TO THE SUBSCRIBERS TO
"A Library of American Literature."
During the issue of the previous Volumes (I-VI1I) of this Work, the Publishers and the Editors have heen in the frequent receipt of letters from its Subscribers, confirming the remarkably favorable verdict passed upon it by the critical press. They have been gratified, also, by the welcome accorded to each successive volume, and the fact that scarcely a single subscriber has desired to abridge his contract for the Series.
But there has been one point to \vhich our correspondents have so frequently adverted, that it is thought advisable to defer to their Avishes and good judgment. Our plan involved 110 Biographical data except a statement of places and dates of nativity, etc., relating to the authors quoted, — whose writings cover a period of nearly three centuries, and some of whom doubtless are here for the first time introduced to many of our readers. We have been so generally urged to give more personal details, that the Publishers and the Editors — although their enterprise has already been sufficiently arduous — have decided to prepare and add, in a Supplementary and Eleventh Volume, a compendium of brief but trust worthy BIOGRAPHIC AL NOTICES of all the authors quoted in the AVork.
This important feature, in itself a BIOGRAPHICAL HAND-BOOK OF AMERICAN AUTHORS, will occupy, together Avith the General Index of the entire "Library," but one-third of the Supplementary Volume. The latter, however, will be handsomely illustrated, and of equal size with the largest of the Series — i. e., full GOO pages. Its remaining tAVo-thirds are needed for another purpose :
The time expended in preparing the "Library" for issue has been prolonged beyond the original expectation. Its plan was formed in 1882, and the Editors began their A\rork in the following January. Within the seven years IIOAV elapsed, a notable increase of literary activity has been observed,— many IICAV and successful novelists, etc., of original merit, appearing in the West and South, as well as in the East. Our Work will lack a most significant feature if the best of these IICAV authors are not represented. To represent them AVC shall need, although Vol. X will include more matter than any of its predecessors, a large portion of the Supplementary Volume not occupied with Biography, and Ave shall also give our readers some important earlier matter crowded out from preceding issues.
The tAVO remaining volumes, then, Avill be the most fresh, full, and interesting of the whole Series, and Vol. XI is so necessary to its com pletion that we confidently hope it Avill be Avelcomed by our subscribers as an indispensable addition to the Work. Extra expense is incurred in the preparation of the Biography, but the volume Avill be delivered at the same price with the others of the Series.
CHARLES L. WEBSTER <& CO.,
Publishers "Library of American Literature."
EDMUND C. STEDMAN, ELLEN M. HUTCHINSON,
Editors "Library of American Literature."
A IJRRARY OF
ERICAN UTERATURl
FROM THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO IMF. PRESENT TIME
G 'MPU.hD AND fcPlTFD BY
D CLAKENCh Si hi AN •N MACKAV HiJT'.HiNS
f . r.N VOI.l-'U
VOL. IX
M- \V-YORK
CHARLtb L. WtBSTtR & COM1M
1889
A LIBRARY OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
FROM THE EARLIEST SETTLEMENT TO THE PRESENT TIME
COMPILED AND EDITED BY
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN AND ELLEN MACKAY HUTCH 1NSON
IN ELEVEN VOLUMES
VOL. IX
NEW-YORK
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY
1889
- r-AT TTTfTRKTA.
COPYRIGHT, 1889, CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY.
i.,4ll rights reserved.)
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX.
Utterature of tt)e
THEODORE WINTHROP. PAQE
Don Fulano to the Rescue ........... 3
Kiduapped 7
But Once 13
A Pull for Life and Love 13
HENRY MARTYN BAIRD.
The Death of Coliguy 19
MARY ASHLEY TOWNSEND.
Down the Bayou 24
HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT.
How They Found the Pacific Gold 27
Argonaut Life and Character 32
MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY.
Death as Foe, and as Friend 40
African Serpent-Drama in America 41
Portia 43
JOHN ALBEE.
A Soldier's Grave 45
Dandelions 45
Bos'nHill 46
Goethe 46
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR.
The Pretty Pass Things Came to 48
The Carpenter 52
What a Witch and a Thief Made 59
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS.
