man was a horror to him; not merely
the light of a friend’s countenance; but even the blessed sunshine, likewise,
which in its universal beneficence typifies the radiance of the Creator’s

face, expressing his love for all the creatures of his hand. The dusky
twilight was now too transparent for Roderick Elliston; the blackest
midnight was his chosen hour to steal abroad; and if ever he were seen, it
was when the watchman’s lantern gleamed upon his figure, gliding along
the street, with his hands clutched upon his bosom, still muttering, “It
gnaws me! It gnaws me!” What could it be that gnawed him?
After a time, it became known that Elliston was in the habit of resorting
to all the noted quacks that infested the city, or whom money would tempt
to journey thither from a distance. By one of these persons, in the exultation
of a supposed cure, it was proclaimed far and wide, by dint of handbills and
little pamphlets on dingy paper, that a distinguished gentleman, Roderick
Elliston, Esq., had been relieved of a SNAKE in his stomach! So here was
the monstrous secret, ejected from its lurking place into public view, in all
its horrible deformity. The mystery was out; but not so the bosom serpent.
He, if it were anything but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living den. The
empiric’s cure had been a sham, the effect, it was supposed, of some
stupefying drug which more nearly caused the death of the patient than of
the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick Elliston regained
entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune the town talk—the more than
nine days’ wonder and horror—while, at his bosom, he felt the sickening
motion of a thing alive, and the gnawing of that restless fang which seemed
to gratify at once a physical appetite and a fiendish spite.
He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in his father’s
house, and was a middle-aged man while Roderick lay in his cradle.
“Scipio!” he began; and then paused, with his arms folded over his heart.
“What do people say of me, Scipio.”
“Sir! my poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom,” answered
the servant with hesitation.
“And what else?” asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at the man.
“Nothing else, dear master,” replied Scipio, “only that the doctor gave
you a powder, and that the snake leaped out upon the floor.”
“No, no!” muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and
pressed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his breast, “I feel him
still. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!”

From this time the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world, but rather
solicited and forced himself upon the notice of acquaintances and strangers.
It was partly the result of desperation on finding that the cavern of his own
bosom had not proved deep and dark enough to hide the secret, even while
it was so secure a fortress for the loathsome fiend that had crept into it. But
still more, this craving for notoriety was a symptom of the intense
morbidness which now pervaded his nature. All persons chronically
diseased are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind or body; whether it
be sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of some endless pain,
or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such individuals are made
acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in which it dwells. Self, therefore,
grows to be so prominent an object with them that they cannot but present it
to the face of every casual passer-by. There is a pleasure—perhaps the
greatest of which the sufferer is susceptible—in displaying the wasted or
ulcerated limb, or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the crime, with so
much the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting up
its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer, or that crime,
which constitutes their respective individuality. Roderick Elliston, who, a
little while before, had held himself so scornfully above the common lot of
men, now paid full allegiance to this humiliating law. The snake in his
bosom seemed the symbol of a monstrous egotism to which everything was
referred, and which he pampered, night and day, with a continual and
exclusive sacrifice of devil worship.
He soon exhibited what most people considered indubitable tokens of
insanity. In some of his moods, strange to say, he prided and gloried himself
on being marked out from the ordinary experience of mankind, by the
possession of a double nature, and a life within a life. He appeared to
imagine that the snake was a divinity,—not celestial, it is true, but darkly
infernal,—and that he thence derived an eminence and a sanctity, horrid,
indeed, yet more desirable than whatever ambition aims at. Thus he drew
his misery around him like a regal mantle, and looked down triumphantly
upon those whose vitals nourished no deadly monster. Oftener, however, his
human nature asserted its empire over him in the shape of a yearning for
fellowship. It grew to be his custom to spend the whole day in wandering
about the streets, aimlessly, unless it might be called an aim to establish a
species of brotherhood between himself and the world. With cankered
ingenuity, he sought out his own disease in every breast. Whether insane or

