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Title: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes

Release date: December 1, 1996 [eBook #751]
Most recently updated: December 29, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/751

Credits: Transcribed from the 1873 James R. Osgood and Company
edition by David Price

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE ***

Transcribed from the 1873 James R. Osgood and Company edition by
David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

THE
AUTOCRAT
OF
THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.

BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
1873.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

THE AUTOCRAT’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The interruption referred to in the first sentence of the first of these papers
was just a quarter of a century in duration.
Two articles entitled “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” will be found in
the “New England Magazine,” formerly published in Boston by J. T. and E.
Buckingham. The date of the first of these articles is November 1831, and
that of the second February 1832. When “The Atlantic Monthly” was
begun, twenty-five years afterwards, and the author was asked to write for
it, the recollection of these crude products of his uncombed literary
boyhood suggested the thought that it would be a curious experiment to
shake the same bough again, and see if the ripe fruit were better or worse
than the early windfalls.
So began this series of papers, which naturally brings those earlier attempts
to my own notice and that of some few friends who were idle enough to
read them at the time of their publication. The man is father to the boy that
was, and I am my own son, as it seems to me, in those papers of the New
England Magazine. If I find it hard to pardon the boy’s faults, others would
find it harder. They will not, therefore, be reprinted here, nor as I hope,
anywhere.
But a sentence or two from them will perhaps bear reproducing, and with
these I trust the gentle reader, if that kind being still breathes, will be
contented.

—“It is a capital plan to carry a tablet with you, and, when you find
yourself felicitous, take notes of your own conversation.”—
—“When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary.
The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The
author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and luftre

have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the fineft fimile
from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow you a
fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a
more eloquent analogy.”—
—“Once on a time, a notion was ftarted, that if all the people in the
world would fhout at once, it might be heard in the moon. So the
projectors agreed it fhould be done in juft ten years. Some thousand
fhip-loads of chronometers were diftributed to the selectmen and other
great folks of all the different nations. For a year beforehand, nothing
else was talked about but the awful noise that was to be made on the
great occafion. When the time came, everybody had their ears so wide
open, to hear the universal ejaculation of Boo,—the word agreed upon,
—that nobody spoke except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands,
and a woman in Pekin, so that the world was never so ftill fince the
creation.”—

There was nothing better than these things and there was not a little that
was much worse. A young fellow of two or three and twenty has as good a
right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in learning how to write, as an
oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his hat-full of eyes in learning how to
operate for cataract, or an elegant like Brummel to point to an armful of
failures in the attempt to achieve a perfect tie. This son of mine, whom I
have not seen for these twenty-five years, generously counted, was a self-
willed youth, always too ready to utter his unchastised fancies. He, like too
many American young people, got the spur when he should have had the
rein. He therefore helped to fill the market with that unripe fruit which his
father says in one of these papers abounds in the marts of his native
country. All these by-gone shortcomings he would hope are forgiven, did
he not feel sure that very few of his readers know anything about them. In
taking the old name for the new papers, he felt bound to say that he had
uttered unwise things under that title, and if it shall appear that his
unwisdom has not diminished by at least half while his years have doubled,
he promises not to repeat the experiment if he should live to double them
again and become his own grandfather.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

Boston Nov. 1st 1858.

CHAPTER I

I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways
of classifying minds is under the heads of arithmetical and algebraical
intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension or variation
of the following arithmetical formula: 2+2=4. Every philosophical
proposition has the more general character of the expression a+b=c. We
are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters
instead of figures.
They all stared. There is a divinity student lately come among us to whom I
commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain
share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are
involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that
Leibnitz had the same observation.—No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he
said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it,
and you found it, not in the original, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will
tell the company what he did say, one of these days.
—If I belong to a Society of Mutual Admiration?—I blush to say that I do
not at this present moment. I once did, however. It was the first association
to which I ever heard the term applied; a body of scientific young men in a
great foreign city who admired their teacher, and to some extent each other.
Many of them deserved it; they have become famous since. It amuses me
to hear the talk of one of those beings described by Thackeray—

“Letters four do form his name”—

about a social development which belongs to the very noblest stage of
civilization. All generous companies of artists, authors, philanthropists,
men of science, are, or ought to be, Societies of Mutual Admiration. A man
of genius, or any kind of superiority, is not debarred from admiring the

same quality in another, nor the other from returning his admiration. They
may even associate together and continue to think highly of each other.
And so of a dozen such men, if any one place is fortunate enough to hold so
many. The being referred to above assumes several false premises. First,
that men of talent necessarily hate each other. Secondly, that intimate
knowledge or habitual association destroys our admiration of persons whom
we esteemed highly at a distance. Thirdly, that a circle of clever fellows,
who meet together to dine and have a good time, have signed a
constitutional compact to glorify themselves and to put down him and the
fraction of the human race not belonging to their number. Fourthly, that it
is an outrage that he is not asked to join them.

Here the company laughed a good deal, and the old gentleman who sits
opposite said, “That’s it! that’s it!”
I continued, for I was in the talking vein. As to clever people’s hating each
other, I think a little extra talent does sometimes make people jealous. They
become irritated by perpetual attempts and failures, and it hurts their

tempers and dispositions. Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is
glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is
detestable. It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the
rinsings of an unwashed wineglass spoil a draught of fair water. No wonder
the poor fellow we spoke of, who always belongs to this class of slightly
flavored mediocrities, is puzzled and vexed by the strange sight of a dozen
men of capacity working and playing together in harmony. He and his
fellows are always fighting. With them familiarity naturally breeds
contempt. If they ever praise each other’s bad drawings, or broken-winded
novels, or spavined verses, nobody ever supposed it was from admiration; it
was simply a contract between themselves and a publisher or dealer.
If the Mutuals have really nothing among them worth admiring, that alters
the question. But if they are men with noble powers and qualities, let me
tell you, that, next to youthful love and family affections, there is no human
sentiment better than that which unites the Societies of Mutual Admiration.
And what would literature or art be without such associations? Who can
tell what we owe to the Mutual Admiration Society of which Shakspeare,
and Ben Jonson, and Beaumont and Fletcher were members? Or to that of
which Addison and Steele formed the centre, and which gave us the
Spectator? Or to that where Johnson, and Goldsmith, and Burke, and
Reynolds, and Beauclerk, and Boswell, most admiring among all admirers,
met together? Was there any great harm in the fact that the Irvings and
Paulding wrote in company? or any unpardonable cabal in the literary union
of Verplanck and Bryant and Sands, and as many more as they chose to
associate with them?
The poor creature does not know what he is talking about, when he abuses
this noblest of institutions. Let him inspect its mysteries through the knot-
hole he has secured, but not use that orifice as a medium for his popgun.
Such a society is the crown of a literary metropolis; if a town has not
material for it, and spirit and good feeling enough to organize it, it is a mere
caravansary, fit for a man of genius to lodge in, but not to live in. Foolish
people hate and dread and envy such an association of men of varied
powers and influence, because it is lofty, serene, impregnable, and, by the
necessity of the case, exclusive. Wise ones are prouder of the title M. S. M.
A. than of all their other honors put together.

—All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “facts.”
They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know
fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead after
them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at
every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant
fancy? I allow no “facts” at this table. What! Because bread is good and
wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my
windpipe while I am talking? Do not these muscles of mine represent a
hundred loaves of bread? and is not my thought the abstract of ten thousand
of these crumbs of truth with which you would choke off my speech?
[The above remark must be conditioned and qualified for the vulgar mind.
The reader will of course understand the precise amount of seasoning which
must be added to it before he adopts it as one of the axioms of his life. The
speaker disclaims all responsibility for its abuse in incompetent hands.]
This business of conversation is a very serious matter. There are men that it
weakens one to talk with an hour more than a day’s fasting would do. Mark
this that I am going to say, for it is as good as a working professional man’s
advice, and costs you nothing: It is better to lose a pint of blood from your
veins than to have a nerve tapped. Nobody measures your nervous force as
it runs away, nor bandages your brain and marrow after the operation.
There are men of esprit who are excessively exhausting to some people.
They are the talkers who have what may be called jerky minds. Their
thoughts do not run in the natural order of sequence. They say bright things
on all possible subjects, but their zigzags rack you to death. After a jolting
half-hour with one of these jerky companions, talking with a dull friend
affords great relief. It is like taking the cat in your lap after holding a
squirrel.
What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground-
glass shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes
than such a one to our minds.
“Do not dull people bore you?” said one of the lady-boarders,—the same
that sent me her autograph-book last week with a request for a few original
stanzas, not remembering that “The Pactolian” pays me five dollars a line
for every thing I write in its columns.

“Madam,” said I, (she and the century were in their teens together,) “all
men are bores, except when we want them. There never was but one man
whom I would trust with my latch-key.”
“Who might that favored person be?”
“Zimmermann.”
—The men of genius that I fancy most have erectile heads like the cobra-di-
capello. You remember what they tell of William Pinkney, the great
pleader; how in his eloquent paroxysms the veins of his neck would swell
and his face flush and his eyes glitter, until he seemed on the verge of
apoplexy. The hydraulic arrangements for supplying the brain with blood
are only second in importance to its own organization. The bulbous-headed
fellows that steam well when they are at work are the men that draw big
audiences and give us marrowy books and pictures. It is a good sign to
have one’s feet grow cold when he is writing. A great writer and speaker
once told me that he often wrote with his feet in hot water; but for this, all
his blood would have run into his head, as the mercury sometimes
withdraws into the ball of a thermometer.
—You don’t suppose that my remarks made at this table are like so many
postage-stamps, do you,—each to be only once uttered? If you do, you are
mistaken. He must be a poor creature that does not often repeat himself.
Imagine the author of the excellent piece of advice, “Know thyself,” never
alluding to that sentiment again during the course of a protracted existence!
Why, the truths a man carries about with him are his tools; and do you think
a carpenter is bound to use the same plane but once to smooth a knotty
board with, or to hang up his hammer after it has driven its first nail? I
shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall use the same
types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A thought is
often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. It has come to
you over a new route, by a new and express train of associations.
Sometimes, but rarely, one may be caught making the same speech twice
over, and yet be held blameless. Thus, a certain lecturer, after performing in
an inland city, where dwells a Littératrice of note, was invited to meet her
and others over the social teacup. She pleasantly referred to his many
wanderings in his new occupation. “Yes,” he replied, “I am like the Huma,

the bird that never lights, being always in the cars, as he is always on the
wing.”—Years elapsed. The lecturer visited the same place once more for
the same purpose. Another social cup after the lecture, and a second
meeting with the distinguished lady. “You are constantly going from place
to place,” she said.—“Yes,” he answered, “I am like the Huma,”—and
finished the sentence as before.
What horrors, when it flashed over him that he had made this fine speech,
word for word, twice over! Yet it was not true, as the lady might perhaps
have fairly inferred, that he had embellished his conversation with the
Huma daily during that whole interval of years. On the contrary, he had
never once thought of the odious fowl until the recurrence of precisely the
same circumstances brought up precisely the same idea. He ought to have
been proud of the accuracy of his mental adjustments. Given certain
factors, and a sound brain should always evolve the same fixed product
with the certainty of Babbage’s calculating machine.
—What a satire, by the way, is that machine on the mere mathematician! A
Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid
to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows
any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!
I have an immense respect for a man of talents plus “the mathematics.” But
the calculating power alone should seem to be the least human of qualities,
and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a machine can be
made to do the work of three or four calculators, and better than any one of
them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive
apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering
hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels clicking
in a calculator’s brain. The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of
“detached lever” arrangement, which may be put into a mighty poor watch
—I suppose it is about as common as the power of moving the ears
voluntarily, which is a moderately rare endowment.
—Little localized powers, and little narrow streaks of specialized
knowledge, are things men are very apt to be conceited about. Nature is
very wise; but for this encouraging principle how many small talents and
little accomplishments would be neglected! Talk about conceit as much as

you like, it is to human character what salt is to the ocean; it keeps it sweet,
and renders it endurable. Say rather it is like the natural unguent of the sea-
fowl’s plumage, which enables him to shed the rain that falls on him and the
wave in which he dips. When one has had all his conceit taken out of him,
when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and
he will fly no more.
“So you admire conceited people, do you?” said the young lady who has
come to the city to be finished off for—the duties of life.
I am afraid you do not study logic at your school, my dear. It does not
follow that I wish to be pickled in brine because I like a salt-water plunge at
Nahant. I say that conceit is just as natural a thing to human minds as a
centre is to a circle. But little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small
circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to
determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect
does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel
as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the
most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply any individual
centre.
Audacious self-esteem, with good ground for it, is always imposing. What
resplendent beauty that must have been which could have authorized
Phryne to “peel” in the way she did! What fine speeches are those two:
“Non omnis mortar,” and “I have taken all knowledge to be my province”!
Even in common people, conceit has the virtue of making them cheerful;
the man who thinks his wife, his baby, his house, his horse, his dog, and
himself severally unequalled, is almost sure to be a good-humored person,
though liable to be tedious at times.
—What are the great faults of conversation? Want of ideas, want of words,
want of manners, are the principal ones, I suppose you think. I don’t doubt
it, but I will tell you what I have found spoil more good talks than anything
else;—long arguments on special points between people who differ on the
fundamental principles upon which these points depend. No men can have
satisfactory relations with each other until they have agreed on certain
ultimata of belief not to be disturbed in ordinary conversation, and unless
they have sense enough to trace the secondary questions depending upon

these ultimate beliefs to their source. In short, just as a written constitution
is essential to the best social order, so a code of finalities is a necessary
condition of profitable talk between two persons. Talking is like playing on
the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their
vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.
—Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your
minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are
alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide—that is, violent treatment of a word
with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike
forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as
man’s laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is primâ facie an insult
to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or
sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total
depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. I
have committed my self-respect by talking with such a person. I should
like to commit him, but cannot, because he is a nuisance. Or I speak of
geological convulsions, and he asks me what was the cosine of Noah’s ark;
also, whether the Deluge was not a deal huger than any modern inundation.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were
given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of
the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated
character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide. Thus, in a case lately
decided before Miller, J., Doe presented Roe a subscription paper, and
urged the claims of suffering humanity. Roe replied by asking, When
charity was like a top? It was in evidence that Doe preserved a dignified
silence. Roe then said, “When it begins to hum.” Doe then—and not till
then—struck Roe, and his head happening to hit a bound volume of the
Monthly Rag-bag and Stolen Miscellany, intense mortification ensued, with
a fatal result. The chief laid down his notions of the law to his brother
justices, who unanimously replied, “Jest so.” The chief rejoined, that no
man should jest so without being punished for it, and charged for the
prisoner, who was acquitted, and the pun ordered to be burned by the
sheriff. The bound volume was forfeited as a deodand, but not claimed.
People that make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad
tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick may

upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
I will thank you, B. F., to bring down two books, of which I will mark the
places on this slip of paper. (While he is gone, I may say that this boy, our
land-lady’s youngest, is called Benjamin Franklin, after the celebrated
philosopher of that name. A highly merited compliment.)
I wished to refer to two eminent authorities. Now be so good as to listen.
The great moralist says: “To trifle with the vocabulary which is the vehicle
of social intercourse is to tamper with the currency of human intelligence.
He who would violate the sanctities of his mother tongue would invade the
recesses of the paternal till without remorse, and repeat the banquet of
Saturn without an indigestion.”
And, once more, listen to the historian. “The Puritans hated puns. The
Bishops were notoriously addicted to them. The Lords Temporal carried
them to the verge of license. Majesty itself must have its Royal quibble.
‘Ye be burly, my Lord of Burleigh,’ said Queen Elizabeth, ‘but ye shall
make less stir in our realm than my Lord of Leicester.’ The gravest wisdom
and the highest breeding lent their sanction to the practice. Lord Bacon
playfully declared himself a descendant of ’Og, the King of Bashan. Sir
Philip Sidney, with his last breath, reproached the soldier who brought him
water, for wasting a casque full upon a dying man. A courtier, who saw
Othello performed at the Globe Theatre, remarked, that the blackamoor was
a brute, and not a man. ‘Thou hast reason,’ replied a great Lord, ‘according
to Plato his saying; for this be a two-legged animal with feathers.’ The fatal
habit became universal. The language was corrupted. The infection spread
to the national conscience. Political double-dealings naturally grew out of
verbal double meanings. The teeth of the new dragon were sown by the
Cadmus who introduced the alphabet of equivocation. What was levity in
the time of the Tudors grew to regicide and revolution in the age of the
Stuarts.”
Who was that boarder that just whispered something about the Macaulay-
flowers of literature?—There was a dead silence.—I said calmly, I shall
henceforth consider any interruption by a pun as a hint to change my
boarding-house. Do not plead my example. If I have used any such, it has

been only as a Spartan father would show up a drunken helot. We have
done with them.
—If a logical mind ever found out anything with its logic?—I should say
that its most frequent work was to build a pons asinorum over chasms
which shrewd people can bestride without such a structure. You can hire
logic, in the shape of a lawyer, to prove anything that you want to prove.
You can buy treatises to show that Napoleon never lived, and that no battle
of Bunker-hill was ever fought. The great minds are those with a wide
span, which couple truths related to, but far removed from, each other.
Logicians carry the surveyor’s chain over the track of which these are the
true explorers. I value a man mainly for his primary relations with truth, as
I understand truth,—not for any secondary artifice in handling his ideas.
Some of the sharpest men in argument are notoriously unsound in
judgment. I should not trust the counsel of a smart debater, any more than
that of a good chess-player. Either may of course advise wisely, but not
necessarily because he wrangles or plays well.
The old gentleman who sits opposite got his hand up, as a pointer lifts his
forefoot, at the expression, “his relations with truth, as I understand truth,”
and when I had done, sniffed audibly, and said I talked like a
transcendentalist. For his part, common sense was good enough for him.
Precisely so, my dear sir, I replied; common sense, as you understand it.
We all have to assume a standard of judgment in our own minds, either of
things or persons. A man who is willing to take another’s opinion has to
exercise his judgment in the choice of whom to follow, which is often as
nice a matter as to judge of things for one’s self. On the whole, I had rather
judge men’s minds by comparing their thoughts with my own, than judge of
thoughts by knowing who utter them. I must do one or the other. It does
not follow, of course, that I may not recognize another man’s thoughts as
broader and deeper than my own; but that does not necessarily change my
opinion, otherwise this would be at the mercy of every superior mind that
held a different one. How many of our most cherished beliefs are like those
drinking-glasses of the ancient pattern, that serve us well so long as we
keep them in our hand, but spill all if we attempt to set them down! I have
sometimes compared conversation to the Italian game of mora, in which
one player lifts his hand with so many fingers extended, and the other gives

the number if he can. I show my thought, another his; if they agree, well; if
they differ, we find the largest common factor, if we can, but at any rate
avoid disputing about remainders and fractions, which is to real talk what
tuning an instrument is to playing on it.
—What if, instead of talking this morning, I should read you a copy of
verses, with critical remarks by the author? Any of the company can retire
that like.

ALBUM VERSES.
When Eve had led her lord away,
And Cain had killed his brother,
The stars and flowers, the poets say,
Agreed with one another
To cheat the cunning tempter’s art,
And teach the race its duty,
By keeping on its wicked heart
Their eyes of light and beauty.
A million sleepless lids, they say,
Will be at least a warning;
And so the flowers would watch by day,
The stars from eve to morning.
On hill and prairie, field and lawn,
Their dewy eyes upturning,
The flowers still watch from reddening dawn
Till western skies are burning.
Alas! each hour of daylight tells
A tale of shame so crushing,
That some turn white as sea-bleached shells,
And some are always blushing.
But when the patient stars look down
On all their light discovers,
The traitor’s smile, the murderer’s frown,
The lips of lying lovers,

They try to shut their saddening eyes,
And in the vain endeavour
We see them twinkling in the skies,
And so they wink forever.

What do you think of these verses my friends?—Is that piece an
impromptu? said my landlady’s daughter. (Aet. 19 +. Tender-eyed blonde.
Long ringlets. Cameo pin. Gold pencil-case on a chain. Locket. Bracelet.
Album. Autograph book. Accordeon. Reads Byron, Tupper, and Sylvanus
Cobb, junior, while her mother makes the puddings. Says “Yes?” when you
tell her anything.)—Oui et non, ma petite,—Yes and no, my child. Five of
the seven verses were written off-hand; the other two took a week,—that is,
were hanging round the desk in a ragged, forlorn, unrhymed condition as
long as that. All poets will tell you just such stories. C’est le dernier pas
qui coute. Don’t you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a
room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and you want to
have them off, but they don’t know how to manage it. One would think
they had been built in your parlour or study, and were waiting to be
launched. I have contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such
visitors, which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them
down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their “native element,”
the great ocean of out-doors. Well, now, there are poems as hard to get rid
of as these rural visitors. They come in glibly, use up all the serviceable
rhymes, day, ray, beauty, duty, skies, eyes, other, brother, mountain,
fountain, and the like; and so they go on until you think it is time for the
wind-up, and the wind-up won’t come on any terms. So they lie about until
you get sick of the sight of them, and end by thrusting some cold scrap of a
final couplet upon them, and turning them out of doors. I suspect a good
many “impromptus” could tell just such a story as the above.—Here turning
to our landlady, I used an illustration which pleased the company much at
the time, and has since been highly commanded. “Madam,” I said, “you
can pour three gills and three quarters of honey from that pint jug, if it is
full, in less than one minute; but, Madam, you could not empty that last
quarter of a gill, though you were turned into a marble Hebe, and held the
vessel upside down for a thousand years.”

One gets tired to death of the old, old rhymes, such as you see in that copy
of verses,—which I don’t mean to abuse, or to praise either. I always feel
as if I were a cobbler, putting new top-leathers to an old pair of boot-soles
and bodies, when I am fitting sentiments to these venerable jingles.
. . . . youth
. . . . . morning
. . . . . truth
. . . . . warning
Nine tenths of the “Juvenile Poems” written spring out of the above musical
and suggestive coincidences.

“Yes?” said our landlady’s daughter.
I did not address the following remark to her, and I trust, from her limited
range of reading, she will never see it; I said it softly to my next neighbour.
When a young female wears a flat circular side—curl, gummed on each
temple,—when she walks with a male, not arm in arm, but his arm against
the back of hers,—and when she says “Yes?” with the note of interrogation,
you are generally safe in asking her what wages she gets, and who the
“feller” was you saw her with.
“What were you whispering?” said the daughter of the house, moistening
her lips, as she spoke, in a very engaging manner.
“I was only laying down a principle of social diagnosis.”
“Yes?”
—It is curious to see how the same wants and tastes find the same
implements and modes of expression in all times and places. The young
ladies of Otaheite, as you may see in Cook’s Voyages, had a sort of
crinoline arrangement fully equal in radius to the largest spread of our own
lady-baskets. When I fling a Bay-State shawl over my shoulders, I am only
taking a lesson from the climate that the Indian had learned before me. A
blanket-shawl we call it, and not a plaid; and we wear it like the aborigines,
and not like the Highlanders.
—We are the Romans of the modern world,—the great assimilating people.
Conflicts and conquests are of course necessary accidents with us, as with
our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword
is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-
knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I
announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the
journals of Congress:—
The race that shortens its weapons lengthens its boundaries.
Corollary. It was the Polish lance that left Poland at last with nothing of
her own to bound.

“Dropped from her nerveless grasp the shattered spear!”

What business had Sarmatia to be fighting for liberty with a fifteen-foot
pole between her and the breasts of her enemies? If she had but clutched
the old Roman and young American weapon, and come to close quarters,
there might have been a chance for her; but it would have spoiled the best
passage in “The Pleasures of Hope.”
—Self-made men?—Well, yes. Of course everybody likes and respects
self-made men. It is a great deal better to be made in that way than not to
be made at all. Are any of you younger people old enough to remember
that Irishman’s house on the marsh at Cambridgeport, which house he built
from drain to chimney-top with his own hands? It took him a good many
years to build it, and one could see that it was a little out of plumb, and a
little wavy in outline, and a little queer and uncertain in general aspect. A
regular hand could certainly have built a better house; but it was a very
good house for a “self-made” carpenter’s house, and people praised it, and
said how remarkably well the Irishman had succeeded. They never thought
of praising the fine blocks of houses a little farther on.
Your self-made man, whittled into shape with his own jack-knife, deserves
more credit, if that is all, than the regular engine-turned article, shaped by
the most approved pattern, and French-polished by society and travel. But
as to saying that one is every way the equal of the other, that is another
matter. The right of strict social discrimination of all things and persons,
according to their merits, native or acquired, is one of the most precious
republican privileges. I take the liberty to exercise it, when I say, that, other
things being equal, in most relations of life I prefer a man of family.
What do I mean by a man of family?—O, I’ll give you a general idea of
what I mean. Let us give him a first-rate fit out; it costs us nothing.
Four or five generations of gentlemen and gentlewomen; among them a
member of his Majesty’s Council for the Province, a Governor or so, one or
two Doctors of Divinity, a member of Congress, not later than the time of
top-boots with tassels.
Family portraits. The member of the Council, by Smibert. The great
merchant-uncle, by Copley, full length, sitting in his arm-chair, in a velvet

cap and flowered robe, with a globe by him, to show the range of his
commercial transactions, and letters with large red seals lying round, one
directed conspicuously to The Honourable etc. etc. Great-grandmother, by
the same artist; brown satin, lace very fine, hands superlative; grand old
lady, stiffish, but imposing. Her mother, artist unknown; flat, angular,
hanging sleeves; parrot on fist. A pair of Stuarts, viz., 1. A superb full-
blown, mediaeval gentleman, with a fiery dash of Tory blood in his veins,
tempered down with that of a fine old rebel grandmother, and warmed up
with the best of old India Madeira; his face is one flame of ruddy sunshine;
his ruffled shirt rushes out of his bosom with an impetuous generosity, as if
it would drag his heart after it; and his smile is good for twenty thousand
dollars to the Hospital, besides ample bequests to all relatives and
dependants. 2. Lady of the same; remarkable cap; high waist, as in time of
Empire; bust à la Josephine; wisps of curls, like celery-tips, at sides of
forehead; complexion clear and warm, like rose-cordial. As for the
miniatures by Malbone, we don’t count them in the gallery.
Books, too, with the names of old college-students in them,—family names;
—you will find them at the head of their respective classes in the days when
students took rank on the catalogue from their parents’ condition. Elzevirs,
with the Latinized appellations of youthful progenitors, and Hic liber est
meus on the title-page. A set of Hogarth’s original plates. Pope, original
edition, 15 volumes, London, 1717. Barrow on the lower shelves, in folio.
Tillotson on the upper, in a little dark platoon of octo-decimos.
Some family silver; a string of wedding and funeral rings; the arms of the
family curiously blazoned; the same in worsted, by a maiden aunt.
If the man of family has an old place to keep these things in, furnished with
claw-footed chairs and black mahogany tables, and tall bevel-edged
mirrors, and stately upright cabinets, his outfit is complete.
No, my friends, I go (always, other things being equal) for the man who
inherits family traditions and the cumulative humanities of at least four or
five generations. Above all things, as a child, he should have tumbled about
in a library. All men are afraid of books, who have not handled them from
infancy. Do you suppose our dear didascalos over there ever read Poli
Synopsis, or consulted Castelli Lexicon, while he was growing up to their

stature? Not he; but virtue passed through the hem of their parchment and
leather garments whenever he touched them, as the precious drugs sweated
through the bat’s handle in the Arabian story. I tell you he is at home
wherever he smells the invigorating fragrance of Russia leather. No self-
made man feels so. One may, it is true, have all the antecedents I have
spoken of, and yet be a boor or a shabby fellow. One may have none of
them, and yet be fit for councils and courts. Then let them change places.
Our social arrangement has this great beauty, that its strata shift up and
down as they change specific gravity, without being clogged by layers of
prescription. But I still insist on my democratic liberty of choice, and I go
for the man with the gallery of family portraits against the one with the
twenty-five-cent daguerreotype, unless I find out that the last is the better of
the two.
—I should have felt more nervous about the late comet, if I had thought the
world was ripe. But it is very green yet, if I am not mistaken; and besides,
there is a great deal of coal to use up, which I cannot bring myself to think
was made for nothing. If certain things, which seem to me essential to a
millennium, had come to pass, I should have been frightened; but they
haven’t. Perhaps you would like to hear my

LATTER-DAY WARNINGS.
When legislators keep the law,
When banks dispense with bolts and locks,
When berries, whortle—rasp—and straw—
Grow bigger downwards through the box,—
When he that selleth house or land
Shows leak in roof or flaw in right,—
When haberdashers choose the stand
Whose window hath the broadest light,—
When preachers tell us all they think,
And party leaders all they mean,—
When what we pay for, that we drink,
From real grape and coffee-bean,—

When lawyers take what they would give,
And doctors give what they would take,—
When city fathers eat to live,
Save when they fast for conscience’ sake,—
When one that hath a horse on sale
Shall bring his merit to the proof,
Without a lie for every nail
That holds the iron on the hoof,—
When in the usual place for rips
Our gloves are stitched with special care,
And guarded well the whalebone tips
Where first umbrellas need repair,—
When Cuba’s weeds have quite forgot
The power of suction to resist,
And claret-bottles harber not
Such dimples as would hold your fist,—
When publishers no longer steal,
And pay for what they stole before,—
When the first locomotive’s wheel
Rolls through the Hoosac tunnel’s bore;—
Till then let Cumming a blaze away,
And Miller’s saints blow up the globe;
But when you see that blessed day,
Then order your ascension robe!

The company seemed to like the verses, and I promised them to read others
occasionally, if they had a mind to hear them. Of course they would not
expect it every morning. Neither must the reader suppose that all these
things I have reported were said at any one breakfast-time. I have not taken
the trouble to date them, as Raspail, père, used to date every proof he sent
to the printer; but they were scattered over several breakfasts; and I have
said a good many more things since, which I shall very possibly print some
time or other, if I am urged to do it by judicious friends.

I finished off with reading some verses of my friend the Professor, of whom
you may perhaps hear more by and by. The Professor read them, he told
me, at a farewell meeting, where the youngest of our great Historians met a
few of his many friends at their invitation.

Yes, we knew we must lose him,—though friendship may claim
To blend her green leaves with the laurels of fame;
Though fondly, at parting, we call him our own,
’Tis the whisper of love when the bugle has blown.
As the rider that rests with the spur on his heel,—
As the guardsman that sleeps in his corselet of steel,—
As the archer that stands with his shaft on the string,
He stoops from his toil to the garland we bring.
What pictures yet slumber unborn in his loom
Till their warriors shall breathe and their beauties shall bloom,
While the tapestry lengthens the life-glowing dyes
That caught from our sunsets the stain of their skies!
In the alcoves of death, in the charnels of time,
Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime,
There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung,
There are heroes yet silent to speak with his tongue!
Let us hear the proud story which time has bequeathed
From lips that are warm with the freedom they breathed!
Let him summon its tyrants, and tell us their doom,
Though he sweep the black past like Van Tromp with his broom!
*****
The dream flashes by, for the west-winds awake
On pampas, on prairie, o’er mountain and lake,
To bathe the swift bark, like a sea-girdled shrine,
With incense they stole from the rose and the pine.
So fill a bright cup with the sunlight that gushed
When the dead summer’s jewels were trampled and crushed:

The true Knight of Learning,—the world holds him dear,—
Love bless him, Joy crown him, God speed his career!

CHAPTER II

I really believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too
precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the
other day to one that was talking good things,—good enough to print?
“Why,” said he, “you are wasting mechantable literature, a cash article, at
the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour.” The talker took him
to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.
“Nothing but a very dusty street,” he said, “and a man driving a sprinkling-
machine through it.”
“Why don’t you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the
state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thought-sprinklers
through them with the valves open, sometimes?
“Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It
shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the surf
rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out
my thoughts in talk as an artist models in clay. Spoken language is so
plastic,—you can pat and coax, and spread and shave, and rub out, and fill
up, and stick on so easily when you work that soft material, that there is
nothing like it for modelling. Out of it come the shapes which you turn into
marble or bronze in your immortal books, if you happen to write such. Or,
to use another illustration, writing or printing is like shooting with a rifle;
you may hit your reader’s mind, or miss it;—but talking is like playing at a
mark with the pipe of an engine; if it is within reach, and you have time
enough, you can’t help hitting it.”
The company agreed that this last illustration was of superior excellence, or,
in the phrase used by them, “Fust-rate.” I acknowledged the compliment,
but gently rebuked the expression. “Fust-rate,” “prime,” “a prime article,”
“a superior piece of goods,” “a handsome garment,” “a gent in a flowered

vest,”—all such expressions are final. They blast the lineage of him or her
who utters them, for generations up and down. There is one other phrase
which will soon come to be decisive of a man’s social status, if it is not
already: “That tells the whole story.” It is an expression which vulgar and
conceited people particularly affect, and which well-meaning ones, who
know better, catch from them. It is intended to stop all debate, like the
previous question in the General Court. Only it doesn’t; simply because
“that” does not usually tell the whole, nor one half of the whole story.
—It is an odd idea, that almost all our people have had a professional
education. To become a doctor a man must study some three years and hear
a thousand lectures, more or less. Just how much study it takes to make a
lawyer I cannot say, but probably not more than this. Now most decent
people hear one hundred lectures or sermons (discourses) on theology every
year,—and this, twenty, thirty, fifty years together. They read a great many
religious books besides. The clergy, however, rarely hear any sermons
except what they preach themselves. A dull preacher might be conceived,
therefore, to lapse into a state of quasi heathenism, simply for want of
religious instruction. And on the other hand, an attentive and intelligent
hearer, listening to a succession of wise teachers, might become actually
better educated in theology than any one of them. We are all theological
students, and more of us qualified as doctors of divinity than have received
degrees at any of the universities.
It is not strange, therefore, that very good people should often find it
difficult, if not impossible, to keep their attention fixed upon a sermon
treating feebly a subject which they have thought vigorously about for
years, and heard able men discuss scores of times. I have often noticed,
however, that a hopelessly dull discourse acts inductively, as electricians
would say, in developing strong mental currents. I am ashamed to think
with what accompaniments and variations and fioriture I have sometimes
followed the droning of a heavy speaker,—not willingly,—for my habit is
reverential,—but as a necessary result of a slight continuous impression on
the senses and the mind, which kept both in action without furnishing the
food they required to work upon. If you ever saw a crow with a king-bird
after him, you will get an image of a dull speaker and a lively listener. The
bird in sable plumage flaps heavily along his straight-forward course, while
the other sails round him, over him, under him, leaves him, comes back

again, tweaks out a black feather, shoots away once more, never losing sight
of him, and finally reaches the crow’s perch at the same time the crow does,
having cut a perfect labyrinth of loops and knots and spirals while the slow
fowl was painfully working from one end of his straight line to the other.
[I think these remarks were received rather coolly. A temporary boarder
from the country, consisting of a somewhat more than middle-aged female,
with a parchment forehead and a dry little “frisette” shingling it, a sallow
neck with a necklace of gold beads, a black dress too rusty for recent grief
and contours in basso-rilievo, left the table prematurely, and was reported to
have been very virulent about what I said. So I went to my good old
minister, and repeated the remarks, as nearly as I could remember them, to
him. He laughed good-naturedly, and said there was considerable truth in
them. He thought he could tell when people’s minds were wandering, by
their looks. In the earlier years of his ministry he had sometimes noticed
this, when he was preaching;—very little of late years. Sometimes, when
his colleague was preaching, he observed this kind of inattention; but after
all, it was not so very unnatural. I will say, by the way, that it is a rule I
have long followed, to tell my worst thoughts to my minister, and my best
thoughts to the young people I talk with.]
—I want to make a literary confession now, which I believe nobody has
made before me. You know very well that I write verses sometimes,
because I have read some of them at this table. (The company assented,—
two or three of them in a resigned sort of way, as I thought, as if they
supposed I had an epic in my pocket, and was going to read half a dozen
books or so for their benefit.)—I continued. Of course I write some lines or
passages which are better than others; some which, compared with the
others, might be called relatively excellent. It is in the nature of things that
I should consider these relatively excellent lines or passages as absolutely
good. So much must be pardoned to humanity. Now I never wrote a
“good” line in my life, but the moment after it was written it seemed a
hundred years old. Very commonly I had a sudden conviction that I had
seen it somewhere. Possibly I may have sometimes unconsciously stolen it,
but I do not remember that I ever once detected any historical truth in these
sudden convictions of the antiquity of my new thought or phrase. I have
learned utterly to distrust them, and never allow them to bully me out of a
thought or line.

This is the philosophy of it. (Here the number of the company was
diminished by a small secession.) Any new formula which suddenly
emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is
virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized
growths of our intellect. Any crystalline group of musical words has had a
long and still period to form in. Here is one theory.

But there is a larger law which perhaps comprehends these facts. It is this.
The rapidity with which ideas grow old in our memories is in a direct ratio
to the squares of their importance. Their apparent age runs up miraculously,
like the value of diamonds, as they increase in magnitude. A great calamity,
for instance, is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened. It
stains backward through all the leaves we have turned over in the book of
life, before its blot of tears or of blood is dry on the page we are turning.
For this we seem to have lived; it was foreshadowed in dreams that we
leaped out of in the cold sweat of terror; in the “dissolving views” of dark
day-visions; all omens pointed to it; all paths led to it. After the tossing
half-forgetfulness of the first sleep that follows such an event, it comes

upon us afresh, as a surprise, at waking; in a few moments it is old again,—
old as eternity.
[I wish I had not said all this then and there. I might have known better.
The pale schoolmistress, in her mourning dress, was looking at me, as I
noticed, with a wild sort of expression. All at once the blood dropped out of
her cheeks as the mercury drops from a broken barometer-tube, and she
melted away from her seat like an image of snow; a slung-shot could not
have brought her down better. God forgive me!
After this little episode, I continued, to some few that remained balancing
teaspoons on the edges of cups, twirling knives, or tilting upon the hind legs
of their chairs until their heads reached the wall, where they left gratuitous
advertisements of various popular cosmetics.]
When a person is suddenly thrust into any strange, new position of trial, he
finds the place fits him as if he had been measured for it. He has committed
a great crime, for instance, and is sent to the State Prison. The traditions,
prescriptions, limitations, privileges, all the sharp conditions of his new life,
stamp themselves upon his consciousness as the signet on soft wax;—a
single pressure is enough. Let me strengthen the image a little. Did you
ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed steam-engine at
the Mint? The smooth piston slides backward and forward as a lady might
slip her delicate finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its
fingers calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will
remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is
crusted over with twenty centuries. So it is that a great silent-moving
misery puts a new stamp on us in an hour or a moment,—as sharp an
impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it.
It is awful to be in the hands of the wholesale professional dealers in
misfortune; undertakers and jailers magnetize you in a moment, and you
pass out of the individual life you were living into the rhythmical
movements of their horrible machinery. Do the worst thing you can, or
suffer the worst that can be thought of, you find yourself in a category of
humanity that stretches back as far as Cain, and with an expert at your
elbow who has studied your case all out beforehand, and is waiting for you
with his implements of hemp or mahogany. I believe, if a man were to be

burned in any of our cities tomorrow for heresy, there would be found a
master of ceremonies that knew just how many fagots were necessary, and
the best way of arranging the whole matter.
—So we have not won the Goodwood cup; au contraire, we were a “bad
fifth,” if not worse than that; and trying it again, and the third time, has not
yet bettered the matter. Now I am as patriotic as any of my fellow-citizens,
—too patriotic in fact, for I have got into hot water by loving too much of
my country; in short, if any man, whose fighting weight is not more than
eight stone four pounds, disputes it, I am ready to discuss the point with
him. I should have gloried to see the stars and stripes in front at the finish.
I love my country, and I love horses. Stubbs’s old mezzotint of Eclipse
hangs over my desk, and Herring’s portrait of Plenipotentiary,—whom I
saw run at Epsom,—over my fireplace. Did I not elope from school to see
Revenge, and Prospect, and Little John, and Peacemaker run over the race-
course where now yon suburban village flourishes, in the year eighteen
hundred and ever-so-few? Though I never owned a horse, have I not been
the proprietor of six equine females, of which one was the prettiest little
“Morgin” that ever stepped? Listen, then, to an opinion I have often
expressed long before this venture of ours in England. Horse-racing is not
a republican institution; horse-trotting is. Only very rich persons can keep
race-horses, and everybody knows they are kept mainly as gambling
implements. All that matter about blood and speed we won’t discuss; we
understand all that; useful, very,—of course,—great obligations to the
Godolphin “Arabian,” and the rest. I say racing horses are essentially
gambling implements, as much as roulette tables. Now I am not preaching
at this moment; I may read you one of my sermons some other morning; but
I maintain that gambling, on the great scale, is not republican. It belongs to
two phases of society,—a cankered over-civilization, such as exists in rich
aristocracies, and the reckless life of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-
barbarism of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real
Republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of
government, but in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of
it. This public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, but it
can and does compel it to keep comparatively quiet. But horse-racing is the
most public way of gambling, and with all its immense attractions to the
sense and the feelings,—to which I plead very susceptible,—the disguise is

too thin that covers it, and everybody knows what it means. Its supporters
are the Southern gentry,—fine fellows, no doubt, but not republicans
exactly, as we understand the term,—a few Northern millionnaires more or
less thoroughly millioned, who do not represent the real people, and the
mob of sporting men, the best of whom are commonly idlers, and the worst
very bad neighbors to have near one in a crowd, or to meet in a dark alley.
In England, on the other hand, with its aristocratic institutions, racing is a
natural growth enough; the passion for it spreads downwards through all
classes, from the Queen to the costermonger. London is like a shelled corn-
cob on the Derby day, and there is not a clerk who could raise the money to
hire a saddle with an old hack under it that can sit down on his office-stool
the next day without wincing.
Now just compare the racer with the trotter for a moment. The racer is
incidentally useful, but essentially something to bet upon, as much as the
thimble-rigger’s “little joker.” The trotter is essentially and daily useful,
and only incidentally a tool for sporting men.
What better reason do you want for the fact that the racer is most cultivated
and reaches his greatest perfection in England, and that the trotting horses
of America beat the world? And why should we have expected that the pick
—if it was the pick—of our few and far-between racing stables should beat
the pick of England and France? Throw over the fallacious time-test, and
there was nothing to show for it but a natural kind of patriotic feeling,
which we all have, with a thoroughly provincial conceit, which some of us
must plead guilty to.
We may beat yet. As an American, I hope we shall. As a moralist and
occasional sermonizer, I am not so anxious about it. Wherever the trotting
horse goes, he carries in his train brisk omnibuses, lively bakers’ carts, and
therefore hot rolls, the jolly butcher’s wagon, the cheerful gig, the
wholesome afternoon drive with wife and child,—all the forms of moral
excellence, except truth, which does not agree with any kind of horse-flesh.
The racer brings with him gambling, cursing, swearing, drinking, the eating
of oysters, and a distaste for mob-caps and the middle-aged virtues.
And by the way, let me beg you not to call a trotting match a race, and not
to speak of a “thoroughbred” as a “blooded” horse, unless he has been

recently phlebotomized. I consent to your saying “blood horse,” if you
like. Also, if, next year, we send out Posterior and Posterioress, the winners
of the great national four-mile race in 7 18.5, and they happen to get beaten,
pay your bets, and behave like men and gentlemen about it, if you know
how.
[I felt a great deal better after blowing off the ill-temper condensed in the
above paragraph. To brag little,—to show well,—to crow gently, if in luck,
—to pay up, to own up, and to shut up, if beaten, are the virtues of a
sporting man, and I can’t say that I think we have shown them in any great
perfection of late.]
—Apropos of horses. Do you know how important good jockeying is to
authors? Judicious management; letting the public see your animal just
enough, and not too much; holding him up hard when the market is too full
of him; letting him out at just the right buying intervals; always gently
feeling his mouth; never slacking and never jerking the rein;—this is what I
mean by jockeying.
—When an author has a number of books out a cunning hand will keep
them all spinning, as Signor Blitz does his dinner-plates; fetching each one
up, as it begins to “wabble,” by an advertisement, a puff, or a quotation.
—Whenever the extracts from a living writer begin to multiply fast in the
papers, without obvious reason, there is a new book or a new edition
coming. The extracts are ground-bait.
—Literary life is fun of curious phenomena. I don’t know that there is
anything more noticeable than what we may call conventional reputations.
There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that
they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded
celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: one is old; one is
rich; one is good-natured; one is such a favorite with the pit that it would
not be safe to hiss him from the manager’s box. The venerable augurs of
the literary or scientific temple may smile faintly when one of the tribe is
mentioned; but the farce is in general kept up as well as the Chinese comic
scene of entreating and imploring a man to stay with you with the implied
compact between you that he shall by no means think of doing it. A poor
wretch he must be who would wantonly sit down on one of these bandbox

reputations. A Prince-Rupert’s-drop, which is a tear of unannealed glass,
lasts indefinitely, if you keep it from meddling hands; but break its tail off,
and it explodes and resolves itself into powder. These celebrities I speak of
are the Prince-Rupert’s-drops of the learned and polite world. See how the
papers treat them! What an array of pleasant kaleidoscopic phrases, which
can be arranged in ever so many charming patterns, is at their service! How
kind the “Critical Notices”—where small authorship comes to pick up chips
of praise, fragrant, sugary, and sappy—always are to them! Well, life
would be nothing without paper-credit and other fictions; so let them pass
current. Don’t steal their chips; don’t puncture their swimming-bladders;
don’t come down on their pasteboard boxes; don’t break the ends of their
brittle and unstable reputations, you fellows who all feel sure that your
names will be household words a thousand years from now.
“A thousand years is a good while,” said the old gentleman who sits
opposite, thoughtfully.
—Where have I been for the last three or four days? Down at the Island,
deer-shooting.—How many did I bag? I brought home one buck shot.—
The Island is where? No matter. It is the most splendid domain that any
man looks upon in these latitudes. Blue sea around it, and running up into
its heart, so that the little boat slumbers like a baby in lap, while the tall
ships are stripping naked to fight the hurricane outside, and storm-stay-sails
banging and flying in ribbons. Trees, in stretches of miles; beeches, oaks,
most numerous;—many of them hung with moss, looking like bearded
Druids; some coiled in the clasp of huge, dark-stemmed grape-vines. Open
patches where the sun gets in and goes to sleep, and the winds come so
finely sifted that they are as soft as swan’s down. Rocks scattered about,—
Stonehenge-like monoliths. Fresh-water lakes; one of them, Mary’s lake,
crystal-clear, full of flashing pickerel lying under the lily-pads like tigers in
the jungle. Six pounds of ditto killed one morning for breakfast. Ego fecit.
The divinity-student looked as if he would like to question my Latin. No,
sir, I said,—you need not trouble yourself. There is a higher law in
grammar, not to be put down by Andrews and Stoddard. Then I went on.
Such hospitality as that island has seen there has not been the like of in
these our New England sovereignties. There is nothing in the shape of

kindness and courtesy that can make life beautiful, which has not found its
home in that ocean-principality. It has welcomed all who were worthy of
welcome, from the pale clergyman who came to breathe the sea-air with its
medicinal salt and iodine, to the great statesman who turned his back on the
affairs of empire, and smoothed his Olympian forehead, and flashed his
white teeth in merriment over the long table, where his wit was the keenest
and his story the best.
[I don’t believe any man ever talked like that in this world. I don’t believe I
talked just so; but the fact is, in reporting one’s conversation, one cannot
help Blair-ing it up more or less, ironing out crumpled paragraphs,
starching limp ones, and crimping and plaiting a little sometimes; it is as
natural as prinking at the looking-glass.]
—How can a man help writing poetry in such a place? Everybody does
write poetry that goes there. In the state archives, kept in the library of the
Lord of the Isle, are whole volumes of unpublished verse,—some by well-
known hands, and others quite as good, by the last people you would think
of as versifiers,—men who could pension off all the genuine poets in the
country, and buy ten acres of Boston common, if it was for sale, with what
they had left. Of course I had to write my little copy of verses with the rest;
here it is, if you will hear me read it. When the sun is in the west, vessels
sailing in an easterly direction look bright or dark to one who observes them
from the north or south, according to the tack they are sailing upon.
Watching them from one of the windows of the great mansion, I saw these
perpetual changes, and moralized thus:—

SUN AND SHADOW.
As I look from the isle, o’er its billows of green,
To the billows of foam-crested blue,
Yon bark, that afar in the distance is seen,
Half dreaming, my eyes will pursue:
Now dark in the shadow, she scatters the spray
As the chaff in the stroke of the flail;
Now white as the sea-gull, she flies on her way,
The sun gleaming bright on her sail.