A Kindred Dramatic Method, in their Use of Double Time, Pursued by ^schylus
and Shakespeare "*
" It Hath the Excuse of Youth" •
GEORGE E. WARING, JR.
Vix 71
vj CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX.
ALBERT DEANE RICHARDSON. PAGE
John 81
MARY AGNES TINCKER.
In the Hall of Cypresses 85
WILLIAM LEIGHTON.
Odin Dethroned 94
ISAAC HILL BROMLEY.
The Noble Teton Sioux 99
The Season of Rampage 101
DAVID Ross LOCKE.
Mr. Nasby Finds a New Business which Promises Ample Profits .... 103 Mr. Nasby Loses his Post-Office 105
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL.
Selections from his Oratory and Writings 108
TRACY ROBINSON.
The Majority 113
JUNIUS HENRI BROWNE.
Marriage is Companionship , 114
Genius and Labor 116
ELISHA MULFORD.
The Right of Revolution 118
The Nation the Antagonist of the Confederacy 120
GEORGE WASHBURN SMALLEY.
Louis Blanc, the Man and the Political Leader 123
Bismarck in the Reichstag 126
Conversation in London Drawing-Rooms 130
WILLIAM CLEAVER WILKINSON.
In Vindication of Webster 137
At Marshfield 140
JAMES MORRIS WHITON.
The Assurance of Immortality 141
WILLIAM SWINTON.
The Little Monitor 144
GEORGE ARNOLD.
Sweet Impatience , 152
Beer 153
A Sunset Fantasie .... 154
MARVIN RICHARDSON VINCENT.
The Pride of Care 155
CHARLTON THOMAS LEWIS.
Influence of Civilization on Duration of Life 158
CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE.
One of Mr. Ward's Business Letters 161
A Visit to Brigham Young .... 162
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX.
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON.
Pomona's Novel' .... PAG,E
The Lady, or the Tiger? . ..... 165
; ••••... 175
ANNIE ADAMS FIELDS.
Theocritus .
...... . . - .181
CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT.
Our American Gentry
*••••... 182
RICHARD REALF.
An Old Man's Idyl .
Interpretation .
loo
MIRIAM COLES HARRIS.
A Sentimentalist's Second Marriage .... 18o
HARRIET McEwEN KIMBALL. The Guest ..... White Azaleas .
•*••••. liTr
KATHARINE PRESCOTT WORMELEY.
A Night-Watch, after Fair Oaks . ..... 195
FRANCES LOUISA BUSHNELL.
In the Dark ......... -.go
FRANK LEE BENEDICT. A Little Cat
JAMES ABBOTT MC^EILL WHISTLER.
That Art is not Over-Indebted to the Multitude ..... 206
CHAUNCEY MITCHELL DEPEW.
A Symbol ........... 208
The American Idea ......... 211
STARR HOYT NICHOLS.
St. Theodule .............. 212
HORACE WHITE.
The Great Chicago Fire ............. 214
CHARLES HENRY WEBB.
Alec. Dunham's Boat ............. 225
With a Nantucket Shell ............. 237
The Lay of Dau'l Drew ............. 228
ADAMS SHERMAN HILL.
English in Newspapers and Novels ....... ... 229
CHARLES AUGUSTUS YOUNG.
Source and Duration of the Solar Heat .......... 233
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR.
The Road to a Liberal Education ........... 236
JOHN JAMES PIATT.
The Mower in Ohio .............. 239
The Morning Street ............ . 241
A Lost Graveyard .............. 242
Apart ................. 242
Leaves at my Window ........ ..... 243
The Grave of Rose .............. 244
The Child in the Street . ......... 245
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX.
PHILLIPS BROOKS. PAGE
The Ministry for Our Age 245
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.
A Painted Fan 248
The House of Death 248
We Lay us Down to Sleep 249
To Night 250
The London Cabby 250
Afar 254
lu Time to Come 254
MOSES COIT TYLER.
The Colonial American Literature 255
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD.
O Soft Spring Airs ! 271
Magdalen 272
A Sigh 272
Circumstance 273
Music in the Night 284
Ballad 285
Fantasia 285
THOMAS WALLACE KNOX.
A Russian Wolf-Hunt 286
HENRY LYNDEN FLASH.