not, he showed so keen a perception of frailty, error, and vice, that many
persons gave him credit for being possessed not merely with a serpent, but
with an actual fiend, who imparted this evil faculty of recognizing whatever
was ugliest in man’s heart.
For instance, he met an individual, who, for thirty years, had cherished a
hatred against his own brother. Roderick, amidst the throng of the street,
laid his hand on this man’s chest, and looking full into his forbidding face,
“How is the snake to-day?” he inquired, with a mock expression of
sympathy.
“The snake!” exclaimed the brother hater—“what do you mean?”
“The snake! The snake! Does it gnaw you?” persisted Roderick. “Did
you take counsel with him this morning when you should have been saying
your prayers? Did he sting, when you thought of your brother’s health,
wealth, and good repute? Did he caper for joy, when you remembered the
profligacy of his only son? And whether he stung, or whether he frolicked,
did you feel his poison throughout your body and soul, converting
everything to sourness and bitterness? That is the way of such serpents. I
have learned the whole nature of them from my own!”
“Where is the police?” roared the object of Roderick’s persecution, at the
same time giving an instinctive clutch to his breast. “Why is this lunatic
allowed to go at large?”
“Ha, ha!” chuckled Roderick, releasing his grasp of the man.— “His
bosom serpent has stung him then!”
Often it pleased the unfortunate young man to vex people with a lighter
satire, yet still characterized by somewhat of snake-like virulence. One day
he encountered an ambitious statesman, and gravely inquired after the
welfare of his boa constrictor; for of that species, Roderick affirmed, this
gentleman’s serpent must needs be, since its appetite was enormous enough
to devour the whole country and constitution. At another time, he stopped a
close-fisted old fellow, of great wealth, but who skulked about the city in
the guise of a scarecrow, with a patched blue surtout, brown hat, and
mouldy boots, scraping pence together, and picking up rusty nails.
Pretending to look earnestly at this respectable person’s stomach, Roderick
assured him that his snake was a copper-head and had been generated by
the immense quantities of that base metal with which he daily defiled his
fingers. Again, he assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few

bosom serpents had more of the devil in them than those that breed in the
vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored with his attention was
a distinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be engaged in a
theological controversy, where human wrath was more perceptible than
divine inspiration.
“You have swallowed a snake in a cup of sacramental wine,” quoth he.
“Profane wretch!” exclaimed the divine; but, nevertheless, his hand stole
to his breast.
He met a person of sickly sensibility, who, on some early
disappointment, had retired from the world, and thereafter held no
intercourse with his fellow-men, but brooded sullenly or passionately over
the irrevocable past. This man’s very heart, if Roderick might be believed,
had been changed into a serpent, which would finally torment both him and
itself to death. Observing a married couple, whose domestic troubles were
matter of notoriety, he condoled with both on having mutually taken a
house adder to their bosoms. To an envious author, who depreciated works
which he could never equal, he said that his snake was the slimiest and
filthiest of all the reptile tribe, but was fortunately without a sting. A man of
impure life, and a brazen face, asking Roderick if there were any serpent in
his breast, he told him that there was, and of the same species that once
tortured Don Rodrigo, the Goth. He took a fair young girl by the hand, and
gazing sadly into her eyes, warned her that she cherished a serpent of the
deadliest kind within her gentle breast; and the world found the truth of
those ominous words, when, a few months afterwards, the poor girl died of
love and shame. Two ladies, rivals in fashionable life who tormented one
another with a thousand little stings of womanish spite, were given to
understand that each of their hearts was a nest of diminutive snakes, which
did quite as much mischief as one great one.
But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of a person
infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous green reptile,
with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting of any snake save
one.
“And what one is that?” asked a by-stander, overhearing him.
It was a dark-browed man who put the question; he had an evasive eye,
which in the course of a dozen years had looked no mortal directly in the
face. There was an ambiguity about this person’s character,—a stain upon