Yet her pilot is thinking of dangers to shun,—
Of breakers that whiten and roar;
How little he cares, if in shadow or sun
They see him that gaze from the shore!
He looks to the beacon that looms from the reef,
To the rock that is under his lee,
As he drifts on the blast, like a wind-wafted leaf,
O’er the gulfs of the desolate sea.
Thus drifting afar to the dim-vaulted caves
Where life and its ventures are laid,
The dreamers who gaze while we battle the waves
May see us in sunshine or shade;
Yet true to our course, though our shadow grow dark,
We’ll trim our broad sail as before,
And stand by the rudder that governs the bark,
Nor ask how we look from the shore!

—Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental
machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust
among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A
weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often
saves a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane
hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called religious mental
disturbances. I confess that I think better of them than of many who hold
the same notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life very well,
outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought to go mad, if he really
holds such or such opinions. It is very much to his discredit in every point
of view, if he does not. What is the use of my saying what some of these
opinions are? Perhaps more than one of you hold such as I should think
ought to send you straight over to Somerville, if you have any logic in your
heads or any human feeling in your hearts. Anything that is brutal, cruel,
heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and perhaps
for entire races,—anything that assumes the necessity of the extermination
of instincts which were given to be regulated,—no matter by what name
you call it,—no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, or a deacon believes it,
—if received, ought to produce insanity in every well-regulated mind. That
condition becomes a normal one, under the circumstances. I am very much

ashamed of some people for retaining their reason, when they know
perfectly well that if they were not the most stupid or the most selfish of
human beings, they would become non-compotes at once.
[Nobody understood this but the theological student and the
schoolmistress. They looked intelligently at each other; but whether they
were thinking about my paradox or not, I am not clear.—It would be natural
enough. Stranger things have happened. Love and Death enter boarding-
houses without asking the price of board, or whether there is room for
them. Alas, these young people are poor and pallid! Love should be both
rich and rosy, but must be either rich or rosy. Talk about military duty!
What is that to the warfare of a married maid-of-all-work, with the title of
mistress, and an American female constitution, which collapses just in the
middle third of life, and comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it happen to
live through the period when health and strength are most wanted?]
—Have I ever acted in private theatricals? Often. I have played the part of
the “Poor Gentleman,” before a great many audiences,—more, I trust, than I
shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage-costume, nor a wig, nor
moustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded and announced as a public
performer, and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer’s
smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have
seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself
in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober literary essay in
my pocket, and seen myself everywhere announced as the most desperate of
buffos,—one who was obliged to restrain himself in the full exercise of his
powers, from prudential considerations. I have been through as many
hardships as Ulysses, in the pursuit of my histrionic vocation. I have
travelled in cars until the conductors all knew me like a brother. I have run
off the rails, and stuck all night in snow-drifts, and sat behind females that
would have the window open when one could not wink without his eyelids
freezing together. Perhaps I shall give you some of my experiences one of
these days;—I will not now, for I have something else for you.
Private theatricals, as I have figured in them in country lyceum-halls, are
one thing,—and private theatricals, as they may be seen in certain gilded
and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are another. Yes, it is pleasant to
see real gentlemen and ladies, who do not think it necessary to mouth, and

rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes and heroines, in the characters
which show off their graces and talents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged,
unspoiled, high bred young maiden, with a lithe figure, and a pleasant
voice, acting in those love-dramas which make us young again to look
upon, when real youth and beauty will play them for us.
—Of course I wrote the prologue I was asked to write. I did not see the
play, though. I knew there was a young lady in it, and that somebody was
in love with her, and she was in love with him, and somebody (an old tutor,
I believe) wanted to interfere, and, very naturally, the young lady was too
sharp for him. The play of course ends charmingly; there is a general
reconciliation, and all concerned form a line and take each others’ hands, as
people always do after they have made up their quarrels,—and then the
curtain falls,—if it does not stick, as it commonly does at private theatrical
exhibitions, in which case a boy is detailed to pull it down, which he does,
blushing violently.
Now, then, for my prologue. I am not going to change my cæsuras and
cadences for anybody; so if you do not like the heroic, or iambic trimeter
brachy-catalectic, you had better not wait to hear it

THIS IS IT.
A Prologue? Well, of course the ladies know;—
I have my doubts. No matter,—here we go!
What is a Prologue? Let our Tutor teach:
Pro means beforehand; logos stands for speech.
’Tis like the harper’s prelude on the strings,
The prima donna’s courtesy ere she sings;—
Prologues in metre are to other pros
As worsted stockings are to engine-hose.
“The world’s a stage,” as Shakspeare said, one day;
The stage a world—was what he meant to say.
The outside world’s a blunder, that is clear;
The real world that Nature meant is here.
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma;
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa;
Misers relent, the spendthrift’s debts are paid,

The cheats are taken in the traps they laid;
One after one the troubles all are past
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last,
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all,
Join hands, so happy at the curtain’s fall.
—Here suffering virtue ever finds relief,
And black-browed ruffians always come to grief,
—When the lorn damsel, with a frantic screech,
And cheeks as hueless as a brandy-peach,
Cries, “Help, kyind Heaven!” and drops upon her knees
On the green—baize,—beneath the (canvas) trees,—
See to her side avenging Valor fly:—
“Ha! Villain! Draw! Now, Terraitorr, yield or die!”
—When the poor hero flounders in despair,
Some dear lost uncle turns up millionnaire,—
Clasps the young scapegrace with paternal joy,
Sobs on his neck, “My boy! My boy!! MY BOY!!!”
Ours, then, sweet friends, the real world to-night.
Of love that conquers in disaster’s spite.
Ladies, attend! While woful cares and doubt
Wrong the soft passion in the world without,
Though fortune scowl, though prudence interfere,
One thing is certain: Love will triumph here!
Lords of creation, whom your ladies rule,—
The world’s great masters, when you’re out of school,—
Learn the brief moral of our evening’s play:
Man has his will,—but woman has her way!
While man’s dull spirit toils in smoke and fire,
Woman’s swift instinct threads the electric wire,—
The magic bracelet stretched beneath the waves
Beats the black giant with his score of slaves.
All earthly powers confess your sovereign art
But that one rebel,—woman’s wilful heart.
All foes you master; but a woman’s wit
Lets daylight through you ere you know you’re hit.

So, just to picture what her art can do,
Hear an old story made as good as new.
Rudolph, professor of the headsman’s trade,
Alike was famous for his arm and blade.
One day a prisoner Justice had to kill
Knelt at the block to test the artist’s skill.
Bare-armed, swart-visaged, gaunt, and shaggy-browed,
Rudolph the headsman rose above the crowd.
His falchion lightened with a sudden gleam,
As the pike’s armor flashes in the stream.
He sheathed his blade; he turned as if to go;
The victim knelt, still waiting for the blow.
“Why strikest not? Perform thy murderous act,”
The prisoner said. (Hs voice was slightly cracked.)
“Friend I have struck,” the artist straight replied;
“Wait but one moment, and yourself decide.”
He held his snuff-box,—“Now then, if you please!”
The prisoner sniffed, and, with a crashing sneeze,
Off his head tumbled,—bowled along the floor,—
Bounced down the steps;—the prisoner said no more!
Woman! thy falchion is a glittering eye;
If death lurks in it, oh, how sweet to die!
Thou takest hearts as Rudolph took the head;
We die with love, and never dream we’re dead!

The prologue went off very well, as I hear. No alterations were suggested
by the lady to whom it was sent, so far as I know. Sometimes people
criticize the poems one sends them, and suggest all sorts of improvements.
Who was that silly body that wanted Burns to alter “Scots wha hae,” so as
to lengthen the last line, thus

“Edward!” Chains and slavery!

Here is a little poem I sent a short time since to a committee for a certain
celebration. I understood that it was to be a festive and convivial occasion,
and ordered myself accordingly. It seems the president of the day was what

is called a “teetotaller.” I received a note from him in the following words,
containing the copy subjoined, with the emendations annexed to it.
“Dear Sir,—your poem gives good satisfaction to the committee. The
sentiments expressed with reference to liquor are not, however, those
generally entertained by this community. I have therefore consulted the
clergyman of this place, who has made come slight changes, which he
thinks will remove all objections, and keep the valuable portions of the
poem. Please to inform me of your charge for said poem. Our means are
limited, etc., etc., etc.
Yours with respect.”

HERE IT IS—WITH THE SLIGHT ALTERATIONS!
Come! fill a fresh bumper,—for why should we go
While the [nectar → logwood] still reddens our cups as they flow?
Pour out the [rich juices → decoction] still bright with the sun,
Till o’er the brimmed crystal the [rubies → dye-stuff] shall run.
The [purple glebed clusters → half-ripened apples] their life-dews
have bled;
How sweet is the [breath → taste] of the [fragrance they shed → sugar
of lead]!
For summer’s [last roses → rank poisons] lie hid in the [wines →
wines!!!]
That were garnered by [maidens who laughed through the vines. →
stable-boys smoking long-nines.]
Then a [smile → scowl], and a [glass → howl], and a [toast → scoff],
and a [cheer → sneer],
For all [the good wine, and we’ve some of it here → strychnine and
whiskey, and ratsbane and beer]
In cellar, in pantry, in attic, in hall,
[Long live the gay servant that laughs for us all! → Down, down, with
the tyrant that masters us all!]

The company said I had been shabbily treated, and advised me to charge the
committee double,—which I did. But as I never got my pay, I don’t know

that it made much difference. I am a very particular person about having all
I write printed as I write it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise,
and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my
productions, especially verse. A misprint kills a sensitive author. An
intentional change of his text murders him. No wonder so many poets die
young!
I have nothing more to report at this time, except two pieces of advice I
gave to the young women at table. One relates to a vulgarism of language,
which I grieve to say is sometimes heard even from female lips. The other
is of more serious purport, and applies to such as contemplate a change of
condition,—matrimony, in fact.
—The woman who “calculates” is lost.
—Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

CHAPTER III

[The “Atlantic” obeys the moon, and its Luniversary has come round
again. I have gathered up some hasty notes of my remarks made since the
last high tides, which I respectfully submit. Please to remember this is talk;
just as easy and just as formal as I choose to make it.]
—I never saw an author in my life—saving, perhaps, one—that did not purr
as audibly as a full-grown domestic cat, (Felis Catus, Linn.,) on having his
fur smoothed in the right way by a skilful hand.
But let me give you a caution. Be very careful how you tell an author he is
droll. Ten to one he will hate you; and if he does, be sure he can do you a
mischief, and very probably will. Say you cried over his romance or his
verses, and he will love you and send you a copy. You can laugh over that
as much as you like—in private.
—Wonder why authors and actors are ashamed of being funny?—Why,
there are obvious reasons, and deep philosophical ones. The clown knows
very well that the women are not in love with him, but with Hamlet, the
fellow in the black cloak and plumed hat. Passion never laughs. The wit
knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.
If you want the deep underlying reason, I must take more time to tell it.
There is a perfect consciousness in every form of wit—using that term in its
general sense—that its essence consists in a partial and incomplete view of
whatever it touches. It throws a single ray, separated from the rest,—red,
yellow, blue, or any intermediate shade,—upon an object; never white light;
that is the province of wisdom. We get beautiful effects from wit,—all the
prismatic colors,—but never the object as it is in fair daylight. A pun,
which is a kind if wit, is a different and much shallower trick in mental
optics throwing the shadows of two objects so that one overlies the other.
Poetry uses the rainbow tints for special effects, but always keeps its

essential object in the purest white light of truth.—Will you allow me to
pursue this subject a little further?
[They didn’t allow me at that time, for somebody happened to scrape the
floor with his chair just then; which accidental sound, as all must have
noticed, has the instantaneous effect that the cutting of the yellow hair by
Iris had upon infelix Dido. It broke the charm, and that breakfast was over.]
—Don’t flatter yourselves that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable
things to your intimates. On the contrary, the nearer you come into relation
with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become. Except in
cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant
truths from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them. Good-breeding
never forgets that amour-propre is universal. When you read the story of
the Archbishop and Gil Blas, you may laugh, if you will, at the poor old
man’s delusion; but don’t forget that the youth was the greater fool of the
two, and that his master served such a booby rightly in turning him out of
doors.
—You need not get up a rebellion against what I say, if you find everything
in my sayings is not exactly new. You can’t possibly mistake a man who
means to be honest for a literary pickpocket. I once read an introductory
lecture that looked to me too learned for its latitude. On examination, I
found all its erudition was taken ready-made from D’Israeli. If I had been
ill-natured, I should have shown up the little great man, who had once
belabored me in his feeble way. But one can generally tell these wholesale
thieves easily enough, and they are not worth the trouble of putting them in
the pillory. I doubt the entire novelty of my remarks just made on telling
unpleasant truths, yet I am not conscious of any larceny.
Neither make too much of flaws and occasional overstatements. Some
persons seem to think that absolute truth, in the form of rigidly stated
propositions, is all that conversation admits. This is precisely as if a
musician should insist on having nothing but perfect chords and simple
melodies,—no diminished fifths, no flat sevenths, no flourishes, on any
account. Now it is fair to say, that, just as music must have all these, so
conversation must have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its
exaggerated truths. It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits

the ideal element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little too
literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit.—“Yes,” you
say, “but who wants to hear fanciful people’s nonsense? Put the facts to it,
and then see where it is!”—Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox,—if
he is flighty and empty,—if, instead of striking those fifths and sevenths,
those harmonious discords, often so much better than the twinned octaves,
in the music of thought,—if, instead of striking these, he jangles the chords,
stick a fact into him like a stiletto. But remember that talking is one of the
fine arts,—the noblest, the most important, and the most difficult,—and that
its fluent harmonies may be spoiled by the intrusion of a single harsh note.
Therefore conversation which is suggestive rather than argumentative,
which lets out the most of each talker’s results of thought, is commonly the
pleasantest and the most profitable. It is not easy, at the best, for two
persons talking together to make the most of each other’s thoughts, there
are so many of them.
[The company looked as if they wanted an explanation.]
When John and Thomas, for instance, are talking together, it is natural
enough that among the six there should be more or less confusion and
misapprehension.
[Our landlady turned pale;—no doubt she thought there was a screw loose
in my intellects,—and that involved the probable loss of a boarder. A
severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted
by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional
ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow,
drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di
petto, to Falstaff’s nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe
the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; at
any rate, he slid it to one side, as it were carelessly.]
I think, I said, I can make it plain to Benjamin Franklin here, that there are
at least six personalities distinctly to be recognized as taking part in that
dialogue between John and Thomas.
Three Johns.
1. The real John; known only to his Maker.

2. John’s ideal John; never the real one, and often very unlike him.
3. Thomas’s ideal John; never the real John, nor John’s John, but often very
unlike either.
Three Thomas.
1. The real Thomas.
2. Thomas’s ideal Thomas.
3. John’s ideal Thomas.

Only one of the three Johns is taxed; only one can be weighed on a
platform-balance; but the other two are just as important in the
conversation. Let us suppose the real John to be old, dull, and ill-looking.
But as the Higher Powers have not conferred on men the gift of seeing
themselves in the true light, John very possibly conceives himself to be
youthful, witty, and fascinating, and talks from the point of view of this
ideal. Thomas, again, believes him to be an artful rogue, we will say;
therefore he is, so far as Thomas’s attitude in the conversation is concerned,
an artful rogue, though really simple and stupid. The same conditions apply
to the three Thomases. It follows, that, until a man can be found who
knows himself as his Maker knows him, or who sees himself as others see
him, there must be at least six persons engaged in every dialogue between
two. Of these, the least important, philosophically speaking, is the one that
we have called the real person. No wonder two disputants often get angry,
when there are six of them talking and listening all at the same time.
[A very unphilosophical application of the above remarks was made by a
young fellow, answering to the name of John, who sits near me at table. A
certain basket of peaches, a rare vegetable, little known to boarding-houses,
was on its way to me viâ this unlettered Johannes. He appropriated the
three that remained in the basket, remarking that there was just one apiece
for him. I convinced him that his practical inference was hasty and
illogical, but in the mean time he had eaten the peaches.]

—The opinions of relatives as to a man’s powers are very commonly of
little value; not merely because they sometimes overrate their own flesh and
blood, as some may suppose; on the contrary, they are quite as likely to
underrate those whom they have grown into the habit of considering like
themselves. The advent of genius is like what florists style the breaking of
a seedling tulip into what we may call high-caste colors,—ten thousand
dingy flowers, then one with the divine streak; or, if you prefer it, like the
coming up in old Jacob’s garden of that most gentlemanly little fruit, the
seckel pear, which I have sometimes seen in shop-windows. It is a surprise,
—there is nothing to account for it. All at once we find that twice two make
five. Nature is fond of what are called “gift-enterprises.” This little book of
life which she has given into the hands of its joint possessors is commonly
one of the old story-books bound over again. Only once in a great while
there is a stately poem in it, or its leaves are illuminated with the glories of

art, or they enfold a draft for untold values signed by the million-fold
millionnaire old mother herself. But strangers are commonly the first to
find the “gift” that came with the little book.
It may be questioned whether anything can be conscious of its own flavor.
Whether the musk-deer, or the civet-cat, or even a still more eloquently
silent animal that might be mentioned, is aware of any personal peculiarity,
may well be doubted. No man knows his own voice; many men do not
know their own profiles. Every one remembers Carlyle’s famous
“Characteristics” article; allow for exaggerations, and there is a great deal
in his doctrine of the self-unconsciousness of genius. It comes under the
great law just stated. This incapacity of knowing its own traits is often
found in the family as well as in the individual. So never mind what your
cousins, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and the rest, say about that fine
poem you have written, but send it (postage-paid) to the editors, if there are
any, of the “Atlantic,”—which, by the way, is not so called because it is a
notion, as some dull wits wish they had said, but are too late.
—Scientific knowledge, even in the most modest persons, has mingled with
it a something which partakes of insolence. Absolute, peremptory facts are
bullies, and those who keep company with them are apt to get a bullying
habit of mind;—not of manners, perhaps; they may be soft and smooth, but
the smile they carry has a quiet assertion in it, such as the Champion of the
Heavy Weights, commonly the best-natured, but not the most diffident of
men, wears upon what he very inelegantly calls his “mug.” Take the man,
for instance, who deals in the mathematical sciences. There is no elasticity
in a mathematical fact; if you bring up against it, it never yields a hair’s
breadth; everything must go to pieces that comes in collision with it. What
the mathematician knows being absolute, unconditional, incapable of
suffering question, it should tend, in the nature of things, to breed a despotic
way of thinking. So of those who deal with the palpable and often
unmistakable facts of external nature; only in a less degree. Every
probability—and most of our common, working beliefs are probabilities—
is provided with buffers at both ends, which break the force of opposite
opinions clashing against it; but scientific certainty has no spring in it, no
courtesy, no possibility of yielding. All this must react on the minds which
handle these forms of truth.

—Oh, you need net tell me that Messrs. A. and B. are the most gracious,
unassuming people in the world, and yet preëminent in the ranges of
science I am referring to. I know that as well as you. But mark this which I
am going to say once for all: If I had not force enough to project a principle
full in the face of the half dozen most obvious facts which seem to
contradict it, I would think only in single file from this day forward. A rash
man, once visiting a certain noted institution at South Boston, ventured to
express the sentiment, that man is a rational being. An old woman who was
an attendant in the Idiot School contradicted the statement, and appealed to
the facts before the speaker to disprove it. The rash man stuck to his hasty
generalization, notwithstanding.
[—It is my desire to be useful to those with whom I am associated in my
daily relations. I not unfrequently practise the divine art of music in
company with our landlady’s daughter, who, as I mentioned before, is the
owner of an accordion. Having myself a well-marked barytone voice of
more than half an octave in compass, I sometimes add my vocal powers to
her execution of

“Thou, thou reign’st in this bosom.”

not, however, unless her mother or some other discreet female is present, to
prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken a good deal of
interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to, sometimes called B. F., or
more frequently Frank, in imitation of that felicitous abbreviation,
combining dignity and convenience, adopted by some of his betters. My
acquaintance with the French language is very imperfect, I having never
studied it anywhere but in Paris, which is awkward, as B. F. devotes himself
to it with the peculiar advantage of an Alsacian teacher. The boy, I think, is
doing well, between us, notwithstanding. The following is an uncorrected
French exercise, written by this young gentleman. His mother thinks it very
creditable to his abilities; though, being unacquainted with the French
language, her judgment cannot be considered final.

Le Rat des Salons à Lecture.
Ce rat çi est un animal fort singulier. Il a deux pattes de derrière sur
lesquelles il marche, et deux pattes de devant dont il fait usage pour

tenir les journaux. Cet animal a la peau noire pour le plupart, et porte
un cerele blanchâtre autour de son cou. On le trouve tous les jours aux
dits salons, on il demeure, digere, s’il y a do quoi dans son interieur,
respire, tousse, eternue, dort, et renfle quelquefois, ayant toujours le
semblant de lire. On ne sait pas s’il a une autre gite que çelà. Il a l’air
d’une bête très stupide, mais il est d’une sagacité et d’une vitesse
extraordinaire quand il s’agit de saisir un journal nouveau. On ne sait
pas pourquoi il lit, parcequ’il ne parait pas avoir des idées. Il vocalise
rarement, mais en revanche, il fait des bruits nasaux divers. Il porte un
crayon dans une de ses poches pectorales, avec lequel il fait des
marques sur les bords des journaux et des livres, semblable aux
suivans: !!!—Bah! Pooh! Il ne faut pas cependant les prendre pour
des signes d’intelligence. Il ne vole pas, ordinairement; il fait rarement
même des echanges de parapluie, et jamais de chapeau, parceque son
chapeau a toujours un caractère specifique. On ne sait pas au juste ce
dont il se nourrit. Feu Cuvier était d’avis que c’etait de l’odeur du cuir
des reliures; ce qu’on dit d’être une nourriture animale fort saine, et
peu chère. Il vit bien longtems. Enfin il meure, en laissant à ses
héritiers une carte du Salon à Lecture on il avait existé pendant sa vie.
On pretend qu’il revient toutes les nuits, après la mort, visiter le
Salon. On peut le voir, dit on, à minuit, dans sa place habituelle,
tenant le journal du soir, et ayant à sa main un crayon de charbon. Le
lendemain on trouve des caractères inconnus sur les bords du journal.
Ce qui prouve que le spiritualisme est vrai, et que Messieurs les
Professeurs de Cambridge sont des imbeçiles qui ne savent rien du
tout, du tout.

I think this exercise, which I have not corrected, or allowed to be touched in
any way, is not discreditable to B. F. You observe that he is acquiring a
knowledge of zoölogy at the same time that he is learning French. Fathers
of families in moderate circumstances will find it profitable to their
children, and an economical mode of instruction, to set them to revising and
amending this boy’s exercise. The passage was originally taken from the
“Histoire Naturelle des Bêtes Ruminans et Rongeurs, Bipèdes et Autres,”
lately published in Paris. This was translated into English and published in
London. It was republished at Great Pedlington, with notes and additions
by the American editor. The notes consist of an interrogation-mark on page

53d, and a reference (p. 127th) to another book “edited” by the same hand.
The additions consist of the editor’s name on the title-page and back, with a
complete and authentic list of said editor’s honorary titles in the first of
these localities. Our boy translated the translation back into French. This
may be compared with the original, to be found on Shelf 13, Division X, of
the Public Library of this metropolis.]
—Some of you boarders ask me from time to time why I don’t write a story,
or a novel, or something of that kind. Instead of answering each one of you
separately, I will thank you to step up into the wholesale department for a
few moments, where I deal in answers by the piece and by the bale.
That every articulately-speaking human being has in him stuff for one novel
in three volumes duodecimo has long been with me a cherished belief. It
has been maintained, on the other hand, that many persons cannot write
more than one novel,—that all after that are likely to be failures.—Life is so
much more tremendous a thing in its heights and depths than any transcript
of it can be, that all records of human experience are as so many bound
herbaria to the innumerable glowing, glistening, rustling, breathing,
fragrance-laden, poison-sucking, life-giving, death-distilling leaves and
flowers of the forest and the prairies. All we can do with books of human
experience is to make them alive again with something borrowed from our
own lives. We can make a book alive for us just in proportion to its
resemblance in essence or in form to our own experience. Now an author’s
first novel is naturally drawn, to a great extent, from his personal
experiences; that is, is a literal copy of nature under various slight
disguises. But the moment the author gets out of his personality, he must
have the creative power, as well as the narrative art and the sentiment, in
order to tell a living story; and this is rare.
Besides, there is great danger that a man’s first life-story shall clean him
out, so to speak, of his best thoughts. Most lives, though their stream is
loaded with sand and turbid with alluvial waste, drop a few golden grains of
wisdom as they flow along. Oftentimes a single cradling gets them all, and
after that the poor man’s labor is only rewarded by mud and worn pebbles.
All which proves that I, as an individual of the human family, could write
one novel or story at any rate, if I would.

—Why don’t I, then?—Well, there are several reasons against it. In the first
place, I should tell all my secrets, and I maintain that verse is the proper
medium for such revelations. Rhythm and rhyme and the harmonies of
musical language, the play of fancy, the fire of imagination, the flashes of
passion, so hide the nakedness of a heart laid open, that hardly any
confession, transfigured in the luminous halo of poetry, is reproached as
self-exposure. A beauty shows herself under the chandeliers, protected by
the glitter of her diamonds, with such a broad snowdrift of white arms and
shoulders laid bare, that, were she unadorned and in plain calico, she would
be unendurable—in the opinion of the ladies.
Again, I am terribly afraid I should show up all my friends. I should like to
know if all story-tellers do not do this? Now I am afraid all my friends
would not bear showing up very well; for they have an average share of the
common weakness of humanity, which I am pretty certain would come out.
Of all that have told stories among us there is hardly one I can recall who
has not drawn too faithfully some living portrait that might better have been
spared.
Once more, I have sometimes thought it possible I might be too dull to
write such a story as I should wish to write.
And finally, I think it very likely I shall write a story one of these days.
Don’t be surprised at any time, if you see me coming out with “The
Schoolmistress,” or “The Old Gentleman Opposite.” [Our schoolmistress
and our old gentleman that sits opposite had left the table before I said
this.] I want my glory for writing the same discounted now, on the spot, if
you please. I will write when I get ready. How many people live on the
reputation of the reputation they might have made!
—I saw you smiled when I spoke about the possibility of my being too dull
to write a good story. I don’t pretend to know what you meant by it, but I
take occasion to make a remark which may hereafter prove of value to some
among you.—When one of us who has been led by native vanity or
senseless flattery to think himself or herself possessed of talent arrives at
the full and final conclusion that he or she is really dull, it is one of the most
tranquillizing and blessed convictions that can enter a mortal’s mind. All
our failures, our shortcomings, our strange disappointments in the effect of

our efforts are lifted from our bruised shoulders, and fall, like Christian’s
pack, at the feet of that Omnipotence which has seen fit to deny us the
pleasant gift of high intelligence,—with which one look may overflow us in
some wider sphere of being.
—How sweetly and honestly one said to me the other day, “I hate books!”
A gentleman,—singularly free from affectations,—not learned, of course,
but of perfect breeding, which is often so much better than learning,—by no
means dull, in the sense of knowledge of the world and society, but
certainly not clever either in the arts or sciences,—his company is pleasing
to all who know him. I did not recognize in him inferiority of literary taste
half so distinctly as I did simplicity of character and fearless
acknowledgment of his inaptitude for scholarship. In fact, I think there are
a great many gentlemen and others, who read with a mark to keep their
place, that really “hate books,” but never had the wit to find it out, or the
manliness to own it. [Entre nous, I always read with a mark.]
We get into a way of thinking as if what we call an “intellectual man” was,
as a matter of course, made up of nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of book-
learning, and one-tenth himself. But even if he is actually so compounded,
he need not read much. Society is a strong solution of books. It draws the
virtue out of what is best worth reading, as hot water draws the strength of
tea-leaves. If I were a prince, I would hire or buy a private literary tea-pot,
in which I would steep all the leaves of new books that promised well. The
infusion would do for me without the vegetable fibre. You understand me; I
would have a person whose sole business should be to read day and night,
and talk to me whenever I wanted him to. I know the man I would have: a
quick-witted, out-spoken, incisive fellow; knows history, or at any rate has
a shelf full of books about it, which he can use handily, and the same of all
useful arts and sciences; knows all the common plots of plays and novels,
and the stock company of characters that are continually coming on in new
costume; can give you a criticism of an octavo in an epithet and a wink, and
you can depend on it; cares for nobody except for the virtue there is in what
he says; delights in taking off big wigs and professional gowns, and in the
disembalming and unbandaging of all literary mummies. Yet he is as tender
and reverential to all that bears the mark of genius,—that is, of a new influx
of truth or beauty,—as a nun over her missal. In short, he is one of those
men that know everything except how to make a living. Him would I keep

on the square next my own royal compartment on life’s chessboard. To him
I would push up another pawn, in the shape of a comely and wise young
woman, whom he would of course take—to wife. For all contingencies I
would liberally provide. In a word, I would, in the plebeian, but expressive
phrase, “put him through” all the material part of life; see him sheltered,
warmed, fed, button-mended, and all that, just to be able to lay on his talk
when I liked,—with the privilege of shutting it off at will.
A Club is the next best thing to this, strung like a harp, with about a dozen
ringing intelligences, each answering to some chord of the macrocosm.
They do well to dine together once in a while. A dinner-party made up of
such elements is the last triumph of civilization over barbarism. Nature and
art combine to charm the senses; the equatorial zone of the system is
soothed by well-studied artifices; the faculties are off duty, and fall into
their natural attitudes; you see wisdom in slippers and science in a short
jacket.
The whole force of conversation depends on how much you can take for
granted. Vulgar chess-players have to play their game out; nothing short of
the brutality of an actual checkmate satisfies their dull apprehensions. But
look at two masters of that noble game! White stands well enough, so far as
you can see; but Red says, Mate in six moves;—White looks,—nods;—the
game is over. Just so in talking with first-rate men; especially when they
are good-natured and expansive, as they are apt to be at table. That blessed
clairvoyance which sees into things without opening them,—that glorious
license, which, having shut the door and driven the reporter from its key-
hole, calls upon Truth, majestic virgin! to get off from her pedestal and drop
her academic poses, and take a festive garland and the vacant place on the
medius lectus,—that carnival-shower of questions and replies and
comments, large axioms bowled over the mahogany like bomb-shells from
professional mortars, and explosive wit dropping its trains of many-colored
fire, and the mischief-making rain of bon-bons pelting everybody that
shows himself,—the picture of a truly intellectual banquet is one which the
old Divinities might well have attempted to reproduce in their—
—“Oh, oh, oh!” cried the young fellow whom they call John,—“that is
from one of your lectures!”

I know it, I replied,—I concede it, I confess it, I proclaim it.

“The trail of the serpent is over them all!”

All lecturers, all professors, all schoolmasters, have ruts and grooves in
their minds into which their conversation is perpetually sliding. Did you
never, in riding through the woods of a still June evening, suddenly feel that
you had passed into a warm stratum of air, and in a minute or two strike the
chill layer of atmosphere beyond? Did you never, in cleaving the green
waters of the Back Bay,—where the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit
of beating the “Metropolitan” boat-clubs,—find yourself in a tepid streak, a
narrow, local gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone,
through which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back to
the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking with any of the
characters above referred to, one not unfrequently finds a sudden change in
the style of the conversation. The lack-lustre eye rayless as a Beacon-Street
door-plate in August, all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide
open like the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little
man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with hair on
end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were talking with a dwarf
and an imbecile,—you have a giant and a trumpet-tongued angel before
you!—Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture.—As when, at some
unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the air
before the astonished passer-by,—silver-footed, diamond-crowned,
rainbow-scarfed,—from the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of
quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less
elevated order of reptilia in other latitudes.
—Who was that person that was so abused some time since for saying that
in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go with the higher?
No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on in India,—a white,
superior “Caucasian” race, against a dark-skinned, inferior, but still
“Caucasian” race,—and where are English and American sympathies? We
can’t stop to settle all the doubtful questions; all we know is, that the brute
nature is sure to come out most strongly in the lower race, and it is the
general law that the human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as
it does the same nature in the inferior animals,—tame it or crush it. The
India mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the

royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes down the
Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and makes a
correction thus: [Delphi] Dele. The civilized world says, Amen.
—Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly, that I should
not find it much lazier work to take each one of them and dilute it down to
an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes and water my remarks to
suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did with their melas oinos,—that
black sweet, syrupy wine (?) which they used to alloy with three parts or
more of the flowing stream. [Could it have been melasses, as Webster and
his provincials spell it,—or Molossa’s, as dear old smattering, chattering,
would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the “Magnalia”?
Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make barn-door-fowl flights of
learning in “Notes and Queries!”—ye Historical Societies, in one of whose
venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug
at the oars!—ye Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of
native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare,
until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have “made a Golgotha”
of your pages!—ponder thereon!]
—Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses. You
will understand by the title that they are written in an imaginary character. I
don’t doubt they will fit some family-man well enough. I send it forth as
“Oak Hall” projects a coat, on a priori grounds of conviction that it will suit
somebody. There is no loftier illustration of faith than this. It believes that
a soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and nurtured it;
that its mysterious compages or frame-work has survived its myriad
exposures and reached the stature of maturity; that the Man, now self-
determining, has given in his adhesion to the traditions and habits of the
race in favor of artificial clothing; that he will, having all the world to
choose from, select the very locality where this audacious generalization
has been acted upon. It builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and
trusts that Nature will model a material shape to fit it. There is a prophecy
in every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.—Now hear the verses.

THE OLD MAN DREAMS.

O for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I’d rather laugh a bright-haired boy
Than reign a gray-beard king!
Off with the wrinkled spoils of age!
Away with learning’s crown!
Tear out life’s wisdom-written page,
And dash its trophies down!
One moment let my life-blood stream
From boyhood’s fount of flame!
Give me one giddy, reeling dream
Of life all love and fame!
—My listening angel heard the prayer,
And calmly smiling, said,
“If I but touch thy silvered hair,
Thy hasty wish hath sped.
“But is there nothing in thy track
To bid thee fondly stay,
While the swift seasons hurry back
To find the wished-for day?”
—Ah, truest soul of womankind!
Without thee, what were life?
One bliss I cannot leave behind:
I’ll take—my—precious wife!
—The angel took a sapphire pen
And wrote in rainbow dew,
“The man would be a boy again,
And be a husband too!”
—“And is there nothing yet unsaid
Before the change appears?
Remember, all their gifts have fled
With those dissolving years!”

Why, yes; for memory would recall
My fond paternal joys;
I could not bear to leave them all;
I’ll take—my—girl—and—boys!
The smiling angel dropped his pen,—
“Why this will never do;
The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”
And so I laughed,—my laughter woke
The household with its noise,—
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the gray-haired boys.

CHAPTER IV

[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to remain there,
perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great many conversations to
report, and they will necessarily be of different tone and on different
subjects. The talks are like the breakfasts,—sometimes dipped toast, and
sometimes dry. You must take them as they come. How can I do what all
these letters ask me to? No. 1. want serious and earnest thought. No. 2.
(letter smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a “good
storey” which he has copied out for me. (I suppose two letters before the
word “good” refer to some Doctor of Divinity who told the story.) No. 3.
(in female hand)—more poetry. No. 4. wants something that would be of
use to a practical man. (Prahctical mahn he probably pronounces it.) No.
5. (gilt-edged, sweet-scented)—“more sentiment,”—“heart’s
outpourings.”—
My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as I
happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will depend on
many accidents,—a good deal on the particular persons in the company to
whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which follow were
mainly intended for the divinity-student and the school-mistress; though
others, whom I need not mention, saw to interfere, with more or less
propriety, in the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and
of course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don’t expect all the
readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of what was said.
Still, I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein,—possibly
prefer it to a livelier one,—serious young men, and young women
generally, in life’s roseate parenthesis from—years of age to—inclusive.
Another privilege of talking is to misquote.—Of course it wasn’t Proserpina
that actually cut the yellow hair,—but Iris. (As I have since told you) it was
the former lady’s regular business, but Dido had used herself ungenteelly,

and Madame d’Enfer stood firm on the point of etiquette. So the
bathycolpian Here—Juno, in Latin—sent down Iris instead. But I was
mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles
for the celebrated “Oceanic Miscellany” misquoted Campbell’s line without
any excuse. “Waft us home the message” of course it ought to be. Will he
be duly grateful for the correction?]
—The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be
governed, not by, but according to laws, such as we observe in the larger
universe.—You think you know all about walking,—don’t you, now? Well,
how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They are
sucked up by two cupping vessels, (“cotyloid”—cup-like—cavities,) and
held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move
them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don’t
you?—On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a
fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular
power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move
faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism as
the movements of the solar system.
[My friend, the Professor, told me all this, referring me to certain German
physiologists by the name of Weber for proof of the facts, which, however,
he said he had often verified. I appropriated it to my own use; what can one
do better than this, when one has a friend that tells him anything worth
remembering?
The Professor seems to think that man and the general powers of the
universe are in partnership. Some one was saying that it had cost nearly
half a million to move the Leviathan only so far as they had got it already.
—Why,—said the Professor,—they might have hired an EARTHQUAKE for
less money!]
Just as we find a mathematical rule at the bottom of many of the bodily
movements, just so thought may be supposed to have its regular cycles.
Such or such a thought comes round periodically, in its turn. Accidental
suggestions, however, so far interfere with the regular cycles, that we may
find them practically beyond our power of recognition. Take all this for
what it is worth, but at any rate you will agree that there are certain

particular thoughts that do not come up once a day, nor once a week, but
that a year would hardly go round without your having them pass through
your mind. Here is one which comes up at intervals in this way. Some one
speaks of it, and there is an instant and eager smile of assent in the listener
or listeners. Yes, indeed; they have often been struck by it.
All at once a conviction flashes through us that we have been in the same
precise circumstances as at the present instant, once or many times before.
O, dear, yes!—said one of the company,—everybody has had that feeling.
The landlady didn’t know anything about such notions; it was an idee in
folks’ heads, she expected.
The schoolmistress said, in a hesitating sort of way, that she knew the
feeling well, and didn’t like to experience it; it made her think she was a
ghost, sometimes.
The young fellow whom they call John said he knew all about it; he had just
lighted a cheroot the other day, when a tremendous conviction all at once
came over him that he had done just that same thing ever so many times
before. I looked severely at him, and his countenance immediately fell—on
the side toward me; I cannot answer for the other, for he can wink and laugh
with either half of his face without the other half’s knowing it.
—I have noticed—I went on to say—the following circumstances
connected with these sudden impressions. First, that the condition which
seems to be the duplicate of a former one is often very trivial,—one that
might have presented itself a hundred times. Secondly, that the impression
is very evanescent, and that it is rarely, if ever, recalled by any voluntary
effort, at least after any time has elapsed. Thirdly, that there is a
disinclination to record the circumstances, and a sense of incapacity to
reproduce the state of mind in words. Fourthly, I have often felt that the
duplicate condition had not only occurred once before, but that it was
familiar and, as it seemed, habitual. Lastly, I have had the same convictions
in my dreams.
How do I account for it?—Why, there are several ways that I can mention,
and you may take your choice. The first is that which the young lady hinted
at;—that these flashes are sudden recollections of a previous existence. I

don’t believe that; for I remember a poor student I used to know told me he
had such a conviction one day when he was blacking his boots, and I can’t
think he had ever lived in another world where they use Day and Martin.
Some think that Dr. Wigan’s doctrine of the brain’s being a double organ, its
hemispheres working together like the two eyes, accounts for it. One of the
hemispheres hangs fire, they suppose, and the small interval between the
perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an indefinitely long
period, and therefore the second perception appears to be the copy of
another, ever so old. But even allowing the centre of perception to be
double, I can see no good reason for supposing this indefinite lengthening
of the time, nor any analogy that bears it out. It seems to me most likely
that the coincidence of circumstances is very partial, but that we take this
partial resemblance for identity, as we occasionally do resemblances of
persons. A momentary posture of circumstances is so far like some
preceding one that we accept it as exactly the same, just as we accost a
stranger occasionally, mistaking him for a friend. The apparent similarity
may be owing perhaps, quite as much to the mental state at the time, as to
the outward circumstances.
—Here is another of these curiously recurring remarks. I have said it, and
heard it many times, and occasionally met with something like it in books,
—somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, I think, and in one of the works of Mr.
Olmsted, I know.
Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily
reached through the sense of smell than by almost any other channel.
Of course the particular odors which act upon each person’s susceptibilities
differ.—O, yes! I will tell you some of mine. The smell of phosphorus is
one of them. During a year or two of adolescence I used to be dabbling in
chemistry a good deal, and as about that time I had my little aspirations and
passions like another, some of these things got mixed up with each other:
orange-colored fumes of nitrous acid, and visions as bright and transient;
reddening litmus-paper, and blushing cheeks;—eheu!