Stonewall Jackson 290
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS.
The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ' . „ 290
How they Burned Women at the Stake in Merrie England ... . 295
The Feud 299
AUGUSTA EVANS WILSON.
The Masterful Style of Proposal 307
THEODORE TILTON.
God Save the Nation 311
The Flight from the Convent 312
Sir Marmaduke's Musings 313
WILLIAM HAYES WARD.
Elements of True Poetry 314
The New Castalia 316
LYMAN ABBOTT.
The Book of Promise 317
AMANDA THEODOSIA JONES.
Prairie Summer 320
EDWARD GREEY.
Legend of the Golden Lotus 322
MARY EMILY BRADLEY.
The Old Story 326
The Key-Note 327
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX. jx
ANDREW CARNEGIE.
The Great Republic
NATHANIEL GRAHAM SHEPHERD.
Roll-Call 331
WILLIAM TORREY HARRIS.
The Personality of God 330
Shakespeare's Historical Plays 334
The Eternity of Rome 335
WILLIAM OSBORN STODDARD.
The Prairie Plover 333
The Sentinel Year 33.^
AUGUSTA LARNED.
A Domestic Tyrant 339
CLARA FLORIDA GUERNSEY.
The Silver Bullet 345
WILLIAM WINTER.
In "The World of Dreams" 348
My Queen £54
Constance 355
An Empty Heart 356
Shakespeare's Grave 357
Poe 360
Relations of the Press and the Stage 361
CELIA THAXTER.
The Sandpiper 365
The Watch of Boon Island 366
Song 367
A Mussel Shell 368
Schumann's Sonata in A Minor 368
JOHN ROSE GREENE HASSARD.
" Siegfried " at Bay reuth 369
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.
Flower and Thorn 377
Palabras Carinosas .............. 377
An Untimely Thought 378
An Old Castle 378
Our New Neighbors at Ponkapog
Prescience
Identity
On an Intaglio Head of Minerva
Enamoured Architect of Airy Rhyme
A Village Sunrise •
Lending a Hand
Odd Sticks, and Certain Reflections Concerning Them
The Last Caesar
Masks
Memories
Sleep
HENRY MILLS ALDEN.
The Childhood of De Quincey
A Child shall Lead them 403
x CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX.
SARAH MORGAN BRYAN PIATT. PAGE
Why Should we Care ? 404
His Share and Mine 405
Tradition of Conquest 406
After Wings 406
Transfigured 407
The Witch in the Glass 407
FITZ HUGH LUDLOW.
The Hour and the Power of Darkness 408
WILLIAM HENRY VENABLE.
The Tunes Dan Harrison Used to Play 413
Summer Love 414
I
ROBERT HENRY NEWELL.
"Picciola" 415
The Calmest of Her Sex 416
BENJAMIN EDWARD WOOLF.
Dialogue from " The Mighty Dollar " 418
EDWARD HOWARD HOUSE.
A Child of Japan .421
JOHN AYLMER DORGAN.
The Dead Solomon 431
Boat Song 433
RUSSELL STURGIS.
John Leech 433
DAVID GRAY.
The Cross of Gold 439
Communion 440
ADONIRAM JUDSON SAGE.
The Violin 441
JOHN BURROUGHS.
In the Hemlocks 443
Obiter Dicta 447
Waiting .451
" Hail to Thee, Blithe Spirit ! " 452
Springs 453
FORCEYTHE WlLLSON.
InState 458
SAMUEL GREENE WHEELER BENJAMIN.
The Source and the Aim of Art 461
JEANNETTE RITCHIE HADERMANN WAL WORTH.
Uncle Lige 463
ARTHUR GILMAN.
" The Good Haroun Alraschid " 468
WHITELAW REID.
Sherman, the Soldier 471
The Pursuit of Politics 474
CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX. xj
KATE NEELY FESTETITS. rAQE
Christmas-Time 477
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS.
Venetian Vagabonds 479
Clement 435
The Priest's Question 488
Before the Gate 493
The Parlor Car 493
The First Cricket 505
HORACE PORTER.
Five Forks, and the Capture of Petersburg 505
EDWARD EGGLESTON.