his reputation,—yet none could tell precisely of what nature, although the
city gossips, male and female, whispered the most atrocious surmises. Until
a recent period he had followed the sea, and was, in fact, the very
shipmaster whom George Herkimer had encountered, under such singular
circumstances, in the Grecian Archipelago.
“What bosom serpent has the sharpest sting?” repeated this man; but he
put the question as if by a reluctant necessity, and grew pale while he was
uttering it.
“Why need you ask?” replied Roderick, with a look of dark intelligence.
“Look into your own breast. Hark! my serpent bestirs himself! He
acknowledges the presence of a master fiend!”
And then, as the by-standers afterwards affirmed, a hissing sound was
heard, apparently in Roderick Elliston’s breast. It was said, too, that an
answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake were
actually lurking there and had been aroused by the call of its brother reptile.
If there were in fact any such sound, it might have been caused by a
malicious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of Roderick.
Thus making his own actual serpent—if a serpent there actually was in
his bosom—the type of each man’s fatal error, or hoarded sin, or unquiet
conscience, and striking his sting so unremorsefully into the sorest spot, we
may well imagine that Roderick became the pest of the city. Nobody could
elude him—none could withstand him. He grappled with the ugliest truth
that he could lay his hand on, and compelled his adversary to do the same.
Strange spectacle in human life where it is the instinctive effort of one and
all to hide those sad realities, and leave them undisturbed beneath a heap of
superficial topics which constitute the materials of intercourse between man
and man! It was not to be tolerated that Roderick Elliston should break
through the tacit compact by which the world has done its best to secure
repose without relinquishing evil. The victims of his malicious remarks, it is
true, had brothers enough to keep them in countenance; for, by Roderick’s
theory, every mortal bosom harbored either a brood of small serpents or one
overgrown monster that had devoured all the rest. Still the city could not
bear this new apostle. It was demanded by nearly all, and particularly by the
most respectable inhabitants, that Roderick should no longer be permitted to
violate the received rules of decorum by obtruding his own bosom serpent

to the public gaze, and dragging those of decent people from their lurking
places.
Accordingly, his relatives interfered and placed him in a private asylum
for the insane. When the news was noised abroad, it was observed that
many persons walked the streets with freer countenances and covered their
breasts less carefully with their hands.
His confinement, however, although it contributed not a little to the peace
of the town, operated unfavorably upon Roderick himself. In solitude his
melancholy grew more black and sullen. He spent whole days—indeed, it
was his sole occupation—in communing with the serpent. A conversation
was sustained, in which, as it seemed, the hidden monster bore a part,
though unintelligibly to the listeners, and inaudible except in a hiss.
Singular as it may appear, the sufferer had now contracted a sort of
affection for his tormentor, mingled, however, with the intensest loathing
and horror. Nor were such discordant emotions incompatible. Each, on the
contrary, imparted strength and poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love—
horrible antipathy—embracing one another in his bosom, and both
concentrating themselves upon a being that had crept into his vitals or been
engendered there, and which was nourished with his food, and lived upon
his life, and was as intimate with him as his own heart, and yet was the
foulest of all created things! But not the less was it the true type of a morbid
nature.
Sometimes, in his moments of rage and bitter hatred against the snake
and himself, Roderick determined to be the death of him, even at the
expense of his own life. Once he attempted it by starvation; but, while the
wretched man was on the point of famishing, the monster seemed to feed
upon his heart, and to thrive and wax gamesome, as if it were his sweetest
and most congenial diet. Then he privily took a dose of active poison,
imagining that it would not fail to kill either himself or the devil that
possessed him, or both together. Another mistake; for if Roderick had not
yet been destroyed by his own poisoned heart nor the snake by gnawing it,
they had little to fear from arsenic or corrosive sublimate. Indeed, the
venomous pest appeared to operate as an antidote against all other poisons.
The physicians tried to suffocate the fiend with tobacco smoke. He breathed
it as freely as if it were his native atmosphere. Again, they drugged their
patient with opium and drenched him with intoxicating liquors, hoping that