“Soles occidere et redire possunt,”

but there is no reagent that will redden the faded roses of eighteen hundred
and—spare them! But, as I was saying, phosphorus fires this train of
associations in an instant; its luminous vapors with their penetrating odor
throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense “trailing clouds of
glory.” Only the confounded Vienna matches, ohne phosphor-geruch, have
worn my sensibilities a little.
Then there is the marigold. When I was of smallest dimensions, and wont
to ride impacted between the knees of fond parental pair, we would
sometimes cross the bridge to the next village-town and stop opposite a low,
brown, “gambrel-roofed” cottage. Out of it would come one Sally, sister of
its swarthy tenant, swarthy herself, shady-lipped, sad-voiced, and, bending
over her flower-bed, would gather a “posy,” as she called it, for the little
boy. Sally lies in the churchyard with a slab of blue slate at her head,
lichen-crusted, and leaning a little within the last few years. Cottage,
garden-beds, posies, grenadier-like rows of seedling onions,—stateliest of
vegetables,—all are gone, but the breath of a marigold brings them all back
to me.
Perhaps the herb everlasting, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn fields,
has the most suggestive odor to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can
hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I
inhale the aroma of its pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of
sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great
pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh.
Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long
in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and
carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River
of Life.
—I should not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities, if I
had not a remark to make about them which I believe is a new one. It is
this. There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the
sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve—so my friend, the
Professor, tells me—is the only one directly connected with the
hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to
believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly the
olfactory “nerve” is not a nerve at all, he says, but a part of the brain, in

intimate connection with its anterior lobes. Whether this anatomical
arrangement is at the bottom of the facts I have mentioned, I will not
decide, but it is curious enough to be worth remembering. Contrast the
sense of taste, as a source of suggestive impressions, with that of smell.
Now the Professor assures me that you will find the nerve of taste has no
immediate connection with the brain proper, but only with the prolongation
of the spinal cord.
[The old gentleman opposite did not pay much attention, I think, to this
hypothesis of mine. But while I was speaking about the sense of smell he
nestled about in his seat, and presently succeeded in getting out a large red
bandanna handkerchief. Then he lurched a little to the other side, and after
much tribulation at last extricated an ample round snuff-box. I looked as he
opened it and felt for the wonted pugil. Moist rappee, and a Tonka-bean
lying therein. I made the manual sign understood of all mankind that use
the precious dust, and presently my brain, too, responded to the long unused
stimulus—O boys,—that were,—actual papas and possible grandpapas,—
some of you with crowns like billiard-balls,—some in locks of sable
silvered, and some of silver sabled,—do you remember, as you doze over
this, those after-dinners at the Trois Frères when the Scotch-plaided snuff-
box went round, and the dry Lundy-Foot tickled its way along into our
happy sensoria? Then it was that the Chambertin or the Clos Vougeot came
in, slumbering in its straw cradle. And one among you,—do you remember
how he would have a bit of ice always in his Burgundy, and sit tinkling it
against the sides of the bubble-like glass, saying that he was hearing the
cow-bells as he used to hear them, when the deep-breathing kine came
home at twilight from the huckleberry pasture, in the old home a thousand
leagues towards the sunset?]
Ah me! what strains and strophes of unwritten verse pulsate through my
soul when I open a certain closet in the ancient house where I was born!
On its shelves used to lie bundles of sweet-marjoram and pennyroyal and
lavender and mint and catnip; there apples were stored until their seeds
should grow black, which happy period there were sharp little milk-teeth
always ready to anticipate; there peaches lay in the dark, thinking of the
sunshine they had lost, until, like the hearts of saints that dream of heaven
in their sorrow, they grew fragrant as the breath of angels. The odorous
echo of a score of dead summers lingers yet in those dim recesses.

—Do I remember Byron’s line about “striking the electric chain”?—To be
sure I do. I sometimes think the less the hint that stirs the automatic
machinery of association, the more easily this moves us. What can be more
trivial than that old story of opening the folio Shakspeare that used to lie in
some ancient English hall and finding the flakes of Christmas pastry
between its leaves, shut up in them perhaps a hundred years ago? And, lo!
as one looks on these poor relics of a bygone generation, the universe
changes in the twinkling of an eye; old George the Second is back again,
and the elder Pitt is coming into power, and General Wolfe is a fine,
promising young man, and over the Channel they are pulling the Sieur
Damiens to pieces with wild horses, and across the Atlantic the Indians are
tomahawking Hirams and Jonathans and Jonases at Fort William Henry; all
the dead people who have been in the dust so long—even to the stout-armed
cook that made the pastry—are alive again; the planet unwinds a hundred of
its luminous coils, and the precession of the equinoxes is retraced on the
dial of heaven! And all this for a bit of pie-crust!
—I will thank you for that pie,—said the provoking young fellow whom I
have named repeatedly. He looked at it for a moment, and put his hands to
his eyes as if moved.—I was thinking,—he said indistinctly—
—How? What is’t?—said our landlady.
—I was thinking—said he—who was king of England when this old pie
was baked,—and it made me feel bad to think how long he must have been
dead.
[Our landlady is a decent body, poor, and a widow, of course; celà va sans
dire. She told me her story once; it was as if a grain of corn that had been
ground and bolted had tried to individualize itself by a special narrative.
There was the wooing and the wedding,—the start in life,—the
disappointments,—the children she had buried,—the struggle against fate,
—the dismantling of life, first of its small luxuries, and then of its comforts,
—the broken spirits,—the altered character of the one on whom she leaned,
—and at last the death that came and drew the black curtain between her
and all her earthly hopes.
I never laughed at my landlady after she had told me her story, but I often
cried,—not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our neighbors’

grounds, the stillicidium of self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal
noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round
about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging
features;—such I did shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-
house Inferno tugged at her soul with their red-hot pincers.]
Young man,—I said,—the pasty you speak lightly of is not old, but courtesy
to those who labor to serve us, especially if they are of the weaker sex, is
very old, and yet well worth retaining. May I recommend to you the
following caution, as a guide, whenever you are dealing with a woman, or
an artist, or a poet—if you are handling an editor or politician, it is
superfluous advice. I take it from the back of one of those little French toys
which contain pasteboard figures moved by a small running stream of fine
sand; Benjamin Franklin will translate it for you: “Quoiqu’elle soit très
solidement montée, il faut ne pas brutaliser la machine.”—I will thank you
for the pie, if you please.
[I took more of it than was good for me—as much as 85°, I should think,—
and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I
wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which took a
very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled them all
“Pie-crust,” and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a
number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some such
title; but, as they have great names on their title-pages,—Doctors of
Divinity, some of them,—it wouldn’t do.]
—My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or twice,
told me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some of the
journals of his calling. I told him that I didn’t doubt he deserved it; that I
hoped he did deserve a little abuse occasionally, and would for a number of
years to come; that nobody could do anything to make his neighbors wiser
or better without being liable to abuse for it; especially that people hated to
have their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been doing
something of the kind.—The Professor smiled.—Now, said I, hear what I
am going to say. It will not take many years to bring you to the period of
life when men, at least the majority of writing and talking men, do nothing
but praise. Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before
they begin to decay. I don’t know what it is,—whether a spontaneous

change, mental or bodily, or whether it is thorough experience of the
thanklessness of critical honesty,—but it is a fact, that most writers, except
sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of finding fault at about the time when
they are beginning to grow old. As a general thing, I would not give a great
deal for the fair words of a critic, if he is himself an author, over fifty years
of age. At thirty we are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the
walls of this tenement of life; twenty years later we have carved it, or shut
up our jack-knives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less to
hinder any, because nobody’s elbows are in our way. So I am glad you have
a little life left; you will be saccharine enough in a few years.
—Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very
much in what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just now spoke of
the sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you know that in the
gradual passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters
sometimes have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young
children? I have heard it said, but I cannot be sponsor for its truth, that the
famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old
age. An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
used to love to hear little nursery-stories read over and over to him. One
who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as very
gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I remember a person of singularly stern
and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and easy in all his ways
in the later period of his life.
And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way of
coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles, and
must be made the most of, for their day is soon over. Some come into their
perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better than the
summer fruit. And some, that, like the Winter-Nelis, have been hard and
uninviting until all the rest have had their season, get their glow and
perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with the
orchards. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you
condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up
beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate Early-
Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old Chaucer was an
Easter-Beurré; the buds of a new summer were swelling when he ripened.

—There is no power I envy so much—said the divinity-student—as that of
seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don’t understand how it is that
some minds are continually coupling thoughts or objects that seem not in
the least related to each other, until all at once they are put in a certain light,
and you wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.
[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of the higher
mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and training. I try his head
occasionally as housewives try eggs,—give it an intellectual shake and hold
it up to the light, so to speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or
only contains lifeless albumen.]
You call it miraculous,—I replied,—tossing the expression with my facial
eminence, a little smartly, I fear.—Two men are walking by the
polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he
can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his
hands, which will hardly hold water at all,—and you call the tin cup a
miraculous possession! It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant
apostle! Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just
according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see
the many in the one and the one in the many. Did Sir Isaac think what he
was saying when he made his speech about the ocean,—the child and the
pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of a
spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before
the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it
until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the
globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of
Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer
the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries! A throne of the
all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of
heaven was strung with beaded stars!
So,—to return to our walk by the ocean,—if all that poetry has dreamed, all
that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics have driven through
the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed in the fancies of women,—
if the dreams of colleges and convents and boarding-schools,—if every
human feeling that sighs, or smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should

bring all their innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-
beat,—the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac,
would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies
that rolls through the universe.
[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he received
this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he reject it; but he took it as
a pickerel takes the bait, and carried it off with him to his hole (in the fourth
story) to deal with at his leisure.]
—Here is another remark made for his especial benefit.—There is a natural
tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together in triads, as I
have heard them called,—thus: He was honorable, courteous, and brave;
she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous. Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I
think it was Bulwer who said you could separate a paper in the “Rambler”
into three distinct essays. Many of our writers show the same tendency,—
my friend, the Professor, especially. Some think it is in humble imitation of
Johnson,—some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only. I don’t
think they get to the bottom of it. It is, I suspect, an instinctive and
involuntary effort of the mind to present a thought or image with the three
dimensions that belong to every solid,—an unconscious handling of an idea
as if it had length, breadth, and thickness. It is a great deal easier to say this
than to prove it, and a great deal easier to dispute it than to disprove it. But
mind this: the more we observe and study, the wider we find the range of
the automatic and instinctive principles in body, mind, and morals, and the
narrower the limits of the self-determining conscious movement.
—I have often seen piano-forte players and singers make such strange
motions over their instruments or song-books that I wanted to laugh at
them. “Where did our friends pick up all these fine ecstatic airs?” I would
say to myself. Then I would remember My Lady in “Marriage à la Mode,”
and amuse myself with thinking how affectation was the same thing in
Hogarth’s time and in our own. But one day I bought me a Canary-bird and
hung him up in a cage at my window. By-and-by he found himself at home,
and began to pipe his little tunes; and there he was, sure enough, swimming
and waving about, with all the droopings and liftings and languishing side-
turnings of the head that I had laughed at. And now I should like to ask,
Who taught him all this?—and me, through him, that the foolish head was

not the one swinging itself from side to side and bowing and nodding over
the music, but that other which was passing its shallow and self-satisfied
judgment on a creature made of finer clay than the frame which carried that
same head upon its shoulders?
—Do you want an image of the human will, or the self-determining
principle, as compared with its prearranged and impassable restrictions? A
drop of water, imprisoned in a crystal; you may see such a one in any
mineralogical collection. One little fluid particle in the crystalline prism of
the solid universe!
—Weaken moral obligations?—No, not weaken, but define them. When I
preach that sermon I spoke of the other day, I shall have to lay down some
principles not fully recognized in some of your text-books.

I should have to begin with one most formidable preliminary. You saw an
article the other day in one of the journals, perhaps, in which some old
Doctor or other said quietly that patients were very apt to be fools and

cowards. But a great many of the clergyman’s patients are not only fools
and cowards, but also liars.
[Immense sensation at the table.—Sudden retirement of the angular female
in oxydated bombazine. Movement of adhesion—as they say in the
Chamber of Deputies—on the part of the young fellow they call John.
Falling of the old-gentleman-opposite’s lower jaw—(gravitation is
beginning to get the better of him.) Our landlady to Benjamin Franklin,
briskly,—Go to school right off, there’s a good boy! Schoolmistress
curious,—takes a quick glance at divinity-student. Divinity-student slightly
flushed draws his shoulders back a little, as if a big falsehood—or truth—
had hit him in the forehead. Myself calm.]
—I should not make such a speech as that, you know, without having pretty
substantial indorsers to fall back upon, in case my credit should be
disputed. Will you run up stairs, Benjamin Franklin, (for B. F. had not gone
right off, of course,) and bring down a small volume from the left upper
corner of the right-hand shelves?
[Look at the precious little black, ribbed backed, clean-typed, vellum-
papered 32mo. “Desiderii Erasmi Colloquia. Amstelodami. Typis
Ludovici Elzevirii. 1650.” Various names written on title-page. Most
conspicuous this: Gul. Cookeson E. Coll. Omn. Anim. 1725. Oxon.
—O William Cookeson, of All-Souls College, Oxford,—then writing as I
now write,—now in the dust, where I shall lie,—is this line all that remains
to thee of earthly remembrance? Thy name is at least once more spoken by
living men;—is it a pleasure to thee? Thou shalt share with me my little
draught of immortality,—its week, its month, its year,—whatever it may be,
—and then we will go together into the solemn archives of Oblivion’s
Uncatalogued Library!]
—If you think I have used rather strong language, I shall have to read
something to you out of the book of this keen and witty scholar,—the great
Erasmus,—who “laid the egg of the Reformation which Luther hatched.”
Oh, you never read his Naufragium, or “Shipwreck,” did you? Of course
not; for, if you had, I don’t think you would have given me credit—or
discredit—for entire originality in that speech of mine. That men are
cowards in the contemplation of futurity he illustrates by the extraordinary

antics of many on board the sinking vessel; that they are fools, by their
praying to the sea, and making promises to bits of wood from the true cross,
and all manner of similar nonsense; that they are fools, cowards, and liars
all at once, by this story: I will put it into rough English for you.—“I
couldn’t help laughing to hear one fellow bawling out, so that he might be
sure to be heard, a promise to Saint Christopher of Paris—the monstrous
statue in the great church there—that he would give him a wax taper as big
as himself. ‘Mind what you promise!’ said an acquaintance that stood near
him, poking him with his elbow; ‘you couldn’t pay for it, if you sold all
your things at auction.’ ‘Hold your tongue, you donkey!’ said the fellow,—
but softly, so that Saint Christopher should not hear him,—‘do you think
I’m in earnest? If I once get my foot on dry ground, catch me giving him so
much as a tallow candle!’”
Now, therefore, remembering that those who have been loudest in their talk
about the great subject of which we were speaking have not necessarily
been wise, brave, and true men, but, on the contrary, have very often been
wanting in one or two or all of the qualities these words imply, I should
expect to find a good many doctrines current in the schools which I should
be obliged to call foolish, cowardly, and false.
—So you would abuse other people’s beliefs, Sir, and yet not tell us your
own creed!—said the divinity-student, coloring up with a spirit for which I
liked him all the better.
—I have a creed,—I replied;—none better, and none shorter. It is told in
two words,—the two first of the Paternoster. And when I say these words I
mean them. And when I compared the human will to a drop in a crystal,
and said I meant to define moral obligations, and not weaken them, this was
what I intended to express: that the fluent, self-determining power of human
beings is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief planes of
its enclosing solid are, of course, organization, education, condition.
Organization may reduce the power of the will to nothing, as in some idiots;
and from this zero the scale mounts upwards by slight gradations.
Education is only second to nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in
Boston and Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but “Give me
neither poverty nor riches” was the prayer of Agur, and with good reason.
If there is any improvement in modern theology, it is in getting out of the

region of pure abstractions and taking these every-day working forces into
account. The great theological question now heaving and throbbing in the
minds of Christian men is this:—
No, I wont talk about these things now. My remarks might be repeated, and
it would give my friends pain to see with what personal incivilities I should
be visited. Besides, what business has a mere boarder to be talking about
such things at a breakfast-table? Let him make puns. To be sure, he was
brought up among the Christian fathers, and learned his alphabet out of a
quarto “Concilium Tridentinum.” He has also heard many thousand
theological lectures by men of various denominations; and it is not at all to
the credit of these teachers, if he is not fit by this time to express an opinion
on theological matters.
I know well enough that there are some of you who had a great deal rather
see me stand on my head than use it for any purpose of thought. Does not
my friend, the Professor, receive at least two letters a week, requesting him
to. . . . ,—on the strength of some youthful antic of his, which, no doubt,
authorizes the intelligent constituency of autograph-hunters to address him
as a harlequin?
—Well, I can’t be savage with you for wanting to laugh, and I like to make
you laugh, well enough, when I can. But then observe this: if the sense of
the ridiculous is one side of an impressible nature, it is very well; but if that
is all there is in a man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have
stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the
wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the
other water-power; that is all. I have often heard the Professor talk about
hysterics as being Nature’s cleverest illustration of the reciprocal
convertibility of the two states of which these acts are the manifestations;
But you may see it every day in children; and if you want to choke with
stifled tears at sight of the transition, as it shows itself in older years, go and
see Mr. Blake play Jesse Rural.
It is a very dangerous thing for a literary man to indulge his love for the
ridiculous. People laugh with him just so long as he amuses them; but if he
attempts to be serious, they must still have their laugh, and so they laugh at
him. There is in addition, however, a deeper reason for this than would at

first appear. Do you know that you feel a little superior to every man who
makes you laugh, whether by making faces or verses? Are you aware that
you have a pleasant sense of patronizing him, when you condescend so far
as to let him turn somersets, literal or literary, for your royal delight? Now
if a man can only be allowed to stand on a daïs, or raised platform, and look
down on his neighbor who is exerting his talent for him, oh, it is all right!—
first-rate performance!—and all the rest of the fine phrases. But if all at
once the performer asks the gentleman to come upon the floor, and,
stepping upon the platform, begins to talk down at him,—ah, that wasn’t in
the programme!
I have never forgotten what happened when Sydney Smith—who, as
everybody knows, was an exceedingly sensible man, and a gentleman,
every inch of him—ventured to preach a sermon on the Duties of Royalty.
The “Quarterly,” “so savage and tartarly,” came down upon him in the most
contemptuous style, as “a joker of jokes,” a “diner-out of the first water,” in
one of his own phrases; sneering at him, insulting him, as nothing but a
toady of a court, sneaking behind the anonymous, would ever have been
mean enough to do to a man of his position and genius, or to any decent
person even.—If I were giving advice to a young fellow of talent, with two
or three facets to his mind, I would tell him by all means to keep his wit in
the background until after he had made a reputation by his more solid
qualities. And so to an actor: Hamlet first, and Bob Logic afterwards, if you
like; but don’t think, as they say poor Liston used to, that people will be
ready to allow that you can do anything great with Macbeth’s dagger after
flourishing about with Paul Pry’s umbrella. Do you know, too, that the
majority of men look upon all who challenge their attention,—for a while,
at least,—as beggars, and nuisances? They always try to get off as cheaply
as they can; and the cheapest of all things they can give a literary man—
pardon the forlorn pleasantry!—is the funny-bone. That is all very well so
far as it goes, but satisfies no man, and makes a good many angry, as I told
you on a former occasion.
—Oh, indeed, no!—I am not ashamed to make you laugh, occasionally. I
think I could read you something I have in my desk which would probably
make you smile. Perhaps I will read it one of these days, if you are patient
with me when I am sentimental and reflective; not just now. The ludicrous
has its place in the universe; it is not a human invention, but one of the

Divine ideas, illustrated in the practical jokes of kittens and monkeys long
before Aristophanes or Shakspeare. How curious it is that we always
consider solemnity and the absence of all gay surprises and encounter of
wits as essential to the idea of the future life of those whom we thus deprive
of half their faculties and then call blessed! There are not a few who, even
in this life, seem to be preparing themselves for that smileless eternity to
which they look forward, by banishing all gayety from their hearts and all
joyousness from their countenances. I meet one such in the street not
unfrequently, a person of intelligence and education, but who gives me (and
all that he passes) such a rayless and chilling look of recognition,—
something as if he were one of Heaven’s assessors, come down to “doom”
every acquaintance he met,—that I have sometimes begun to sneeze on the
spot, and gone home with a violent cold, dating from that instant. I don’t
doubt he would cut his kitten’s tail off, if he caught her playing with it.
Please tell me, who taught her to play with it?
No, no!—give me a chance to talk to you, my fellow-boarders, and you
need not be afraid that I shall have any scruples about entertaining you, if I
can do it, as well as giving you some of my serious thoughts, and perhaps
my sadder fancies. I know nothing in English or any other literature more
admirable than that sentiment of Sir Thomas Browne “Every man truly
lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties
of himself.”

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in
what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail
sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it,—but we must sail, and
not drift, nor lie at anchor. There is one very sad thing in old friendships, to
every mind that is really moving onward. It is this: that one cannot help
using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress.
Every now and then we throw an old schoolmate over the stern with a string
of thought tied to him, and look—I am afraid with a kind of luxurious and
sanctimonious compassion—to see the rate at which the string reels off,
while he lies there bobbing up and down, poor fellow! and we are dashing
along with the white foam and bright sparkle at our bows;—the ruffled
bosom of prosperity and progress, with a sprig of diamonds stuck in it! But
this is only the sentimental side of the matter; for grow we must, if we
outgrow all that we love.

Don’t misunderstand that metaphor of heaving the log, I beg you. It is
merely a smart way of saying that we cannot avoid measuring our rate of
movement by those with whom we have long been in the habit of
comparing ourselves; and when they once become stationary, we can get
our reckoning from them with painful accuracy. We see just what we were
when they were our peers, and can strike the balance between that and
whatever we may feel ourselves to be now. No doubt we may sometimes
be mistaken. If we change our last simile to that very old and familiar one
of a fleet leaving the harbor and sailing in company for some distant region,
we can get what we want out of it. There is one of our companions;—her
streamers were torn into rags before she had got into the open sea, then by
and by her sails blew out of the ropes one after another, the waves swept her
deck, and as night came on we left her a seeming wreck, as we flew under
our pyramid of canvas. But lo! at dawn she is still in sight,—it may be in
advance of us. Some deep ocean-current has been moving her on, strong,
but silent,—yes, stronger than these noisy winds that puff our sails until
they are swollen as the cheeks of jubilant cherubim. And when at last the
black steam-tug with the skeleton arms, which comes out of the mist sooner
or later and takes us all in tow, grapples her and goes off panting and
groaning with her, it is to that harbor where all wrecks are refitted, and
where, alas! we, towering in our pride, may never come.
So you will not think I mean to speak lightly of old friendships, because we
cannot help instituting comparisons between our present and former selves
by the aid of those who were what we were, but are not what we are.
Nothing strikes one more, in the race of life, than to see how many give out
in the first half of the course. “Commencement day” always reminds me of
the start for the “Derby,” when the beautiful high-bred three-year olds of the
season are brought up for trial. That day is the start, and life is the race.
Here we are at Cambridge, and a class is just “graduating.” Poor Harry! he
was to have been there too, but he has paid forfeit; step out here into the
grass back of the church; ah! there it is:—

“Hunc lapidem posuerunt
Socii mœrentes.”

But this is the start, and here they are,—coats bright as silk, and manes as
smooth as eau lustrale can make them. Some of the best of the colts are

pranced round, a few minutes each, to show their paces. What is that old
gentleman crying about? and the old lady by him, and the three girls, what
are they all covering their eyes for? Oh, that is their colt which has just
been trotted up on the stage. Do they really think those little thin legs can
do anything in such a slashing sweepstakes as is coming off in these next
forty years? Oh, this terrible gift of second-sight that comes to some of us
when we begin to look through the silvered rings of the arcus senilis!
Ten years gone. First turn in the race. A few broken down; two or three
bolted. Several show in advance of the ruck. Cassock, a black colt, seems
to be ahead of the rest; those black colts commonly get the start, I have
noticed, of the others, in the first quarter. Meteor has pulled up.
Twenty years. Second corner turned. Cassock has dropped from the front,
and Judex, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they have thinned
out! Down flat,—five,—six,—how many? They lie still enough! they will
not get up again in this race, be very sure! And the rest of them, what a
“tailing off”! Anybody can see who is going to win,—perhaps.
Thirty years. Third corner turned. Dives, bright sorrel, ridden by the fellow
in a yellow jacket, begins to make play fast; is getting to be the favourite
with many. But who is that other one that has been lengthening his stride
from the first, and now shows close up to the front? Don’t you remember
the quiet brown colt Asteroid, with the star in his forehead? That is he; he is
one of the sort that lasts; look out for him! The black “colt,” as we used to
call him, is in the background, taking it easily in a gentle trot. There is one
they used to call the Filly, on account of a certain feminine air he had; well
up, you see; the Filly is not to be despised my boy!
Forty years. More dropping off,—but places much as before.
Fifty years. Race over. All that are on the course are coming in at a walk;
no more running. Who is ahead? Ahead? What! and the winning-post a
slab of white or gray stone standing out from that turf where there is no
more jockeying or straining for victory! Well, the world marks their places
in its betting-book; but be sure that these matter very little, if they have run
as well as they knew how!

—Did I not say to you a little while ago that the universe swam in an ocean
of similitudes and analogies? I will not quote Cowley, or Burns, or
Wordsworth, just now, to show you what thoughts were suggested to them
by the simplest natural objects, such as a flower or a leaf; but I will read
you a few lines, if you do not object, suggested by looking at a section of
one of those chambered shells to which is given the name of Pearly
Nautilus. We need not trouble ourselves about the distinction between this
and the Paper Nautilus, the Argonauta of the ancients. The name applied to
both shows that each has long been compared to a ship, as you may see
more fully in Webster’s Dictionary, or the “Encyclopedia,” to which he
refers. If you will look into Roget’s Bridgewater Treatise, you will find a
figure of one of these shells, and a section of it. The last will show you the
series of enlarging compartments successively dwelt in by the animal that
inhabits the shell, which is built in a widening spiral. Can you find no
lesson in this?

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS.
This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair
Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every clambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!
Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,

Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!

CHAPTER V

A lyric conception—my friend, the Poet, said—hits me like a bullet in the
forehead. I have often had the blood drop from my cheeks when it struck,
and felt that I turned as white as death. Then comes a creeping as of
centipedes running down the spine,—then a gasp and a great jump of the
heart,—then a sudden flush and a beating in the vessels of the head,—then a
long sigh,—and the poem is written.
It is an impromptu, I suppose, then, if you write it so suddenly,—I replied.
No,—said he,—far from it. I said written, but I did not say copied. Every
such poem has a soul and a body, and it is the body of it, or the copy, that
men read and publishers pay for. The soul of it is born in an instant in the
poet’s soul. It comes to him a thought, tangled in the meshes of a few sweet
words,—words that have loved each other from the cradle of the language,
but have never been wedded until now. Whether it will ever fully embody
itself in a bridal train of a dozen stanzas or not is uncertain; but it exists
potentially from the instant that the poet turns pale with it. It is enough to
stun and scare anybody, to have a hot thought come crashing into his brain,
and ploughing up those parallel ruts where the wagon trains of common
ideas were jogging along in their regular sequences of association. No
wonder the ancients made the poetical impulse wholly external. Μηνιν
αειδε θεά. Goddess,—Muse,—divine afflatus,—something outside always.
I never wrote any verses worth reading. I can’t. I am too stupid. If I ever
copied any that were worth reading, I was only a medium.
[I was talking all this time to our boarders, you understand,—telling them
what this poet told me. The company listened rather attentively, I thought,
considering the literary character of the remarks.]
The old gentleman opposite all at once asked me if I ever read anything
better than Pope’s “Essay on Man”? Had I ever perused McFingal? He

was fond of poetry when he was a boy,—his mother taught him to say many
little pieces,—he remembered one beautiful hymn;—and the old gentleman
began, in a clear, loud voice, for his years,—

“The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens,”—

He stopped, as if startled by our silence, and a faint flush ran up beneath the
thin white hairs that fell upon his cheek. As I looked round, I was reminded
of a show I once saw at the Museum,—the Sleeping Beauty, I think they
called it. The old man’s sudden breaking out in this way turned every face
towards him, and each kept his posture as if changed to stone. Our Celtic
Bridget, or Biddy, is not a foolish fat scullion to burst out crying for a
sentiment. She is of the serviceable, red-handed, broad-and-high-
shouldered type; one of those imported female servants who are known in
public by their amorphous style of person, their stoop forwards, and a
headlong and as it were precipitous walk,—the waist plunging downwards
into the rocking pelvis at every heavy footfall. Bridget, constituted for
action, not for emotion, was about to deposit a plate heaped with something
upon the table, when I saw the coarse arm stretched by my shoulder
arrested,—motionless as the arm of a terra-cotta caryatid; she couldn’t set
the plate down while the old gentleman was speaking!
He was quite silent after this, still wearing the slight flush on his cheek.
Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is
wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they
ever were there, they are there still!
By and by we got talking again.—Does a poet love the verses written
through him, do you think, Sir?—said the divinity-student.
So long as they are warm from his mind, carry any of his animal heat about
them, I know he loves them,—I answered. When they have had time to
cool, he is more indifferent.
A good deal as it is with buckwheat cakes,—said the young fellow whom
they call John.

The last words, only, reached the ear of the economically organized female
in black bombazine.—Buckwheat is skerce and high,—she remarked.
[Must be a poor relation sponging on our landlady,—pays nothing,—so she
must stand by the guns and be ready to repel boarders.]
I liked the turn the conversation had taken, for I had some things I wanted
to say, and so, after waiting a minute, I began again.—I don’t think the
poems I read you sometimes can be fairly appreciated, given to you as they
are in the green state.
—You don’t know what I mean by the green state? Well, then, I will tell
you. Certain things are good for nothing until they have been kept a long
while; and some are good for nothing until they have been long kept and
used. Of the first, wine is the illustrious and immortal example. Of those
which must be kept and used I will name three,—meerschaum pipes,
violins, and poems. The meerschaum is but a poor affair until it has burned
a thousand offerings to the cloud-compelling deities. It comes to us without
complexion or flavor,—born of the sea-foam, like Aphrodite, but colorless
as pallida Mors herself. The fire is lighted in its central shrine, and
gradually the juices which the broad leaves of the Great Vegetable had
sucked up from an acre and curdled into a drachm are diffused through its
thirsting pores. First a discoloration, then a stain, and at last a rich,
glowing, umber tint spreading over the whole surface. Nature true to her
old brown autumnal hue, you see,—as true in the fire of the meerschaum as
in the sunshine of October! And then the cumulative wealth of its fragrant
reminiscences! he who inhales its vapors takes a thousand whiffs in a single
breath; and one cannot touch it without awakening the old joys that hang
around it as the smell of flowers clings to the dresses of the daughters of the
house of Farina!
[Don’t think I use a meerschaum myself, for I do not, though I have owned
a calumet since my childhood, which from a naked Pict (of the Mohawk
species) my grandsire won, together with a tomahawk and beaded knife-
sheath; paying for the lot with a bullet-mark on his right check. On the
maternal side I inherit the loveliest silver-mounted tobacco-stopper you
ever saw. It is a little box-wood Triton, carved with charming liveliness and
truth; I have often compared it to a figure in Raphael’s “Triumph of
Galatea.” It came to me in an ancient shagreen case,—how old it is I do not

know,—but it must have been made since Sir Walter Raleigh’s time. If you
are curious, you shall see it any day. Neither will I pretend that I am so
unused to the more perishable smoking contrivance that a few whiffs would
make me feel as if I lay in a ground-swell on the Bay of Biscay. I am not
unacquainted with that fusiform, spiral-wound bundle of chopped stems and
miscellaneous incombustibles, the cigar, so called, of the shops,—which to
“draw” asks the suction-power of a nursling infant Hercules, and to relish,
the leathery palate of an old Silenus. I do not advise you, young man, even
if my illustration strike your fancy, to consecrate the flower of your life to
painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of a reverie-
breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for. I have seen the
green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under such Nicotian
regimen, and thought the umbered meerschaum was dearly bought at the
cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.]
Violins, too,—the sweet old Amati!—the divine Stradivarius! Played on by
ancient maestros until the bow-hand lost its power and the flying fingers
stiffened. Bequeathed to the passionate, young enthusiast, who made it
whisper his hidden love, and cry his inarticulate longings, and scream his
untold agonies, and wail his monotonous despair. Passed from his dying
hand to the cold virtuoso, who let it slumber in its case for a generation, till,
when his hoard was broken up, it came forth once more and rode the stormy
symphonies of royal orchestras, beneath the rushing bow of their lord and
leader. Into lonely prisons with improvident artists; into convents from
which arose, day and night, the holy hymns with which its tones were
blended; and back again to orgies in which it learned to howl and laugh as if
a legion of devils were shut up in it; then again to the gentle dilettante who
calmed it down with easy melodies until it answered him softly as in the
days of the old maestros. And so given into our hands, its pores all full of
music; stained, like the meerschaum, through and through, with the
concentrated hue and sweetness of all the harmonies which have kindled
and faded on its strings.
Now I tell you a poem must be kept and used, like a meerschaum, or a
violin. A poem is just as porous as the meerschaum;—the more porous it is,
the better. I mean to say that a genuine poem is capable of absorbing an
indefinite amount of the essence of our own humanity,—its tenderness, its
heroism, its regrets, its aspirations, so as to be gradually stained through

with a divine secondary color derived from ourselves. So you see it must
take time to bring the sentiment of a poem into harmony with our nature, by
staining ourselves through every thought and image our being can
penetrate.
Then again as to the mere music of a new poem; why, who can expect
anything more from that than from the music of a violin fresh from the
maker’s hands? Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-
eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each other,
and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted.
At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an
organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a
garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full
of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or a hundred more gets
tolerably dry and comparatively resonant.
Don’t you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as
a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin.
The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they
don’t understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and
murmured over in the mind’s muffled whisper often enough, and at length
the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not
change a syllable without the whole world’s crying out against you for
meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process
takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin. Here is a
Tyrolese fiddle that is just coming to its hundredth birthday,—(Pedro
Klauss, Tyroli, fecit, 1760,)—the sap is pretty well out of it. And here is the
song of an old poet whom Neæra cheated.—

“Nox erat, et cœlo fulgebat Luna sereno
Inter minora sidera,
Cum tu magnorum numen læsura deorum
In verba jurabas mea.”

Don’t you perceive the sonorousness of these old dead Latin phrases? Now
I tell you that, every word fresh from the dictionary brings with it a certain
succulence; and though I cannot expect the sheets of the “Pactolian,” in
which, as I told you, I sometimes print my verses, to get so dry as the crisp

papyrus that held those words of Horatius Flaccus, yet you may be sure,
that, while the sheets are damp, and while the lines hold their sap, you can’t
fairly judge of my performances, and that, if made of the true stuff, they
will ring better after a while.
[There was silence for a brief space, after my somewhat elaborate
exposition of these self-evident analogies. Presently a person turned
towards me—I do not choose to designate the individual—and said that he
rather expected my pieces had given pretty good “sahtisfahction.”—I had,
up to this moment, considered this complimentary phrase as sacred to the
use of secretaries of lyceums, and, as it has been usually accompanied by a
small pecuniary testimonial, have acquired a certain relish for this
moderately tepid and unstimulating expression of enthusiasm. But as a
reward for gratuitous services, I confess I thought it a little below that
blood-heat standard which a man’s breath ought to have, whether silent, or
vocal and articulate. I waited for a favorable opportunity, however, before
making the remarks which follow.]
—There are single expressions, as I have told you already, that fix a man’s
position for you before you have done shaking hands with him. Allow me
to expand a little. There are several things, very slight in themselves, yet
implying other things not so unimportant. Thus, your French servant has
dévalisé your premises and got caught. Excusez, says the sergent-de-ville,
as he politely relieves him of his upper garments and displays his bust in the
full daylight. Good shoulders enough,—a little marked,—traces of
smallpox, perhaps,—but white. . . . . Crac! from the sergent-de-ville’s broad
palm on the white shoulder! Now look! Vogue la galère! Out comes the
big red V—mark of the hot iron;—he had blistered it out pretty nearly,—
hadn’t he?—the old rascal VOLEUR, branded in the galleys at Marseilles!
[Don’t! What if he has got something like this?—nobody supposes I
invented such a story.]
My man John, who used to drive two of those six equine females which I
told you I had owned,—for, look you, my friends, simple though I stand
here, I am one that has been driven in his “kerridge,”—not using that term,
as liberal shepherds do, for any battered old shabby-genteel go-cart which
has more than one wheel, but meaning thereby a four-wheeled vehicle with
a pole,—my man John, I say, was a retired soldier. He retired

unostentatiously, as many of Her Majesty’s modest servants have done
before and since. John told me, that when an officer thinks he recognizes
one of these retiring heroes, and would know if he has really been in the
service, that he may restore him, if possible, to a grateful country, he comes
suddenly upon him, and says, sharply, “Strap!” If he has ever worn the
shoulder-strap, he has learned the reprimand for its ill adjustment. The old
word of command flashes through his muscles, and his hand goes up in an
instant to the place where the strap used to be.
[I was all the time preparing for my grand coup, you understand; but I saw
they were not quite ready for it, and so continued,—always in illustration of
the general principle I had laid down.]
Yes, odd things come out in ways that nobody thinks of. There was a
legend, that, when the Danish pirates made descents upon the English coast,
they caught a few Tartars occasionally, in the shape of Saxons, who would
not let them go,—on the contrary, insisted on their staying, and, to make
sure of it, treated them as Apollo treated Marsyas, or an Bartholinus has
treated a fellow-creature in his title-page, and, having divested them of the
one essential and perfectly fitting garment, indispensable in the mildest
climates, nailed the same on the church-door as we do the banns of
marriage, in terrorem.
[There was a laugh at this among some of the young folks; but as I looked
at our landlady, I saw that “the water stood in her eyes,” as it did in
Christiana’s when the interpreter asked her about the spider, and I fancied,
but wasn’t quite sure that the schoolmistress blushed, as Mercy did in the
same conversation, as you remember.]
That sounds like a cock-and-bull-story,—said the young fellow whom they
call John. I abstained from making Hamlet’s remark to Horatio, and
continued.
Not long since, the church-wardens were repairing and beautifying an old
Saxon church in a certain English village, and among other things thought
the doors should be attended to. One of them particularly, the front-door,
looked very badly, crusted, as it were, and as if it would be all the better for
scraping. There happened to be a microscopist in the village who had heard
the old pirate story, and he took it into his head to examine the crust on this

door. There was no mistake about it; it was a genuine historical document,
of the Ziska drum-head pattern,—a real cutis humana, stripped from some
old Scandinavian filibuster, and the legend was true.
My friend, the Professor, settled an important historical and financial
question once by the aid of an exceedingly minute fragment of a similar
document. Behind the pane of plate-glass which bore his name and title
burned a modest lamp, signifying to the passers-by that at all hours of the
night the slightest favors (or fevers) were welcome. A youth who had freely
partaken of the cup which cheers and likewise inebriates, following a moth-
like impulse very natural under the circumstances, dashed his fist at the
light and quenched the meek luminary,—breaking through the plate-glass,
of course, to reach it. Now I don’t want to go into minutiæ at table, you
know, but a naked hand can no more go through a pane of thick glass
without leaving some of its cuticle, to say the least, behind it, than a
butterfly can go through a sausage-machine without looking the worse for
it. The Professor gathered up the fragments of glass, and with them certain
very minute but entirely satisfactory documents which would have
identified and hanged any rogue in Christendom who had parted with them.
—The historical question, Who did it? and the financial question, Who paid
for it? were both settled before the new lamp was lighted the next evening.
You see, my friends, what immense conclusions, touching our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor, may be reached by means of very
insignificant premises. This is eminently true of manners and forms of
speech; a movement or a phrase often tells you all you want to know about
a person. Thus, “How’s your health?” (commonly pronounced haälth)—
instead of, How do you do? or, How are you? Or calling your little dark
entry a “hall,” and your old rickety one-horse wagon a “kerridge.” Or
telling a person who has been trying to please you that he has given you
pretty good “sahtisfahction.” Or saying that you “remember of” such a
thing, or that you have been “stoppin”’ at Deacon Somebody’s,—and other
such expressions. One of my friends had a little marble statuette of Cupid
in the parlor of his country-house,—bow, arrows, wings, and all complete.
A visitor, indigenous to the region, looking pensively at the figure, asked
the lady of the house “if that was a statoo of her deceased infant?” What a
delicious, though somewhat voluminous biography, social, educational, and
æsthetic in that brief question!

[Please observe with what Machiavellian astuteness I smuggled in the
particular offence which it was my object to hold up to my fellow-boarders,
without too personal an attack on the individual at whose door it lay.]
That was an exceedingly dull person who made the remark, Ex pede
Herculem. He might as well have said, “From a peck of apples you may
judge of the barrel.” Ex pede, to be sure! Read, instead, Ex ungue minimi
digiti pedis, Herculem, ejusque patrem, matrem, avos et proavos, filios,
nepotes et pronepotes! Talk to me about your δὸς ποῠ στῶ! Tell me about
Cuvier’s getting up a megatherium from a tooth, or Agassiz’s drawing a
portrait of an undiscovered fish from a single scale! As the “O” revealed
Giotto,—as the one word “moi” betrayed the Stratford atte-Bowe-taught
Anglais,—so all a man’s antecedents and possibilities are summed up in a
single utterance which gives at once the gauge of his education and his
mental organization.
Possibilities, Sir?—said the divinity-student; can’t a man who says Haöw?
arrive at distinction?
Sir,—I replied,—in a republic all things are possible. But the man with a
future has almost of necessity sense enough to see that any odious trick of
speech or manners must be got rid of. Doesn’t Sydney Smith say that a
public man in England never gets over a false quantity uttered in early life?
Our public men are in little danger of this fatal misstep, as few of them are
in the habit of introducing Latin into their speeches,—for good and
sufficient reasons. But they are bound to speak decent English,—unless,
indeed, they are rough old campaigners, like General Jackson or General
Taylor; in which case, a few scars on Priscian’s head are pardoned to old
fellows who have quite as many on their own, and a constituency of thirty
empires is not at all particular, provided they do not swear in their
Presidential Messages.
However, it is not for me to talk. I have made mistakes enough in
conversation and print. I never find them out until they are stereotyped, and
then I think they rarely escape me. I have no doubt I shall make half a
dozen slips before this breakfast is over, and remember them all before
another. How one does tremble with rage at his own intense momentary
stupidity about things he knows perfectly well, and to think how he lays

himself open to the impertinences of the captatores verborum, those useful
but humble scavengers of the language, whose business it is to pick up what
might offend or injure, and remove it, hugging and feeding on it as they go!
I don’t want to speak too slightingly of these verbal critics;—how can I,
who am so fond of talking about errors and vulgarisms of speech? Only
there is a difference between those clerical blunders which almost every
man commits, knowing better, and that habitual grossness or meanness of
speech which is unendurable to educated persons, from anybody that wears
silk or broadcloth.
[I write down the above remarks this morning, January 26th, making this
record of the date that nobody may think it was written in wrath, on account
of any particular grievance suffered from the invasion of any individual
scarabæus grammaticus.]
—I wonder if anybody ever finds fault with anything I say at this table
when it is repeated? I hope they do, I am sure. I should be very certain that
I had said nothing of much significance, if they did not.
Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone,
which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the
grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its edges,—and
have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been
lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers
under its edge and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says
to herself, “It’s done brown enough by this time”? What an odd revelation,
and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the
very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and
scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over!
Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had
been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them
coleopterous or horny-shelled,—turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of
them softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches;
(Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern
bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-pattern five timekeepers to slide
into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the
whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young
larvæ, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the

infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned and the
wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of
creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs—and some
of them have a good many—rush round wildly, butting each other and
everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground
retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the
grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her
nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are
growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their
golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate
through their glorified being.
—The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very familiar
way,—at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I sometimes
think it necessary to repress,—that I was coming it rather strong on the
butterflies.
No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images,—the butterfly as
well as the others. The stone is ancient error. The grass is human nature
borne down and bleached of all its colour by it. The shapes which are
found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker
organisms kept helpless by it. He who turns the stone over is whosoever
puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it
with a serious face or a laughing one. The next year stands for the coming
time. Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its
full stature and native hues in the sunshine. Then shall God’s minstrels
build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity. Then shall beauty—
Divinity taking outlines and color—light upon the souls of men as the
butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the
shell that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not
the stone been lifted.
You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible
squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.
—Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of
somebody or other. As soon as his breath comes back, he very probably
begins to expend it in hard words. These are the best evidence a man can

have that he has said something it was time to say. Dr. Johnson was
disappointed in the effect of one of his pamphlets. “I think I have not been
attacked enough for it,” he said;—“attack is the reaction; I never think I
have hit hard unless it rebounds.”
—If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I. Do you
think I don’t understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called the
hydrostatic paradox of controversy?
Don’t know what that means?—Well, I will tell you. You know, that, if you
had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the
other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in
one as in the other. Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same
way,—and the fools know it.
—No, but I often read what they say about other people. There are about a
dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like the tongs, and
the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the bellows, in one of those
domestic avalanches that everybody knows. If you get one, you get the
whole lot.
What are they?—Oh, that depends a good deal on latitude and longitude.
Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately. Grouping them in
two families, one finds himself a clever, genial, witty, wise, brilliant,
sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished, celebrated, illustrious scholar and
perfect gentleman, and first writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked,
pert, shallow, ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted outcast, and
disgrace to civilization.
What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets?—Well, I should
say a set of influences something like these:—1st. Relationships, political,
religious, social, domestic. 2d. Oyster, in the form of suppers given to
gentlemen connected with criticism. I believe in the school, the college,
and the clergy; but my sovereign logic, for regulating public opinion—
which means commonly the opinion of half a dozen of the critical gentry—
is the following Major proposition. Oysters au naturel. Minor
proposition. The same “scalloped.” Conclusion. That—(here insert
entertainer’s name) is clever, witty, wise, brilliant,—and the rest.