Abraham Lincoln's Defence of Tom Grayson 514
Courtship and Marriage in the Colonies 523
BURKE AARON HINSDALE.
The Connecticut Western Reserve . 528
EDWARD PAYSON ROE.
A Day in Spring 531
CHARLOTTE FISKE BATES.
The Problem 540
Spring in Winter . 540
Woodbines in October 540
MARGARET ELIZABETH SANGSTER.
Our Own 541
Apple Blossoms 541
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER.
Landor as a Classic .....••••••••• 542
A Vision of Peace ^>
" As Good as a Play" 551
HENRY AMES BLOOD.
Shakespeare ^
The War of the Dryads 555
ALBION WINEGAR TOURGEE.
A Race against Time
JOHN RICHARD DENNETT.
Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelitism
JOHN DAVIS LONG.
At the Fireside
EDNA DEAN PROCTOR.
Heaven, O Lord, I Cannot Lose '
•»«• • • • o<u
Moscow •
CHARLES BARNARD. .
Scene from "The County Fair"
x|i CONTENTS OF VOLUME IX.
MARY MAPES DODGE. PAGE
The Two Mysteries 574
The Stars 575
Miss Malouy on the Chinese Question 575
Eufoldiugs 577
Shadow-Evidence 578
THOMAS RAYNESFORD LOUNSBURY.
Literary and Personal Characteristics of Cooper 578
The Future of Our Tongue 587
JOHN HAY.
Liberty 590
Red-Letter Days in Spain 591
A Woman's Love 594
A Triumph of Order 595
The Stirrup-Cup 596
JAMES RYDER RANDALL.
My Maryland 596
John Pelham 593
Why the Robin's Breast was Red 599
ABRAM JOSEPH RYAN.
The Conquered Banner . 599
My Beads , . 601
WILLIAM WALTER PHELPS.
The Theory of Commercial Panics 601
A Bad American Type 003
Ireland's Want g04
HEZEKIAH BUTTERWORTH.
The First Christmas in New England 605
SARAH CHAUNCEY WOOLSEY.
Gulf-Stream 607
Lohengrin gOg
MARY CLEMMER HUDSON.
Good-Night 609
PORTRAITS IN VOLUME IX.
-\ 111
portraits in rtjis Unlume.
ON STEEL.
THEODORE WINTHROP FRONTISPIECE.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS Page 486
MISCELLANEOUS.
HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT 28
HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 62
FRANCIS RICHARD STOCKTON . . . , 166
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD 272
SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS ..„..,... 290
WILLIAM WINTER , 348
CELIA THAXTER 366
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 378
JOHN BURROUGHS 444
WHITELAW REID 472
EDWARD EGGLESTON .514
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER . 542
MART MAPES DODGE • 574
JOHN HAY . .590
LITEKATUEE
OF THE REPUBLIC PART iv
1861-1888
To get rid of provinciality is a certain stage of culture,— a stage the positive result of which we must not make of too much importance, but which is, nevertheless, indispensable ; for it brings us on to the platform where alone tbe best and highest intellectual work can be said fairly to begin.
MATTHEW ARNOLD. A. D. 186-.
American literature should stand firmly on its own ground, making no claims on the score of patriotism, or youth, or disadvantageous circumstances, or bizarre achievements, but gravely pointing to what has been done.
CHARLES FRANCIS RICHARDSON. A. D. 1887.
We strip Illusion of her veil ; We vivisect the nightingale To prove tbe secret of his note.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH. A. D. 188-.
Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with Need it must perish. It perceives that to take itself from the many and leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. . . . In all ages poetry has affirmed something of this sort, but it remained for ours to perceive it and express it somehow in every form of literature. But this is only one phase of the devotion of the best literature of our time to the service of humanity. . . . The romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, but at its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized the supreme claim of the lowest humanity.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS. A. D. 1888.
While ourselves . . . who working ne'er shall know if work bear fruit Others reap and garner, heedless how produced by stalk and root, — We who, darkling, timed the day's birth, — struggling, testified to peace, — Earned, by dint of failure, triumph, — we, creative thought, must cease In created word, thought's echo, due to impulse long since sped ! Why repine ? There's ever some one lives although ourselves be dead !