the snake might thus be reduced to stupor and perhaps be ejected from the
stomach. They succeeded in rendering Roderick insensible; but, placing
their hands upon his breast, they were inexpressibly horror stricken to feel
the monster wriggling, twining, and darting to and fro within his narrow
limits, evidently enlivened by the opium or alcohol, and incited to unusual
feats of activity. Thenceforth they gave up all attempts at cure or palliation.
The doomed sufferer submitted to his fate, resumed his former loathsome
affection for the bosom fiend, and spent whole miserable days before a
looking-glass, with his mouth wide open, watching, in hope and horror, to
catch a glimpse of the snake’s head far down within his throat. It is
supposed that he succeeded; for the attendants once heard a frenzied shout,
and, rushing into the room, found Roderick lifeless upon the floor.
He was kept but little longer under restraint. After minute investigation,
the medical directors of the asylum decided that his mental disease did not
amount to insanity, nor would warrant his confinement, especially as its
influence upon his spirits was unfavorable, and might produce the evil
which it was meant to remedy. His eccentricities were doubtless great; he
had habitually violated many of the customs and prejudices of society; but
the world was not, without surer ground, entitled to treat him as a madman.
On this decision of such competent authority Roderick was released, and
had returned to his native city the very day before his encounter with
George Herkimer.
As soon as possible after learning these particulars the sculptor, together
with a sad and tremulous companion, sought Elliston at his own house. It
was a large, sombre edifice of wood, with pilasters and a balcony, and was
divided from one of the principal streets by a terrace of three elevations,
which was ascended by successive flights of stone steps. Some immense
old elms almost concealed the front of the mansion. This spacious and once
magnificent family residence was built by a grandee of the race early in the
past century, at which epoch, land being of small comparative value, the
garden and other grounds had formed quite an extensive domain. Although
a portion of the ancestral heritage had been alienated, there was still a
shadowy enclosure in the rear of the mansion where a student, or a dreamer,
or a man of stricken heart might lie all day upon the grass, amid the solitude
of murmuring boughs, and forget that a city had grown up around him.

Into this retirement the sculptor and his companion were ushered by
Scipio, the old black servant, whose wrinkled visage grew almost sunny
with intelligence and joy as he paid his humble greetings to one of the two
visitors.
“Remain in the arbor,” whispered the sculptor to the figure that leaned
upon his arm. “You will know whether, and when, to make your
appearance.”
“God will teach me,” was the reply. “May He support me too!”
Roderick was reclining on the margin of a fountain which gushed into the
fleckered sunshine with the same clear sparkle and the same voice of airy
quietude as when trees of primeval growth flung their shadows cross its
bosom. How strange is the life of a fountain!—born at every moment, yet of
an age coeval with the rocks, and far surpassing the venerable antiquity of a
forest.
“You are come! I have expected you,” said Elliston, when he became
aware of the sculptor’s presence.
His manner was very different from that of the preceding day—quiet,
courteous, and, as Herkimer thought, watchful both over his guest and
himself. This unnatural restraint was almost the only trait that betokened
anything amiss. He had just thrown a book upon the grass, where it lay half
opened, thus disclosing itself to be a natural history of the serpent tribe,
illustrated by lifelike plates. Near it lay that bulky volume, the Ductor
Dubitantium of Jeremy Taylor, full of cases of conscience, and in which
most men, possessed of a conscience, may find something applicable to
their purpose.
“You see,” observed Elliston, pointing to the book of serpents, while a
smile gleamed upon his lips, “I am making an effort to become better
acquainted with my bosom friend; but I find nothing satisfactory in this
volume. If I mistake not, he will prove to be sui generis, and akin to no
other reptile in creation.”
“Whence came this strange calamity?” inquired the sculptor.
“My sable friend Scipio has a story,” replied Roderick, “of a snake that
had lurked in this fountain—pure and innocent as it looks—ever since it
was known to the first settlers. This insinuating personage once crept into
the vitals of my great grandfather and dwelt there many years, tormenting