—No, it isn’t exactly bribery. One man has oysters, and another epithets. It
is an exchange of hospitalities; one gives a “spread” on linen, and the other
on paper,—that is all. Don’t you think you and I should be apt to do just so,
if we were in the critical line? I am sure I couldn’t resist the softening
influences of hospitality. I don’t like to dine out, you know,—I dine so well
at our own table, [our landlady looked radiant,] and the company is so
pleasant [a rustling movement of satisfaction among the boarders]; but if I
did partake of a man’s salt, with such additions as that article of food
requires to make it palatable, I could never abuse him, and if I had to speak
of him, I suppose I should hang my set of jingling epithets round him like a
string of sleigh-bells. Good feeling helps society to make liars of most of
us,—not absolute liars, but such careless handlers of truth that its sharp
corners get terribly rounded. I love truth as chiefest among the virtues; I
trust it runs in my blood; but I would never be a critic, because I know I
could not always tell it. I might write a criticism of a book that happened to
please me; that is another matter.
—Listen, Benjamin Franklin! This is for you, and such others of tender age
as you may tell it to.
When we are as yet small children, long before the time when those two
grown ladies offer us the choice of Hercules, there comes up to us a
youthful angel, holding in his right hand cubes like dice, and in his left
spheres like marbles. The cubes are of stainless ivory, and on each is
written in letters of gold—Truth. The spheres are veined and streaked and
spotted beneath, with a dark crimson flush above, where the light falls on
them, and in a certain aspect you can make out upon every one of them the
three letters L, I, E. The child to whom they are offered very probably
clutches at both. The spheres are the most convenient things in the world;
they roll with the least possible impulse just where the child would have
them. The cubes will not roll at all; they have a great talent for standing
still, and always keep right side up. But very soon the young philosopher
finds that things which roll so easily are very apt to roll into the wrong
corner, and to get out of his way when he most wants them, while he always
knows where to find the others, which stay where they are left. Thus he
learns—thus we learn—to drop the streaked and speckled globes of
falsehood and to hold fast the white angular blocks of truth. But then
comes Timidity, and after her Good-nature, and last of all Polite-behavior,

all insisting that truth must roll, or nobody can do anything with it; and so
the first with her coarse rasp, and the second with her broad file, and the
third with her silken sleeve, do so round off and smooth and polish the
snow-white cubes of truth, that, when they have got a little dingy by use, it
becomes hard to tell them from the rolling spheres of falsehood.
The schoolmistress was polite enough to say that she was pleased with this,
and that she would read it to her little flock the next day. But she should
tell the children, she said, that there were better reasons for truth than could
be found in mere experience of its convenience and the inconvenience of
lying.
Yes,—I said,—but education always begins through the senses, and works
up to the idea of absolute right and wrong. The first thing the child has to
learn about this matter is, that lying is unprofitable,—afterwards, that it is
against the peace and dignity of the universe.
—Do I think that the particular form of lying often seen in newspapers,
under the title, “From our Foreign Correspondent,” does any harm?—Why,
no,—I don’t know that it does. I suppose it doesn’t really deceive people
any more than the “Arabian Nights” or “Gulliver’s Travels” do. Sometimes
the writers compile too carelessly, though, and mix up facts out of
geographies, and stories out of the penny papers, so as to mislead those who
are desirous of information. I cut a piece out of one of the papers, the other
day, which contains a number of improbabilities, and, I suspect,
misstatements. I will send up and get it for you, if you would like to hear it.
—Ah, this is it; it is headed
“Our Sumatra Correspondence.
“This island is now the property of the Stamford family,—having been won,
it is said, in a raffle, by Sir — Stamford, during the stock-gambling mania
of the South-Sea Scheme. The history of this gentleman may be found in
an interesting series of questions (unfortunately not yet answered) contained
in the ‘Notes and Queries.’ This island is entirely surrounded by the ocean,
which here contains a large amount of saline substance, crystallizing in
cubes remarkable for their symmetry, and frequently displays on its surface,
during calm weather, the rainbow tints of the celebrated South-Sea bubbles.
The summers are oppressively hot, and the winters very probably cold; but

this fact cannot be ascertained precisely, as, for some peculiar reason, the
mercury in these latitudes never shrinks, as in more northern regions, and
thus the thermometer is rendered useless in winter.
“The principal vegetable productions of the island are the pepper tree and
the bread-fruit tree. Pepper being very abundantly produced, a benevolent
society was organized in London during the last century for supplying the
natives with vinegar and oysters, as an addition to that delightful
condiment. [Note received from Dr. D. P.] It is said, however, that, as the
oysters were of the kind called natives in England, the natives of Sumatra,
in obedience to a natural instinct, refused to touch them, and confined
themselves entirely to the crew of the vessel in which they were brought
over. This information was received from one of the oldest inhabitants, a
native himself, and exceedingly fond of missionaries. He is said also to be
very skilful in the cuisine peculiar to the island.
“During the season of gathering the pepper, the persons employed are
subject to various incommodities, the chief of which is violent and long-
continued sternutation, or sneezing. Such is the vehemence of these
attacks, that the unfortunate subjects of them are often driven backwards for
great distances at immense speed, on the well-known principle of the
aeolipile. Not being able to see where they are going, these poor creatures
dash themselves to pieces against the rocks or are precipitated over the
cliffs and thus many valuable lives are lost annually. As, during the whole
pepper-harvest, they feed exclusively on this stimulant, they become
exceedingly irritable. The smallest injury is resented with ungovernable
rage. A young man suffering from the pepper-fever as it is called, cudgelled
another most severely for appropriating a superannuated relative of trifling
value, and was only pacified by having a present made him of a pig of that
peculiar species of swine called the Peccavi by the Catholic Jews, who, it is
well known, abstain from swine’s flesh in imitation of the Mahometan
Buddhists.
“The bread-tree grows abundantly. Its branches are well known to Europe
and America under the familiar name of maccaroni. The smaller twigs are
called vermicelli. They have a decided animal flavor, as may be observed
in the soups containing them. Maccaroni, being tubular, is the favorite
habitat of a very dangerous insect, which is rendered peculiarly ferocious

by being boiled. The government of the island, therefore, never allows a
stick of it to be exported without being accompanied by a piston with which
its cavity may at any time be thoroughly swept out. These are commonly
lost or stolen before the maccaroni arrives among us. It therefore always
contains many of these insects, which, however, generally die of old age in
the shops, so that accidents from this source are comparatively rare.
“The fruit of the bread-tree consists principally of hot rolls. The buttered-
muffin variety is supposed to be a hybrid with the cocoa-nut palm, the
cream found on the milk of the cocoa-nut exuding from the hybrid in the
shape of butter, just as the ripe fruit is splitting, so as to fit it for the tea-
table, where it is commonly served up with cold”—
—There,—I don’t want to read any more of it. You see that many of these
statements are highly improbable.—No, I shall not mention the paper.—No,
neither of them wrote it, though it reminds me of the style of these popular
writers. I think the fellow who wrote it must have been reading some of
their stories, and got them mixed up with his history and geography. I don’t
suppose he lies;—he sells it to the editor, who knows how many squares off
“Sumatra” is. The editor, who sells it to the public—By the way, the papers
have been very civil haven’t they?—to the—the what d’ye call it?
—“Northern Magazine,”—isn’t it?—got up by some of those Come-outers,
down East, as an organ for their local peculiarities.
—The Professor has been to see me. Came in, glorious, at about twelve
o’clock, last night. Said he had been with “the boys.” On inquiry, found
that “the boys,” were certain baldish and grayish old gentlemen that one
sees or hears of in various important stations of society. The Professor is
one of the same set, but he always talks as if he had been out of college
about ten years, whereas. . . [Each of these dots was a little nod, which the
company understood, as the reader will, no doubt.] He calls them
sometimes “the boys,” and sometimes “the old fellows.” Call him by the
latter title, and see how he likes it.—Well, he came in last night glorious, as
I was saying. Of course I don’t mean vinously exalted; he drinks little wine
on such occasions, and is well known to all the Peters and Patricks as the
gentleman who always has indefinite quantities of black tea to kill any extra
glass of red claret he may have swallowed. But the Professor says he
always gets tipsy on old memories at these gatherings. He was, I forget

how many years old when he went to the meeting; just turned of twenty
now,—he said. He made various youthful proposals to me, including a duet
under the landlady’s daughter’s window. He had just learned a trick, he
said, of one of “the boys,” of getting a splendid bass out of a door-panel by
rubbing it with the palm of his hand. Offered to sing “The sky is bright,”
accompanying himself on the front-door, if I would go down and help in the
chorus. Said there never was such a set of fellows as the old boys of the set
he has been with. Judges, mayors, Congress-men, Mr. Speakers, leaders in
science, clergymen better than famous, and famous too, poets by the half-
dozen, singers with voices like angels, financiers, wits, three of the best
laughers in the Commonwealth, engineers, agriculturists,—all forms of
talent and knowledge he pretended were represented in that meeting. Then
he began to quote Byron about Santa Croce, and maintained that he could
“furnish out creation” in all its details from that set of his. He would like to
have the whole boodle of them, (I remonstrated against this word, but the
Professor said it was a diabolish good word, and he would have no other,)
with their wives and children, shipwrecked on a remote island, just to see
how splendidly they would reorganize society. They could build a city,—
they have done it; make constitutions and laws; establish churches and
lyceums; teach and practise the healing art; instruct in every department;
found observatories; create commerce and manufactures; write songs and
hymns, and sing ’em, and make instruments to accompany the songs with;
lastly, publish a journal almost as good as the “Northern Magazine,” edited
by the Come-outers. There was nothing they were not up to, from a
christening to a hanging; the last, to be sure, could never be called for,
unless some stranger got in among them.
—I let the Professor talk as long as he liked; it didn’t make much difference
to me whether it was all truth, or partly made up of pale Sherry and similar
elements. All at once he jumped up and said,—
Don’t you want to hear what I just read to the boys?
I have had questions of a similar character asked me before, occasionally. A
man of iron mould might perhaps say, No! I am not a man of iron mould,
and said that I should be delighted.

The Professor then read—with that slightly sing-song cadence which is
observed to be common in poets reading their own verses—the following
stanzas; holding them at a focal distance of about two feet and a half, with
an occasional movement back or forward for better adjustment, the
appearance of which has been likened by some impertinent young folks to
that of the act of playing on the trombone. His eyesight was never better; I
have his word for it.

MARE RUBRUM.
Flash out a stream of blood-red wine!—
For I would drink to other days;
And brighter shall their memory shine,
Seen flaming through its crimson blaze.
The roses die, the summers fade;
But every ghost of boyhood’s dream
By Nature’s magic power is laid
To sleep beneath this blood-red stream.
It filled the purple grapes that lay
And drank the splendors of the sun
Where the long summer’s cloudless day
Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;
It pictures still the bacchant shapes
That saw their hoarded sunlight shed,—
The maidens dancing on the grapes,—
Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.
Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
Those flitting shapes that never die,
The swift-winged visions of the past.
Kiss but the crystal’s mystic rim,
Each shadow rends its flowery chain,
Springs in a bubble from its brim
And walks the chambers of the brain.
Poor Beauty! time and fortune’s wrong
No form nor feature may withstand,—

Thy wrecks are scattered all along,
Like emptied sea-shells on the sand;—
Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain,
The dust restores each blooming girl,
As if the sea-shells moved again
Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.
Here lies the home of school-boy life,
With creaking stair and wind-swept hall,
And, scarred by many a truant knife,
Our old initials on the wall;
Here rest—their keen vibrations mute—
The shout of voices known so well,
The ringing laugh, the wailing flute,
The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell.
Here, clad in burning robes, are laid
Life’s blossomed joys, untimely shed;
And here those cherished forms have strayed
We miss awhile, and call them dead.
What wizard fills the maddening glass
What soil the enchanted clusters grew?
That buried passions wake and pass
In beaded drops of fiery dew?
Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine,—
Our hearts can boast a warmer grow,
Filled from a vantage more divine,—
Calmed, but not chilled by winter’s snow!
To-night the palest wave we sip
Rich as the priceless draught shall be
That wet the bride of Cana’s lip,—
The wedding wine of Galilee!

CHAPTER VI

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
—I think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—you must intend that for one of
the sayings of the Seven Wise Men of Boston you were speaking of the
other day.
I thank you, my young friend,—was my reply,—but I must say something
better than that, before I could pretend to fill out the number.
—The schoolmistress wanted to know how many of these sayings there
were on record, and what, and by whom said.
—Why, let us see,—there is that one of Benjamin Franklin, “the great
Bostonian,” after whom this lad was named. To be sure, he said a great
many wise things,—and I don’t feel sure he didn’t borrow this,—he speaks
as if it were old. But then he applied it so neatly!—
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another
than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
Then there is that glorious Epicurean paradox, uttered by my friend, the
Historian, in one of his flashing moments:—
“Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.”
To these must certainly be added that other saying of one of the wittiest of
men:—
“Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”—
The divinity-student looked grave at this, but said nothing.

The schoolmistress spoke out, and said she didn’t think the wit meant any
irreverence. It was only another way of saying, Paris is a heavenly place
after New York or Boston.
A jaunty-looking person, who had come in with the young fellow they call
John,—evidently a stranger,—said there was one more wise man’s saying
that he had heard; it was about our place, but he didn’t know who said it.—
A civil curiosity was manifested by the company to hear the fourth wise
saying. I heard him distinctly whispering to the young fellow who brought
him to dinner, Shall I tell it? To which the answer was, Go ahead!—Well,
—he said,—this was what I heard:—
“Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that
out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a
crowbar.”
Sir,—said I,—I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with pleasing
vivacity that which I have sometimes heard uttered with malignant dulness.
The satire of the remark is essentially true of Boston,—and of all other
considerable—and inconsiderable—places with which I have had the
privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys think London is the only place in
the world. Frenchmen—you remember the line about Paris, the Court, the
World, etc.—I recollect well, by the way, a sign in that city which ran thus:
“Hôtel l’Univers et des États Unis”; and as Paris is the universe to a
Frenchman, of course the United States are outside of it.—“See Naples and
then die.”—It is quite as bad with smaller places. I have been about,
lecturing, you know, and have found the following propositions to hold true
of all of them.
1. The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and
every town or city.
2. If more than fifty years have passed since its foundation, it is
affectionately styled by the inhabitants the “good old town of”—(whatever
its name may happen to be.)
3. Every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen to a
stranger is invariably declared to be a “remarkably intelligent audience.”
4. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity.

5. It contains several persons of vast talent little known to the world. (One
or two of them, you may perhaps chance to remember, sent short pieces to
the “Pactolian” some time since, which were “respectfully declined.”)
Boston is just like other places of its size;—only perhaps, considering its
excellent fish-market, paid fire-department, superior monthly publications,
and correct habit of spelling the English language, it has some right to look
down on the mob of cities. I’ll tell you, though, if you want to know it,
what is the real offence of Boston. It drains a large water-shed of its
intellect, and will not itself be drained. If it would only send away its first-
rate men, instead of its second-rate ones, (no offence to the well-known
exceptions, of which we are always proud,) we should be spared such
epigrammatic remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can
never be a real metropolis in this country, until the biggest centre can drain
the lesser ones of their talent and wealth.—I have observed, by the way, that
the people who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous of
each other, as are those of smaller cities situated within the intellectual
basin, or suction-range, of one large one, of the pretensions of any other.
Don’t you see why? Because their promising young author and rising
lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the neighboring big city,
—their prettiest girl has been exported to the same market; all their
ambition points there, and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there. I
hate little toad-eating cities.
—Would I be so good as to specify any particular example?—Oh,—an
example? Did you ever see a bear-trap? Never? Well, shouldn’t you like
to see me put my foot into one? With sentiments of the highest
consideration I must beg leave to be excused.
Besides, some of the smaller cities are charming. If they have an old
church or two, a few stately mansions of former grandees, here and there an
old dwelling with the second story projecting, (for the convenience of
shooting the Indians knocking at the front-door with their tomahawks,)—if
they have, scattered about, those mighty square houses built something
more than half a century ago, and standing like architectural boulders
dropped by the former diluvium of wealth, whose refluent wave has left
them as its monument,—if they have gardens with elbowed apple-trees that
push their branches over the high board-fence and drop their fruit on the

side-walk,—if they have a little grass in the side-streets, enough to betoken
quiet without proclaiming decay,—I think I could go to pieces, after my
life’s work were done, in one of those tranquil places, as sweetly as in any
cradle that an old man may be rocked to sleep in. I visit such spots always
with infinite delight. My friend, the Poet, says, that rapidly growing towns
are most unfavorable to the imaginative and reflective faculties. Let a man
live in one of these old quiet places, he says, and the wine of his soul, which
is kept thick and turbid by the rattle of busy streets, settles, and, as you hold
it up, you may see the sun through it by day and the stars by night.
—Do I think that the little villages have the conceit of the great towns?—I
don’t believe there is much difference. You know how they read Pope’s
line in the smallest town in our State of Massachusetts?—Well, they read it

“All are but parts of one stupendous Hull!”

—Every person’s feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they
may be entered. The front-door is on the street. Some keep it always open;
some keep it latched; some, locked; some, bolted,—with a chain that will
let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass
its threshold. This front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-
room, and this into the inferior apartments. The side-door opens at once
into the sacred chambers.
There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is carried for
years hidden in a mother’s bosom. Fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends,
often, but by no means so universally, have duplicates of it. The wedding-
ring conveys a right to one; alas, if none is given with it!
If nature or accident has put one of these keys into the hands of a person
who has the torturing instinct, I can only solemnly pronounce the words that
Justice utters over its doomed victim,—The Lord have mercy on your soul!
You will probably go mad within a reasonable time,—or, if you are a man,
run off and die with your head on a curb-stone, in Melbourne or San
Francisco,—or, if you are a woman, quarrel and break your heart, or turn
into a pale, jointed petrifaction that moves about as if it were alive, or play
some real life-tragedy or other.

Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side-door. The
fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very terrible
at times. You can keep the world out from your front-door, or receive
visitors only when you are ready for them; but those of your own flesh and
blood, or of certain grades of intimacy, can come in at the side-door, if they
will, at any hour and in any mood. Some of them have a scale of your
whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in
semitones,—touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of
his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-
playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance. Married
life is the school in which the most accomplished artists in this department
are found. A delicate woman is the best instrument; she has such a
magnificent compass of sensibilities! From the deep inward moan which
follows pressure on the great nerves of right, to the sharp cry as the
filaments of taste are struck with a crashing sweep, is a range which no
other instrument possesses. A few exercises on it daily at home fit a man
wonderfully for his habitual labors, and refresh him immensely as he
returns from them. No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of
a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister,
intimate. Be very careful to whom you give a side-door key; too many have
them already.
—You remember the old story of the tender-hearted man, who placed a
frozen viper in his bosom, and was stung by it when it became thawed? If
we take a cold-blooded creature into our bosom, better that it should sting
us and we should die than that its chill should slowly steal into our hearts;
warm it we never can! I have seen faces of women that were fair to look
upon, yet one could see that the icicles were forming round these women’s
hearts. I knew what freezing image lay on the white breasts beneath the
laces!
A very simple intellectual mechanism answers the necessities of friendship,
and even of the most intimate relations of life. If a watch tells us the hour
and the minute, we can be content to carry it about with us for a life-time,
though it has no second-hand and is not a repeater, nor a musical watch,—
though it is not enamelled nor jewelled,—in short, though it has little
beyond the wheels required for a trustworthy instrument, added to a good
face and a pair of useful hands. The more wheels there are in a watch or a

brain, the more trouble they are to take care of. The movements of
exaltation which belong to genius are egotistic by their very nature. A calm,
clear mind, not subject to the spasms and crises which are so often met with
in creative or intensely perceptive natures, is the best basis for love or
friendship.—Observe, I am talking about minds. I won’t say, the more
intellect, the less capacity for loving; for that would do wrong to the
understanding and reason;—but, on the other hand, that the brain often runs
away with the heart’s best blood, which gives the world a few pages of
wisdom or sentiment or poetry, instead of making one other heart happy, I
have no question.
If one’s intimate in love or friendship cannot or does not share all one’s
intellectual tastes or pursuits, that is a small matter. Intellectual companions
can be found easily in men and books. After all, if we think of it, most of
the world’s loves and friendships have been between people that could not
read nor spell.
But to radiate the heat of the affections into a clod which absorbs all that is
poured into it, but never warms beneath the sunshine of smiles or the
pressure of hand or lip,—this is the great martyrdom of sensitive beings,—
most of all in that perpetual auto da fé where young womanhood is the
sacrifice.
—You noticed, perhaps, what I just said about the loves and friendships of
illiterate persons,—that is, of the human race, with a few exceptions here
and there. I like books,—I was born and bred among them, and have the
easy feeling, when I get into their presence, that a stable-boy has among
horses. I don’t think I undervalue them either as companions or as
instructors. But I can’t help remembering that the world’s great men have
not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men. The
Hebrew patriarchs had small libraries, I think, if any; yet they represent to
our imaginations a very complete idea of manhood, and, I think, if we could
ask in Abraham to dine with us men of letters next Saturday, we should feel
honored by his company.
What I wanted to say about books is this: that there are times in which
every active mind feels itself above any and all human books.

—I think a man must have a good opinion of himself, Sir,—said the
divinity-student,—who should feel himself above Shakspeare at any time.
My young friend,—I replied,—the man who is never conscious of a state of
feeling or of intellectual effort entirely beyond expression by any form of
words whatsoever is a mere creature of language. I can hardly believe there
are any such men. Why, think for a moment of the power of music. The
nerves that make us alive to it spread out (so the Professor tells me) in the
most sensitive region of the marrow just where it is widening to run
upwards into the hemispheres. It has its seat in the region of sense rather
than of thought. Yet it produces a continuous and, as it were, logical
sequence of emotional and intellectual changes; but how different from
trains of thought proper! how entirely beyond the reach of symbols!—
Think of human passions as compared with all phrases! Did you ever hear
of a man’s growing lean by the reading of “Romeo and Juliet,” or blowing
his brains out because Desdemona was maligned? There are a good many
symbols, even, that are more expressive than words. I remember a young
wife who had to part with her husband for a time. She did not write a
mournful poem; indeed, she was a silent person, and perhaps hardly said a
word about it; but she quietly turned of a deep orange color with jaundice.
A great many people in this world have but one form of rhetoric for their
profoundest experiences,—namely, to waste away and die. When a man
can read, his paroxysm of feeling is passing. When he can read, his
thought has slackened its hold.—You talk about reading Shakspeare, using
him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any
common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can
rise above the text which lies before him. But think a moment. A child’s
reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge’s or Schlegel’s reading of
him is another. The saturation-point of each mind differs from that of every
other. But I think it is as true for the small mind which can only take up a
little as for the great one which takes up much, that the suggested trains of
thought and feeling ought always to rise above—not the author, but the
reader’s mental version of the author, whoever he may be.
I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into
exalted mental conditions like those produced by music. Then they may
drop the book, to pass at once into the region of thought without words. We
may happen to be very dull folks, you and I, and probably are, unless there

is some particular reason to suppose the contrary. But we get glimpses now
and then of a sphere of spiritual possibilities, where we, dull as we are now,
may sail in vast circles round the largest compass of earthly intelligences.
—I confess there are times when I feel like the friend I mentioned to you
some time ago,—I hate the very sight of a book. Sometimes it becomes
almost a physical necessity to talk out what is in the mind, before putting
anything else into it. It is very bad to have thoughts and feelings, which
were meant to come out in talk, strike in, as they say of some complaints
that ought to show outwardly.
I always believed in life rather than in books. I suppose every day of earth,
with its hundred thousand deaths and something more of births,—with its
loves and hates, its triumphs and defeats, its pangs and blisses, has more of
humanity in it than all the books that were ever written, put together. I
believe the flowers growing at this moment send up more fragrance to
heaven than was ever exhaled from all the essences ever distilled.
—Don’t I read up various matters to talk about at this table or elsewhere?—
No, that is the last thing I would do. I will tell you my rule. Talk about
those subjects you have had long in your mind, and listen to what others say
about subjects you have studied but recently. Knowledge and timber
shouldn’t be much used, till they are seasoned.
—Physiologists and metaphysicians have had their attention turned a good
deal of late to the automatic and involuntary actions of the mind. Put an
idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without
ever having occasion to refer to it. When, at last, you return to it, you do
not find it as it was when acquired. It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,—
become at home,—entered into relations with your other thoughts, and
integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind.—Or take a simple and
familiar example; Dr. Carpenter has adduced it. You forget a name, in
conversation,—go on talking, without making any effort to recall it,—and
presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and unconscious
action, while you were pursuing another train of thought, and the name rises
of itself to your lips.

There are some curious observations I should like to make about the mental
machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.
—I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know something
of his progress in the French language. I rather liked that exercise he read
us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly dare to translate it,
for fear some people in a remote city where I once lived might think I was
drawing their portraits.
—Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies. I don’t know whether the piece
I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural
History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description. At any
rate, when I gave my translation to B. F. to turn back again into French, one
reason was that I thought it would sound a little bald in English, and some
people might think it was meant to have some local bearing or other,—

which the author, of course, didn’t mean, inasmuch as he could not be
acquainted with anything on this side of the water.
[The above remarks were addressed to the school-mistress, to whom I
handed the paper after looking it over. The divinity-student came and read
over her shoulder,—very curious, apparently, but his eyes wandered, I
thought. Fancying that her breathing was somewhat hurried and high, or
thoracic, as my friend, the Professor, calls it, I watched her a little more
closely.—It is none of my business.—After all, it is the imponderables that
move the world,—heat, electricity, love. Habet?]
This is the piece that Benjamin Franklin made into boarding-school French,
such as you see here; don’t expect too much;—the mistakes give a relish to
it, I think.

LES SOCIÉTÉS POLYPHYSIOPHILOSOPHIQUES.
Ces Sociétés là sont une Institution pour suppléer aux besoins d’esprit
et de coeur de ces individus qui ont survécu à leurs émotions à l’égard
du beau sexe, et qui n’ont pas la distraction de l’habitude de boire.
Pour devenir membre d’une de ces Sociétés, on doit avoir le moins de
cheveux possible. S’il y en reste plusieurs qui resistent aux
dépilatoires naturelles et autres, on doit avoir quelques connaissances,
n’importe dans quel genre. Dès le moment qu’on ouvre la porte de la
Société, on a un grand intérêt dans toutes les choses dont on ne sait
rien. Ainsi, un microscopiste démontre un nouveau flexor du tarse
d’un melolontha vulgaris. Douze savans improvisés, portans des
besicles, et qui ne connaissent rien des insectes, si ce n’est les
morsures du culex, se précipitent sur l’instrument, et voient—une
grande bulle d’air, dont ils s’émerveillent avec effusion. Ce qui est un
spectacle plein d’instruction—pour ceux qui ne sont pas de ladite
Société. Tous les membres regardent les chimistes en particulier avec
un air d’intelligence parfaite pendant qu’ils prouvent dans un discours
d’une demiheure que O6 N3 H5 C6 etc. font quelque chose qui n’est
bonne à rien, mais qui probablement a une odeur très désagréable,
selon l’habitude des produits chimiques. Après celà vient un
mathématicien qui vous bourre avec des a+b et vous rapporte enfin un

x+y, dont vous n’avex pas besoin et qui ne change nullement vos
relations avec la vie. Un naturaliste vous parle des formations
spéciales des animaux excessivement inconnus, dont vous n’avez
jamais soupçonné l’existence. Ainsi il vous décrit les follicules de
l’appendix vermiformis d’un dzigguetai. Vous ne savez pas ce que
c’est qu’un follicule. Vous ne savez pas ce que c’est qu’un appendix
uermiformis. Vous n’avez jamais entendu parler du dzigguetai. Ainsi
vous gagnez toutes ces connaisances à la fois, qui s’attachent à votre
esprit comme l’eau adhére aux plumes d’un canard. On connait toutes
les langues ex officio en devenant membre d’une de ces Sociétés.
Ainsi quand on entend lire un Essai sur les dialectes Tchutchiens, on
comprend tout celà de suite, et s’instruit énormément.
Il y a deux espèces d’individus qu’on trouve toujours à ces Sociétés: 1°
Le membre à questions; 2° Le membre à “Bylaws.”
La question est une spécialité. Celui qui en fait métier ne fait jamais
des réponses. La question est une manière très commode de dire les
choses suivantes: “Me voilà! Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,—je respire
encore! J’ai des idées,—voyez mon intelligence! Vous ne croyiez pas,
vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de celà! Ah, nous avons un
peu de sagacité, voyez vous! Nous ne sommes nullement la bête qu’on
pense!”—Le faiseur de questions donne peu d’attention aux réponses
qu’on fait; ce n’est pas là dans sa spécialité.
Le membre à “Bylaws” est le bouchon de toutes les émotions
mousseuses et généreuses qui se montrent dans la Société. C’est un
empereur manqué,—un tyran à la troisème trituration. C’est un esprit
dur, borné, exact, grand dans les petitesses, petit dans les grandeurs,
selon le mot du grand Jefferson. On ne l’aime pas dans la Société,
mais on le respecte et on le craint. Il n’y a qu’un mot pour ce membre
audessus de “Bylaws.” Ce mot est pour lui ce que l’Om est aux
Hundous. C’est sa religion; il n’y a rien audelà. Ce mot là c’est la
Constitution!
Lesdites Sociétés publient des feuilletons de tems en tems. On les
trouve abandonnés à sa porte, nus comme des enfans nouveaunés,
faute de membrane cutanée, ou même papyracée. Si on aime la

botanique, on y trouve une mémoire sur les coquilles; si on fait des
études zoölogiques, on square trouve un grand tas de q’ √-1, ce qui doit
être infiniment plus commode que les encyclopédies. Ainsi il est clair
comme la métaphysique qu’on doit devenir membre d’une Société
telle que nous décrivons.
Recette pour le Dépilatoire Physiophilosophique
Chaux vive lb. ss. Eau bouillante Oj.
Dépilez avec. Polissez ensuite.

I told the boy that his translation into French was creditable to him; and
some of the company wishing to hear what there was in the piece that made
me smile, I turned it into English for them, as well as I could, on the spot.
The landlady’s daughter seemed to be much amused by the idea that a
depilatory could take the place of literary and scientific accomplishments;
she wanted me to print the piece, so that she might send a copy of it to her
cousin in Mizzourah; she didn’t think he’d have to do anything to the
outside of his head to get into any of the societies; he had to wear a wig
once, when he played a part in a tabullo.
No,—said I,—I shouldn’t think of printing that in English. I’ll tell you
why. As soon as you get a few thousand people together in a town, there is
somebody that every sharp thing you say is sure to hit. What if a thing was
written in Paris or in Pekin?—that makes no difference. Everybody in
those cities, or almost everybody, has his counterpart here, and in all large
places.—You never studied averages as I have had occasion to.
I’ll tell you how I came to know so much about averages. There was one
season when I was lecturing, commonly, five evenings in the week, through
most of the lecturing period. I soon found, as most speakers do, that it was
pleasanter to work one lecture than to keep several in hand.
—Don’t you get sick to death of one lecture?—said the landlady’s daughter,
—who had a new dress on that day, and was in spirits for conversation.
I was going to talk about averages,—I said,—but I have no objection to
telling you about lectures, to begin with.

A new lecture always has a certain excitement connected with its delivery.
One thinks well of it, as of most things fresh from his mind. After a few
deliveries of it, one gets tired and then disgusted with its repetition. Go on
delivering it, and the disgust passes off, until, after one has repeated it a
hundred or a hundred and fifty times, he rather enjoys the hundred and first
or hundred and fifty-first time, before a new audience. But this is on one
condition,—that he never lays the lecture down and lets it cool. If he does,
there comes on a loathing for it which is intense, so that the sight of the old
battered manuscript is as bad as sea-sickness.
A new lecture is just like any other new tool. We use it for a while with
pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it. By-and-by our
hands get callous, and then we have no longer any sensitiveness about it.
But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again,
we miss the novelty and get the blisters.—The story is often quoted of
Whitefield, that he said a sermon was good for nothing until it had been
preached forty times. A lecture doesn’t begin to be old until it has passed its
hundredth delivery; and some, I think, have doubled, if not quadrupled, that
number. These old lectures are a man’s best, commonly; they improve by
age, also,—like the pipes, fiddles, and poems I told you of the other day.
One learns to make the most of their strong points and to carry off their
weak ones,—to take out the really good things which don’t tell on the
audience, and put in cheaper things that do. All this degrades him, of
course, but it improves the lecture for general delivery. A thoroughly
popular lecture ought to have nothing in it which five hundred people
cannot all take in a flash, just as it is uttered.
—No, indeed,—I should be very sorry to say anything disrespectful of
audiences. I have been kindly treated by a great many, and may
occasionally face one hereafter. But I tell you the average intellect of five
hundred persons, taken as they come, is not very high. It may be sound and
safe, so far as it goes, but it is not very rapid or profound. A lecture ought
to be something which all can understand, about something which interests
everybody. I think, that, if any experienced lecturer gives you a different
account from this, it will probably be one of those eloquent or forcible
speakers who hold an audience by the charm of their manner, whatever they
talk about,—even when they don’t talk very well.

But an average, which was what I meant to speak about, is one of the most
extraordinary subjects of observation and study. It is awful in its
uniformity, in its automatic necessity of action. Two communities of ants or
bees are exactly alike in all their actions, so far as we can see. Two lyceum
assemblies, of five hundred each, are so nearly alike, that they are
absolutely undistinguishable in many cases by any definite mark, and there
is nothing but the place and time by which one can tell the “remarkably
intelligent audience” of a town in New York or Ohio from one in any New
England town of similar size. Of course, if any principle of selection has
come in, as in those special associations of young men which are common
in cities, it deranges the uniformity of the assemblage. But let there be no
such interfering circumstances, and one knows pretty well even the look the
audience will have, before he goes in. Front seats: a few old folk,—shiny-
headed,—slant up best ear towards the speaker,—drop off asleep after a
while, when the air begins to get a little narcotic with carbonic acid. Bright
women’s faces, young and middle-aged, a little behind these, but toward the
front—(pick out the best, and lecture mainly to that.) Here and there a
countenance, sharp and scholarlike, and a dozen pretty female ones
sprinkled about. An indefinite number of pairs of young people,—happy,
but not always very attentive. Boys, in the background, more or less quiet.
Dull faces here, there,—in how many places! I don’t say dull people, but
faces without a ray of sympathy or a movement of expression. They are
what kill the lecturer. These negative faces with their vacuous eyes and
stony lineaments pump and suck the warm soul out of him;—that is the
chief reason why lecturers grow so pale before the season is over. They
render latent any amount of vital caloric; they act on our minds as those
cold-blooded creatures I was talking about act on our hearts.
Out of all these inevitable elements the audience is generated,—a great
compound vertebrate, as much like fifty others you have seen as any two
mammals of the same species are like each other. Each audience laughs,
and each cries, in just the same places of your lecture; that is, if you make
one laugh or cry, you make all. Even those little indescribable movements
which a lecturer takes cognizance of, just as a driver notices his horse’s
cocking his ears, are sure to come in exactly the same place of your lecture
always. I declare to you, that as the monk said about the picture in the
convent,—that he sometimes thought the living tenants were the shadows,

and the painted figures the realities,—I have sometimes felt as if I were a
wandering spirit, and this great unchanging multivertebrate which I faced
night after night was one ever-listening animal, which writhed along after
me wherever I fled, and coiled at my feet every evening, turning up to me
the same sleepless eyes which I thought I had closed with my last drowsy
incantation!
—Oh, yes! A thousand kindly and courteous acts,—a thousand faces that
melted individually out of my recollection as the April snow melts, but only
to steal away and find the beds of flowers whose roots are memory, but
which blossom in poetry and dreams. I am not ungrateful, nor unconscious
of all the good feeling and intelligence everywhere to be met with through
the vast parish to which the lecturer ministers. But when I set forth, leading
a string of my mind’s daughters to market, as the country-folk fetch in their
strings of horses—Pardon me, that was a coarse fellow who sneered at the
sympathy wasted on an unhappy lecturer, as if, because he was decently
paid for his services, he had therefore sold his sensibilities.—Family men
get dreadfully homesick. In the remote and bleak village the heart returns
to the red blaze of the logs in one’s fireplace at home.

“There are his young barbarians all at play,”—

if he owns any youthful savages.—No, the world has a million roosts for a
man, but only one nest.
—It is a fine thing to be an oracle to which an appeal is always made in all
discussions. The men of facts wait their turn in grim silence, with that
slight tension about the nostrils which the consciousness of carrying a
“settler” in the form of a fact or a revolver gives the individual thus armed.
When a person is really full of information, and does not abuse it to crush
conversation, his part is to that of the real talkers what the instrumental
accompaniment is in a trio or quartette of vocalists.
—What do I mean by the real talkers?—Why, the people with fresh ideas,
of course, and plenty of good warm words to dress them in. Facts always
yield the place of honor, in conversation, to thoughts about facts; but if a
false note is uttered, down comes the finger on the key and the man of facts

asserts his true dignity. I have known three of these men of facts, at least,
who were always formidable,—and one of them was tyrannical.
—Yes, a man sometimes makes a grand appearance on a particular
occasion; but these men knew something about almost everything, and
never made mistakes.—He? Veneers in first-rate style. The mahogany
scales off now and then in spots, and then you see the cheap light stuff—I
found—very fine in conversational information, the other day when we
were in company. The talk ran upon mountains. He was wonderfully well
acquainted with the leading facts about the Andes, the Apennines, and the
Appalachians; he had nothing in particular to say about Ararat, Ben Nevis,
and various other mountains that were mentioned. By and by some
Revolutionary anecdote came up, and he showed singular familiarity with
the lives of the Adamses, and gave many details relating to Major André. A
point of Natural History being suggested, he gave an excellent account of
the air-bladder of fishes. He was very full upon the subject of agriculture,
but retired from the conversation when horticulture was introduced in the
discussion. So he seemed well acquainted with the geology of anthracite,
but did not pretend to know anything of other kinds of coal. There was
something so odd about the extent and limitations of his knowledge, that I
suspected all at once what might be the meaning of it, and waited till I got
an opportunity.—Have you seen the “New American Cyclopædia?” said I.
—I have, he replied; I received an early copy.—How far does it go?—He
turned red, and answered,—To Araguay.—Oh, said I to myself,—not quite
so far as Ararat;—that is the reason he knew nothing about it; but he must
have read all the rest straight through, and, if he can remember what is in
this volume until he has read all those that are to come, he will know more
than I ever thought he would.
Since I had this experience, I hear that somebody else has related a similar
story. I didn’t borrow it, for all that.—I made a comparison at table some
time since, which has often been quoted and received many compliments.
It was that of the mind of a bigot to the pupil of the eye; the more light you
pour on it, the more it contracts. The simile is a very obvious, and, I
suppose I may now say, a happy one; for it has just been shown me that it
occurs in a Preface to certain Political Poems of Thomas Moore’s published
long before my remark was repeated. When a person of fair character for
literary honesty uses an image, such as another has employed before him,

the presumption is, that he has struck upon it independently, or
unconsciously recalled it, supposing it his own.
It is impossible to tell, in a great many cases, whether a comparison which
suddenly suggests itself is a new conception or a recollection. I told you the
other day that I never wrote a line of verse that seemed to me comparatively
good, but it appeared old at once, and often as if it had been borrowed. But
I confess I never suspected the above comparison of being old, except from
the fact of its obviousness. It is proper, however, that I proceed by a formal
instrument to relinquish all claim to any property in an idea given to the
world at about the time when I had just joined the class in which Master
Thomas Moore was then a somewhat advanced scholar.
I, therefore, in full possession of my native honesty, but knowing the
liability of all men to be elected to public office, and for that reason feeling
uncertain how soon I may be in danger of losing it, do hereby renounce all
claim to being considered the first person who gave utterance to a certain
simile or comparison referred to in the accompanying documents, and
relating to the pupil of the eye on the one part and the mind of the bigot on
the other. I hereby relinquish all glory and profit, and especially all claims
to letters from autograph collectors, founded upon my supposed property in
the above comparison,—knowing well, that, according to the laws of
literature, they who speak first hold the fee of the thing said. I do also agree
that all Editors of Cyclopedias and Biographical Dictionaries, all Publishers
of Reviews and Papers, and all Critics writing therein, shall be at liberty to
retract or qualify any opinion predicated on the supposition that I was the
sole and undisputed author of the above comparison. But, inasmuch as I do
affirm that the comparison aforesaid was uttered by me in the firm belief
that it was new and wholly my own, and as I have good reason to think that
I had never seen or heard it when first expressed by me, and as it is well
known that different persons may independently utter the same idea,—as is
evinced by that familiar line from Donatus,—

“Pereant illi qui ante nos nostra dixerunt,”—

now, therefore, I do request by this instrument that all well-disposed
persons will abstain from asserting or implying that I am open to any
accusation whatsoever touching the said comparison, and, if they have so

asserted or implied, that they will have the manliness forthwith to retract the
same assertion or insinuation.

I think few persons have a greater disgust for plagiarism than myself. If I
had even suspected that the idea in question was borrowed, I should have
disclaimed originality, or mentioned the coincidence, as I once did in a case
where I had happened to hit on an idea of Swift’s.—But what shall I do
about these verses I was going to read you? I am afraid that half mankind
would accuse me of stealing their thoughts, if I printed them. I am
convinced that several of you, especially if you are getting a little on in life,
will recognize some of these sentiments as having passed through your
consciousness at some time. I can’t help it,—it is too late now. The verses
are written, and you must have them. Listen, then, and you shall hear

WHAT WE ALL THINK.
That age was older once than now,
In spite of locks untimely shed,
Or silvered on the youthful brow;
That babes make love and children wed.
That sunshine had a heavenly glow,
Which faded with those “good old days,”
When winters came with deeper snow,
And autumns with a softer haze.
That—mother, sister, wife, or child—
The “best of women” each has known.
Were schoolboys ever half so wild?
How young the grandpapas have grown,
That but for this our souls were free,
And but for that our lives were blest;
That in some season yet to be
Our cares will leave us time to rest.
Whene’er we groan with ache or pain,
Some common ailment of the race,—

Though doctors think the matter plain,—
That ours is “a peculiar case.”
That when like babes with fingers burned
We count one bitter maxim more,
Our lesson all the world has learned,
And men are wiser than before.
That when we sob o’er fancied woes,
The angels hovering overhead
Count every pitying drop that flows
And love us for the tears we shed.
That when we stand with tearless eye
And turn the beggar from our door,
They still approve us when we sigh,
“Ah, had I but one thousand more!”
That weakness smoothed the path of sin,
In half the slips our youth has known;
And whatsoe’er its blame has been,
That Mercy flowers on faults outgrown.
Though temples crowd the crumbled brink
O’erhanging truth’s eternal flow,
Their tablets bold with what we think,
Their echoes dumb to what we know;
That one unquestioned text we read,
All doubt beyond, all fear above,
Nor crackling pile nor cursing creed
Can burn or blot it: God is Love!

CHAPTER VII

[This particular record is noteworthy principally for containing a paper by
my friend, the Professor, with a poem or two annexed or intercalated. I
would suggest to young persons that they should pass over it for the
present, and read, instead of it, that story about the young man who was in
love with the young lady, and in great trouble for something like nine pages,
but happily married on the tenth page or thereabouts, which, I take it for
granted, will be contained in the periodical where this is found, unless it
differ from all other publications of the kind. Perhaps, if such young people
will lay the number aside, and take it up ten years, or a little more, from the
present time, they may find something in it for their advantage. They can’t
possibly understand it all now.]
My friend, the Professor, began talking with me one day in a dreary sort of
way. I couldn’t get at the difficulty for a good while, but at last it turned out
that somebody had been calling him an old man.—He didn’t mind his
students calling him the old man, he said. That was a technical expression,
and he thought that he remembered hearing it applied to himself when he
was about twenty-five. It may be considered as a familiar and sometimes
endearing appellation. An Irishwoman calls her husband “the old man,”
and he returns the caressing expression by speaking of her as “the old
woman.” But now, said he, just suppose a case like one of these. A young
stranger is overheard talking of you as a very nice old gentleman. A
friendly and genial critic speaks of your green old age as illustrating the
truth of some axiom you had uttered with reference to that period of life.
What I call an old man is a person with a smooth, shining crown and a
fringe of scattered white hairs, seen in the streets on sunshiny days,
stooping as he walks, bearing a cane, moving cautiously and slowly; telling
old stories, smiling at present follies, living in a narrow world of dry habits;
one that remains waking when others have dropped asleep, and keeps a
little night-lamp-flame of life burning year after year, if the lamp is not

upset, and there is only a careful hand held round it to prevent the puffs of
wind from blowing the flame out. That’s what I call an old man.
Now, said the Professor, you don’t mean to tell me that I have got to that
yet? Why, bless you, I am several years short of the time when—[I knew
what was coming, and could hardly keep from laughing; twenty years ago
he used to quote it as one of those absurd speeches men of genius will
make, and now he is going to argue from it]—several years short of the
time when Balzac says that men are—most—you know—dangerous to—
the hearts of—in short, most to be dreaded by duennas that have charge of
susceptible females.—What age is that? said I, statistically.—Fifty-two
years, answered the Professor.—Balzac ought to know, said I, if it is true
that Goethe said of him that each of his stories must have been dug out of a
woman’s heart. But fifty-two is a high figure.
Stand in the light of the window, Professor, said I.—The Professor took up
the desired position.—You have white hairs, I said.—Had ’em any time
these twenty years, said the Professor.—And the crow’s-foot,—pes
anserinus, rather.—The Professor smiled, as I wanted him to, and the folds
radiated like the ridges of a half-opened fan, from the outer corner of the
eyes to the temples.—And the calipers said I.—What are the calipers? he
asked, curiously.—Why, the parenthesis, said I.—Parenthesis? said the
Professor; what’s that?—Why, look in the glass when you are disposed to
laugh, and see if your mouth isn’t framed in a couple of crescent lines,—so,
my boy ( ).—It’s all nonsense, said the Professor; just look at my biceps;—
and he began pulling off his coat to show me his arm. Be careful, said I;
you can’t bear exposure to the air, at your time of life, as you could once.—
I will box with you, said the Professor, row with you, walk with you, ride
with you, swim with you, or sit at table with you, for fifty dollars a side.—
Pluck survives stamina, I answered.
The Professor went off a little out of humor. A few weeks afterwards he
came in, looking very good-natured, and brought me a paper, which I have
here, and from which I shall read you some portions, if you don’t object.
He had been thinking the matter over, he said,—had read Cicero “De
Senectute,” and made up his mind to meet old age half way. These were
some of his reflections that he had written down; so here you have.

THE PROFESSOR’S PAPER.
There is no doubt when old age begins. The human body is a furnace which
keeps in blast three-score years and ten, more or less. It burns about three
hundred pounds of carbon a year, (besides other fuel,) when in fair working
order, according to a great chemist’s estimate. When the fire slackens, life
declines; when it goes out, we are dead.
It has been shown by some noted French experimenters, that the amount of
combustion increases up to about the thirtieth year, remains stationary to
about forty-five, and then diminishes. This last is the point where old age
starts from. The great fact of physical life is the perpetual commerce with
the elements, and the fire is the measure of it.
About this time of life, if food is plenty where you live,—for that, you
know, regulates matrimony,—you may be expecting to find yourself a
grandfather some fine morning; a kind of domestic felicity that gives one a
cool shiver of delight to think of, as among the not remotely possible
events.
I don’t mind much those slipshod lines Dr. Johnson wrote to Thrale, telling
her about life’s declining from thirty-five; the furnace is in full blast for ten
years longer, as I have said. The Romans came very near the mark; their
age of enlistment reached from seventeen to forty-six years.
What is the use of fighting against the seasons, or the tides, or the
movements of the planetary bodies, or this ebb in the wave of life that flows
through us? We are old fellows from the moment the fire begins to go out.
Let us always behave like gentlemen when we are introduced to new
acquaintance.
Incipit Allegoria Senectutis.
Old Age, this is Mr. Professor; Mr. Professor, this is Old Age.
Old Age.—Mr. Professor, I hope to see you well. I have known you for
some time, though I think you did not know me. Shall we walk down the
street together?

Professor (drawing back a little).—We can talk more quietly, perhaps, in
my study. Will you tell me how it is you seem to be acquainted with
everybody you are introduced to, though he evidently considers you an
entire stranger?
Old Age.—I make it a rule never to force myself upon a person’s
recognition until I have known him at least five years.
Professor.—Do you mean to say that you have known me so long as that?
Old Age. I do. I left my card on you longer ago than that, but I am afraid
you never read it; yet I see you have it with you.
Professor.—Where?
Old Age.—There, between your eyebrows,—three straight lines running up
and down; all the probate courts know that token,—“Old Age, his mark.”
Put your forefinger on the inner end of one eyebrow, and your middle finger
on the inner end of the other eyebrow; now separate the fingers, and you
will smooth out my sign-manual; that’s the way you used to look before I
left my card on you.
Professor.—What message do people generally send back when you first
call on them?
Old Age.—Not at home. Then I leave a card and go. Next year I call; get
the same answer; leave another card. So for five or six,—sometimes ten
years or more. At last, if they don’t let me in, I break in through the front
door or the windows.
We talked together in this way some time. Then Old Age said again,—
Come, let us walk down the street together,—and offered me a cane, an
eyeglass, a tippet, and a pair of over-shoes.—No, much obliged to you, said
I. I don’t want those things, and I had a little rather talk with you here,
privately, in my study. So I dressed myself up in a jaunty way and walked
out alone;—got a fall, caught a cold, was laid up with a lumbago, and had
time to think over this whole matter.
Explicit Allegoria Senectutis.

We have settled when old age begins. Like all Nature’s processes, it is
gentle and gradual in its approaches, strewed with illusions, and all its little
griefs soothed by natural sedatives. But the iron hand is not less irresistible
because it wears the velvet glove. The button-wood throws off its bark in
large flakes, which one may find lying at its foot, pushed out, and at last
pushed off, by that tranquil movement from beneath, which is too slow to
be seen, but too powerful to be arrested. One finds them always, but one
rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from us,—scales off, sapless
and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and immature fresh growth of old age.
Looked at collectively, the changes of old age appear as a series of personal
insults and indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas
Browne has called “the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature.”

My lady’s cheek can boast no more
The cranberry white and pink it wore;
And where her shining locks divide,
The parting line is all too wide—

No, no,—this will never do. Talk about men, if you will, but spare the poor
women.
We have a brief description of seven stages of life by a remarkably good
observer. It is very presumptuous to attempt to add to it, yet I have been
struck with the fact that life admits of a natural analysis into no less than
fifteen distinct periods. Taking the five primary divisions, infancy,
childhood, youth, manhood, old age, each of these has its own three periods
of immaturity, complete development, and decline. I recognize on old baby
at once,—with its “pipe and mug,” (a stick of candy and a porringer,)—so
does everybody; and an old child shedding its milk-teeth is only a little
prototype of the old man shedding his permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts
is only the childhood, as it were, of old age; the graybeard youngster must
be weaned from his late suppers now. So you will see that you have to
make fifteen stages at any rate, and that it would not be hard to make
twenty-five; five primary, each with five secondary divisions.
The infancy and childhood of commencing old age have the same
ingenuous simplicity and delightful unconsciousness about them as the first
stage of the earlier periods of life shows. The great delusion of mankind is

in supposing that to be individual and exceptional which is universal and
according to law. A person is always startled when he hears himself
seriously called an old man for the first time.
Nature gets us out of youth into manhood, as sailors are hurried on board of
vessels,—in a state of intoxication. We are hustled into maturity reeling
with our passions and imaginations, and we have drifted far away from port
before we awake out of our illusions. But to carry us out of maturity into
old age, without our knowing where we are going, she drugs us with strong
opiates, and so we stagger along with wide open eyes that see nothing until
snow enough has fallen on our heads to rouse our comatose brains out of
their stupid trances.
There is one mark of age that strikes me more than any of the physical ones;
—I mean the formation of Habits. An old man who shrinks into himself
falls into ways that become as positive and as much beyond the reach of
outside influences as if they were governed by clock-work. The animal
functions, as the physiologists call them, in distinction from the organic,
tend, in the process of deterioration to which age and neglect united
gradually lead them, to assume the periodical or rhythmical type of
movement. Every man’s heart (this organ belongs, you know, to the
organic system) has a regular mode of action; but I know a great many men
whose brains, and all their voluntary existence flowing from their brains,
have a systole and diastole as regular as that of the heart itself. Habit is the
approximation of the animal system to the organic. It is a confession of
failure in the highest function of being, which involves a perpetual self-
determination, in full view of all existing circumstances. But habit, you
see, is an action in present circumstances from past motives. It is
substituting a vis a tergo for the evolution of living force.
When a man, instead of burning up three hundred pounds of carbon a year,
has got down to two hundred and fifty, it is plain enough he must
economize force somewhere. Now habit is a labor-saving invention which
enables a man to get along with less fuel,—that is all; for fuel is force, you
know, just as much in the page I am writing for you as in the locomotive or
the legs that carry it to you. Carbon is the same thing, whether you call it
wood, or coal, or bread and cheese. A reverend gentleman demurred to this
statement,—as if, because combustion is asserted to be the sine qua non of

thought, therefore thought is alleged to be a purely chemical process. Facts
of chemistry are one thing, I told him, and facts of consciousness another.
It can be proved to him, by a very simple analysis of some of his spare
elements, that every Sunday, when he does his duty faithfully, he uses up
more phosphorus out of his brain and nerves than on ordinary days. But
then he had his choice whether to do his duty, or to neglect it, and save his
phosphorus and other combustibles.
It follows from all this that the formation of habits ought naturally to be, as
it is, the special characteristic of age. As for the muscular powers, they pass
their maximum long before the time when the true decline of life begins, if
we may judge by the experience of the ring. A man is “stale,” I think, in
their language, soon after thirty,—often, no doubt, much earlier, as
gentlemen of the pugilistic profession are exceedingly apt to keep their vital
fire burning with the blower up.
—So far without Tully. But in the mean time I have been reading the
treatise, “De Senectute.” It is not long, but a leisurely performance. The
old gentleman was sixty-three years of age when he addressed it to his
friend T. Pomponius Atticus, Eq., a person of distinction, some two or three
years older. We read it when we are schoolboys, forget all about it for thirty
years, and then take it up again by a natural instinct,—provided always that
we read Latin as we drink water, without stopping to taste it, as all of us
who ever learned it at school or college ought to do.
Cato is the chief speaker in the dialogue. A good deal of it is what would be
called in vulgar phrase “slow.” It unpacks and unfolds incidental
illustrations which a modern writer would look at the back of, and toss each
to its pigeon-hole. I think ancient classics and ancient people are alike in
the tendency to this kind of expansion.
An old doctor came to me once (this is literal fact) with some contrivance
or other for people with broken kneepans. As the patient would be confined
for a good while, he might find it dull work to sit with his hands in his lap.
Reading, the ingenious inventor suggested, would be an agreeable mode of
passing the time. He mentioned, in his written account of his contrivance,
various works that might amuse the weary hour. I remember only three,—
Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Watts on the Mind.

It is not generally understood that Cicero’s essay was delivered as a lyceum
lecture, (concio popularis,) at the Temple of Mercury. The journals
(papyri) of the day (“Tempora Quotidiana,”—“Tribuinus
Quirinalis,”—“Præco Romanus,” and the rest) gave abstracts of it, one of
which I have translated and modernized, as being a substitute for the
analysis I intended to make.
IV. Kal. Mart. . . . .
The lecture at the Temple of Mercury, last evening, was well attended by
the élite of our great city. Two hundred thousand sestertia were thought to
have been represented in the house. The doors were besieged by a mob of
shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,) who were at length quieted after two or
three had been somewhat roughly handled (gladio jugulati). The speaker
was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,—the subject Old Age. Mr. T. has a
lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal
feature, from which his nickname of chick-pea (Cicero) is said by some to
be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer
garment (toga) was of cheap stuff and somewhat worn, and that his general
style and appearance of dress and manner (habitus, vestitusque) were
somewhat provincial.
The lecture consisted of an imaginary dialogue between Cato and Lælius.
We found the first portion rather heavy, and retired a few moments for
refreshment (pocula quædam vini).—All want to reach old age, says Cato,
and grumble when they get it; therefore they are donkeys.—The lecturer
will allow us to say that he is the donkey; we know we shall grumble at old
age, but we want to live through youth and manhood, in spite of the
troubles we shall groan over.—There was considerable prosing as to what
old age can do and can’t.—True, but not new. Certainly, old folks can’t
jump,—break the necks of their thigh-bones, (femorum cervices,) if they do;
can’t crack nuts with their teeth; can’t climb a greased pole (malum
inunctum scandere non possunt); but they can tell old stories and give you
good advice; if they know what you have made up your mind to do when
you ask them.—All this is well enough, but won’t set the Tiber on fire
(Tiberim accendere nequaquam potest.)

There were some clever things enough, (dicta hand inepta,) a few of which
are worth reporting.—Old people are accused of being forgetful; but they
never forget where they have put their money.—Nobody is so old he
doesn’t think he can live a year.—The lecturer quoted an ancient maxim,—
Grow old early, if you would be old long,—but disputed it.—Authority, he
thought, was the chief privilege of age.—It is not great to have money, but
fine to govern those that have it.—Old age begins at forty-six years,
according to the common opinion.—It is not every kind of old age or of
wine that grows sour with time.—Some excellent remarks were made on
immortality, but mainly borrowed from and credited to Plato.—Several
pleasing anecdotes were told.—Old Milo, champion of the heavy weights in
his day, looked at his arms and whimpered, “They are dead.” Not so dead
as you, you old fool,—says Cato;—you never were good for anything but
for your shoulders and flanks.—Pisistratus asked Solon what made him
dare to be so obstinate. Old age, said Solon.
The lecture was on the whole acceptable, and a credit to our culture and
civilization.—The reporter goes on to state that there will be no lecture next
week, on account of the expected combat between the bear and the
barbarian. Betting (sponsio) two to one (duo ad unum) on the bear.

—After all, the most encouraging things I find in the treatise, “De
Senectute,” are the stories of men who have found new occupations when
growing old, or kept up their common pursuits in the extreme period of
life. Cato learned Greek when he was old, and speaks of wishing to learn
the fiddle, or some such instrument, (fidibus,) after the example of
Socrates. Solon learned something new, every day, in his old age, as he
gloried to proclaim. Cyrus pointed out with pride and pleasure the trees he
had planted with his own hand. [I remember a pillar on the Duke of
Northumberland’s estate at Alnwick, with an inscription in similar words, if
not the same. That, like other country pleasures, never wears out. None is
too rich, none too poor, none too young, none too old to enjoy it.] There is
a New England story I have heard more to the point, however, than any of
Cicero’s. A young farmer was urged to set out some apple-trees.—No, said
he, they are too long growing, and I don’t want to plant for other people.
The young farmer’s father was spoken to about it, but he, with better

reason, alleged that apple-trees were slow and life was fleeting. At last
some one mentioned it to the old grandfather of the young farmer. He had
nothing else to do,—so he stuck in some trees. He lived long enough to
drink barrels of cider made from the apples that grew on those trees.
As for myself, after visiting a friend lately,—[Do remember all the time that
this is the Professor’s paper.]—I satisfied myself that I had better concede
the fact that—my contemporaries are not so young as they have been,—and
that,—awkward as it is,—science and history agree in telling me that I can
claim the immunities and must own the humiliations of the early stage of
senility. Ah! but we have all gone down the hill together. The dandies of
my time have split their waistbands and taken to high-low shoes. The
beauties of my recollections—where are they? They have run the gantlet of
the years as well as I. First the years pelted them with red roses till their
cheeks were all on fire. By and by they began throwing white roses, and
that morning flush passed away. At last one of the years threw a snow-ball,
and after that no year let the poor girls pass without throwing snow-balls.
And then came rougher missiles,—ice and stones; and from time to time an
arrow whistled, and down went one of the poor girls. So there are but few
left; and we don’t call those few girls, but—
Ah, me! Here am I groaning just as the old Greek sighed Aï, aï! and the old
Roman, Eheu! I have no doubt we should die of shame and grief at the
indignities offered us by age, if it were not that we see so many others as
badly or worse off than ourselves. We always compare ourselves with our
contemporaries.
[I was interrupted in my reading just here. Before I began at the next
breakfast, I read them these verses;—I hope you will like them, and get a
useful lesson from them.]

THE LAST BLOSSOM.
Though young no more, we still would dream
Of beauty’s dear deluding wiles;
The leagues of life to graybeards seem
Shorter than boyhood’s lingering miles.

Who knows a woman’s wild caprice?
It played with Goethe’s silvered hair,
And many a Holy Father’s “niece”
Has softly smoothed the papal chair.
When sixty bids us sigh in vain
To melt the heart of sweet sixteen,
We think upon those ladies twain
Who loved so well the tough old Dean.
We see the Patriarch’s wintry face,
The maid of Egypt’s dusky glow,
And dream that Youth and Age embrace,
As April violets fill with snow.
Tranced in her Lord’s Olympian smile
His lotus-loving Memphian lies,—
The musky daughter of the Nile
With plaited hair and almond eyes.
Might we but share one wild caress
Ere life’s autumnal blossoms fall,
And Earth’s brown, clinging lips impress
The long cold kiss that waits us all!
My bosom heaves, remembering yet
The morning of that blissful day
When Rose, the flower of spring, I met,
And gave my raptured soul away.
Flung from her eyes of purest blue,
A lasso, with its leaping chain
Light as a loop of larkspurs, flew
O’er sense and spirit, heart and brain.
Thou com’st to cheer my waning age,
Sweet vision, waited for so long!
Dove that would seek the poet’s cage
Lured by the magic breath of song!

She blushes! Ah, reluctant maid,
Love’s drapeau rouge the truth has told!
O’er girlhood’s yielding barricade
Floats the great Leveller’s crimson fold!
Come to my arms!—love heeds not years
No frost the bud of passion knows.—
Ha! what is this my frenzy hears?
A voice behind me uttered,—Rose!
Sweet was her smile,—but not for me;
Alas, when woman looks too kind,
Just turn your foolish head and see,—
Some youth is walking close behind!

As to giving up because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that it is
about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such thing. I grant you
that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people of my standing
really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, la lèvre inférieure déjà pendante,
with what little life they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium.
But as the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and
everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, I am going to say, for
the encouragement of such as need it, how I treat the malady in my own
case.
First. As I feel, that, when I have anything to do, there is less time for it
than when I was younger, I find that I give my attention more thoroughly,
and use my time more economically than ever before; so that I can learn
anything twice as easily as in my earlier days. I am not, therefore, afraid to
attack a new study. I took up a difficult language a very few years ago with
good success, and think of mathematics and metaphysics by-and-by.
Secondly. I have opened my eyes to a good many neglected privileges and
pleasures within my reach, and requiring only a little courage to enjoy
them. You may well suppose it pleased me to find that old Cato was
thinking of learning to play the fiddle, when I had deliberately taken it up in
my old age, and satisfied myself that I could get much comfort, if not much
music, out of it.

Thirdly. I have found that some of those active exercises, which are
commonly thought to belong to young folks only, may be enjoyed at a
much later period.
A young friend has lately written an admirable article in one of the journals,
entitled, “Saints and their Bodies.” Approving of his general doctrines, and
grateful for his records of personal experience, I cannot refuse to add my
own experimental confirmation of his eulogy of one particular form of
active exercise and amusement, namely, boating. For the past nine years, I
have rowed about, during a good part of the summer, on fresh or salt water.
My present fleet on the river Charles consists of three row-boats. 1. A small
flat-bottomed skiff of the shape of a flat-iron, kept mainly to lend to boys.
2. A fancy “dory” for two pairs of sculls, in which I sometimes go out with
my young folks. 3. My own particular water-sulky, a “skeleton” or “shell”
race-boat, twenty-two feet long, with huge outriggers, which boat I pull
with ten-foot sculls,—alone, of course, as it holds but one, and tips him out,
if he doesn’t mind what he is about. In this I glide around the Back Bay,
down the stream, up the Charles to Cambridge and Watertown, up the
Mystic, round the wharves, in the wake of steamboats which leave a swell
after them delightful to rock upon; I linger under the bridges,—those
“caterpillar bridges,” as my brother professor so happily called them; rub
against the black sides of old wood-schooners; cool down under the
overhanging stern of some tall Indiaman; stretch across to the Navy-Yard,
where the sentinel warns me off from the Ohio,—just as if I should hurt her
by lying in her shadow; then strike out into the harbor, where the water gets
clear and the air smells of the ocean,—till all at once I remember, that, if a
west wind blows up of a sudden, I shall drift along past the islands, out of
sight of the dear old State-house,—plate, tumbler, knife and fork all waiting
at home, but no chair drawn up at the table,—all the dear people waiting,
waiting, waiting, while the boat is sliding, sliding, sliding into the great
desert, where there is no tree and no fountain. As I don’t want my wreck to
be washed up on one of the beaches in company with devil’s-aprons,
bladder-weeds, dead horse-shoes, and bleached crab-shells, I turn about and
flap my long narrow wings for home. When the tide is running out swiftly,
I have a splendid fight to get through the bridges, but always make it a rule
to beat,—though I have been jammed up into pretty tight places at times,
and was caught once between a vessel swinging round and the pier, until

our bones (the boat’s, that is) cracked as if we had been in the jaws of
Behemoth. Then back to my moorings at the foot of the Common, off with
the rowing-dress, dash under the green translucent wave, return to the garb
of civilization, walk through my Garden, take a look at my elms on the
Common, and, reaching my habitat, in consideration of my advanced period
of life, indulge in the Elysian abandonment of a huge recumbent chair.
When I have established a pair of well-pronounced feathering-calluses on
my thumbs, when I am in training so that I can do my fifteen miles at a
stretch without coming to grief in any way, when I can perform my mile in
eight minutes or a little less, then I feel as if I had old Time’s head in
chancery, and could give it to him at my leisure.
I do not deny the attraction of walking. I have bored this ancient city
through and through in my daily travels, until I know it as an old inhabitant
of a Cheshire knows his cheese. Why, it was I who, in the course of these
rambles, discovered that remarkable avenue called Myrtle Street, stretching
in one long line from east of the Reservoir to a precipitous and rudely paved
cliff which looks down on the grim abode of Science, and beyond it to the
far hills; a promenade so delicious in its repose, so cheerfully varied with
glimpses down the northern slope into busy Cambridge Street with its iron
river of the horse-railroad, and wheeled barges gliding back and forward
over it,—so delightfully closing at its western extremity in sunny courts and
passages where I know peace, and beauty, and virtue, and serene old age
must be perpetual tenants,—so alluring to all who desire to take their daily
stroll, in the words of Dr. Watts,—

“Alike unknowing and unknown,”—

that nothing but a sense of duty would have prompted me to reveal the
secret of its existence. I concede, therefore, that walking is an
immeasurably fine invention, of which old age ought constantly to avail
itself.
Saddle-leather is in some respects even preferable to sole-leather. The
principal objection to it is of a financial character. But you may be sure that
Bacon and Sydenham did not recommend it for nothing. One’s hepar, or, in
vulgar language, liver,—a ponderous organ, weighing some three or four

pounds,—goes up and down like the dasher of a churn in the midst of the
other vital arrangements, at every step of a trotting horse. The brains also
are shaken up like coppers in a money-box. Riding is good, for those that
are born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as much
and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they hear that steady
grinding sound as the horse’s jaws triturate with calm lateral movement the
bank-bills and promises to pay upon which it is notorious that the profligate
animal in question feeds day and night.
Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this empirical
way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of them in a more
scientific form.
The pleasure of exercise is due first to a purely physical impression, and
secondly to a sense of power in action. The first source of pleasure varies
of course with our condition and the state of the surrounding circumstances;
the second with the amount and kind of power, and the extent and kind of
action. In all forms of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously
in action,—the will, the muscles, and the intellect. Each of these
predominates in different kinds of exercise. In walking, the will and
muscles are so accustomed to work together and perform their task with so
little expenditure of force, that the intellect is left comparatively free. The
mental pleasure in walking, as such, is in the sense of power over all our
moving machinery. But in riding, I have the additional pleasure of
governing another will, and my muscles extend to the tips of the animal’s
ears and to his four hoofs, instead of stopping at my hands and feet. Now in
this extension of my volition and my physical frame into another animal,
my tyrannical instincts and my desire for heroic strength are at once
gratified. When the horse ceases to have a will of his own and his muscles
require no special attention on your part, then you may live on horseback as
Wesley did, and write sermons or take naps, as you like. But you will
observe, that, in riding on horseback, you always have a feeling, that, after
all, it is not you that do the work, but the animal, and this prevents the
satisfaction from being complete.
Now let us look at the conditions of rowing. I won’t suppose you to be
disgracing yourself in one of those miserable tubs, tugging in which is to
rowing the true boat what riding a cow is to bestriding an Arab. You know

the Esquimaux kayak, (if that is the name of it,) don’t you? Look at that
model of one over my door. Sharp, rather?—On the contrary, it is a lubber
to the one you and I must have; a Dutch fish-wife to Psyche, contrasted
with what I will tell you about.—Our boat, then, is something of the shape
of a pickerel, as you look down upon his back, he lying in the sunshine just
where the sharp edge of the water cuts in among the lily-pads. It is a kind
of a giant pod, as one may say,—tight everywhere, except in a little place in
the middle, where you sit. Its length is from seven to ten yards, and as it is
only from sixteen to thirty inches wide in its widest part, you understand
why you want those “outriggers,” or projecting iron frames with the
rowlocks in which the oars play. My rowlocks are five feet apart; double
the greatest width of the boat.
Here you are, then, afloat with a body a rod and a half long, with arms, or
wings, as you may choose to call them, stretching more than twenty feet
from tip to tip; every volition of yours extending as perfectly into them as if
your spinal cord ran down the centre strip of your boat, and the nerves of
your arms tingled as far as the broad blades of your oars,—oars of spruce,
balanced, leathered, and ringed under your own special direction. This, in
sober earnest, is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or
perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so
you drift with the tide when you will, in the most luxurious form of
locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit. But if your blood wants
rousing, turn round that stake in the river, which you see a mile from here;
and when you come in in sixteen minutes, (if you do, for we are old boys,
and not champion scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a
little warmed up or not! You can row easily and gently all day, and you can
row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just as you like. It
has been long agreed that there is no way in which a man can accomplish so
much labor with his muscles as in rowing. It is in the boat, then, that man
finds the largest extension of his volitional and muscular existence; and yet
he may tax both of them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that
he shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks he has
made in company and put them in form for the public, as well as in his
easy-chair.
I dare not publicly name the rare joys, the infinite delights, that intoxicate
me on some sweet June morning, when the river and bay are smooth as a

sheet of beryl-green silk, and I run along ripping it up with my knife-edged
shell of a boat, the rent closing after me like those wounds of angels which
Milton tells of, but the seam still shining for many a long rood behind me.
To lie still over the Flats, where the waters are shallow, and see the crabs
crawling and the sculpins gliding busily and silently beneath the boat,—to
rustle in through the long harsh grass that leads up some tranquil creek,—to
take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges,
and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy
growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark
muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every
wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the
ocean,—lying there moored unseen, in loneliness so profound that the
columns of Tadmor in the Desert could not seem more remote from life,—
the cool breeze on one’s forehead, the stream whispering against the half-
sunken pillars,—why should I tell of these things, that I should live to see
my beloved haunts invaded and the waves blackened with boats as with a
swarm of water-beetles? What a city of idiots we must be not to have
covered this glorious bay with gondolas and wherries, as we have just
learned to cover the ice in winter with skaters!
I am satisfied that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled,
paste-complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic cities never
before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage. Of the females that are
the mates of these males I do not here speak. I preached my sermon from
the lay-pulpit on this matter a good while ago. Of course, if you heard it,
you know my belief is that the total climatic influences here are getting up a
number of new patterns of humanity, some of which are not an
improvement on the old model. Clipper-built, sharp in the bows, long in the
spars, slender to look at, and fast to go, the ship, which is the great organ of
our national life of relation, is but a reproduction of the typical form which
the elements impress upon its builder. All this we cannot help; but we can
make the best of these influences, such as they are. We have a few good
boatmen,—no good horsemen that I hear of,—I cannot speak for cricketing,
—but as for any great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these
latitudes, society would drop a man who should run round the Common in
five minutes. Some of our amateur fencers, single-stick players, and
boxers, we have no reason to be ashamed of. Boxing is rough play, but not

too rough for a hearty young fellow. Anything is better than this white-
blooded degeneration to which we all tend.
I dropped into a gentlemen’s sparring exhibition only last evening. It did
my heart good to see that there were a few young and youngish youths left
who could take care of their own heads in case of emergency. It is a fine
sight, that of a gentleman resolving himself into the primitive constituents
of his humanity. Here is a delicate young man now, with an intellectual
countenance, a slight figure, a sub-pallid complexion, a most unassuming
deportment, a mild adolescent in fact, that any Hiram or Jonathan from
between the ploughtails would of course expect to handle with perfect ease.
Oh, he is taking off his gold-bowed spectacles! Ah, he is divesting himself
of his cravat! Why, he is stripping off his coat! Well, here he is, sure
enough, in a tight silk shirt, and with two things that look like batter
puddings in the place of his fists. Now see that other fellow with another
pair of batter puddings,—the big one with the broad shoulders; he will
certainly knock the little man’s head off, if he strikes him. Feinting,
dodging, stopping, hitting, countering,—little man’s head not off yet. You
might as well try to jump upon your own shadow as to hit the little man’s
intellectual features. He needn’t have taken off the gold-bowed spectacles
at all. Quick, cautious, shifty, nimble, cool, he catches all the fierce lunges
or gets out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of
the batter puddings against the big one’s ribs, and bang goes the other into
the big one’s face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping, collapsing,
sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous bundle.—If my young
friend, whose excellent article I have referred to, could only introduce the
manly art of self-defence among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should
have better sermons and an infinitely less quarrelsome church-militant. A
bout with the gloves would let off the ill-nature, and cure the indigestion,
which, united, have embroiled their subject in a bitter controversy. We
should then often hear that a point of difference between an infallible and a
heretic, instead of being vehemently discussed in a series of newspaper
articles, had been settled by a friendly contest in several rounds, at the close
of which the parties shook hands and appeared cordially reconciled.
But boxing you and I are too old for, I am afraid. I was for a moment
tempted, by the contagion of muscular electricity last evening, to try the
gloves with the Benicia Boy, who looked in as a friend to the noble art; but

remembering that he had twice my weight and half my age, besides the
advantage of his training, I sat still and said nothing.
There is one other delicate point I wish to speak of with reference to old
age. I refer to the use of dioptric media which correct the diminished
refracting power of the humors of the eye,—in other words, spectacles. I
don’t use them. All I ask is a large, fair type, a strong daylight or gas-light,
and one yard of focal distance, and my eyes are as good as ever. But if your
eyes fail, I can tell you something encouraging. There is now living in New
York State an old gentleman who, perceiving his sight to fail, immediately
took to exercising it on the finest print, and in this way fairly bullied Nature
out of her foolish habit of taking liberties at five-and-forty, or thereabout.
And now this old gentleman performs the most extraordinary feats with his
pen, showing that his eyes must be a pair of microscopes. I should be afraid
to say to you how much he writes in the compass of a half-dime,—whether
the Psalms or the Gospels, or the Psalms and the Gospels, I won’t be
positive.
But now let rue tell you this. If the time comes when you must lay down
the fiddle and the bow, because your fingers are too stiff, and drop the ten-
foot sculls, because your arms are too weak, and, after dallying awhile with
eye-glasses, come at last to the undisguised reality of spectacles,—if the
time comes when that fire of life we spoke of has burned so low that where
its flames reverberated there is only the sombre stain of regret, and where
its coals glowed, only the white ashes that cover the embers of memory,—
don’t let your heart grow cold, and you may carry cheerfulness and love
with you into the teens of your second century, if you can last so long. As
our friend, the Poet, once said, in some of those old-fashioned heroics of his
which he keeps for his private reading,—

Call him not old, whose visionary brain
Holds o’er the past its undivided reign.
For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul.
If yet the minstrel’s song, the poet’s lay,
Spring with her birds, or children with their play,
Or maiden’s smile, or heavenly dream of art
Stir the few life-drops creeping round his heart,—

Turn to the record where his years are told,—
Count his gray hairs,—they cannot make him old!

End of the Professor’s paper.
[The above essay was not read at one time, but in several instalments, and
accompanied by various comments from different persons at the table. The
company were in the main attentive, with the exception of a little
somnolence on the part of the old gentleman opposite at times, and a few
sly, malicious questions about the “old boys” on the part of that forward
young fellow who has figured occasionally, not always to his advantage, in
these reports.
On Sunday mornings, in obedience to a feeling I am not ashamed of, I have
always tried to give a more appropriate character to our conversation. I
have never read them my sermon yet, and I don’t know that I shall, as some
of them might take my convictions as a personal indignity to themselves.
But having read our company so much of the Professor’s talk about age and
other subjects connected with physical life, I took the next Sunday morning
to repeat to them the following poem of his, which I have had by me some
time. He calls it—I suppose, for his professional friends—The Anatomist’s
Hymn, but I shall name it—]

THE LIVING TEMPLE.
Not in the world of light alone,
Where God has built his blazing throne,
Nor yet alone in earth below,
With belted seas that come and go,
And endless isles of sunlit green,
Is all thy Maker’s glory seen:
Look in upon thy wondrous frame,—
Eternal wisdom still the same!
The smooth, soft air with pulse-like waves
Flows murmuring through its hidden caves
Whose streams of brightening purple rush
Fired with a new and livelier blush,
While all their burden of decay

The ebbing current steals away,
And red with Nature’s flame they start
From the warm fountains of the heart.
No rest that throbbing slave may ask,
Forever quivering o’er his task,
While far and wide a crimson jet
Leaps forth to fill the woven net
Which in unnumbered crossing tides
The flood of burning life divides,
Then kindling each decaying part
Creeps back to find the throbbing heart.
But warmed with that uchanging flame
Behold the outward moving frame,
Its living marbles jointed strong
With glistening band and silvery thong,
And linked to reason’s guiding reins
By myriad rings in trembling chains,
Each graven with the threaded zone
Which claims it as the master’s own.
See how yon beam of seeming white
Is braided out of seven-hued light,
Yet in those lucid globes no ray
By any chance shall break astray.
Hark how the rolling surge of sound,
Arches and spirals circling round,
Wakes the hushed spirit through thine ear
With music it is heaven to hear.
Then mark the cloven sphere that holds
All thought in its mysterious folds,
That feels sensation’s faintest thrill
And flashes forth the sovereign will;
Think on the stormy world that dwells
Locked in its dim and clustering cells!

The lightning gleams of power it sheds
Along its hollow glassy threads!
O Father! grant thy love divine
To make these mystic temples thine!
When wasting age and wearying strife
Have sapped the leaning walls of life,
When darkness gathers over all,
And the last tottering pillars fall,
Take the poor dust thy mercy warms
And mould it into heavenly forms!

CHAPTER VIII

[Spring has come. You will find some verses to that effect at the end of
these notes. If you are an impatient reader, skip to them at once. In reading
aloud, omit, if you please, the sixth and seventh verses. These are
parenthetical and digressive, and, unless your audience is of superior
intelligence, will confuse them. Many people can ride on horseback who
find it hard to get on and to get off without assistance. One has to dismount
from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.]
—The old gentleman who sits opposite, finding that spring had fairly come,
mounted a white hat one day, and walked into the street. It seems to have
been a premature or otherwise exceptionable exhibition, not unlike that
commemorated by the late Mr. Bayly. When the old gentleman came home,
he looked very red in the face, and complained that he had been “made
sport of.” By sympathizing questions, I learned from him that a boy had
called him “old daddy,” and asked him when he had his hat whitewashed.
This incident led me to make some observations at table the next morning,
which I here repeat for the benefit of the readers of this record.
—The hat is the vulnerable point of the artificial integument. I learned this
in early boyhood. I was once equipped in a hat of Leghorn straw, having a
brim of much wider dimensions than were usual at that time, and sent to
school in that portion of my native town which lies nearest to this
metropolis. On my way I was met by a “Port-chuck,” as we used to call the
young gentlemen of that locality, and the following dialogue ensued.

The Port-chuck. Hullo, You-sir, joo know th’ wuz gön-to be a race to-
morrah?
Myself. No. Who’s gön-to run, ’n’ wher’s’t gön-to be?
The Port-chuck. Squire Mico ’n’ Doctor Wiliams, round the brim o’ your
hat.
These two much-respected gentlemen being the oldest inhabitants at that
time, and the alleged race-course being out of the question, the Port-chuck
also winking and thrusting his tongue into his cheek, I perceived that I had
been trifled with, and the effect has been to make me sensitive and

observant respecting this article of dress ever since. Here is an axiom or
two relating to it.
A hat which has been popped, or exploded by being sat down upon, is never
itself again afterwards.
It is a favorite illusion of sanguine natures to believe the contrary.
Shabby gentility has nothing so characteristic as its hat. There is always an
unnatural calmness about its nap, and an unwholesome gloss, suggestive of
a wet brush.
The last effort of decayed fortune is expended in smoothing its dilapidated
castor. The hat is the ultimum moriens of “respectability.”
—The old gentleman took all these remarks and maxims very pleasantly,
saying, however, that he had forgotten most of his French except the word
for potatoes,—pummies de tare.—Ultimum moriens, I told him, is old
Italian, and signifies last thing to die. With this explanation he was well
contented, and looked quite calm when I saw him afterwards in the entry
with a black hat on his head and the white one in his hand.

—I think myself fortunate in having the Poet and the Professor for my
intimates. We are so much together, that we no doubt think and talk a good
deal alike; yet our points of view are in many respects individual and
peculiar. You know me well enough by this time. I have not talked with
you so long for nothing and therefore I don’t think it necessary to draw my
own portrait. But let me say a word or two about my friends.
The Professor considers himself, and I consider him, a very useful and
worthy kind of drudge. I think he has a pride in his small technicalities. I
know that he has a great idea of fidelity; and though I suspect he laughs a
little inwardly at times at the grand airs “Science” puts on, as she stands
marking time, but not getting on, while the trumpets are blowing and the
big drums beating,—yet I am sure he has a liking for his specially, and a
respect for its cultivators.
But I’ll tell you what the Professor said to the Poet the other day.—My boy,
said he, I can work a great deal cheaper than you, because I keep all my

goods in the lower story. You have to hoist yours into the upper chambers
of the brain, and let them down again to your customers. I take mine in at
the level of the ground, and send them off from my doorstep almost without
lifting. I tell you, the higher a man has to carry the raw material of thought
before he works it up, the more it costs him in blood, nerve, and muscle.
Coleridge knew all this very well when he advised every literary man to
have a profession.
—Sometimes I like to talk with one of them, and sometimes with the other.
After a while I get tired of both. When a fit of intellectual disgust comes
over me, I will tell you what I have found admirable as a diversion, in
addition to boating and other amusements which I have spoken of,—that is,
working at my carpenter’s-bench. Some mechanical employment is the
greatest possible relief, after the purely intellectual faculties begin to tire.
When I was quarantined once at Marseilles, I got to work immediately at
carving a wooden wonder of loose rings on a stick, and got so interested in
it, that when we were set loose, I “regained my freedom with a sigh,”
because my toy was unfinished.
There are long seasons when I talk only with the Professor, and others when
I give myself wholly up to the Poet. Now that my winter’s work is over and
spring is with us, I feel naturally drawn to the Poet’s company. I don’t
know anybody more alive to life than he is. The passion of poetry seizes on
him every spring, he says,—yet oftentimes he complains, that, when he
feels most, he can sing least.
Then a fit of despondency comes over him.—I feel ashamed, sometimes,—
said he, the other day,—to think how far my worst songs fall below my
best. It sometimes seems to me, as I know it does to others who have told
me so, that they ought to be all best,—if not in actual execution, at least in
plan and motive. I am grateful—he continued—for all such criticisms. A
man is always pleased to have his most serious efforts praised, and the
highest aspect of his nature get the most sunshine.
Yet I am sure, that, in the nature of things, many minds must change their
key now and then, on penalty of getting out of tune or losing their voices.
You know, I suppose,—he said,—what is meant by complementary colors?
You know the effect, too, which the prolonged impression of any one color

has on the retina. If you close your eyes after looking steadily at a red
object, you see a green image.
It is so with many minds,—I will not say with all. After looking at one
aspect of external nature, or of any form of beauty or truth, when they turn
away, the complementary aspect of the same object stamps itself irresistibly
and automatically upon the mind. Shall they give expression to this
secondary mental state, or not?
When I contemplate—said my friend, the Poet—the infinite largeness of
comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence, how remote the
creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulæ, I am led to
think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and
come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade itself
by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a
chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second floor have
been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our
humble friends in the basement have their holiday, and the cotton velvet and
the thin-skinned jewelry—simple adornments, but befitting the station of
those who wear them—show themselves to the crowd, who think them
beautiful, as they ought to, though the people up stairs know that they are
cheap and perishable?
—I don’t know that I may not bring the Poet here, some day or other, and
let him speak for himself. Still I think I can tell you what he says quite as
well as he could do it.—Oh,—he said to me, one day,—I am but a hand-
organ man,—say rather, a hand-organ. Life turns the winch, and fancy or
accident pulls out the stops. I come under your windows, some fine spring
morning, and play you one of my adagio movements, and some of you say,
—This is good,—play us so always. But, dear friends, if I did not change
the stop sometimes, the machine would wear out in one part and rust in
another. How easily this or that tune flows!—you say,—there must be no
end of just such melodies in him.—I will open the poor machine for you
one moment, and you shall look.—Ah! Every note marks where a spur of
steel has been driven in. It is easy to grind out the song, but to plant these
bristling points which make it was the painful task of time.

I don’t like to say it,—he continued,—but poets commonly have no larger
stock of tunes than hand-organs; and when you hear them piping up under
your window, you know pretty well what to expect. The more stops, the
better. Do let them all be pulled out in their turn!
So spoke my friend, the Poet, and read me one of his stateliest songs, and
after it a gay chanson, and then a string of epigrams. All true,—he said,—
all flowers of his soul; only one with the corolla spread, and another with its
disk half opened, and the third with the heart-leaves covered up and only a
petal or two showing its tip through the calyx. The water-lily is the type of
the poet’s soul,—he told me.
—What do you think, Sir,—said the divinity-student,—opens the souls of
poets most fully?
Why, there must be the internal force and the external stimulus. Neither is
enough by itself. A rose will not flower in the dark, and a fern will not
flower anywhere.
What do I think is the true sunshine that opens the poet’s corolla?—I don’t
like to say. They spoil a good many, I am afraid; or at least they shine on a
good many that never come to anything.
Who are they?—said the schoolmistress.
Women. Their love first inspires the poet, and their praise is his best
reward.
The schoolmistress reddened a little, but looked pleased.—Did I really
think so?—I do think so; I never feel safe until I have pleased them; I don’t
think they are the first to see one’s defects, but they are the first to catch the
color and fragrance of a true poem. Fit the same intellect to a man and it is
a bow-string,—to a woman and it is a harp-string. She is vibratile and
resonant all over, so she stirs with slighter musical tremblings of the air
about her.—Ah, me!—said my friend, the Poet, to me, the other day,—what
color would it not have given to my thoughts, and what thrice-washed
whiteness to my words, had I been fed on women’s praises! I should have
grown like Marvell’s fawn,—

“Lilies without; roses within!”