the old gentleman beyond mortal endurance. In short it is a family
peculiarity. But, to tell you the truth, I have no faith in this idea of the
snake’s being an heirloom. He is my own snake, and no man’s else.”
“But what was his origin?” demanded Herkimer.
“Oh, there is poisonous stuff in any man’s heart sufficient to generate a
brood of serpents,” said Elliston with a hollow laugh. “You should have
heard my homilies to the good town’s-people. Positively, I deem myself
fortunate in having bred but a single serpent. You, however, have none in
your bosom, and therefore cannot sympathize with the rest of the world. It
gnaws me! It gnaws me!”
With this exclamation Roderick lost his self-control and threw himself
upon the grass, testifying his agony by intricate writhings, in which
Herkimer could not but fancy a resemblance to the motions of a snake.
Then, likewise, was heard that frightful hiss, which often ran through the
sufferer’s speech, and crept between the words and syllables without
interrupting their succession.
“This is awful indeed!” exclaimed the sculptor—“an awful infliction,
whether it be actual or imaginary. Tell me, Roderick Elliston, is there any
remedy for this loathsome evil?”
“Yes, but an impossible one,” muttered Roderick, as he lay wallowing
with his face in the grass. “Could I for one moment forget myself, the
serpent might not abide within me. It is my diseased self-contemplation that
has engendered and nourished him.”
“Then forget yourself, my husband,” said a gentle voice above him;
“forget yourself in the idea of another!”
Rosina had emerged from the arbor, and was bending over him with the
shadow of his anguish reflected in her countenance, yet so mingled with
hope and unselfish love that all anguish seemed but an earthly shadow and a
dream. She touched Roderick with her hand. A tremor shivered through his
frame. At that moment, if report be trustworthy, the sculptor beheld a
waving motion through the grass, and heard a tinkling sound, as if
something had plunged into the fountain. Be the truth as it might, it is
certain that Roderick Elliston sat up like a man renewed, restored to his
right mind, and rescued from the fiend which had so miserably overcome
him in the battle-field of his own breast.

“Rosina!” cried he, in broken and passionate tones, but with nothing of
the wild wail that had haunted his voice so long, “forgive! forgive!”
Her happy tears bedewed his face.
“The punishment has been severe,” observed the sculptor. “Even Justice
might now forgive; how much more a woman’s tenderness! Roderick
Elliston, whether the serpent was a physical reptile, or whether the
morbidness of your nature suggested that symbol to your fancy, the moral
of the story is not the less true and strong. A tremendous Egotism,
manifesting itself in your case in the form of jealousy, is as fearful a fiend
as ever stole into the human heart. Can a breast, where it has dwelt so long,
be purified?”
“Oh yes,” said Rosina with a heavenly smile. “The serpent was but a dark
fantasy, and what it typified was as shadowy as itself. The past, dismal as it
seems, shall fling no gloom upon the future. To give it its due importance
we must think of it but as an anecdote in our Eternity.”

THE CHRISTMAS BANQUET

FROM THE UNPUBLISHED “ALLEGORIES OF THE HEART.”
“I have here attempted,” said Roderick, unfolding a few sheets of
manuscript, as he sat with Rosina and the sculptor in the summer-house,
—“I have attempted to seize hold of a personage who glides past me,
occasionally, in my walk through life. My former sad experience, as you
know, has gifted me with some degree of insight into the gloomy mysteries
of the human heart, through which I have wandered like one astray in a dark
cavern, with his torch fast flickering to extinction. But this man, this class
of men, is a hopeless puzzle.”
“Well, but propound him,” said the sculptor. “Let us have an idea of hint,
to begin with.”
“Why, indeed,” replied Roderick, “he is such a being as I could conceive
you to carve out of marble, and some yet unrealized perfection of human
science to endow with an exquisite mockery of intellect; but still there lacks
the last inestimable touch of a divine Creator. He looks like a man; and,
perchance, like a better specimen of man than you ordinarily meet. You
might esteem him wise; he is capable of cultivation and refinement, and has
at least an external conscience; but the demands that spirit makes upon
spirit are precisely those to which he cannot respond. When at last you
come close to him you find him chill and unsubstantial,—a mere vapor.”
“I believe,” said Rosina, “I have a glimmering idea of what you mean.”
“Then be thankful,” answered her husband, smiling; “but do not
anticipate any further illumination from what I am about to read. I have
here imagined such a man to be—what, probably, he never is—conscious of
the deficiency in his spiritual organization. Methinks the result would be a
sense of cold unreality wherewith he would go shivering through the world,

longing to exchange his load of ice for any burden of real grief that fate
could fling upon a human being.”
Contenting himself with this preface, Roderick began to read.