But then,—he added,—we all think, if so and so, we should have been this
or that, as you were saying the other day, in those rhymes of yours.
—I don’t think there are many poets in the sense of creators; but of those
sensitive natures which reflect themselves naturally in soft and melodious
words, pleading for sympathy with their joys and sorrows, every literature
is full. Nature carves with her own hands the brain which holds the creative
imagination, but she casts the over-sensitive creatures in scores from the
same mould.
There are two kinds of poets, just as there are two kinds of blondes.
[Movement of curiosity among our ladies at table.—Please to tell us about
those blondes, said the schoolmistress.] Why, there are blondes who are
such simply by deficiency of coloring matter,—negative or washed blondes,
arrested by Nature on the way to become albinesses. There are others that
are shot through with golden light, with tawny or fulvous tinges in various
degree,—positive or stained blondes, dipped in yellow sunbeams, and as
unlike in their mode of being to the others as an orange is unlike a
snowball. The albino-style carries with it a wide pupil and a sensitive
retina. The other, or the leonine blonde, has an opaline fire in her clear eye,
which the brunette can hardly match with her quick glittering glances.
Just so we have the great sun-kindled, constructive imaginations, and a far
more numerous class of poets who have a certain kind of moonlight-genius
given them to compensate for their imperfection of nature. Their want of
mental coloring-matter makes them sensitive to those impressions which
stronger minds neglect or never feel at all. Many of them die young, and all
of them are tinged with melancholy. There is no more beautiful illustration
of the principle of compensation which marks the Divine benevolence than
the fact that some of the holiest lives and some of the sweetest songs are the
growth of the infirmity which unfits its subject for the rougher duties of
life. When one reads the life of Cowper, or of Keats, or of Lucretia and
Margaret Davidson,—of so many gentle, sweet natures, born to weakness,
and mostly dying before their time,—one cannot help thinking that the
human race dies out singing, like the swan in the old story. The French
poet, Gilbert, who died at the Hôtel Dieu, at the age of twenty-nine,—
(killed by a key in his throat, which he had swallowed when delirious in
consequence of a fall,)—this poor fellow was a very good example of the

poet by excess of sensibility. I found, the other day, that some of my
literary friends had never heard of him, though I suppose few educated
Frenchmen do not know the lines which he wrote, a week before his death,
upon a mean bed in the great hospital of Paris.

“Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J’apparus un jour, et je meurs;
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j’arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs.”
At life’s gay banquet placed, a poor unhappy guest,
One day I pass, then disappear;
I die, and on the tomb where I at length shall rest
No friend shall come to shed a tear.

You remember the same thing in other words some where in Kirke White’s
poems. It is the burden of the plaintive songs of all these sweet albino-
poets. “I shall die and be forgotten, and the world will go on just as if I had
never been;—and yet how I have loved! how I have longed! how I have
aspired!” And so singing, their eyes grow brighter and brighter, and their
features thinner and thinner, until at last the veil of flesh is threadbare, and,
still singing, they drop it and pass onward.

—Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up
once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the
Angel of the Resurrection.
Tic-tac! tic-tac! go the wheels of thought; our will cannot stop them; they
cannot stop themselves, sleep cannot still them; madness only makes them
go faster; death alone can break into the case, and, seizing the ever-
swinging pendulum, which we call the heart, silence at last the clicking of
the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled
foreheads.
If we could only get at them, as we lie on our pillows and count the dead
beats of thought after thought and image after image jarring through the
overtired organ! Will nobody block those wheels, uncouple that pinion, cut

the string that holds those weights, blow up the infernal machine with
gunpowder? What a passion comes over us sometimes for silence and rest!
—that this dreadful mechanism, unwinding the endless tapestry of time,
embroidered with spectral figures of life and death, could have but one brief
holiday! Who can wonder that men swing themselves off from beams in
hempen lassos?—that they jump off from parapets into the swift and
gurgling waters beneath?—that they take counsel of the grim friend who
has but to utter his one peremptory monosyllable and the restless machine is
shivered as a vase that is dashed upon a marble floor? Under that building
which we pass every day there are strong dungeons, where neither hook,
nor bar, nor bed-cord, nor drinking-vessel from which a sharp fragment may
be shattered, shall by any chance be seen. There is nothing for it, when the
brain is on fire with the whirling of its wheels, but to spring against the
stone wall and silence them with one crash. Ah, they remembered that,—
the kind city fathers,—and the walls are nicely padded, so that one can take
such exercise as he likes without damaging himself on the very plain and
serviceable upholstery. If anybody would only contrive some kind of a
lever that one could thrust in among the works of this horrid automaton and
check them, or alter their rate of going, what would the world give for the
discovery?
—From half a dime to a dime, according to the style of the place and the
quality of the liquor,—said the young fellow whom they call John.
You speak trivially, but not unwisely,—I said. Unless the will maintain a
certain control over these movements, which it cannot stop, but can to some
extent regulate, men are very apt to try to get at the machine by some
indirect system of leverage or other. They clap on the brakes by means of
opium; they change the maddening monotony of the rhythm by means of
fermented liquors. It is because the brain is locked up and we cannot touch
its movement directly, that we thrust these coarse tools in through any
crevice, by which they may reach the interior, and so alter its rate of going
for a while, and at last spoil the machine.
Men who exercise chiefly those faculties of the mind which work
independently of the will,—poets and artists, for instance, who follow their
imagination in their creative moments, instead of keeping it in hand as your
logicians and practical men do with their reasoning faculty,—such men are

too apt to call in the mechanical appliances to help them govern their
intellects.
—He means they get drunk,—said the young fellow already alluded to by
name.
Do you think men of true genius are apt to indulge in the use of inebriating
fluids? said the divinity-student.
If you think you are strong enough to bear what I am going to say,—I
replied,—I will talk to you about this. But mind, now, these are the things
that some foolish people call dangerous subjects,—as if these vices which
burrow into people’s souls, as the Guinea-worm burrows into the naked feet
of West-Indian slaves, would be more mischievous when seen than out of
sight. Now the true way to deal with those obstinate animals, which are a
dozen feet long, some of them, and no bigger than a horse hair, is to get a
piece of silk round their heads, and pull them out very cautiously. If you
only break them off, they grow worse than ever, and sometimes kill the
person who has the misfortune to harbor one of them. Whence it is plain
that the first thing to do is to find out where the head lies.
Just so of all the vices, and particularly of this vice of intemperance. What
is the head of it, and where does it lie? For you may depend upon it, there
is not one of these vices that has not a head of its own,—an intelligence,—a
meaning,—a certain virtue, I was going to say,—but that might, perhaps,
sound paradoxical. I have heard an immense number of moral physicians
lay down the treatment of moral Guinea-worms, and the vast majority of
them would always insist that the creature had no head at all, but was all
body and tail. So I have found a very common result of their method to be
that the string slipped, or that a piece only of the creature was broken off,
and the worm soon grew again, as bad as ever. The truth is, if the Devil
could only appear in church by attorney, and make the best statement that
the facts would bear him out in doing on behalf of his special virtues, (what
we commonly call vices,) the influence of good teachers would be much
greater than it is. For the arguments by which the Devil prevails are
precisely the ones that the Devil-queller most rarely answers. The way to
argue down a vice is not to tell lies about it,—to say that it has no
attractions, when everybody knows that it has,—but rather to let it make out

its case just as it certainly will in the moment of temptation, and then meet
it with the weapons furnished by the Divine armory. Ithuriel did not spit the
toad on his spear, you remember, but touched him with it, and the blasted
angel took the sad glories of his true shape. If he had shown fight then, the
fair spirits would have known how to deal with him.
That all spasmodic cerebral action is an evil is not perfectly clear. Men get
fairly intoxicated with music, with poetry, with religious excitement,
oftenest with love. Ninon de l’Enclos said she was so easily excited that
her soup intoxicated her, and convalescents have been made tipsy by a beef-
steak.
There are forms and stages of alcoholic exaltation which, in themselves,
and without regard to their consequences, might be considered as positive
improvements of the persons affected. When the sluggish intellect is
roused, the slow speech quickened, the cold nature warmed, the latent
sympathy developed, the flagging spirit kindled,—before the trains of
thought become confused or the will perverted, or the muscles relaxed,—
just at the moment when the whole human zoöphyte flowers out like a full-
blown rose, and is ripe for the subscription-paper or the contribution-box,—
it would be hard to say that a man was, at that very time, worse, or less to
be loved, than when driving a hard bargain with all his meaner wits about
him. The difficulty is, that the alcoholic virtues don’t wash; but until the
water takes their colors out, the tints are very much like those of the true
celestial stuff.
[Here I was interrupted by a question which I am very unwilling to report,
but have confidence enough in those friends who examine these records to
commit to their candor.
A person at table asked me whether I “went in for rum as a steady
drink?”—His manner made the question highly offensive, but I restrained
myself, and answered thus:—]
Rum I take to be the name which unwashed moralists apply alike to the
product distilled from molasses and the noblest juices of the vineyard.
Burgundy “in all its sunset glow” is rum. Champagne, “the foaming wine
of Eastern France,” in rum. Hock, which our friend, the Poet, speaks of as

“The Rhine’s breastmilk, gushing cold and bright,
Pale as the moon, and maddening as her light,”

is rum. Sir, I repudiate the loathsome vulgarism as an insult to the first
miracle wrought by the Founder of our religion! I address myself to the
company.—I believe in temperance, nay, almost in abstinence, as a rule for
healthy people. I trust that I practice both. But let me tell you, there are
companies of men of genius into which I sometimes go, where the
atmosphere of intellect and sentiment is so much more stimulating than
alcohol, that, if I thought fit to take wine, it would be to keep me sober.
Among the gentlemen that I have known, few, if any, were ruined by
drinking. My few drunken acquaintances were generally ruined before they
became drunkards. The habit of drinking is often a vice, no doubt,—
sometimes a misfortune,—as when an almost irresistible hereditary
propensity exists to indulge in it,—but oftenest of all a punishment.
Empty heads,—heads without ideas in wholesome variety and sufficient
number to furnish food for the mental clockwork,—ill-regulated heads,
where the faculties are not under the control of the will,—these are the ones
that hold the brains which their owners are so apt to tamper with, by
introducing the appliances we have been talking about. Now, when a
gentleman’s brain is empty or ill-regulated, it is, to a great extent, his own
fault; and so it is simple retribution, that, while he lies slothfully sleeping or
aimlessly dreaming, the fatal habit settles on him like a vampyre, and sucks
his blood, fanning him all the while with its hot wings into deeper slumber
or idler dreams! I am not such a hard-souled being as to apply this to the
neglected poor, who have had no chance to fill their heads with wholesome
ideas, and to be taught the lesson of self-government. I trust the tariff of
Heaven has an ad valorem scale for them—and all of us.
But to come back to poets and artists;—if they really are more prone to the
abuse of stimulants,—and I fear that this is true,—the reason of it is only
too clear. A man abandons himself to a fine frenzy, and the power which
flows through him, as I once explained to you, makes him the medium of a
great poem or a great picture. The creative action is not voluntary at all, but
automatic; we can only put the mind into the proper attitude, and wait for
the wind, that blows where it listeth, to breathe over it. Thus the true state

of creative genius is allied to reverie, or dreaming. If mind and body were
both healthy and had food enough and fair play, I doubt whether any men
would be more temperate than the imaginative classes. But body and mind
often flag,—perhaps they are ill-made to begin with, underfed with bread or
ideas, overworked, or abused in some way. The automatic action, by which
genius wrought its wonders, fails. There is only one thing which can rouse
the machine; not will,—that cannot reach it; nothing but a ruinous agent,
which hurries the wheels awhile and soon eats out the heart of the
mechanism. The dreaming faculties are always the dangerous ones,
because their mode of action can be imitated by artificial excitement; the
reasoning ones are safe, because they imply continued voluntary effort.
I think you will find it true, that, before any vice can fasten on a man, body,
mind, or moral nature must be debilitated. The mosses and fungi gather on
sickly trees, not thriving ones; and the odious parasites which fasten on the
human frame choose that which is already enfeebled. Mr. Walker, the
hygeian humorist, declared that he had such a healthy skin it was
impossible for any impurity to stick to it, and maintained that it was an
absurdity to wash a face which was of necessity always clean. I don’t know
how much fancy there was in this; but there is no fancy in saying that the
lassitude of tired-out operatives, and the languor of imaginative natures in
their periods of collapse, and the vacuity of minds untrained to labor and
discipline, fit the soul and body for the germination of the seeds of
intemperance.
Whenever the wandering demon of Drunkenness finds a ship adrift,—no
steady wind in its sails, no thoughtful pilot directing its course,—he steps
on board, takes the helm, and steers straight for the maelstrom.

—I wonder if you know the terrible smile? [The young fellow whom they
call John winked very hard, and made a jocular remark, the sense of which
seemed to depend on some double meaning of the word smile. The
company was curious to know what I meant.]
There are persons—I said—who no sooner come within sight of you than
they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth, which
conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and thinking, too,

that you are thinking they are thinking about themselves,—and so look at
you with a wretched mixture of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and
attempts to carry off both, which are betrayed by the cowardly behaviour of
the eye and the tell-tale weakness of the lips that characterize these
unfortunate beings.
—Why do you call them unfortunate, Sir?—asked the divinity-student.
Because it is evident that the consciousness of some imbecility or other is at
the bottom of this extraordinary expression. I don’t think, however, that
these persons are commonly fools. I have known a number, and all of them
were intelligent. I think nothing conveys the idea of underbreeding more
than this self-betraying smile. Yet I think this peculiar habit as well as that
of meaningless blushing may be fallen into by very good people who met
often, or sit opposite each other at table. A true gentleman’s face is
infinitely removed from all such paltriness,—calm-eyed, firm-mouthed. I
think Titian understood the look of a gentleman as well as anybody that
ever lived. The portrait of a young man holding a glove in his hand, in the
Gallery of the Louvre, if any of you have seen that collection, will remind
you of what I mean.
—Do I think these people know the peculiar look they have?—I cannot say;
I hope not; I am afraid they would never forgive me, if they did. The worst
of it is, the trick is catching; when one meets one of these fellows, he feels a
tendency to the same manifestation. The Professor tells me there is a
muscular slip, a dependence of the platysma myoides, which is called the
risorius Santorini.
—Say that once more,—exclaimed the young fellow mentioned above.
The Professor says there is a little fleshy slip called Santorini’s laughing
muscle. I would have it cut out of my face, if I were born with one of those
constitutional grins upon it. Perhaps I am uncharitable in my judgment of
those sour-looking people I told you of the other day, and of these smiling
folks. It may be that they are born with these looks, as other people are
with more generally recognized deformities. Both are bad enough, but I
had rather meet three of the scowlers than one of the smilers.

—There is another unfortunate way of looking, which is peculiar to that
amiable sex we do not like to find fault with. There are some very pretty,
but, unhappily, very ill-bred women, who don’t understand the law of the
road with regard to handsome faces. Nature and custom would, no doubt,
agree in conceding to all males the right of at least two distinct looks at
every comely female countenance, without any infraction of the rules of
courtesy or the sentiment of respect. The first look is necessary to define
the person of the individual one meets so as to avoid it in passing. Any
unusual attraction detected in a first glance is a sufficient apology for a
second,—not a prolonged and impertinent stare, but an appreciating
homage of the eyes, such as a stranger may inoffensively yield to a passing
image. It is astonishing how morbidly sensitive some vulgar beauties are to
the slightest demonstration of this kind. When a lady walks the streets, she
leaves her virtuous-indignation countenance at home; she knows well
enough that the street is a picture-gallery, where pretty faces framed in
pretty bonnets are meant to be seen, and everybody has a right to see them.
—When we observe how the same features and style of person and
character descend from generation to generation, we can believe that some
inherited weakness may account for these peculiarities. Little snapping-
turtles snap—so the great naturalist tells us—before they are out of the egg-
shell. I am satisfied, that, much higher up in the scale of life, character is
distinctly shown at the age of -2 or -3 months.
—My friend, the Professor, has been full of eggs lately. [This remark
excited a burst of hilarity which I did not allow to interrupt the course of my
observations.] He has been reading the great book where he found the fact
about the little snapping-turtles mentioned above. Some of the things he
has told me have suggested several odd analogies enough.
There are half a dozen men, or so, who carry in their brains the ovarian
eggs of the next generation’s or century’s civilization. These eggs are not
ready to be laid in the form of books as yet; some of them are hardly ready
to be put into the form of talk. But as rudimentary ideas or inchoate
tendencies, there they are; and these are what must form the future. A
man’s general notions are not good for much, unless he has a crop of these
intellectual ovarian eggs in his own brain, or knows them as they exist in
the minds of others. One must be in the habit of talking with such persons

to get at these rudimentary germs of thought; for their development is
necessarily imperfect, and they are moulded on new patterns, which must
be long and closely studied. But these are the men to talk with. No fresh
truth ever gets into a book.
—A good many fresh lies get in, anyhow,—said one of the company.
I proceeded in spite of the interruption.—All uttered thought, my friend, the
Professor, says, is of the nature of an excretion. Its materials have been
taken in, and have acted upon the system, and been reacted on by it; it has
circulated and done its office in one mind before it is given out for the
benefit of others. It may be milk or venom to other minds; but, in either
case, it is something which the producer has had the use of and can part
with. A man instinctively tries to get rid of his thought in conversation or in
print so soon as it is matured; but it is hard to get at it as it lies imbedded, a
mere potentiality, the germ of a germ, in his intellect.
—Where are the brains that are fullest of these ovarian eggs of thought?—I
decline mentioning individuals. The producers of thought, who are few, the
“jobbers” of thought, who are many, and the retailers of thought, who are
numberless, are so mixed up in the popular apprehension, that it would be
hopeless to try to separate them before opinion has had time to settle.
Follow the course of opinion on the great subjects of human interest for a
few generations or centuries, get its parallax, map out a small arc of its
movement, see where it tends, and then see who is in advance of it or even
with it; the world calls him hard names, probably; but if you would find the
ova of the future, you must look into the folds of his cerebral convolutions.
[The divinity-student looked a little puzzled at this suggestion, as if he did
not see exactly where he was to come out, if he computed his arc too
nicely. I think it possible it might cut off a few corners of his present belief,
as it has cut off martyr-burning and witch-hanging;—but time will show,—
time will show, as the old gentleman opposite says.]
—Oh,—here is that copy of verses I told you about.

SPRING HAS COME.
Intra Muros.

The sunbeams, lost for half a year,
Slant through my pane their morning rays
For dry Northwesters cold and clear,
The East blows in its thin blue haze.
And first the snowdrop’s bells are seen,
Then close against the sheltering wall
The tulip’s horn of dusky green,
The peony’s dark unfolding ball.
The golden-chaliced crocus burns;
The long narcissus-blades appear;
The cone-beaked hyacinth returns,
And lights her blue-flamed chandelier.
The willow’s whistling lashes, wrung
By the wild winds of gusty March,
With sallow leaflets lightly strung,
Are swaying by the tufted larch.
The elms have robed their slender spray
With full-blown flower and embryo leaf;
Wide o’er the clasping arch of day
Soars like a cloud their hoary chief.
—[See the proud tulip’s flaunting cup,
That flames in glory for an hour,—
Behold it withering,—then look up,—
How meek the forest-monarch’s flower!—
When wake the violets, Winter dies;
When sprout the elm-buds, Spring is near;
When lilacs blossom, Summer cries,
“Bud, little roses! Spring is here!”]
The windows blush with fresh bouquets,
Cut with the May-dew on their lips;
The radish all its bloom displays,
Pink as Aurora’s finger-tips.

Nor less the flood of light that showers
On beauty’s changed corolla-shades,—
The walks are gay as bridal bowers
With rows of many-petalled maids.
The scarlet shell-fish click and clash
In the blue barrow where they slide;
The horseman, proud of streak and splash,
Creeps homeward from his morning ride.
Here comes the dealer’s awkward string,
With neck in rope and tail in knot,—
Rough colts, with careless country-swing,
In lazy walk or slouching trot.
—Wild filly from the mountain-side,
Doomed to the close and chafing thills,
Lend me thy long, untiring stride
To seek with thee thy western hills!
I hear the whispering voice of Spring,
The thrush’s trill, the cat-bird’s cry,
Like some poor bird with prisoned wing
That sits and sings, but longs to fly.
Oh for one spot of living green,—
One little spot where leaves can grow,—
To love unblamed, to walk unseen,
To dream above, to sleep below!

CHAPTER IX

[Aquí está encerrada el alma del licenciado Pedro Garcias.
If I should ever make a little book out of these papers, which I hope you are
not getting tired of, I suppose I ought to save the above sentence for a motto
on the title-page. But I want it now, and must use it. I need not say to you
that the words are Spanish, nor that they are to be found in the short
Introduction to “Gil Blas,” nor that they mean, “Here lies buried the soul of
the licentiate Pedro Garcias.”
I warned all young people off the premises when I began my notes referring
to old age. I must be equally fair with old people now. They are earnestly
requested to leave this paper to young persons from the age of twelve to
that of fourscore years and ten, at which latter period of life I am sure that I
shall have at least one youthful reader. You know well enough what I mean
by youth and age;—something in the soul, which has no more to do with
the color of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a
thousand feet above it.
I am growing bolder as I write. I think it requires not only youth, but
genius, to read this paper. I don’t mean to imply that it required any
whatsoever to talk what I have here written down. It did demand a certain
amount of memory, and such command of the English tongue as is given by
a common school education. So much I do claim. But here I have related,
at length, a string of trivialities. You must have the imagination of a poet to
transfigure them. These little colored patches are stains upon the windows
of a human soul; stand on the outside, they are but dull and meaningless
spots of color; seen from within, they are glorified shapes with empurpled
wings and sunbright aureoles.
My hand trembles when I offer you this. Many times I have come bearing
flowers such as my garden grew; but now I offer you this poor, brown,

homely growth, you may cast it away as worthless. And yet—and yet—it is
something better than flowers; it is a seed-capsule. Many a gardener will
cut you a bouquet of his choicest blossoms for small fee, but he does not
love to let the seeds of his rarest varieties go out of his own hands.
It is by little things that we know ourselves; a soul would very probably
mistake itself for another, when once disembodied, were it not for
individual experiences which differ from those of others only in details
seemingly trifling. All of us have been thirsty thousands of times, and felt,
with Pindar, that water was the best of things. I alone, as I think, of all
mankind, remember one particular pailful of water, flavored with the white-
pine of which the pail was made, and the brown mug out of which one
Edmund, a red-faced and curly-haired boy, was averred to have bitten a
fragment in his haste to drink; it being then high summer, and little full-
blooded boys feeling very warm and porous in the low-“studded” school-
room where Dame Prentiss, dead and gone, ruled over young children,
many of whom are old ghosts now, and have known Abraham for twenty or
thirty years of our mortal time.
Thirst belongs to humanity, everywhere, in all ages; but that white-pine
pail, and that brown mug belong to me in particular; and just so of my
special relationships with other things and with my rice. One could never
remember himself in eternity by the mere fact of having loved or hated any
more than by that of having thirsted; love and hate have no more
individuality in them than single waves in the ocean;—but the accidents or
trivial marks which distinguished those whom we loved or hated make their
memory our own forever, and with it that of our own personality also.
Therefore, my aged friend of five-and-twenty, or thereabouts, pause at the
threshold of this particular record, and ask yourself seriously whether you
are fit to read such revelations as are to follow. For observe, you have here
no splendid array of petals such as poets offer you,—nothing but a dry
shell, containing, if you will get out what is in it, a few small seeds of
poems. You may laugh at them, if you like. I shall never tell you what I
think of you for so doing. But if you can read into the heart of these things,
in the light of other memories as slight, yet as dear to your soul, then you
are neither more nor less than a Poet, and can afford to write no more
verses during the rest of your natural life,—which abstinence I take to be

one of the surest marks of your meriting the divine name I have just
bestowed upon you.
May I beg of you who have begun this paper nobly trusting to your own
imagination and sensibilities to give it the significance which it does not lay
claim to without your kind assistance,—may I beg of you, I say, to pay
particular attention to the brackets which enclose certain paragraphs? I
want my “asides,” you see, to whisper loud to you who read my notes, and
sometimes I talk a page or two to you without pretending that I said a word
of it to our boarders. You will find a very long “aside” to you almost as
soon as you begin to read. And so, dear young friend, fall to at once, taking
such things as I have provided for you; and if you turn them, by the aid of
your powerful imagination, into a fair banquet, why, then, peace be with
you, and a summer by the still waters of some quiet river, or by some
yellow beach, where, as my friend the Professor, says, you can sit with
Nature’s wrist in your hand and count her ocean-pulses.]
I should like to make a few intimate revelations relating especially to my
early life, if I thought you would like to hear them.
[The schoolmistress turned a little in her chair, and sat with her face
directed partly towards me.—Half-mourning now;—purple ribbon. That
breastpin she wears has gray hair in it; her mother’s, no doubt;—I
remember our landlady’s daughter telling me, soon after the schoolmistress
came to board with us, that she had lately “buried a payrent.” That’s what
made her look so pale,—kept the poor dying thing alive with her own
blood. Ah! long illness is the real vampyrism; think of living a year or two
after one is dead, by sucking the life-blood out of a frail young creature at
one’s bedside! Well, souls grow white, as well as cheeks, in these holy
duties one that goes in a nurse may come out an angel.—God bless all good
women!—to their soft hands and pitying hearts we must all come at last!—
The schoolmistress has a better color than when she came.—Too late! “It
might have been.”—Amen!—How many thoughts go to a dozen heart-
beats, sometimes! There was no long pause after my remark addressed to
the company, but in that time I had the train of ideas and feelings I have just
given flash through my consciousness sudden and sharp as the crooked red
streak that springs out of its black sheath like the creese of a Malay in his
death-race, and stabs the earth right and left in its blind rage.

I don’t deny that there was a pang in it,—yes, a stab; but there was a prayer,
too,—the “Amen” belonged to that.—Also, a vision of a four-story brick
house, nicely furnished,—I actually saw many specific articles,—curtains,
sofas, tables, and others, and could draw the patterns of them at this
moment,—a brick house, I say, looking out on the water, with a fair parlor,
and books and busts and pots of flowers and bird-cages, all complete; and at
the window, looking on the water, two of us.—“Male and female created He
them.”—These two were standing at the window, when a smaller shape that
was playing near them looked up at me with such a look that I — — poured
out a glass of water, drank it all down, and then continued.]
I said I should like to tell you some things, such as people commonly never
tell, about my early recollections. Should you like to hear them?
Should we like to hear them?—said the schoolmistress;—no, but we should
love to.
[The voice was a sweet one, naturally, and had something very pleasant in
its tone, just then.—The four-story brick house, which had gone out like a
transparency when the light behind it is quenched, glimmered again for a
moment; parlor, books, busts, flower-pots, bird-cages, all complete,—and
the figures as before.]
We are waiting with eagerness, Sir,—said the divinity-student.
[The transparency went out as if a flash of black lightning had struck it.]
If you want to hear my confessions, the next thing—I said—is to know
whether I can trust you with them. It is only fair to say that there are a great
many people in the world that laugh at such things. I think they are fools,
but perhaps you don’t all agree with me.
Here are children of tender age talked to as if they were capable of
understanding Calvin’s “Institutes,” and nobody has honesty or sense
enough to tell the plain truth about the little wretches: that they are as
superstitious as naked savages, and such miserable spiritual cowards—that
is, if they have any imagination—that they will believe anything which is
taught them, and a great deal more which they teach themselves.

I was born and bred, as I have told you twenty times, among books and
those who knew what was in books. I was carefully instructed in things
temporal and spiritual. But up to a considerable maturity of childhood I
believed Raphael and Michael Angelo to have been superhuman beings.
The central doctrine of the prevalent religious faith of Christendom was
utterly confused and neutralized in my mind for years by one of those too
common stories of actual life, which I overheard repeated in a whisper.—
Why did I not ask? you will say.—You don’t remember the rosy pudency of
sensitive children. The first instinctive movement of the little creatures is to
make a cache, and bury in it beliefs, doubts, dreams, hopes, and terrors. I
am uncovering one of these caches. Do you think I was necessarily a
greater fool and coward than another?
I was afraid of ships. Why, I could never tell. The masts looked frightfully
tall,—but they were not so tall as the steeple of our old yellow meeting-
house. At any rate I used to hide my eyes from the sloops and schooners
that were wont to lie at the end of the bridge, and I confess that traces of
this undefined terror lasted very long.—One other source of alarm had a
still more fearful significance. There was a great wooden hand,—a glove-
maker’s sign, which used to swing and creak in the blast, as it hung from a
pillar before a certain shop a mile or two outside of the city. Oh, the
dreadful hand! Always hanging there ready to catch up a little boy, who
would come home to supper no more, nor yet to bed,—whose porringer
would be laid away empty thenceforth, and his half-worn shoes wait until
his small brother grew to fit them.
As for all manner of superstitious observances, I used once to think I must
have been peculiar in having such a list of them, but I now believe that half
the children of the same age go through the same experiences. No Roman
soothsayer ever had such a catalogue of omens as I found in the Sibylline
leaves of my childhood. That trick of throwing a stone at a tree and
attaching some mighty issue to hitting or missing, which you will find
mentioned in one or more biographies, I well remember. Stepping on or
over certain particular things or spots—Dr. Johnson’s especial weakness I
got the habit of at a very early age.—I won’t swear that I have not some
tendency to these not wise practices even at this present date. [How many
of you that read these notes can say the same thing!]

With these follies mingled sweet delusions, which I loved so well I would
not outgrow them, even when it required a voluntary effort to put a
momentary trust in them. Here is one which I cannot help telling you.
The firing of the great guns at the Navy-yard is easily heard at the place
where I was born and lived. “There is a ship of war come in,” they used to
say, when they heard them. Of course, I supposed that such vessels came in
unexpectedly, after indefinite years of absence,—suddenly as falling stones;
and that the great guns roared in their astonishment and delight at the sight
of the old war-ship splitting the bay with her cutwater. Now, the sloop-of-
war the Wasp, Captain Blakely, after gloriously capturing the Reindeer and
the Avon, had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and was supposed to
be lost. But there was no proof of it, and, of course, for a time, hopes were
entertained that she might be heard from. Long after the last real chance
had utterly vanished, I pleased myself with the fond illusion that
somewhere on the waste of waters she was still floating, and there were
years during which I never heard the sound of the great guns booming
inland from the Navy-yard without saying to myself, “The Wasp has
come!” and almost thinking I could see her, as she rolled in, crumpling the
water before her, weather-beaten, barnacled, with shattered spars and
threadbare canvas, welcomed by the shouts and tears of thousands. This
was one of those dreams that I nursed and never told. Let me make a clean
breast of it now, and say, that, so late as to have outgrown childhood,
perhaps to have got far on towards manhood, when the roar of the cannon
has struck suddenly on my ear, I have started with a thrill of vague
expectation and tremulous delight, and the long-unspoken words have
articulated themselves in the mind’s dumb whisper, The Wasp has come!
—Yes, children believe plenty of queer things. I suppose all of you have
had the pocket-book fever when you were little?—What do I mean? Why,
ripping up old pocket-books in the firm belief that bank-bills to an immense
amount were hidden in them.—So, too, you must all remember some
splendid unfulfilled promise of somebody or other, which fed you with
hopes perhaps for years, and which left a blank in your life which nothing
has ever filled up.—O. T. quitted our household carrying with him the
passionate regrets of the more youthful members. He was an ingenious
youngster; wrote wonderful copies, and carved the two initials given above
with great skill on all available surfaces. I thought, by the way, they were

all gone; but the other day I found them on a certain door which I will show
you some time. How it surprised me to find them so near the ground! I had
thought the boy of no trivial dimensions. Well, O. T., when he went, made
a solemn promise to two of us. I was to have a ship, and the other a martin-
house (last syllable pronounced as in the word tin). Neither ever came; but,
oh, how many and many a time I have stolen to the corner,—the cars pass
close by it at this time,—and looked up that long avenue, thinking that he
must be coming now, almost sure, as I turned to look northward, that there
he would be, trudging toward me, the ship in one hand and the martin-house
in the other!
[You must not suppose that all I am going to say, as well as all I have said,
was told to the whole company. The young fellow whom they call John
was in the yard, sitting on a barrel and smoking a cheroot, the fumes of
which came in, not ungrateful, through the open window. The divinity-
student disappeared in the midst of our talk. The poor relation in black
bombazine, who looked and moved as if all her articulations were elbow-
joints, had gone off to her chamber, after waiting with a look of soul-
subduing decorum at the foot of the stairs until one of the male sort had
passed her and ascended into the upper regions. This is a famous point of
etiquette in our boarding-house; in fact, between ourselves, they make such
an awful fuss about it, that I, for one, had a great deal rather have them
simple enough not to think of such matters at all. Our landlady’s daughter
said, the other evening, that she was going to “retire”; whereupon the young
fellow called John took up a lamp and insisted on lighting her to the foot of
the staircase. Nothing would induce her to pass by him, until the
schoolmistress, saying in good plain English that it was her bed-time,
walked straight by them both, not seeming to trouble herself about either of
them.
I have been led away from what I meant the portion included in these
brackets to inform my readers about. I say, then, most of the boarders had
left the table about the time when I began telling some of these secrets of
mine,—all of them, in fact, but the old gentleman opposite and the
schoolmistress. I understand why a young woman should like to hear these
simple but genuine experiences of early life, which are, as I have said, the
little brown seeds of what may yet grow to be poems with leaves of azure
and gold; but when the old gentleman pushed up his chair nearer to me, and

slanted round his best ear, and once, when I was speaking of some trifling,
tender reminiscence, drew a long breath, with such a tremor in it that a little
more and it would have been a sob, why, then I felt there must be something
of nature in them which redeemed their seeming insignificance. Tell me,
man or woman with whom I am whispering, have you not a small store of
recollections, such as these I am uncovering, buried beneath the dead leaves
of many summers, perhaps under the unmelting snows of fast-returning
winters,—a few such recollections, which, if you should write them all out,
would be swept into some careless editor’s drawer, and might cost a scanty
half-hour’s lazy reading to his subscribers,—and yet, if Death should cheat
you of them, you would not know yourself in eternity?]
—I made three acquaintances at a very early period of life, my introduction
to whom was never forgotten. The first unequivocal act of wrong that has
left its trace in my memory was this: refusing a small favor asked of me,—
nothing more than telling what had happened at school one morning. No
matter who asked it; but there were circumstances which saddened and
awed me. I had no heart to speak;—I faltered some miserable, perhaps
petulant excuse, stole away, and the first battle of life was lost. What
remorse followed I need not tell. Then and there, to the best of my
knowledge, I first consciously took Sin by the hand and turned my back on
Duty. Time has led me to look upon my offence more leniently; I do not
believe it or any other childish wrong is infinite, as some have pretended,
but infinitely finite. Yet, oh if I had but won that battle!
The great Destroyer, whose awful shadow it was that had silenced me, came
near me,—but never, so as to be distinctly seen and remembered, during my
tender years. There flits dimly before me the image of a little girl, whose
name even I have forgotten, a schoolmate, whom we missed one day, and
were told that she had died. But what death was I never had any very
distinct idea, until one day I climbed the low stone wall of the old burial-
ground and mingled with a group that were looking into a very deep, long,
narrow hole, dug down through the green sod, down through the brown
loam, down through the yellow gravel, and there at the bottom was an
oblong red box, and a still, sharp, white face of a young man seen through
an opening at one end of it. When the lid was closed, and the gravel and
stones rattled down pell-mell, and the woman in black, who was crying and

wringing her hands, went off with the other mourners, and left him, then I
felt that I had seen Death, and should never forget him.
One other acquaintance I made at an earlier period of life than the habit of
romancers authorizes.—Love, of course.—She was a famous beauty
afterwards.—I am satisfied that many children rehearse their parts in the
drama of life before they have shed all their milk-teeth.—I think I won’t tell
the story of the golden blonde.—I suppose everybody has had his childish
fancies; but sometimes they are passionate impulses, which anticipate all
the tremulous emotions belonging to a later period. Most children
remember seeing and adoring an angel before they were a dozen years old.
[The old gentleman had left his chair opposite and taken a seat by the
schoolmistress and myself, a little way from the table.—It’s true, it’s true,—
said the old gentleman.—He took hold of a steel watch-chain, which carried
a large, square gold key at one end and was supposed to have some kind of
time-keeper at the other. With some trouble he dragged up an ancient-
looking, thick, silver, bull’s-eye watch. He looked at it for a moment,—
hesitated,—touched the inner corner of his right eye with the pulp of his
middle finger,—looked at the face of the watch,—said it was getting into
the forenoon,—then opened the watch and handed me the loose outside
case without a word.—The watch-paper had been pink once, and had a faint
tinge still, as if all its tender life had not yet quite faded out. Two little
birds, a flower, and, in small school-girl letters, a date,—17 . .—no matter.
—Before I was thirteen years old,—said the old gentleman.—I don’t know
what was in that young schoolmistress’s head, nor why she should have
done it; but she took out the watch-paper and put it softly to her lips, as if
she were kissing the poor thing that made it so long ago. The old gentleman
took the watch-paper carefully from her, replaced it, turned away and
walked out, holding the watch in his hand. I saw him pass the window a
moment after with that foolish white hat on his head; he couldn’t have been
thinking what he was about when he put it on. So the schoolmistress and I
were left alone. I drew my chair a shade nearer to her, and continued.]
And since I am talking of early recollections, I don’t know why I shouldn’t
mention some others that still cling to me,—not that you will attach any
very particular meaning to these same images so full of significance to me,
but that you will find something parallel to them in your own memory. You

remember, perhaps, what I said one day about smells. There were certain
sounds also which had a mysterious suggestiveness to me,—not so intense,
perhaps, as that connected with the other sense, but yet peculiar, and never
to be forgotten.
The first was the creaking of the wood-sleds, bringing their loads of oak
and walnut from the country, as the slow-swinging oxen trailed them along
over the complaining snow, in the cold, brown light of early morning.
Lying in bed and listening to their dreary music had a pleasure in it akin to
the Lucretian luxury, or that which Byron speaks of as to be enjoyed in
looking on at a battle by one “who hath no friend, no brother there.”
There was another sound, in itself so sweet, and so connected with one of
those simple and curious superstitions of childhood of which I have spoken,
that I can never cease to cherish a sad sort of love for it.—Let me tell the
superstitious fancy first. The Puritan “Sabbath,” as everybody knows,
began at “sundown” on Saturday evening. To such observance of it I was
born and bred. As the large, round disk of day declined, a stillness, a
solemnity, a somewhat melancholy hush came over us all. It was time for
work to cease, and for playthings to be put away. The world of active life
passed into the shadow of an eclipse, not to emerge until the sun should
sink again beneath the horizon.
It was in this stillness of the world without and of the soul within that the
pulsating lullaby of the evening crickets used to make itself most distinctly
heard,—so that I well remember I used to think that the purring of these
little creatures, which mingled with the batrachian hymns from the
neighboring swamp, was peculiar to Saturday evenings. I don’t know that
anything could give a clearer idea of the quieting and subduing effect of the
old habit of observance of what was considered holy time, than this strange,
childish fancy.
Yes, and there was still another sound which mingled its solemn cadences
with the waking and sleeping dreams of my boyhood. It was heard only at
times,—a deep, muffled roar, which rose and fell, not loud, but vast,—a
whistling boy would have drowned it for his next neighbor, but it must have
been heard over the space of a hundred square miles. I used to wonder
what this might be. Could it be the roar of the thousand wheels and the ten

thousand footsteps jarring and trampling along the stones of the
neighboring city? That would be continuous; but this, as I have said, rose
and fell in regular rhythm. I remember being told, and I suppose this to
have been the true solution, that it was the sound of the waves, after a high
wind, breaking on the long beaches many miles distant. I should really like
to know whether any observing people living ten miles, more or less, inland
from long beaches,—in such a town, for instance, as Cantabridge, in the
eastern part of the Territory of the Massachusetts,—have ever observed any
such sound, and whether it was rightly accounted for as above.
Mingling with these inarticulate sounds in the low murmur of memory, are
the echoes of certain voices I have heard at rare intervals. I grieve to say it,
but our people, I think, have not generally agreeable voices. The marrowy
organisms, with skins that shed water like the backs of ducks, with smooth
surfaces neatly padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes,
are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular
outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous covering
of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once
thin and strenuous,—acidulous enough to produce effervescence with
alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids. I think our
conversational soprano, as sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a
group of young persons, who may have taken the train at one of our great
industrial centres, for instance,—young persons of the female sex, we will
say, who have bustled in full-dressed, engaged in loud strident speech, and
who, after free discussion, have fixed on two or more double seats, which
having secured, they proceed to eat apples and hand round daguerreotypes,
—I say, I think the conversational soprano, heard under these
circumstances, would not be among the allurements the old Enemy would
put in requisition, were he getting up a new temptation of St. Anthony.
There are sweet voices among us, we all know, and voices not musical, it
may be, to those who hear them for the first time, yet sweeter to us than any
we shall hear until we listen to some warbling angel in the overture to that
eternity of blissful harmonies we hope to enjoy.—But why should I tell
lies? If my friends love me, it is because I try to tell the truth. I never heard
but two voices in my life that frightened me by their sweetness.

—Frightened you?—said the schoolmistress.—Yes, frightened me. They
made me feel as if there might be constituted a creature with such a chord in
her voice to some string in another’s soul, that, if she but spoke, he would
leave all and follow her, though it were into the jaws of Erebus. Our only
chance to keep our wits is, that there are so few natural chords between
others’ voices and this string in our souls, and that those which at first may
have jarred a little by and by come into harmony with it.—But I tell you
this is no fiction. You may call the story of Ulysses and the Sirens a fable,
but what will you say to Mario and the poor lady who followed him?
—Whose were those two voices that bewitches me so?—They both
belonged to German women. One was a chambermaid, not otherwise
fascinating. The key of my room at a certain great hotel was missing, and
this Teutonic maiden was summoned to give information respecting it. The
simple soul was evidently not long from her mother-land, and spoke with
sweet uncertainty of dialect. But to hear her wonder and lament and
suggest, with soft, liquid inflexions, and low, sad murmurs, in tones as full
of serious tenderness for the fate of the lost key as if it had been a child that
had strayed from its mother, was so winning, that, had her features and
figure been as delicious as her accents,—if she had looked like the marble
Clytie, for instance,—why, all can say is—
[The schoolmistress opened her eyes so wide, that I stopped short.]
I was only going to say that I should have drowned myself. For Lake Erie
was close by, and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, which takes only
three minutes by the watch, than a mésalliance, that lasts fifty years to
begin with, and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in
all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men
were only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through the
square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung
the armorial bearings of the De Champignons or the De la Morues, until
one came to beings that ate with knives and said “Haow?”) that no person
of right feeling could have hesitated for a single moment.
The second of the ravishing voices I have heard was, as I have said, that of
another German woman.—I suppose I shall ruin myself by saying that such
a voice could not have come from any Americanized human being.

—What was there in it?—said the schoolmistress,—and, upon my word, her
tones were so very musical, that I almost wished I had said three voices
instead of two, and not made the unpatriotic remark above reported.—Oh, I
said, it had so much woman in it,—muliebrity, as well as femineity;—no
self-assertion, such as free suffrage introduces into every word and
movement; large, vigorous nature, running back to those huge-limbed
Germans of Tacitus, but subdued by the reverential training and tuned by
the kindly culture of fifty generations. Sharp business habits, a lean soil,
independence, enterprise, and east winds, are not the best things for the
larynx. Still, you hear noble voices among us,—I have known families
famous for them,—but ask the first person you meet a question, and ten to
one there is a hard, sharp, metallic, matter-of-business clink in the accents
of the answer, that produces the effect of one of those bells which small
trades-people connect with their shop-doors, and which spring upon your
ear with such vivacity, as you enter, that your first impulse is to retire at
once from the precincts.
—Ah, but I must not forget that dear little child I saw and heard in a French
hospital. Between two and three years old. Fell out of her chair and
snapped both thigh-bones. Lying in bed, patient, gentle. Rough students
round her, some in white aprons, looking fearfully business-like; but the
child placid, perfectly still. I spoke to her, and the blessed little creature
answered me in a voice of such heavenly sweetness, with that reedy thrill in
it which you have heard in the thrush’s even-song, that I hear it at this
moment, while I am writing, so many, many years afterwards.—C’est tout
comme un serin, said the French student at my side.
These are the voices which struck the key-note of my conceptions as to
what the sounds we are to hear in heaven will be, if we shall enter through
one of the twelve gates of pearl. There must be other things besides
aërolites that wander from their own spheres to ours; and when we speak of
celestial sweetness or beauty, we may be nearer the literal truth than we
dream. If mankind generally are the shipwrecked survivors of some pre-
Adamitic cataclysm, set adrift in these little open boats of humanity to make
one more trial to reach the shore,—as some grave theologians have
maintained,—if, in plain English, men are the ghosts of dead devils who
have “died into life,” (to borrow an expression from Keats,) and walk the
earth in a suit of living rags which lasts three or four score summers,—why,

there must have been a few good spirits sent to keep them company, and
these sweet voices I speak of must belong to them.
—I wish you could once hear my sister’s voice,—said the schoolmistress.
If it is like yours, it must be a pleasant one,—said I.
I never thought mine was anything,—said the schoolmistress.
How should you know?—said I.—People never hear their own voices,—
any more than they see their own faces. There is not even a looking-glass
for the voice. Of course, there is something audible to us when we speak;
but that something is not our own voice as it is known to all our
acquaintances. I think, if an image spoke to us in our own tones, we should
not know them in the least.—How pleasant it would be, if in another state
of being we could have shapes like our former selves for playthings,—we
standing outside or inside of them, as we liked, and they being to us just
what we used to be to others!
—I wonder if there will be nothing like what we call “play,” after our
earthly toys are broken,—said the schoolmistress.
Hush,—said I,—what will the divinity-student say?
[I thought she was hit, that time;—but the shot must have gone over her, or
on one side of her; she did not flinch.]
Oh,—said the schoolmistress,—he must look out for my sister’s heresies; I
am afraid he will be too busy with them to take care of mine.
Do you mean to say,—said I,—that it is your sister whom that student—
[The young fellow commonly known as John, who had been sitting on the
barrel, smoking, jumped off just then, kicked over the barrel, gave it a push
with his foot that set it rolling, and stuck his saucy-looking face in at the
window so as to cut my question off in the middle; and the schoolmistress
leaving the room a few minutes afterwards, I did not have a chance to finish
it.
The young fellow came in and sat down in a chair, putting his heels on the
top of another.