In a certain old gentleman’s last will and testament there appeared a
bequest, which, as his final thought and deed, was singularly in keeping
with a long life of melancholy eccentricity. He devised a considerable sum
for establishing a fund, the interest of which was to be expended, annually
forever, in preparing a Christmas Banquet for ten of the most miserable
persons that could be found. It seemed not to be the testator’s purpose to
make these half a score of sad hearts merry, but to provide that the stern or
fierce expression of human discontent should not be drowned, even for that
one holy and joyful day, amid the acclamations of festal gratitude which all
Christendom sends up. And he desired, likewise, to perpetuate his own
remonstrance against the earthly course of Providence, and his sad and sour
dissent from those systems of religion or philosophy which either find
sunshine in the world or draw it down from heaven.
The task of inviting the guests, or of selecting among such as might
advance their claims to partake of this dismal hospitality, was confided to
the two trustees or stewards of the fund. These gentlemen, like their
deceased friend, were sombre humorists, who made it their principal
occupation to number the sable threads in the web of human life, and drop
all the golden ones out of the reckoning. They performed their present
office with integrity and judgment. The aspect of the assembled company,
on the day of the first festival, might not, it is true, have satisfied every
beholder that these were especially the individuals, chosen forth from all
the world, whose griefs were worthy to stand as indicators of the mass of
human suffering. Yet, after due consideration, it could not be disputed that
here was a variety of hopeless discomfort, which, if it sometimes arose
from causes apparently inadequate, was thereby only the shrewder
imputation against the nature and mechanism of life.
The arrangements and decorations of the banquet were probably intended
to signify that death in life which had been the testator’s definition of
existence. The hall, illuminated by torches, was hung round with curtains of
deep and dusky purple, and adorned with branches of cypress and wreaths
of artificial flowers, imitative of such as used to be strewn over the dead. A

sprig of parsley was laid by every plate. The main reservoir of wine, was a
sepulchral urn of silver, whence the liquor was distributed around the table
in small vases, accurately copied from those that held the tears of ancient
mourners. Neither had the stewards—if it were their taste that arranged
these details—forgotten the fantasy of the old Egyptians, who seated a
skeleton at every festive board, and mocked their own merriment with the
imperturbable grin of a death’s-head. Such a fearful guest, shrouded in a
black mantle, sat now at the head of the table. It was whispered, I know not
with what truth, that the testator himself had once walked the visible world
with the machinery of that sane skeleton, and that it was one of the
stipulations of his will, that he should thus be permitted to sit, from year to
year, at the banquet which he had instituted. If so, it was perhaps covertly
implied that he had cherished no hopes of bliss beyond the grave to
compensate for the evils which he felt or imagined here. And if, in their
bewildered conjectures as to the purpose of earthly existence, the
banqueters should throw aside the veil, and cast an inquiring glance at this
figure of death, as seeking thence the solution otherwise unattainable, the
only reply would be a stare of the vacant eye-caverns and a grin of the
skeleton jaws. Such was the response that the dead man had fancied himself
to receive when he asked of Death to solve the riddle of his life; and it was
his desire to repeat it when the guests of his dismal hospitality should find
themselves perplexed with the same question.
“What means that wreath?” asked several of the company, while viewing
the decorations of the table.
They alluded to a wreath of cypress, which was held on high by a
skeleton arm, protruding from within the black mantle.
“It is a crown,” said one of the stewards, “not for the worthiest, but for
the wofulest, when he shall prove his claim to it.”
The guest earliest bidden to the festival was a man of soft and gentle
character, who had not energy to struggle against the heavy despondency to
which his temperament rendered him liable; and therefore with nothing
outwardly to excuse him from happiness, he had spent a life of quiet misery
that made his blood torpid, and weighed upon his breath, and sat like a
ponderous night-fiend upon every throb of his unresisting heart. His
wretchedness seemed as deep as his original nature, if not identical with it.
It was the misfortune of a second guest to cherish within his bosom a

diseased heart, which had become so wretchedly sore that the continual and
unavoidable rubs of the world, the blow of an enemy, the careless jostle of a
stranger, and even the faithful and loving touch of a friend, alike made
ulcers in it. As is the habit of people thus afflicted, he found his chief
employment in exhibiting these miserable sores to any who would give
themselves the pain of viewing them. A third guest was a hypochondriac,
whose imagination wrought necromancy in his outward and inward world,
and caused him to see monstrous faces in the household fire, and dragons in
the clouds of sunset, and fiends in the guise of beautiful women, and
something ugly or wicked beneath all the pleasant surfaces of nature. His
neighbor at table was one who, in his early youth, had trusted mankind too
much, and hoped too highly in their behalf, and, in meeting with many
disappointments, had become desperately soured. For several years back
this misanthrope bad employed himself in accumulating motives for hating
and despising his race,—such as murder, lust, treachery, ingratitude,
faithlessness of trusted friends, instinctive vices of children, impurity of
women, hidden guilt in men of saint-like aspect,—and, in short, all manner
of black realities that sought to decorate themselves with outward grace or
glory. But at every atrocious fact that was added to his catalogue, at every
increase of the sad knowledge which he spent his life to collect, the native
impulses of the poor man’s loving and confiding heart made him groan with
anguish. Next, with his heavy brow bent downward, there stole into the hall
a man naturally earnest and impassioned, who, from his immemorial
infancy, had felt the consciousness of a high message to the world; but,
essaying to deliver it, had found either no voice or form of speech, or else
no ears to listen. Therefore his whole life was a bitter questioning of
himself: “Why have not men acknowledged my mission? Am I not a self-
deluding fool? What business have I on earth? Where is my grave?”
Throughout the festival, he quaffed frequent draughts from the sepulchral
urn of wine, hoping thus to quench the celestial fire that tortured his own
breast and could not benefit his race.
Then there entered, having flung away a ticket for a ball, a gay gallant of
yesterday, who had found four or five wrinkles in his brow, and more gray
hairs than he could well number on his head. Endowed with sense and
feeling, he had nevertheless spent his youth in folly, but had reached at last
that dreary point in life where Folly quits us of her own accord, leaving us
to make friends with Wisdom if we can. Thus, cold and desolate, he had

come to seek Wisdom at the banquet, and wondered if the skeleton were
she. To eke out the company, the stewards had invited a distressed poet
from his home in the almshouse, and a melancholy idiot from the street-
corner. The latter had just the glimmering of sense that was sufficient to
make him conscious of a vacancy, which the poor fellow, all his life long,
had mistily sought to fill up with intelligence, wandering up and down the
streets, and groaning miserably because his attempts were ineffectual. The
only lady in the hall was one who had fallen short of absolute and perfect
beauty, merely by the trifling defect of a slight cast in her left eye. But this
blemish, minute as it was, so shocked the pure ideal of her soul, rather than
her vanity, that she passed her life in solitude, and veiled her countenance
even from her own gaze. So the skeleton sat shrouded at one end of the
table, and this poor lady at the other.
One other guest remains to be described. He was a young man of smooth
brow, fair cheek, and fashionable mien. So far as his exterior developed
him, he might much more suitably have found a place at some merry
Christmas table, than have been numbered among the blighted, fate-
stricken, fancy-tortured set of ill-starred banqueters. Murmurs arose among
the guests as they noted, the glance of general scrutiny which the intruder
threw over his companions. What had he to do among them? Why did not
the skeleton of the dead founder of the feast unbend its rattling joints, arise,
and motion the unwelcome stranger from the board?
“Shameful!” said the morbid man, while a new ulcer broke out in his
heart. “He comes to mock us! we shall be the jest of his tavern friends I—
he will make a farce of our miseries, and bring it out upon the stage!”
“O, never mind him!” said the hypochondriac, smiling sourly. “He shall
feast from yonder tureen of viper-soup; and if there is a fricassee of
scorpions on the table, pray let him have his share of it. For the dessert, he
shall taste the apples of Sodom, then, if he like our Christmas fare, let him
return again next year!”
“Trouble him not,” murmured the melancholy man, with gentleness.
“What matters it whether the consciousness of misery come a few years
sooner or later? If this youth deem himself happy now, yet let him sit with
us for the sake of the wretchedness to come.”
The poor idiot approached the young man with that mournful aspect of
vacant inquiry which his face continually wore, and which caused people to