Pooty girl,—said he.
A fine young lady,—I replied.
Keeps a first-rate school, according to accounts,—said he,—teaches all
sorts of things,—Latin and Italian and music. Folks rich once,—smashed
up. She went right ahead as smart as if she’d been born to work. That’s the
kind o’ girl I go for. I’d marry her, only two or three other girls would
drown themselves, if I did.
I think the above is the longest speech of this young fellow’s which I have
put on record. I do not like to change his peculiar expressions, for this is
one of those cases in which the style is the man, as M. de Buffon says. The
fact is, the young fellow is a good-hearted creature enough, only too fond of
his jokes,—and if it were not for those heat-lightning winks on one side of
his face, I should not mind his fun much.]

[Some days after this, when the company were together again, I talked a
little.]
—I don’t think I have a genuine hatred for anybody. I am well aware that I
differ herein from the sturdy English moralist and the stout American
tragedian. I don’t deny that I hate the sight of certain people; but the
qualities which make me tend to hate the man himself are such as I am so
much disposed to pity, that, except under immediate aggravation, I feel
kindly enough to the worst of them. It is such a sad thing to be born a
sneaking fellow, so much worse than to inherit a hump-back or a couple of
club-feet, that I sometimes feel as if we ought to love the crippled souls, if I
may use this expression, with a certain tenderness which we need not waste
on noble natures. One who is born with such congenital incapacity that
nothing can make a gentleman of him is entitled, not to our wrath, but to
our profoundest sympathy. But as we cannot help hating the sight of these
people, just as we do that of physical deformities, we gradually eliminate
them from our society,—we love them, but open the window and let them
go. By the time decent people reach middle age they have weeded their
circle pretty well of these unfortunates, unless they have a taste for such
animals; in which case, no matter what their position may be, there is
something, you may be sure, in their natures akin to that of their wretched
parasites.
—The divinity-student wished to know what I thought of affinities, as well
as of antipathies; did I believe in love at first sight?
Sir,—said I,—all men love all women. That is the primâ-facie aspect of the
case. The Court of Nature assumes the law to be, that all men do so; and
the individual man is bound to show cause why he does not love any
particular woman. A man, says one of my old black-letter law-books, may
show divers good reasons, as thus: He hath not seen the person named in
the indictment; she is of tender age, or the reverse of that; she hath certain
personal disqualifications,—as, for instance, she is a blackamoor, or hath an
ill-favored countenance; or, his capacity of loving being limited, his
affections are engrossed by a previous comer; and so of other conditions.
Not the less is it true that he is bound by duty and inclined by nature to love
each and every woman. Therefore it is that each woman virtually summons

every man to show cause why he doth not love her. This is not by written
document, or direct speech, for the most part, but by certain signs of silk,
gold, and other materials, which say to all men,—Look on me and love, as
in duty bound. Then the man pleadeth his special incapacity, whatsoever
that may be,—as, for instance, impecuniosity, or that he hath one or many
wives in his household, or that he is of mean figure, or small capacity; of
which reasons it may be noted, that the first is, according to late decisions,
of chiefest authority.—So far the old law-book. But there is a note from an
older authority, saying that every woman doth also love each and every
man, except there be some good reason to the contrary; and a very
observing friend of mine, a young unmarried clergyman, tells me, that, so
far as his experience goes, he has reason to think the ancient author had fact
to justify his statement.
I’ll tell you how it is with the pictures of women we fall in love with at first
sight.
—We a’n’t talking about pictures,—said the landlady’s daughter,—we’re
talking about women.
I understood that we were speaking of love at sight,—I remarked, mildly.—
Now, as all a man knows about a woman whom he looks at is just what a
picture as big as a copper, or a “nickel,” rather, at the bottom of his eye can
teach him, I think I am right in saying we are talking about the pictures of
women.—Well, now, the reason why a man is not desperately in love with
ten thousand women at once is just that which prevents all our portraits
being distinctly seen upon that wall. They all are painted there by
reflection from our faces, but because all of them are painted on each spot,
and each on the same surface, and many other objects at the same time, no
one is seen as a picture. But darken a chamber and let a single pencil of
rays in through a key-hole, then you have a picture on the wall. We never
fall in love with a woman in distinction from women, until we can get an
image of her through a pin-hole; and then we can see nothing else, and
nobody but ourselves can see the image in our mental camera-obscura.
—My friend, the Poet, tells me he has to leave town whenever the
anniversaries come round.

What’s the difficulty?—Why, they all want him to get up and make
speeches, or songs, or toasts; which is just the very thing he doesn’t want to
do. He is an old story, he says, and hates to show on these occasions. But
they tease him, and coax him, and can’t do without him, and feel all over
his poor weak head until they get their fingers on the fontanelle, (the
Professor will tell you what this means,—he says the one at the top of the
head always remains open in poets,) until, by gentle pressure on that soft
pulsating spot, they stupefy him to the point of acquiescence.
There are times, though, he says, when it is a pleasure, before going to
some agreeable meeting, to rush out into one’s garden and clutch up a
handful of what grows there,—weeds and violets together,—not cutting
them off, but pulling them up by the roots with the brown earth they grow
in sticking to them. That’s his idea of a post-prandial performance. Look
here, now. These verses I am going to read you, he tells me, were pulled up
by the roots just in that way, the other day.—Beautiful entertainment,—
names there on the plates that flow from all English-speaking tongues as
familiarly as and or the; entertainers known wherever good poetry and fair
title-pages are held in esteem; guest a kind-hearted, modest, genial, hopeful
poet, who sings to the hearts of his countrymen, the British people, the
songs of good cheer which the better days to come, as all honest souls trust
and believe, will turn into the prose of common life. My friend, the Poet,
says you must not read such a string of verses too literally. If he trimmed it
nicely below, you wouldn’t see the roots, he says, and he likes to keep them,
and a little of the soil clinging to them.
This is the farewell my friend, the Poet, read to his and our friend, the Poet:
—

A GOOD TIME GOING!
Brave singer of the coming time,
Sweet minstrel of the joyous present,
Crowned with the noblest wreath of rhyme,
The holly-leaf of Ayrshire’s peasant,
Good-bye! Good-bye!—Our hearts and hands,
Our lips in honest Saxon phrases,

Cry, God be with him, till he stands
His feet among the English daisies!
’Tis here we part;—for other eyes
The busy deck, the flattering streamer,
The dripping arms that plunge and rise,
The waves in foam, the ship in tremor,
The kerchiefs waving from the pier,
The cloudy pillar gliding o’er him,
The deep blue desert, lone and drear,
With heaven above and home before him!
His home!—the Western giant smiles,
And twirls the spotty globe to find it;—
This little speck the British Isles?
’Tis but a freckle,—never mind it!—
He laughs, and all his prairies roll,
Each gurgling cataract roars and chuckles,
And ridges stretched from pole to pole
Heave till they crack their iron knuckles!
But memory blushes at the sneer,
And Honor turns with frown defiant,
And Freedom, leaning on her spear,
Laughs louder than the laughing giant:—
“An islet is a world,” she said,
“When glory with its dust has blended,
And Britain kept her noble dead
Till earth and seas and skies are rended!”
Beneath each swinging forest-bough
Some arm as stout in death reposes,—
From wave-washed foot to heaven-kissed brow
Her valor’s life-blood runs in roses;
Nay, let our brothers of the West
Write smiling in their florid pages,
One-half her soil has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages!

Hugged in the clinging billow’s clasp,
From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather,
The British oak with rooted grasp
Her slender handful holds together;—
With cliffs of white and bowers of green,
And Ocean narrowing to caress her,
And hills and threaded streams between,—
Our little mother isle, God bless her!
In earth’s broad temple where we stand,
Fanned by the eastern gales that brought us,
We hold the missal in our hand,
Bright with the lines our Mother taught us;
Where’er its blazoned page betrays
The glistening links of gilded fetters,
Behold, the half-turned leaf displays
Her rubric stained in crimson letters!
Enough! To speed a parting friend
’Tis vain alike to speak and listen;—
Yet stay,—these feeble accents blend
With rays of light from eyes that glisten.
Good-bye! once more,—and kindly tell
In words of peace the young world’s story,—
And say, besides,—we love too well
Our mother’s soil, our father’s glory!

When my friend, the Professor, found that my friend, the Poet, had been
coming out in this full-blown style, he got a little excited, as you may have
seen a canary, sometimes, when another strikes up. The Professor says he
knows he can lecture, and thinks he can write verses. At any rate, he has
often tried, and now he was determined to try again. So when some
professional friends of his called him up, one day, after a feast of reason and
a regular “freshet” of soul which had lasted two or three hours, he read
them these verses. He introduced them with a few remarks, he told me, of
which the only one he remembered was this: that he had rather write a
single line which one among them should think worth remembering than set
them all laughing with a string of epigrams. It was all right, I don’t doubt;

at any rate, that was his fancy then, and perhaps another time he may be
obstinately hilarious; however, it may be that he is growing graver, for time
is a fact so long as clocks and watches continue to go, and a cat can’t be a
kitten always, as the old gentleman opposite said the other day.
You must listen to this seriously, for I think the Professor was very much in
earnest when he wrote it.

THE TWO ARMIES.
As Life’s unending column pours,
Two marshalled hosts are seen,—
Two armies on the trampled shores
That Death flows black between.
One marches to the drum-beat’s roll,
The wide-mouthed clarion’s bray,
And bears upon a crimson scroll,
“Our glory is to slay.”
One moves in silence by the stream,
With sad, yet watchful eyes,
Calm as the patient planet’s gleam
That walks the clouded skies.
Along its front no sabres shine,
No blood-red pennons wave;
Its banner bears the single line,
“Our duty is to save.”
For those no death-bed’s lingering shade;
At Honor’s trumpet-call,
With knitted brow and lifted blade
In Glory’s arms they fall.
For these no clashing falchions bright,
No stirring battle-cry;
The bloodless stabber calls by night,—
Each answers, “Here am I!”

For those the sculptor’s laurelled bust,
The builder’s marble piles,
The anthems pealing o’er their dust
Through long cathedral aisles.
For these the blossom-sprinkled turf
That floods the lonely graves,
When Spring rolls in her sea-green surf
In flowery-foaming waves.
Two paths lead upward from below,
And angels wait above,
Who count each burning life-drop’s flow,
Each falling tear of Love.
Though from the Hero’s bleeding breast
Her pulses Freedom drew,
Though the white lilies in her crest
Sprang from that scarlet dew,—
While Valor’s haughty champions wait
Till all their scars are shown,
Love walks unchallenged through the gate,
To sit beside the Throne!

CHAPTER X

[The schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair,—a fresh June rose.
She has been walking early; she has brought back two others,—one on each
cheek.
I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the occasion.
Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a couple of damasks. I
suppose all this went through my mind, for this was what I went on to say:
—]
I love the damask rose best of all. The flowers our mothers and sisters used
to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our eaves and by our
doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If the Houyhnhnms should ever
catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious and unmanageable, send a
man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I’ll tell you what drugs he would have to take
and how he would have to use them. Imagine yourself reading a number of
the Houyhnhnm Gazette, giving an account of such an experiment.

“MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.
“The soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to
the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous
assembly. The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely confined
by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of shoulder-
hitting and foot-striking. His countenance expressed the utmost degree
of ferocity and cunning.
“The operator took a handful of budding lilac-leaves, and crushing
them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar
fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them
towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,—it drew in
their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with its soft split

hoofs. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject, the operator
proceeded to tie a blue hyacinth to the end of the pole and held it out
towards the wild animal. The effect was magical. Its eyes filled as if
with raindrops, and its lips trembled as it pressed them to the flower.
After this it was perfectly quiet, and brought a measure of corn to the
man-tamer, without showing the least disposition to strike with the feet
or hit from the shoulder.”

That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette.—Do you ever wonder why poets
talk so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who did not talk
about them? Don’t you think a poem, which, for the sake of being original,
should leave them out, would be like those verses where the letter a or e or
some other is omitted? No,—they will bloom over and over again in poems
as in the summer fields, to the end of time, always old and always new.
Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves than the spring be tired
of blossoms or the night of stars? Look at Nature. She never wearies of
saying over her floral pater-noster. In the crevices of Cyclopean walls,—in
the dust where men lie, dust also,—on the mounds that bury huge cities, the
wreck of Nineveh and the Babel-heap,—still that same sweet prayer and
benediction. The Amen! of Nature is always a flower.
Are you tired of my trivial personalities,—those splashes and streaks of
sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see when I
show you my heart’s corolla as if it were a tulip? Pray, do not give yourself
the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is to treat himself as an
exceptional being. It is because you are just like me that I talk and know
that you will listen. We are all splashed and streaked with sentiments,—not
with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the same patterns, but by the
same hand and from the same palette.
I don’t believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the blue
hyacinth which I have,—very certainly not for the crushed lilac-leaf-buds;
many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love the smell of the
sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don’t doubt; but I hardly think that the
last bewitches you with young memories as it does me. For the same
reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised a good many of the
rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and concerts, but there are queer little

old homely sounds that are better than music to me. However, I suppose
it’s foolish to tell such things.
—It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,—said the divinity-student;—
saying it, however, in one of the dead languages, which I think are
unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not bear quotation as such.
Well, now,—said I,—suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking
countryman’s cart stops opposite my door.—Do I want any huckleberries?
—If I do not, there are those that do. Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid
bears out a large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the
peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the
wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing channel
until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on the
resounding metal beneath.—I won’t say that this rushing huckleberry hail-
storm has not more music for me than the “Anvil Chorus.”
—I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.
—Where are your great trees, Sir?—said the divinity-student.
Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put my
wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has
human ones.
—One set’s as green as the other,—exclaimed a boarder, who has never
been identified.
They’re all Bloomers,—said the young fellow called John.
[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady’s
daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my wedding-
ring on a tree.]
Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,—said I,—I have worn
a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and
other big trees.—Don’t you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That is
one of my specialities.
[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about trees.]

I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most intense,
passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic
attachments to certain trees in particular. Now, if you expect me to hold
forth in a “scientific” way about my tree-loves,—to talk, for instance, of the
Ulmus Americana, and describe the ciliated edges of its samara, and all that,
—you are an anserine individual, and I must refer you to a dull friend who
will discourse to you of such matters. What should you think of a lover
who should describe the idol of his heart in the language of science, thus:
Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus, Homo; Species, Europeus;
Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental Formula
i(2—2 / 2—2) c(1—1 / 1—1) p(2—2 / 2—2) m(3—3/3—3’)
and so on?
No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them, adore them
in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green sun-shades over our
heads, talking to us with their hundred thousand whispering tongues,
looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to huge, but
limited organisms,—which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen, but most in
the patient posture, the outstretched arms, and the heavy-drooping robes of
these vast beings endowed with life, but not with soul,—which outgrow us
and outlive us, but stand helpless,—poor things!—while Nature dresses and
undresses them, like so many full-sized, but under-witted children.
Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English
men; yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman.
I always supposed “Dr. Syntax” was written to make fun of him. I have a
whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and
open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The Père Gilpin had
the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little less observation
than White of Selborne, but a little more poetry.—Just think of applying the
Linnæan system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or pistils that
little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may have to classify it
by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the expression of a tree, as
a kind and as an individual.
There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well
marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the

oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength and
endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of supremacy
which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest-trees? All the rest of
them shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak alone defies it. It chooses
the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that their whole weight may tell,—
and then stretches them out fifty or sixty feet, so that the strain may be
mighty enough to be worth resisting. You will find, that, in passing from
the extreme downward droop of the branches of the weeping-willow to the
extreme upward inclination of those of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a
circle. At 90° the oak stops short; to slant upward another degree would
mark infirmity of purpose; to bend downwards, weakness of organization.
The American elm betrays something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall
see, puts on a certain resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.
It won’t do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is hardly one of
them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it. I
remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a vast pillar
of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and a beacon to all the
country round. A native of that region saw fit to build his house very near
it, and, having a fancy that it might blow down some time or other, and
exterminate himself and any incidental relatives who might be “stopping”
or “tarrying” with him,—also laboring under the delusion that human life is
under all circumstances to be preferred to vegetable existence,—had the
great poplar cut down. It is so easy to say, “It is only a poplar!” and so
much harder to replace its living cone than to build a granite obelisk!
I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. I was at one period of my life
much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a small, but
delightful State in the neighborhood of Pawtucket. The number of
inhabitants being not very large, I had leisure, during my visits to the
Providence Plantations, to inspect the face of the country in the intervals of
more fascinating studies of physiognomy. I heard some talk of a great elm
a short distance from the locality just mentioned. “Let us see the great
elm,”—I said, and proceeded to find it,—knowing that it was on a certain
farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly. I shall never forget
my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston elm.

I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first time.
Provincialism has no scale of excellence in man or vegetable; it never
knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is constantly
taking second and third rate ones for Nature’s best. I have often fancied the
tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came over it as over a
betrothed maiden when she first stands before the unknown to whom she
has been plighted. Before the measuring-tape the proudest tree of them all
quails and shrinks into itself. All those stories of four or five men stretching
their arms around it and not touching each other’s fingers, if one’s pacing
the shadow at noon and making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy
lips in the presence of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false
pretensions.
As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of my
journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the road-
side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I asked myself,
—“Is this it?” But as I drew nearer, they grew smaller,—or it proved,
perhaps, that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so deceived
me. At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it,—I declare to you it
makes my flesh creep when I think of it now,—all at once I saw a great,
green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such
Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-growths,
that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a
five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering the
words,—“This is it!”
You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent Report
upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has given my
friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but measured this
tree himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs,
and muscular development,—one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first
class of New England elms.
The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground is in
the great elm lying a stone’s throw or two north of the main road (if my
points of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much the
appearance of having been formed by the union of two trunks growing side
by side.

The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong
also to the first class of trees.
There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to spread its
claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or more before they
covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This is the American elm most
like an oak of any I have ever seen.
The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of form. I
have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County, and few to
compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember any other first-
class elms in New England, but there may be many.
—What makes a first-class elm?—Why, size, in the first place, and chiefly.
Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and
with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title,
according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable exception of the
Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my experience goes, at
about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a hundred and twenty of
spread.
Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen feet,
are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious tree near
one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately she is beyond all
praise. The “great tree” on Boston Common comes in the second rank, as
does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, and probably has still, a head
as round as an apple-tree, and that at Newburyport, with scores of others
which might be mentioned. These last two have perhaps been over-
celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield
elm lives on its past reputation. A wig of false leaves is indispensable to
make it presentable.
[I don’t doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating green,
but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which only wants a
sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your measurements,—
(certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible imposition,)—circumference
five feet from soil, length of line from bough-end to bough-end, and we will
see what can be done for you.]

—I wish somebody would get us up the following work:—

SYLVA NOVANGLICA.
Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the
Same Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a
Distinguished Literary Gentleman. Boston — — & Co. 185..

The same camera should be used,—so far as possible,—at a fixed distance.
Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures in his “Trees of
America,” must not think this Prospectus invades his province; a dozen
portraits, with lively descriptions, would be a pretty complement to his
large work, which, so far as published, I find excellent. If my plan were
carried out, and another series of a dozen English trees photographed on the
same scale the comparison would be charming.
It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the Old and
the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of their various
types of organization. We should begin with man, of course; institute a
large and exact comparison between the development of la pianta umana,
as Alfieri called it, in different sections of each country, in the different
callings, at different ages, estimating height, weigh, force by the
dynamometer and the spirometer, and finishing off with a series of typical
photographs, giving the principal national physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson
has given us some excellent English data to begin with.
Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel forms of life
in the two continents. Our naturalists have often referred to this
incidentally or expressly; but the animus of Nature in the two half globes of
the planet is so momentous a point of interest to our race, that it should be
made a subject of express and elaborate study. Go out with me into that
walk which we call the Mall, and look at the English and American elms.
The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed, and drooping as if from
languor. The English elm is compact, robust, holds its branches up, and
carries its leaves for weeks longer than our own native tree.
Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean, or not?
Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole realm of life can
answer this question.

There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life of
the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an extraordinary
manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet not the same,
both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a complete flora and a
fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it with various
modifications. Inventive power is the only quality of which the Creative
Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our largest human minds,
that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that most exhausts the mind
which exercises it. As the same patterns have very commonly been
followed, we can see which is worked out in the largest spirit, and
determine the exact limitations under which the Creator places the
movement of life in all its manifestations in either locality. We should find
ourselves in a very false position, if it should prove that Anglo-Saxons can’t
live here, but die out, if not kept up by fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other
more or less wise persons have maintained. It may turn out the other way,
as I have heard one of our literary celebrities argue,—and though I took the
other side, I liked his best,—that the American is the Englishman
reinforced.
—Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?—I said
to the schoolmistress.
[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,—as I suppose
she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry as that was
for our boarding-house. On the contrary, she turned a little pale,—but
smiled brightly and said,—Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk towards
her school.—She went for her bonnet.—The old gentleman opposite
followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow.
Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet,
and carrying a school-book in her hand.]

MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

This is the shortest way,—she said, as we came to a corner.—Then we
won’t take it,—said I.—The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said she
was ten minutes early, so she could go round.

We walked under Mr. Paddock’s row of English elms. The gray squirrels
were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in
light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the burial-
ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at its head, and a
shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave of a young man who
was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a hundred years ago
and more.—Oh, yes, died,—with a small triangular mark in one breast, and
another smaller opposite, in his back, where another young man’s rapier had
slid through his body; and so he lay down out there on the Common, and
was found cold the next morning, with the night-dews and the death-dews
mingled on his forehead.
Let us have one look at poor Benjamin’s grave,—said I.—His bones lie
where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they lie,—
which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and several
other burial-grounds.
[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge
was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our city
burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting them in
rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators. Many years ago,
when this disgraceful process was going on under my eyes, I addressed an
indignant remonstrance to a leading journal. I suppose it was deficient in
literary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no notice was taken of it,
and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete itself in the face of daylight.
I have never got over it. The bones of my own ancestors, being entombed,
lie beneath their own tablet; but the upright stones have been shuffled about
like chessmen, and nothing short of the Day of Judgment will tell whose
dust lies beneath any of those records, meant by affection to mark one small
spot as sacred to some cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame!—that is
all I can say. It was on public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that
this infamy was enacted. The red Indians would have known better; the
selectmen of an African kraal-village would have had more respect for their
ancestors. I should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed
all removed, and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs
were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of “Here lies” never had
such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the
stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]

Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman’s sigh over poor
Benjamin’s dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out there
fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that old July
evening;—yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.
The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the
rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her comment
upon what I told her.—How women love Love! said I;—but she did not
speak.
We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the
main street.—Look down there,—I said,—My friend the Professor lived in
that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and years. He
died out of it, the other day.—Died?—said the schoolmistress.—Certainly,
—said I.—We die out of houses, just as we die out of our bodies. A
commercial smash kills a hundred men’s houses for them, as a railroad
crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the immortal tenants. Men
sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as the soul leaves its body
when it is tired of its infirmities. The body has been called “the house we
live in”; the house is quite as much the body we live in. Shall I tell you
some things the Professor said the other day?—Do!—said the
schoolmistress.
A man’s body,—said the Professor,—is whatever is occupied by his will
and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers
you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a
paralytic’s senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.
The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the
core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his
natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments, with
their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues, and their
variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a single chamber or a
stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world, in which Time buttons
him up as in a loose outside wrapper.
You shall observe,—the Professor said,—for, like Mr. John Hunter and
other great men, he brings in that shall with great effect sometimes,—you
shall observe that a man’s clothing or series of envelopes does after a

certain time mould itself upon his individual nature. We know this of our
hats, and are always reminded of it when we happen to put them on wrong
side foremost. We soon find that the beaver is a hollow cast of the skull,
with all its irregular bumps and depressions. Just so all that clothes a man,
even to the blue sky which caps his head,—a little loosely,—shapes itself to
fit each particular being beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets,
lovers, condemned criminals, all find it different, according to the eyes with
which they severally look.
But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures.
See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a shell-
fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of its own. A
house is never a home until we have crusted it with the spoils of a hundred
lives besides those of our own past. See what these are and you can tell
what the occupant is.
I had no idea,—said the Professor,—until I pulled up my domestic
establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had been
making during the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn’t a nook or a
corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when I gave the last
wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake, as it broke its hold
and came away.
There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably, and
which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable aspect and
in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await but one brief
process and all their pictures will be called out and fixed forever. We had a
curious illustration of the great fact on a very humble scale. When a certain
bookcase, long standing in one place, for which it was built, was removed,
there was the exact image on the wall of the whole, and of many of its
portions. But in the midst of this picture was another,—the precise outline
of a map which had hung on the wall before the bookcase was built. We
had all forgotten everything about the map until we saw its photograph on
the wall. Then we remembered it, as some day or other we may remember
a sin which has been built over and covered up, when this lower universe is
pulled away from before the wall of Infinity, where the wrong-doing stands
self-recorded.

The Professor lived in that house a long time,—not twenty years, but pretty
near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the threshold;
five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the last time,—
and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer than his
own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained through every
roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity, wedded, faded away,
threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was played in that stock-
company’s theatre of a dozen houses, one of which was his, and no deep
sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling. Peace be to those
walls, forever,—the Professor said,—for the many pleasant years he has
passed within them!
The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been with him
in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in imagination with
tender interest wherever he goes.—In that little court, where he lived in gay
loneliness so long,—
—in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering
down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the
small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets proud and
swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair Northampton
meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant’s memory in profligate
freshets at Hartford and all along its lower shores,—up in that caravansary
on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his log canoe, and the
jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement processions,—where
blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and the hills of Beulah,
as the Professor always called them, rolled up the opposite horizon in soft
climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim’s Heavenward Path that he
used to look through his old “Dollond” to see if the Shining Ones were not
within range of sight,—sweet visions, sweetest in those Sunday walks
which carried them by the peaceful common, through the solemn village
lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the rod of Moses, to the
terminus of their harmless stroll,—the patulous fage, in the Professor’s
classic dialect,—the spreading beech, in more familiar phrase,—[stop and
breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not done yet, and we have
another long journey before us,]—

—and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the amber-
flowing Housatonic,—dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs that shine
beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed demi-blondes,—in the
home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth, flat meadow; looked
down upon by wild hills, where the tracks of bears and catamounts may yet
sometimes be seen upon the winter snow; facing the twin summits which
rise in the far North, the highest waves of the great land-storm in all this
billowy region,—suggestive to mad fancies of the breasts of a half-buried
Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away
beneath the leaves of the forest,—in that home where seven blessed
summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven golden
candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer,—
—in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not
unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little
boys’ playthings from top to bottom,—in all these summer or winter nests
he was always at home and always welcome.
This long articulated sigh of reminiscences,—this calenture which shows
me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-circled green
of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling their way along the
wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as blind men’s busy fingers,—is
for that friend of mine who looks into the waters of the Patapsco and sees
beneath them the same visions which paint themselves for me in the green
depths of the Charles.
—Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress?—Why, no,—of course not. I
have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten minutes. You don’t
think I should expect any woman to listen to such a sentence as that long
one, without giving her a chance to put in a word?
—What did I say to the schoolmistress?—Permit me one moment. I don’t
doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as I was
allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting young
woman, you must allow me to remark, in the classic version of a familiar
phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is nullum tui negotii.
When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask
roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I felt

sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every morning, and
made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.

EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.

(To be burned unread.)
I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to this
young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which invites
confidence and expansive utterance. I have been low-spirited and listless,
lately,—it is coffee, I think,—(I observe that which is bought ready-ground
never affects the head,)—and I notice that I tell my secrets too easily when I
am downhearted.
There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock, are
never to be seen except at dead-low tide.
There is a woman’s footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest ocean-
buried inscription!
—Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no!—Yet what is this which has been
shaping itself in my soul?—Is it a thought?—is it a dream?—is it a passion?
—Then I know what comes next.
—The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed corridors are
pleasant to walk in, in bad weather. But there are iron bars to all the
windows. When it is fair, some of us can stroll outside that very high
fence. But I never see much life in those groups I sometimes meet;—and
then the careful man watches them so closely! How I remember that sad
company I used to pass on fine mornings, when I was a schoolboy!—B.,
with his arms full of yellow weeds,—ore from the gold mines which he
discovered long before we heard of California,—Y., born to millions, crazed
by too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged, explosive,—made a
Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious flirt with a stick,
—(the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was said, to buy another eye
with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I don’t doubt the good people
made him easy for life,)—how I remember them all!

I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in “Vathek,” and how
each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its heart,—a burning
coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder summit. Go there on the next
visiting-day, and ask that figure crouched in the corner, huddled up like
those Indian mummies and skeletons found buried in the sitting posture, to
lift its hand,—look upon its heart, and behold, not fire, but ashes.—No, I
must not think of such an ending! Dying would be a much more
gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty. Make a will and leave her a
house or two and some stocks, and other little financial conveniences, to
take away her necessity for keeping school.—I wonder what nice young
man’s feet would be in my French slippers before six months were over!
Well, what then? If a man really loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t
marry her for the world, if he were not quite sure that he was the best
person she could by any possibility marry.
—It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing.—It is the
merest fancy that ever was in the world. I shall never be married. She will;
and if she is as pleasant as she has been so far, I will give her a silver tea-
set, and go and take tea with her and her husband, sometimes. No coffee, I
hope, though,—it depresses me sadly. I feel very miserably;—they must
have been grinding it at home.—Another morning walk will be good for
me, and I don’t doubt the schoolmistress will be glad of a little fresh air
before school.

—The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been coming over
me from time to time of late. Did you ever see that electrical experiment
which consists in passing a flash through letters of gold-leaf in a darkened
room, whereupon some name or legend springs out of the darkness in
characters of fire?
There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the flash
might pass through them,—but the fire must come down from heaven. Ah!
but what if the stormy nimbus of youthful passion has blown by, and one
asks for lightning from the ragged cirrus of dissolving aspirations, or the
silvered cumulus of sluggish satiety? I will call on her whom the dead
poets believed in, whom living ones no longer worship,—the immortal
maid, who, name her what you will,—Goddess, Muse, Spirit of Beauty,—

sits by the pillow of every youthful poet, and bends over his pale forehead
until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain their gold into his dreams.

MUSA.
O my lost Beauty!—hast thou folded quite
Thy wings of morning light
Beyond those iron gates
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
To chill our fiery dreams,
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?
Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
Whose flowers are silvered hair!—
Have I not loved thee long,
Though my young lips have often done thee wrong
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?
Ah, wilt thou yet return,
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?
Come to me!—I will flood thy silent shine
With my soul’s sacred wine,
And heap thy marble floors
As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
In leafy islands walled with madrepores
And lapped in Orient seas,
When all their feathery palm toss, plume-like, in the breeze.
Come to me!—thou shalt feed on honied words,
Sweeter than song of birds;—
No wailing bulbul’s throat,
No melting dulcimer’s melodious note,
When o’er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
Thy ravished sense might soothe
With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.
Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
Sought in those bowers of green

Where loop the clustered vines
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,—
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,
And Summer’s fruited gems,
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn’s berried stems.
Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,—
Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
Carved with old names Life’s time-worn roll disowns,
Lean, lichen-spotted, o’er the crumbled bones
Still slumbering where they lay
While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.
Spread o’er my couch thy visionary wing!
Still let me dream and sing,—
Dream of that winding shore
Where scarlet cardinals bloom,—for me no more,—
The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
And clustering nenuphars
Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!
Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!—
Come while the rose is red,—
While blue-eyed Summer smiles
On the green ripples round you sunken piles
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,
And on the sultry air
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!
Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
With thrills of wild sweet pain!—
On life’s autumnal blast,
Like shrivelled leaves, youth’s, passion-flowers are cast,—
Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!—
Behold thy new-decked shrine,
And hear once more the voice that breathed “Forever thine!”

CHAPTER XI

[The company looked a little flustered one morning when I came in,—so
much so, that I inquired of my neighbor, the divinity-student,) what had
been going on. It appears that the young fellow whom they call John had
taken advantage of my being a little late (I having been rather longer than
usual dressing that morning) to circulate several questions involving a
quibble or play upon words,—in short, containing that indignity to the
human understanding, condemned in the passages from the distinguished
moralist of the last century and the illustrious historian of the present, which
I cited on a former occasion, and known as a pun. After breakfast, one of
the boarders handed me a small roll of paper containing some of the
questions and their answers. I subjoin two or three of them, to show what a
tendency there is to frivolity and meaningless talk in young persons of a
certain sort, when not restrained by the presence of more reflective natures.
—It was asked, “Why tertian and quartan fevers were like certain short-
lived insects.” Some interesting physiological relation would be naturally
suggested. The inquirer blushes to find that the answer is in the paltry
equivocation, that they skip a day or two.—“Why an Englishman must go
to the Continent to weaken his grog or punch.” The answer proves to have
no relation whatever to the temperance-movement, as no better reason is
given than that island—(or, as it is absurdly written, ile and) water won’t
mix.—But when I came to the next question and its answer, I felt that
patience ceased to be a virtue. “Why an onion is like a piano” is a query
that a person of sensibility would be slow to propose; but that in an
educated community an individual could be found to answer it in these
words,—“Because it smell odious,” quasi, it’s melodious,—is not credible,
but too true. I can show you the paper.
Dear reader, I beg your pardon for repeating such things. I know most
conversations reported in books are altogether above such trivial details, but
folly will come up at every table as surely as purslain and chickweed and

sorrel will come up in gardens. This young fellow ought to have talked
philosophy, I know perfectly well; but he didn’t,—he made jokes.]
I am willing,—I said,—to exercise your ingenuity in a rational and
contemplative manner.—No, I do not proscribe certain forms of
philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd or the
ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio of the Reverend
Father Thomas Sanchez, in his famous Disputations, “De Sancto
Matrimonio.” I will therefore turn this levity of yours to profit by reading
you a rhymed problem, wrought out by my friend the Professor.

THE DEACON’S MASTERPIECE:
OR THE WONDERFUL “ONE-HOSS-SHAY.”

A LOGICAL STORY.

Have you heard of the wonderful one-shay,
That was built in such a logical way
It ran a hundred years to a day,
And then, of a sudden, it—ah, but stay,
I’ll tell you what happened without delay,
Scaring the parson into fits,
Frightening people out of their wits,—
Have you ever heard of that, I say?
Seventeen hundred and fifty-five.
Georgius Secundus was then alive,—
Snuffy old drone from the German hive.
That was the year when Lisbon-town
Saw the earth open and gulp her down,
And Braddock’s army was done so brown,
Left without a scalp to its crown.
It was on the terrible Earthquake-day
That the Deacon finished the one-hoss-shay.
Now in building of chaises, I tell you what,
There is always somewhere a weakest spot,—
In hub, tire, felloe, in spring or thill,
In panel, or crossbar, or floor, or sill,
In screw, bolt, thoroughbrace,—lurking still
Find it somewhere you must and will,—
Above or below, or within or without,—
And that’s the reason, beyond a doubt,
A chaise breasts down, but doesn’t wear out.
But the Deacon swore (as Deacons do,
With an “I dew vum,” or an “I tell yeou,”)
He would build one shay to beat the taown
’n’ the keounty ’n’ all the kentry raoun’;
It should be so built that it couldn’ break daown—
—“Fur,” said the Deacon, “’t’s mighty plain
Thut the weakes’ place mus’ stan the strain;
’n’ the way t’ fix it, uz I maintain,

Is only jest
T’ make that place uz strong uz the rest.”
So the Deacon inquired of the village folk
Where he could find the strongest oak,
That couldn’t be split nor bent nor broke,—
That was for spokes and floor and sills;
He sent for lancewood to make the thills;
The crossbars were ash, from the straightest trees;
The panels of white-wood, that cuts like cheese,
But lasts like iron for things like these;
The hubs of logs from the “Settler’s ellum,”—
Last of its timber,—they couldn’t sell ’em,
Never an axe had seen their chips,
And the wedges flew from between their lips,
Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips;
Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw,
Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too,
Steel of the finest, bright and blue;
Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide;
Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide
Found in the pit when the tanner died.
That was the way he “put her through.”—
“There!” said the Deacon, “naow she’ll dew.”
Do! I tell you, I father guess
She was a wonder, and nothing less!
Colts grew horses, beards turned gray,
Deacon and deaconess dropped away,
Children and grand-children—where were they?
But there stood the stout old one-hoss-shay
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day!
Eighteen hundred;—it came and found
The Deacon’s Masterpiece strong and sound.
Eighteen hundred increased by ten;—
“Hahnsum kerridge” they called it then.
Eighteen hundred and twenty came;—

Running as usual; much the same.
Thirty and forty at last arrive,
And then come fifty, and fifty-five.
Little of all we value here
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year
Without both feeling and looking queer.
In fact, there’s nothing that keeps its youth,
So far as I know, but a tree and truth.
(This is a moral that runs at large;
Take it.—You’re welcome.—No extra charge.)
First of November,—the Earthquake-day.—
There are traces of age in the one-hoss-shay.
A general flavor of mild decay,
But nothing local, as one may say.
There couldn’t be,—for the Deacon’s art
Had made it so like in every part
That there wasn’t a chance for one to start.
For the wheels were just as strong as the thills,
And the floor was just as strong as the sills,
And the panels just as strong as the floor,
And the whippletree neither less nor more,
And the back-crossbar as strong as the fore,
And spring and axle and hub encore.
And yet, as a whole, it is past a doubt
In another hour it will be worn out!
First of November, ’Fifty-five!
This morning the parson takes a drive.
Now, small boys, get out of the way!
Here comes the wonderful one-horse-shay,
Drawn by a rat-tailed, ewe-necked bay.
“Huddup!” said the parson.—Off went they.
The parson was working his Sunday’s text,—
Had got to fifthly, and stopped perplexed
At what the—Moses—was coming next.

All at once the horse stood still,
Close by the meet’n-house on the hill.
—First a shiver, and then a thrill,
Then something decidedly like a spill,—
And the parson was sitting upon a rock,
At half-past nine by the meet’n-house clock,—
Just the hour of the Earthquake shock!
—What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you’re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once,—
All at once, and nothing first,—
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.

—I think there is one habit,—I said to our company a day or two afterwards
—worse than that of punning. It is the gradual substitution of cant or flash
terms for words which truly characterize their objects. I have known
several very genteel idiots whose whole vocabulary had deliquesced into
some half dozen expressions. All things fell into one of two great
categories,—fast or slow. Man’s chief end was to be a brick. When the
great calamities of life overtook their friends, these last were spoken of as
being a good deal cut up. Nine-tenths of human existence were summed up
in the single word, bore. These expressions come to be the algebraic
symbols of minds which have grown too weak or indolent to discriminate.
They are the blank checks of intellectual bankruptcy;—you may fill them
up with what idea you like; it makes no difference, for there are no funds in
the treasury upon which they are drawn. Colleges and good-for-nothing
smoking-clubs are the places where these conversational fungi spring up
most luxuriantly. Don’t think I undervalue the proper use and application
of a cant word or phrase. It adds piquancy to conversation, as a mushroom
does to a sauce. But it is no better than a toadstool, odious to the sense and
poisonous to the intellect, when it spawns itself all over the talk of men and
youths capable of talking, as it sometimes does. As we hear flash

phraseology, it is commonly the dishwater from the washings of English
dandyism, school-boy or full-grown, wrung out of a three-volume novel
which had sopped it up, or decanted from the pictured urn of Mr. Verdant
Green, and diluted to suit the provincial climate.
—The young fellow called John spoke up sharply and said, it was “rum” to
hear me “pitchin’ into fellers” for “goin’ it in the slang line,” when I used all
the flash words myself just when I pleased.
—I replied with my usual forbearance.—Certainly, to give up the algebraic
symbol, because a or b is often a cover for ideal nihility, would be unwise.
I have heard a child laboring to express a certain condition, involving a
hitherto undescribed sensation (as it supposed,) all of which could have
been sufficiently explained by the participle—bored. I have seen a country-
clergyman, with a one-story intellect and a one-horse vocabulary, who has
consumed his valuable time (and mine) freely, in developing an opinion of a
brother-minister’s discourse which would have been abundantly
characterized by a peach-down-lipped sophomore in the one word—slow.
Let us discriminate, and be shy of absolute proscription. I am
omniverbivorous by nature and training. Passing by such words as are
poisonous, I can swallow most others, and chew such as I cannot swallow.
Dandies are not good for much, but they are good for something. They
invent or keep in circulation those conversational blank checks or counters
just spoken of, which intellectual capitalists may sometimes find it worth
their while to borrow of them. They are useful, too, in keeping up the
standard of dress, which, but for them, would deteriorate, and become, what
some old fools would have it, a matter of convenience, and not of taste and
art. Yes, I like dandies well enough,—on one condition.
—What is that, Sir?—said the divinity-student.
—That they have pluck. I find that lies at the bottom of all true dandyism.
A little boy dressed up very fine, who puts his finger in his mouth and takes
to crying, if other boys make fun of him, looks very silly. But if he turns
red in the face and knotty in the fists, and makes an example of the biggest
of his assailants, throwing off his fine Leghorn and his thickly-buttoned
jacket, if necessary, to consummate the act of justice, his small toggery
takes on the splendors of the crested helmet that frightened Astyanax. You

remember that the Duke said his dandy officers were his best officers. The
“Sunday blood,” the super-superb sartorial equestrian of our annual Fast-
day, is not imposing or dangerous. But such fellows as Brummel and
D’Orsay and Byron are not to be snubbed quite so easily. Look out for “la
main de fer sous le gant de velours,” (which I printed in English the other
day without quotation-marks, thinking whether any scarabæus criticus
would add this to his globe and roll in glory with it into the newspapers,—
which he didn’t do it, in the charming pleonasm of the London language,
and therefore I claim the sole merit of exposing the same.) A good many
powerful and dangerous people have had a decided dash of dandyism about
them. There was Alcibiades, the “curled son of Clinias,” an accomplished
young man, but what would be called a “swell” in these days. There was
Aristoteles, a very distinguished writer, of whom you have heard,—a
philosopher, in short, whom it took centuries to learn, centuries to unlearn,
and is now going to take a generation or more to learn over again. Regular
dandy, he was. So was Marcus Antonius; and though he lost his game, he
played for big stakes, and it wasn’t his dandyism that spoiled his chance.
Petrarca was not to be despised as a scholar or a poet, but he was one of the
same sort. So was Sir Humphrey Davy; so was Lord Palmerston, formerly,
if I am not forgetful. Yes,—a dandy is good for something as such; and
dandies such as I was just speaking of have rocked this planet like a cradle,
—aye, and left it swinging to this day.—Still, if I were you, I wouldn’t go to
the tailor’s, on the strength of these remarks, and run up a long bill which
will render pockets a superfluity in your next suit. Elegans “nascitur, non
fit.” A man is born a dandy, as he is born a poet. There are heads that can’t
wear hats; there are necks that can’t fit cravats; there are jaws that can’t fill
out collars—(Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes,
if I remember rightly); there are tournures nothing can humanize, and
movements nothing can subdue to the gracious suavity or elegant languor or
stately serenity which belong to different styles of dandyism.
We are forming an aristocracy, as you may observe, in this country,—not a
gratiâ-Dei, nor a juredivino one,—but a de-facto upper stratum of being,
which floats over the turbid waves of common life like the iridescent film
you may have seen spreading over the water about our wharves,—very
splendid, though its origin may have been tar, tallow, train-oil, or other such
unctuous commodities. I say, then, we are forming an aristocracy; and,

transitory as its individual life often is, it maintains itself tolerably, as a
whole. Of course, money is its corner-stone. But now observe this. Money
kept for two or three generations transforms a race,—I don’t mean merely
in manners and hereditary culture, but in blood and bone. Money buys air
and sunshine, in which children grow up more kindly, of course, than in
close, back streets; it buys country-places to give them happy and healthy
summers, good nursing, good doctoring, and the best cuts of beef and
mutton. When the spring-chickens come to market—I beg your pardon,—
that is not what I was going to speak of. As the young females of each
successive season come on, the finest specimens among them, other things
being equal, are apt to attract those who can afford the expensive luxury of
beauty. The physical character of the next generation rises in consequence.
It is plain that certain families have in this way acquired an elevated type of
face and figure, and that in a small circle of city-connections one may
sometimes find models of both sexes which one of the rural counties would
find it hard to match from all its townships put together. Because there is a
good deal of running down, of degeneration and waste of life, among the
richer classes, you must not overlook the equally obvious fact I have just
spoken of,—which in one or two generations more will be, I think, much
more patent than just now.
The weak point in our chryso-aristocracy is the same I have alluded to in
connection with cheap dandyism. Its thorough manhood, its high-caste
gallantry, are not so manifest as the plate-glass of its windows and the more
or less legitimate heraldry of its coach-panels. It is very curious to observe
of how small account military folks are held among our Northern people.
Our young men must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The
equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the
necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element of refinement,
and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to count heroism among its
virtues. Still I don’t believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its
backbone. Ours may show it when the time comes, if it ever does come.
—These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual green fruit
of all the places in the world. I think so, at any rate. The demand for
intellectual labor is so enormous and the market so far from nice, that
young talent is apt to fare like unripe gooseberries,—get plucked to make a
fool of. Think of a country which buys eighty thousand copies of the

“Proverbial Philosophy,” while the author’s admiring countrymen have
been buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun
until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such hungry mouths
ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises? Consequently, there never was
such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native
literature displays among its fruits. There are literary green-groceries at
every corner, which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple.
It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and
writing. The temptation of money and fame is too great for young people.
Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr.—we won’t say
who,—editor of the—we won’t say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents
per double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his
foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I
should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning
that the fifty cents was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by
no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.
—Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues. It is
good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or
hurtful. But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless
one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic
benevolence.
—I don’t believe one word of what you are saying,—spoke up the angular
female in black bombazine.
I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam,—I said, and added softly to my next
neighbor,—but you prove it.
The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student said, in
an undertone,—Optime dictum.
Your talking Latin,—said I,—reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old
tutors. He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into
it. He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and
wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals. Eclogues he called them,
and meant to have published them by subscription. I remember some of his
verses, if you want to hear them.—You, Sir, (addressing myself to the
divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the

same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a
dictionary. The old man had a great deal to say about “æstivation,” as he
called it, in opposition, as one might say, to hibernation. Intramural
æstivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of
suspended existence, or semi-asphyxia. One wakes up from it about the
beginning of the last week in September. This is what I remember of his
poem:—

ÆSTIVATION.
An Unpublished Poem, by my late Latin Tutor
In candent ire the solar splendor flames;
The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;
His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes,
And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes,
Dorm on the herb with none to supervise,
Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine,
And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!
To me, alas! no verdurous visions come,
Save yon exiguous pool’s conferva-scum,—
No concave vast repeats the tender hue
That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades
Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,—
Depart,—be off,—excede,—evade,—erump!

—I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains.—No, I am not going
to say which is best. The one where your place is is the best for you. But
this difference there is: you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is feræ
naturæ. You may have a hut, or know the owner of one, on the mountain-
side; you see a light half-way up its ascent in the evening, and you know
there is a home, and you might share it. You have noted certain trees,
perhaps; you know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in

October, when the maples and beeches have faded. All its reliefs and
intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round
the walls of your memory’s chamber.—The sea remembers nothing. It is
feline. It licks your feet,—its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but
it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned
foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened. The mountains give their
lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die.
The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a
fascinating, treacherous intelligence. The mountains lie about like huge
ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle. The
sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see their joints,—but their
shining is that of a snake’s belly, after all.—In deeper suggestiveness I find
as great a difference. The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the
procession of its long generations. The sea drowns out humanity and time;
it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings
its monotonous song forever and ever.
Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore. I should love to gaze
out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I
should love to look on a caged panther, and see it, stretch its shining length,
and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash
itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the
cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.—And then,—to look at it with that
inward eye,—who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at
intervals,—to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he
belongs to, what language he speaks, which golden-headed nail of the
firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the
great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging
when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily
after the human chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?
—What should decide one, in choosing a summer residence?—
Constitution, first of all. How much snow could you melt in an hour, if you
were planted in a hogshead of it? Comfort is essential to enjoyment. All
sensitive people should remember that persons in easy circumstances suffer
much more cold in summer—that is, the warm half of the year—than in
winter, or the other half. You must cut your climate to your constitution, as
much as your clothing to your shape. After this, consult your taste and

convenient. But if you would be happy in Berkshire, you must carry
mountains in your brain; and if you would enjoy Nahant, you must have an
ocean in your soul. Nature plays at dominos with you; you must match her
piece, or she will never give it up to you.
—The schoolmistress said, in a rather mischievous way, that she was afraid
some minds or souls would be a little crowded, if they took in the Rocky
Mountains or the Atlantic.
Have you ever read the little book called “The Stars and the Earth?”—said
I.—Have you seen the Declaration of Independence photographed in a
surface that a fly’s foot would cover? The forms or conditions of Time and
Space, as Kant will tell you, are nothing in themselves,—only our way of
looking at things. You are right, I think, however, in recognizing the
category of Space as being quite as applicable to minds as to the outer
world. Every man of reflection is vaguely conscious of an imperfectly-
defined circle which is drawn about his intellect. He has a perfectly clear
sense that the fragments of his intellectual circle include the curves of many
other minds of which he is cognizant. He often recognizes these as
manifestly concentric with his own, but of less radius. On the other hand,
when we find a portion of an are on the outside of our own, we say it
intersects ours, but are very slow to confess or to see that it circumscribes
it. Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or
sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions. After looking at
the Alps, I felt that my mind had been stretched beyond the limits of its
elasticity, and fitted so loosely on my old ideas of space that I had to spread
these to fit it.
—If I thought I should ever see the Alps!—said the schoolmistress.
Perhaps you will, some time or other,—I said.
It is not very likely,—she answered.—I have had one or two opportunities,
but I had rather be anything than governess in a rich family.
[Proud, too, you little soft-voiced woman! Well, I can’t say I like you any
the worse for it. How long will school-keeping take to kill you? Is it
possible the poor thing works with her needle, too? I don’t like those marks
on the side of her forefinger.

Tableau. Chamouni. Mont Blanc in full view. Figures in the foreground;
two of them standing apart; one of them a gentleman of—oh,—ah,—yes!
the other a lady in a white cashmere, leaning on his shoulder.—The
ingenuous reader will understand that this was an internal, private, personal,
subjective diorama, seen for one instant on the background of my own
consciousness, and abolished into black nonentity by the first question
which recalled me to actual life, as suddenly as if one of those iron shop-
blinds (which I always pass at dusk with a shiver, expecting to stumble over
some poor but honest shop-boy’s head, just taken off by its sudden and
unexpected descent, and left outside upon the sidewalk) had come down in
front of it “by the run.”]
—Should you like to hear what moderate wishes life brings one to at last? I
used to be very ambitious,—wasteful, extravagant, and luxurious in all my
fancies. Read too much in the “Arabian Nights.” Must have the lamp,—
couldn’t do without the ring. Exercise every morning on the brazen horse.
Plump down into castles as full of little milk-white princesses as a nest is of
young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.—Charming idea of life, but
too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have
become exceedingly primitive,—almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry
happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you
will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited
desires of my maturity.

CONTENTMENT.
“Man wants but little here below.”
Little I ask, my wants are few;
I only wish a hut of stone,
(A very plain brown stone will do,)
That I may call my own;—
And close at hand is such a one,
In yonder street that fronts the sun.
Plain food is quite enough for me;
Three courses are as good as ten;—
If Nature can subsist on three,
Thank heaven for three. Amen!

I always thought cold victual nice;—
My choice would be vanilla-ice.
I care not much for gold or land;—
Give me a mortgage here and there,—
Some good bank-stock,—some note of hand,
Or trifling railroad share;—
I only ask that Fortune send
A little more than I shall spend.
Honors are silly toys, I know,
And titles are but empty names;—
I would, perhaps, be Plenipo,—
But only near St. James;—
I’m very sure I should not care
To fill our Gubernator’s chair.
Jewels are baubles; ’tis a sin
To care for such unfruitful things;—
One good-sized diamond in a pin,—
Some, not so large, in rings,—
A ruby and a pearl, or so,
Will do for me;—I laugh at show.
My dame should dress in cheap attire;
(Good, heavy silks are never dear;)—
I own perhaps I might desire
Some shawls of true cashmere,—
Some marrowy crapes of China silk,
Like wrinkled skins on scalded milk.
I would not have the horse I drive
So fast that folks must stop and stare
An easy gait—two, forty-five—
Suits me; I do not care;—
Perhaps, for just a single spurt,
Some seconds less would do no hurt.

Of pictures, I should like to own
Titians and Raphaels three or four,—
I love so much their style and tone,—
One Turner, and no more,—
(A landscape,—foreground golden dirt
The sunshine painted with a squirt.)
Of books but few,—some fifty score
For daily use, and bound for wear;
The rest upon an upper floor;—
Some little luxury there
Of red morocco’s gilded gleam,
And vellum rich as country cream.
Busts, cameos, gems,—such things as these,
Which others often show for pride,
I value for their power to please,
And selfish churls deride;—
One Stradivarius, I confess,
Two Meerschaums, I would fain possess.
Wealth’s wasteful tricks I will not learn,
Nor ape the glittering upstart fool;—
Shall not carved tables serve my turn,
But all must be of buhl?
Give grasping pomp its double share,—
I ask but one recumbent chair.
Thus humble let me live and die,
Nor long for Midas’ golden touch,
If Heaven more generous gifts deny,
I shall not miss them much,—
Too grateful for the blessing lent
Of simple tastes and mind content!

MY LAST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.

(A Parenthesis.)

I can’t say just how many walks she and I had taken together before this
one. I found the effect of going out every morning was decidedly favorable
on her health. Two pleasing dimples, the places for which were just marked
when she came, played, shadowy, in her freshening cheeks when she smiled
and nodded good-morning to me from the school-house-steps.
I am afraid I did the greater part of the talking. At any rate, if I should try to
report all that I said during the first half-dozen walks we took together, I
fear that I might receive a gentle hint from my friends the publishers, that a
separate volume, at my own risk and expense, would be the proper method
of bringing them before the public.
—I would have a woman as true as Death. At the first real lie which works
from the heart outward, she should be tenderly chloroformed into a better
world, where she can have an angel for a governess, and feed on strange
fruits which will make her all over again, even to her bones and marrow.—
Whether gifted with the accident of beauty or not, she should have been
moulded in the rose-red clay of Love, before the breath of life made a
moving mortal of her. Love-capacity is a congenital endowment; and I
think, after a while, one gets to know the warm-hued natures it belongs to
from the pretty pipe-clay counterfeits of them.—Proud she may be, in the
sense of respecting herself; but pride in the sense of contemning others less
gifted than herself, deserves the two lowest circles of a vulgar woman’s
Inferno, where the punishments are Smallpox and Bankruptcy.—She who
nips off the end of a brittle courtesy, as one breaks the tip of an icicle, to
bestow upon those whom she ought cordially and kindly to recognize,
proclaims the fact that she comes not merely of low blood, but of bad
blood. Consciousness of unquestioned position makes people gracious in
proper measure to all; but if a woman puts on airs with her real equals, she
has something about herself or her family she is ashamed of, or ought to
be. Middle, and more than middle-aged people, who know family histories,
generally see through it. An official of standing was rude to me once. Oh,
that is the maternal grandfather,—said a wise old friend to me,—he was a
boor.—Better too few words, from the woman we love, than too many:
while she is silent, Nature is working for her; while she talks, she is
working for herself.—Love is sparingly soluble in the words of men;
therefore they speak much of it; but one syllable of woman’s speech can
dissolve more of it than a man’s heart can hold.

—Whether I said any or all of these things to the schoolmistress, or not,—
whether I stole them out of Lord Bacon,—whether I cribbed them from
Balzac,—whether I dipped them from the ocean of Tupperian wisdom,—or
whether I have just found them in my head, laid there by that solemn fowl,
Experience, (who, according to my observation, cackles oftener than she
drops real live eggs,) I cannot say. Wise men have said more foolish things,
—and foolish men, I don’t doubt, have said as wise things. Anyhow, the
schoolmistress and I had pleasant walks and long talks, all of which I do not
feel bound to report.
—You are a stranger to me, Ma’am.—I don’t doubt you would like to know
all I said to the schoolmistress.—I sha’n’t do it;—I had rather get the
publishers to return the money you have invested in this. Besides, I have
forgotten a good deal of it. I shall tell only what I like of what I remember.
—My idea was, in the first place, to search out the picturesque spots which
the city affords a sight of, to those who have eyes. I know a good many,
and it was a pleasure to look at them in company with my young friend.
There were the shrubs and flowers in the Franklin-Place front-yards or
borders; Commerce is just putting his granite foot upon them. Then there
are certain small seraglio-gardens, into which one can get a peep through
the crevices of high fences,—one in Myrtle Street, or backing on it,—here
and there one at the North and South Ends. Then the great elms in Essex
Street. Then the stately horse-chestnuts in that vacant lot in Chambers
Street, which hold their outspread hands over your head, (as I said in my
poem the other day,) and look as if they were whispering, “May grace,
mercy, and peace be with you!”—and the rest of that benediction. Nay,
there are certain patches of ground, which, having lain neglected for a time,
Nature, who always has her pockets full of seeds, and holes in all her
pockets, has covered with hungry plebeian growths, which fight for life
with each other, until some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and you
have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have disdained
to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. The Professor pretends
that he found such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil
impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-
beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of young
tatterdemalions playing pitch-and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys
with their teacher at their head.

But then the Professor has one of his burrows in that region, and puts
everything in high colors relating to it. That is his way about everything. I
hold any man cheap,—he said,—of whom nothing stronger can be uttered
than that all his geese are swans.—How is that, Professor?—said I;—I
should have set you down for one of that sort.—Sir,—said he,—I am proud
to say, that Nature has so far enriched me, that I cannot own so much as a
duck without seeing in it as pretty a swan as ever swam the basin in the
garden of the Luxembourg. And the Professor showed the whites of his
eyes devoutly, like one returning thanks after a dinner of many courses.
I don’t know anything sweeter than this leaking in of Nature through all the
cracks in the walls and floors of cities. You heap up a million tons of hewn
rocks on a square mile or two of earth which was green once. The trees
look down from the hill-sides and ask each other, as they stand on tiptoe,
—“What are these people about?” And the small herbs at their feet look up
and whisper back,—“We will go and see.” So the small herbs pack
themselves up in the least possible bundles, and wait until the wind steals to
them at night and whispers, “Come with me.” Then they go softly with it
into the great city,—one to a cleft in the pavement, one to a spout on the
roof, one to a seam in the marbles over a rich gentleman’s bones, and one to
the grave without a stone where nothing but a man is buried,—and there
they grow, looking down on the generations of men from mouldy roofs,
looking up from between the less-trodden pavements, looking out through
iron cemetery-railings. Listen to them, when there is only a light breath
stirring, and you will hear them saying to each other,—“Wait awhile!” The
words run along the telegraph of those narrow green lines that border the
roads leading from the city, until they reach the slope of the hills, and the
trees repeat in low murmurs to each other,—“Wait awhile!” By-and-by the
flow of life in the streets ebbs, and the old leafy inhabitants—the smaller
tribes always in front—saunter in, one by one, very careless seemingly, but
very tenacious, until they swarm so that the great stones gape from each
other with the crowding of their roots, and the feldspar begins to be picked
out of the granite to find them food. At last the trees take up their solemn
line of march, and never rest until they have encamped in the market-place.
Wait long enough and you will find an old doting oak hugging a huge worn
block in its yellow underground arms; that was the cornerstone of the State-
House. Oh, so patient she is, this imperturbable Nature!

—Let us cry!—
But all this has nothing to do with my walks and talks with the
schoolmistress. I did not say that I would not tell you something about
them. Let me alone, and I shall talk to you more than I ought to, probably.
We never tell our secrets to people that pump for them.
Books we talked about, and education. It was her duty to know something
of these, and of course she did. Perhaps I was somewhat more learned than
she, but I found that the difference between her reading and mine was like
that of a man’s and a woman’s dusting a library. The man flaps about with
a bunch of feathers; the woman goes to work softly with a cloth. She does
not raise half the dust, nor fill her own eyes and mouth with it,—but she
goes into all the corners, and attends to the leaves as much as the covers.—
Books are the negative pictures of thought, and the more sensitive the mind
that receives their images, the more nicely the finest lines are reproduced.
A woman, (of the right kind,) reading after a man, follows him as Ruth
followed the reapers of Boaz, and her gleanings are often the finest of the
wheat.
But it was in talking of Life that we came most clearly together. I thought I
knew something about that,—that I could speak or write about it somewhat
to the purpose.
To take up this fluid earthly being of ours as a sponge sucks up water,—to
be steeped and soaked in its realities as a hide fills its pores lying seven
years in a tan-pit,—to have winnowed every wave of it as a mill-wheel
works up the stream that runs through the flume upon its float-boards,—to
have curled up in the keenest spasms and flattened out in the laxest languors
of this breathing-sickness, which keeps certain parcels of matter uneasy for
three or four score years,—to have fought all the devils and clasped all the
angels of its delirium,—and then, just at the point when the white-hot
passions have cooled down to cherry-red, plunge our experience into the
ice-cold stream of some human language or other, one might think would
end in a rhapsody with something of spring and temper in it. All this I
thought my power and province.
The schoolmistress had tried life, too. Once in a while one meets with a
single soul greater than all the living pageant which passes before it. As the

pale astronomer sits in his study with sunken eyes and thin fingers, and
weighs Uranus or Neptune as in a balance, so there are meek, slight women
who have weighed all which this planetary life can offer, and hold it like a
bauble in the palm of their slender hands. This was one of them. Fortune
had left her, sorrow had baptized her; the routine of labor and the loneliness
of almost friendless city-life were before her. Yet, as I looked upon her
tranquil face, gradually regaining a cheerfulness which was often sprightly,
as she became interested in the various matters we talked about and places
we visited, I saw that eye and lip and every shifting lineament were made
for love,—unconscious of their sweet office as yet, and meeting the cold
aspect of Duty with the natural graces which were meant for the reward of
nothing less than the Great Passion.
—I never addressed one word of love to the schoolmistress in the course of
these pleasant walks. It seemed to me that we talked of everything but love
on that particular morning. There was, perhaps, a little more timidity and
hesitancy on my part than I have commonly shown among our people at the
boarding-house. In fact, I considered myself the master at the breakfast-
table; but, somehow, I could not command myself just then so well as
usual. The truth is, I had secured a passage to Liverpool in the steamer
which was to leave at noon,—with the condition, however, of being
released in case circumstances occurred to detain me. The schoolmistress
knew nothing about all this, of course, as yet.
It was on the Common that we were walking. The mall, or boulevard of our
Common, you know, has various branches leading from it in different
directions. One of these runs down from opposite Joy Street southward
across the whole length of the Common to Boylston Street. We called it the
long path, and were fond of it.
I felt very weak indeed (though of a tolerably robust habit) as we came
opposite the head of this path on that morning. I think I tried to speak twice
without making myself distinctly audible. At last I got out the question,—
Will you take the long path with me?—Certainly,—said the schoolmistress,
—with much pleasure.—Think,—I said,—before you answer; if you take
the long path with me now, I shall interpret it that we are to part no more!—
The schoolmistress stepped back with a sudden movement, as if an arrow
had struck her.

One of the long granite blocks used as seats was hard by,—the one you may
still see close by the Gingko-tree.—Pray, sit down,—I said.—No, no, she
answered, softly,—I will walk the long path with you!
—The old gentleman who sits opposite met us walking, arm in arm, about
the middle of the long path, and said, very charmingly,—“Good morning,
my dears!”

CHAPTER XII

[I did not think it probable that I should have a great many more talks with
our company, and therefore I was anxious to get as much as I could into
every conversation. That is the reason why you will find some odd,
miscellaneous facts here, which I wished to tell at least once, as I should not
have a chance to tell them habitually at our breakfast-table.—We’re very
free and easy, you know; we don’t read what we don’t like. Our parish is so
large, one can’t pretend to preach to all the pews at once. One can’t be all
the time trying to do the best of one’s best if a company works a steam fire-
engine, the firemen needn’t be straining themselves all day to squirt over
the top of the flagstaff. Let them wash some of those lower-story windows
a little. Besides, there is no use in our quarrelling now, as you will find out
when you get through this paper.]
—Travel, according to my experience, does not exactly correspond to the
idea one gets of it out of most books of travels. I am thinking of travel as it
was when I made the Grand Tour, especially in Italy. Memory is a net; one
finds it full of fish when he takes it from the brook; but a dozen miles of
water have run through it without sticking. I can prove some facts about
travelling by a story or two. There are certain principles to be assumed,—
such as these:—He who is carried by horses must deal with rogues.—To-
day’s dinner subtends a larger visual angle than yesterday’s revolution. A
mote in my eye is bigger to me than the biggest of Dr. Gould’s private
planets.—Every traveller is a self-taught entomologist.—Old jokes are
dynamometers of mental tension; an old joke tells better among friends
travelling than at home,—which shows that their minds are in a state of
diminished, rather than increased vitality. There was a story about “strahps
to your pahnts,” which was vastly funny to us fellows—on the road from
Milan to Venice.—Cælum, non animum,—travellers change their guineas,
but not their characters. The bore is the same, eating dates under the cedars
of Lebanon, as over a plate of baked beans in Beacon Street.—Parties of

travellers have a morbid instinct for “establishing raws” upon each other.—
A man shall sit down with his friend at the foot of the Great Pyramid and
they will take up the question they had been talking about under “the great
elm,” and forget all about Egypt. When I was crossing the Po, we were all
fighting about the propriety of one fellow’s telling another that his argument
was absurd; one maintaining it to be a perfectly admissible logical term, as
proved by the phrase “reductio ad absurdum;” the rest badgering him as a
conversational bully. Mighty little we troubled ourselves for Padus, the Po,
“a river broader and more rapid than the Rhone,” and the times when
Hannibal led his grim Africans to its banks, and his elephants thrust their
trunks into the yellow waters over which that pendulum ferry-boat was
swinging back and forward every ten minutes!
—Here are some of those reminiscences, with morals prefixed, or annexed,
or implied.
Lively emotions very commonly do not strike us full in front, but obliquely
from the side; a scene or incident in undress often affects us more than one
in full costume.

“Is this the mighty ocean?—is this all?”

says the Princess in Gebir. The rush that should have flooded my soul in
the Coliseum did not come. But walking one day in the fields about the
city, I stumbled over a fragment of broken masonry, and lo! the World’s
Mistress in her stone girdle—alta mænia Romæ—rose before me and
whitened my cheek with her pale shadow as never before or since.
I used very often, when coming home from my morning’s work at one of
the public institutions of Paris, to stop in at the dear old church of St.
Etienne du Mont. The tomb of St. Genevieve, surrounded by burning
candles and votive tablets, was there; the mural tablet of Jacobus Benignus
Winslow was there; there was a noble organ with carved figures; the pulpit
was borne on the oaken shoulders of a stooping Samson; and there was a
marvellous staircase like a coil of lace. These things I mention from
memory, but not all of them together impressed me so much as an
inscription on a small slab of marble fixed in one of the walls. It told how
this church of St. Stephen was repaired and beautified in the year 16**, and

how, during the celebration of its reopening, two girls of the parish (filles de
la paroisse) fell from the gallery, carrying a part of the balustrade with
them, to the pavement, but by a miracle escaped uninjured. Two young
girls, nameless, but real presences to my imagination, as much as when they
came fluttering down on the tiles with a cry that outscreamed the sharpest
treble in the Te Deum. (Look at Carlyle’s article on Boswell, and see how
he speaks of the poor young woman Johnson talked with in the streets one
evening.) All the crowd gone but these two “filles de la paroisse,”—gone
as utterly as the dresses they wore, as the shoes that were on their feet, as
the bread and meat that were in the market on that day.
Not the great historical events, but the personal incidents that call up single
sharp pictures of some human being in its pang or struggle, reach us most
nearly. I remember the platform at Berne, over the parapet of which
Theobald Weinzäpfli’s restive horse sprung with him and landed him more
than a hundred feet beneath in the lower town, not dead, but sorely broken,
and no longer a wild youth, but God’s servant from that day forward. I
have forgotten the famous bears, and all else.—I remember the Percy lion
on the bridge over the little river at Alnwick,—the leaden lion with his tail
stretched out straight like a pump-handle,—and why? Because of the story
of the village boy who must fain bestride the leaden tail, standing out over
the water,—which breaking, he dropped into the stream far below, and was
taken out an idiot for the rest of his life.
Arrow-heads must be brought to a sharp point, and the guillotine-axe must
have a slanting edge. Something intensely human, narrow, and definate
pierces to the seat of our sensibilities more readily than huge occurrences
and catastrophes. A nail will pick a lock that defies hatchet and hammer.
“The Royal George” went down with all her crew, and Cowper wrote an
exquisitely simple poem about it; but the leaf which holds it is smooth,
while that which bears the lines on his mother’s portrait is blistered with
tears.
My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the same kind
which strike the imagination, especially when one is still young. You
remember the monument in Devizes market to the woman struck dead with
a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but it is in the books. Here is one I
never heard mentioned;—if any of the “Note and Query” tribe can tell the

story, I hope they will. Where is this monument? I was riding on an
English stage-coach when we passed a handsome marble column (as I
remember it) of considerable size and pretensions.—What is that?—I said.
—That,—answered the coachman,—is the hangman’s pillar. Then he told
me how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He
caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head, and started
for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped, caught him by the neck,
and strangled him. Next morning he was found hanging dead on one side
of the fence and the sheep on the other; in memory whereof the lord of the
manor caused this monument to be erected as a warning to all who love
mutton better than virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her
who shall first set me right about this column and its locality.
And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something which
may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I once ascended
the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the highest, I think, in Europe. It
is a shaft of stone filigree-work, frightfully open, so that the guide puts his
arms behind you to keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday
nightmare, and to think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of
one’s twenty digits. While I was on it, “pinnacled dim in the intense inane,”
a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire was rocking. It
swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a cat-o’nine-tails (bulrush)
with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it to the guide, and he said that the spire
did really swing back and forward,—I think he said some feet.
Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will intersect it.
Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of Dumeril’s in an old journal,—
the “Magazin Encyclopédique” for l’an troisième, (1795,) when I stumbled
upon a brief article on the vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A
man can shake it so that the movement shall be shown in a vessel of water
nearly seventy feet below the summit, and higher up the vibration is like
that of an earthquake. I have seen one of those wretched wooden spires
with which we very shabbily finish some of our stone churches (thinking
that the lidless blue eye of heaven cannot tell the counterfeit we try to pass
on it,) swinging like a reed, in a wind, but one would hardly think of such a
thing’s happening in a stone spire. Does the Bunker-Hill Monument bend
in the blast like a blade of grass? I suppose so.

You see, of course, that I am talking in a cheap way;—perhaps we will have
some philosophy by and by;—let me work out this thin mechanical vein.—I
have something more to say about trees. I have brought down this slice of
hemlock to show you. Tree blew down in my woods (that were) in 1852.
Twelve feet and a half round, fair girth;—nine feet, where I got my section,
higher up. This is a wedge, going to the centre, of the general shape of a
slice of apple-pie in a large and not opulent family. Length, about eighteen
inches. I have studied the growth of this tree by its rings, and it is curious.
Three hundred and forty-two rings. Started, therefore, about 1510. The
thickness of the rings tells the rate at which it grew. For five or six years
the rate was slow,—then rapid for twenty years. A little before the year
1550 it began to grow very slowly, and so continued for about seventy
years. In 1620 it took a new start and grew fast until 1714 then for the most
part slowly until 1786, when it started again and grew pretty well and
uniformly until within the last dozen years, when it seems to have got on
sluggishly.
Look here. Here are some human lives laid down against the periods of its
growth, to which they corresponded. This is Shakspeare’s. The tree was
seven inches in diameter when he was born; ten inches when he died. A
little less than ten inches when Milton was born; seventeen when he died.
Then comes a long interval, and this thread marks out Johnson’s life, during
which the tree increased from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in
diameter. Here is the span of Napoleon’s career;—the tree doesn’t seem to
have minded it.
I never saw the man yet who was not startled at looking on this section. I
have seen many wooden preachers,—never one like this. How much more
striking would be the calendar counted on the rings of one of those awful
trees which were standing when Christ was on earth, and where that brief
mortal life is chronicled with the stolid apathy of vegetable being, which
remembers all human history as a thing of yesterday in its own dateless
existence!
I have something more to say about elms. A relative tells me there is one of
great glory in Andover, near Bradford. I have some recollections of the
former place, pleasant and other. [I wonder if the old Seminary clock
strikes as slowly as it used to. My room-mate thought, when he first came,

it was the bell tolling deaths, and people’s ages, as they do in the country.
He swore—(ministers’ sons get so familiar with good words that they are
apt to handle them carelessly)—that the children were dying by the dozen,
of all ages, from one to twelve, and ran off next day in recess, when it
began to strike eleven, but was caught before the clock got through
striking.] At the foot of “the hill,” down in town, is, or was, a tidy old elm,
which was said to have been hooped with iron to protect it from Indian
tomahawks, (Credat Hahnemannus,) and to have grown round its hoops and
buried them in its wood. Of course, this is not the tree my relative means.
Also, I have a very pretty letter from Norwich, in Connecticut, telling me of
two noble elms which are to be seen in that town. One hundred and twenty-
seven feet from bough-end to bough-end! What do you say to that? And
gentle ladies beneath it, that love it and celebrate its praises! And that in a
town of such supreme, audacious, Alpine loveliness as Norwich!—Only the
dear people there must learn to call it Norridge, and not be misled by the
mere accident of spelling.
Norwich.
Porchmouth.
Cincinnatah.
What a sad picture of our civilization!
I did not speak to you of the great tree on what used to be the Colman farm,
in Deerfield, simply because I had not seen it for many years, and did not
like to trust my recollection. But I had it in memory, and even noted down,
as one of the finest trees in symmetry and beauty I had ever seen. I have
received a document, signed by two citizens of a neighboring town,
certified by the postmaster and a selectman, and these again corroborated,
reinforced, and sworn to by a member of that extraordinary college-class to
which it is the good fortune of my friend the Professor to belong, who,
though he has formerly been a member of Congress, is, I believe, fully
worthy of confidence. The tree “girts” eighteen and a half feet, and spreads
over a hundred, and is a real beauty. I hope to meet my friend under its
branches yet; if we don’t have “youth at the prow,” we will have “pleasure
at the ’elm.”

And just now, again, I have got a letter about some grand willows in Maine,
and another about an elm in Wayland, but too late for anything but thanks.
[And this leads me to say, that I have received a great many
communications, in prose and verse since I began printing these notes. The
last came this very morning, in the shape of a neat and brief poem, from
New Orleans. I could not make any of them public, though sometimes
requested to do so. Some of them have given me great pleasure, and
encouraged me to believe I had friends whose faces I had never seen. If
you are pleased with anything a writer says, and doubt whether to tell him
of it, do not hesitate; a pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks
he is tiring you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr very loud over a good,
honest letter that says pretty things to me.]
—Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want
forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to have
right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public, and of
themselves. Here is a letter I wrote to one of these young folks, but, on the
whole, thought it best not to send. It is not fair to single out one for such
sharp advice, where there are hundreds that are in need of it.

Dear Sir,—You seem to be somewhat, but not a great deal, wiser than
I was at your age. I don’t wish to be understood as saying too much,
for I think, without committing myself to any opinion on my present
state, that I was not a Solomon at that stage of development.
You long to “leap at a single bound into celebrity.” Nothing is so
common-place as to wish to be remarkable. Fame usually comes to
those who are thinking about something else,—very rarely to those
who say to themselves, “Go to, now, let us be a celebrated
individual!” The struggle for fame, as such, commonly ends in
notoriety;—that ladder is easy to climb, but it leads to the pillory
which is crowded with fools who could not hold their tongues and
rogues who could not hide their tricks.
If you have the consciousness of genius, do something to show it. The
world is pretty quick, nowadays, to catch the flavor of true originality;
if you write anything remarkable, the magazines and newspapers will
find you out, as the school-boys find out where the ripe apples and

pears are. Produce anything really good, and an intelligent editor will
jump at it. Don’t flatter yourself that any article of yours is rejected
because you are unknown to fame. Nothing pleases an editor more
than to get anything worth having from a new hand. There is always a
dearth of really fine articles for a first-rate journal; for, of a hundred
pieces received, ninety are at or below the sea-level; some have water
enough, but no head; some head enough, but no water; only two or
three are from full reservoirs, high up that hill which is so hard to
climb.
You may have genius. The contrary is of course probable, but it is not
demonstrated. If you have, the world wants you more than you want
it. It has not only a desire, but a passion, for every spark of genius that
shows itself among us; there is not a bull-calf in our national pasture
that can bleat a rhyme but it is ten to one, among his friends, and no
takers, that he is the real, genuine, no-mistake Osiris.
Qu’est ce qu’il a fait? What has he done? That was Napoleon’s test.
What have you done? Turn up the faces of your picture-cards, my
boy! You need not make mouths at the public because it has not
accepted you at your own fancy-valuation. Do the prettiest thing you
can and wait your time.
For the verses you send me, I will not say they are hopeless, and I dare
not affirm that they show promise. I am not an editor, but I know the
standard of some editors. You must not expect to “leap with a single
bound” into the society of those whom it is not flattery to call your
betters. When “The Pactolian” has paid you for a copy of verses,—(I
can furnish you a list of alliterative signatures, beginning with Annie
Aureole and ending with Zoë Zenith,)—when “The Rag-bag” has
stolen your piece, after carefully scratching your name out,—when
“The Nut-cracker” has thought you worth shelling, and strung the
kernel of your cleverest poem,—then, and not till then, you may
consider the presumption against you, from the fact of your rhyming
tendency, as called in question, and let our friends hear from you, if
you think it worth while. You may possibly think me too candid, and
even accuse me of incivility; but let me assure you that I am not half so
plain-spoken as Nature, nor half so rude as Time. If you prefer the

long jolting of public opinion to the gentle touch of friendship, try it
like a man. Only remember this,—that, if a bushel of potatoes is
shaken in a market-cart without springs to it, the small potatoes always
get to the bottom.
Believe me, etc., etc.

I always think of verse-writers, when I am in this vein; for these are by far
the most exacting, eager, self-weighing, restless, querulous, unreasonable
literary persons one is like to meet with. Is a young man in the habit of
writing verses? Then the presumption is that he is an inferior person. For,
look you, there are at least nine chances in ten that he writes poor verses.
Now the habit of chewing on rhymes without sense and soul to match them
is, like that of using any other narcotic, at once a proof of feebleness and a
debilitating agent. A young man can get rid of the presumption against him
afforded by his writing verses only by convincing us that they are verses
worth writing.
All this sounds hard and rough, but, observe, it is not addressed to any
individual, and of course does not refer to any reader of these pages. I
would always treat any given young person passing through the meteoric
showers which rain down on the brief period of adolescence with great
tenderness. God forgive us if we ever speak harshly to young creatures on
the strength of these ugly truths, and so sooner or later, smite some tender-
souled poet or poetess on the lips who might have sung the world into sweet
trances, had we not silenced the matin-song in its first low breathings! Just
as my heart yearns over the unloved, just so it sorrows for the ungifted who
are doomed to the pangs of an undeceived self-estimate. I have always
tried to be gentle with the most hopeless cases. My experience, however,
has not been encouraging.
—X. Y., æt. 18, a cheaply-got-up youth, with narrow jaws, and broad, bony,
cold, red hands, having been laughed at by the girls in his village, and “got
the mitten” (pronounced mittin) two or three times, falls to souling and
controlling, and youthing and truthing, in the newspapers. Sends me some
strings of verses, candidates for the Orthopedic Infirmary, all of them, in
which I learn for the millionth time one of the following facts: either that
something about a chime is sublime, or that something about time is

sublime, or that something about a chime is concerned with time, or that
something about a rhyme is sublime or concerned with time or with a
chime. Wishes my opinion of the same, with advice as to his future course.
What shall I do about it? Tell him the whole truth, and send him a ticket of
admission to the Institution for Idiots and Feeble-minded Youth? One
doesn’t like to be cruel,—and yet one hates to lie. Therefore one softens
down the ugly central fact of donkeyism,—recommends study of good
models,—that writing verse should be an incidental occupation only, not
interfering with the hoe, the needle, the lapstone, or the ledger,—and, above
all that there should be no hurry in printing what is written. Not the least
use in all this. The poetaster who has tasted type is done for. He is like the
man who has once been a candidate for the Presidency. He feeds on the
madder of his delusion all his days, and his very bones grow red with the
glow of his foolish fancy. One of these young brains is like a bunch of
India crackers; once touch fire to it and it is best to keep hands off until it
has done popping,—if it ever stops. I have two letters on file; one is a
pattern of adulation, the other of impertinence. My reply to the first,
containing the best advice I could give, conveyed in courteous language,
had brought out the second. There was some sport in this, but Dulness is
not commonly a game fish, and only sulks after he is struck. You may set it
down as a truth which admits of few exceptions, that those who ask your
opinion really want your praise, and will be contented with nothing less.
There is another kind of application to which editors, or those supposed to
have access to them, are liable, and which often proves trying and painful.
One is appealed to in behalf of some person in needy circumstances who
wishes to make a living by the pen. A manuscript accompanying the letter
is offered for publication. It is not commonly brilliant, too often lamentably
deficient. If Rachel’s saying is true, that “fortune is the measure of
intelligence,” then poverty is evidence of limited capacity which it too
frequently proves to be, notwithstanding a noble exception here and there.
Now an editor is a person under a contract with the public to furnish them
with the best things he can afford for his money. Charity shown by the
publication of an inferior article would be like the generosity of Claude
Duval and the other gentlemen highwaymen, who pitied the poor so much
they robbed the rich to have the means of relieving them.

Though I am not and never was an editor, I know something of the trials to
which they are submitted. They have nothing to do but to develope
enormous calluses at every point of contact with authorship. Their business
is not a matter of sympathy, but of intellect. They must reject the unfit
productions of those whom they long to befriend, because it would be a
profligate charity to accept them. One cannot burn his house down to warm
the hands even of the fatherless and the widow.

THE PROFESSOR UNDER CHLOROFORM.

—You haven’t heard about my friend the Professor’s first experiment in the
use of anæsthetics, have you?
He was mightily pleased with the reception of that poem of his about the
chaise. He spoke to me once or twice about another poem of similar
character he wanted to read me, which I told him I would listen to and
criticize.
One day, after dinner, he came in with his face tied up, looking very red in
the cheeks and heavy about the eyes.—Hy’r’ye?—he said, and made for an
arm-chair, in which he placed first his hat and then his person, going smack
through the crown of the former as neatly as they do the trick at the circus.
The Professor jumped at the explosion as if he had sat down on one of those
small calthrops our grandfathers used to sow round in the grass when there
were Indians about,—iron stars, each ray a rusty thorn an inch and a half
long,—stick through moccasins into feet,—cripple ’em on the spot, and
give ’em lockjaw in a day or two.
At the same time he let off one of those big words which lie at the bottom
of the best man’s vocabulary, but perhaps never turn up in his life,—just as
every man’s hair may stand on end, but in most men it never does.
After he had got calm, he pulled out a sheet or two of manuscript, together
with a smaller scrap, on which, as he said, he had just been writing an
introduction or prelude to the main performance. A certain suspicion had
come into my mind that the Professor was not quite right, which was
confirmed by the way he talked; but I let him begin. This is the way he read
it:—

Prelude.
I’m the fellah that tole one day
The tale of the won’erful one-hoss-shay.
Wan’ to hear another? Say.
—Funny, wasn’it? Made me laugh,—
I’m too modest, I am, by half,—
Made me laugh ’s though I sh’d split,—
Cahn’ a fellah like fellah’s own wit?—
—Fellahs keep sayin’,—“Well, now that’s nice;
Did it once, but cahn’ do it twice.”—
Dön’ you b’lieve the’z no more fat;
Lots in the kitch’n ’z good ’z that.
Fus’-rate throw, ’n’ no mistake,—
Han’ us the props for another shake;—
Know I’ll try, ’n’ guess I’ll win;
Here sh’ goes for hit ’m ag’in!

Here I thought it necessary to interpose.—Professor,—I said,—you are
inebriated. The style of what you call your “Prelude” shows that it was
written under cerebral excitement. Your articulation is confused. You have
told me three times in succession, in exactly the same words, that I was the
only true friend you had in the world that you would unbutton your heart
to. You smell distinctly and decidedly of spirits.—I spoke, and paused;
tender, but firm.
Two large tears orbed themselves beneath the Professor’s lids,—in
obedience to the principle of gravitation celebrated in that delicious bit of
bladdery bathos, “The very law that moulds a tear,” with which the
“Edinburgh Review” attempted to put down Master George Gordon when
that young man was foolishly trying to make himself conspicuous.
One of these tears peeped over the edge of the lid until it lost its balance,—
slid an inch and waited for reinforcements,—swelled again,—rolled down a
little further,—stopped,—moved on,—and at last fell on the back of the
Professor’s hand. He held it up for me to look at, and lifted his eyes,
brimful, till they met mine.

I couldn’t stand it,—I always break down when folks cry in my face,—so I
hugged him, and said he was a dear old boy, and asked him kindly what was
the matter with him, and what made him smell so dreadfully strong of
spirits.
Upset his alcohol lamp,—he said,—and spilt the alcohol on his legs. That
was it.—But what had he been doing to get his head into such a state?—had
he really committed an excess? What was the matter?—Then it came out
that he had been taking chloroform to have a tooth out, which had left him
in a very queer state, in which he had written the “Prelude” given above,
and under the influence of which he evidently was still.
I took the manuscript from his hands and read the following continuation of
the lines he had begun to read me, while he made up for two or three nights’
lost sleep as he best might.

PARSON TURELL’S LEGACY:
OR THE PRESIDENT’S OLD ARM-CHAIR.

A MATHEMATICAL STORY.

Facts respecting an old arm-chair.
At Cambridge. Is kept in the College there.
Seems but little the worse for wear.
That’s remarkable when I say
It was old in President Holyoke’s day.
(One of his boys, perhaps you know,
Died, at one hundred, years ago.)
He took lodging for rain or shine
Under green bed-clothes in ’69.
Know old Cambridge? Hope you do.—
Born there? Don’t say so! I was, too.
(Born in a house with a gambrel-roof,—
Standing still, if you must have proof.—
“Gambrel?—Gambrel?”—Let me beg
You’ll look at a horse’s hinder leg,—
First great angle above the hoof,—

That’s the gambrel; hence gambrel-roof.)
—Nicest place that ever was seen,—
Colleges red and Common green,
Sidewalks brownish with trees between.
Sweetest spot beneath the skies
When the canker-worms don’t rise,—
When the dust, that sometimes flies
Into your mouth and ears and eyes.
In a quiet slumber lies,
Not in the shape of unbaked pies
Such as barefoot children prize.
A kind of harber it seems to be,
Facing the flow of a boundless sea.
Rows of gray old Tutors stand
Ranged like rocks above the sand;
Rolling beneath them, soft and green,
Breaks the tide of bright sixteen,—
One wave, two waves, three waves, four,
Sliding up the sparkling floor;
Then it ebbs to flow no more,
Wandering off from shore to shore
With its freight of golden ore!
—Pleasant place for boys to play;—
Better keep your girls away;
Hearts get rolled as pebbles do
Which countless fingering waves pursue,
And every classic beach is strown
With heart-shaped pebbles of blood-red stone.
But this is neither here nor there;—
I’m talking about an old arm-chair.
You’ve heard, no doubt, of Parson Turell?
Over at Medford he used to dwell;
Married one of the Mathers’ folk;
Got with his wife a chair of oak,—
Funny old chair, with seat like wedge,
Sharp behind and broad front edge,—

One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings,—
But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand,—
Fit for the worthies of the land,—
Chief-Justice Sewall a cause to try in,
Or Cotton Mather to sit—and lie—in.
—Parson Turell bequeathed the same
To a certain student,—Smith by name;
These were the terms, as we are told:
“Saide Smith saide Chaire to have and holde;
When he doth graduate, then to passe
To ye oldest Youth in ye Senior Classe.
On Payment of”—(naming a certain sum)—
“By him to whom ye Chaire shall come;
He to ye oldest Senior next,
And soe forever,”—(thus runs the text,)—
“But one Crown lesse then he gave to claime,
That being his Debte for use of same.”
Smith transferred it to one of the Browns,
And took his money,—five silver crowns.
Brown delivered it up to Moore,
Who paid, it is plain, not five, but four.
Moore made over the chair to Lee,
Who gave him crowns of silver three.
Lee conveyed it unto Drew,
And now the payment, of course, was two.
Drew gave up the chair to Dunn,—
All he got, as you see, was one.
Dunn released the chair to Hall,
And got by the bargain no crown at all.
—And now it passed to a second Brown,
Who took it, and likewise claimed a crown.
When Brown conveyed it unto Ware,
Having had one crown, to make it fair,
He paid him two crowns to take the chair;
And Ware, being honest, (as all Wares be,)