ROBERT BROWNING. A. D. 1878.
LITEEATUEE
OF THE REPUBLIC. PART iv.
1861—1888.
C^eofcorc ffitlmt^rop,
BORN in New Haven, Conn., 1838. FELL at Great Bethel, Va., 1861.
DON FULANO TO THE RESCUE.
[John Brent. 1862.]
~\7~ES, John Brent, you were right when you called Luggernel Alley -*- a wonder of our continent.
I remember it now, — I only saw it then ; — for those strong scenes of nature assault the soul whether it will or no, fight in against affirmative or negative resistance, and bide their time to be admitted as dominant over the imagination. It seemed to me then that I was not noticing how grand the precipices, how stupendous the cleavages, how rich and gleaming the rock faces in Luggernel Alley. My business was not to stare about, but to look sharp and ride hard ; and I did it.
Yet now I can remember, distinct as if I beheld it, every stride of that pass ; arid everywhere, as I recall foot after foot of that fierce chasm, I see three men with set faces, — one deathly pale and wearing a bloody turban, — all galloping steadily on, on an errand to save and to slay.
Terrible riding it was! A pavement of slippery, sheeny rock; great beds of loose stories ; barricades of mighty boulders, where a cliff had fallen an ason ago, before the days of the road-maker race; crevices
4 THEODORE WINTHEOP. [1861-88
where an unwary foot might catch ; wide rifts where a shaky horse might fall, or a timid horseman drag him down. Terrible riding I A pass where a calm traveller would go quietly picking his steps, thankful if each hour counted him a safe mile.
Terrible riding! Madness to go as we went! Horse and man, any moment either might shatter every limb. But man and horse neither can know what he can do, until be has dared and done. On we went, with the old frenzy growing tenser. Heart almost broken with eager ness.
No whipping or spurring. Our horses were a part of ourselves. While we could go, they would go. Since the water, they were full of leap again. Down in the shady Alley, too, evening had come before its time. Noon's packing of hot air had been dislodged by a mountain breeze drawing through. Horses and men were braced and cheered to their work; and in such riding as that, the man and the horse must think together and move together, — eye and hand of the rider must choose and command, as bravely as the horse executes. The blue sky was overhead, the red sun upon the castellated walls a thousand feet above us, the purpling chasm opened before. It was late; these were the last moments. But we should save the lady yet.
u Yes,". our hearts shouted to us, " we shall save her yet."
An arroyo, the channel of a dry torrent, followed the pass. It had made its way as water does, not straightway, but by that potent femi nine method of passing under the frowning front of an obstacle, and leav ing the dull rock staring there, while the wild creature it would have held is gliding away down the valley. This zigzag channel baffled us ; we must leap it without check wherever it crossed our path. Every second now was worth a century. Here was the sign of horses, passed but now. We could not choose ground. We must take our leaps on that cruel rock wherever they offered.
Poor Purnps !
He had carried his master so nobly ! There were so few miles to. do ! He had chased so well ; he merited to be in at the death.
Brent lifted him at a leap across the arroyo.
Poor Pumps !
His hind feet slipped on the time-smoothed rock. He fell short. He plunged down a dozen feet among the rough boulders of the torrent-bed. Brent was out of the saddle almost before he struck, raising him.
No, he would never rise again. Both his fore legs were broken at the knee. He rested there, kneeling on the rocks where he fell.
Brent groaned. The horse screamed horribly, horribly, — there is no more agonized sound, — and the scream went echoing high up the cliffs where the red sunlight rested.
1861-88] THEODORE WINTHROP c
0
It costs a loving master much to butcher his brave and trusty horse, the half of his knightly self; but it costs him more to hear him shriek in such misery. Brent drew his pistol to put poor Pumps out of pain.
Armstrong sprang down and caught his hand.
:' Stop ! " he said in his hoarse whisper.
He had hardly spoken since we started. My nerves were so strained, that this mere ghost of a sound rang through me like a death-yell, a grisly cry of merciless and exultant vengeance. I seemed to hear its echoes, rising up and swelling in a flood of thick uproar, until they burst over the summit of the pass and were wasted in the crannies of the towering mountain-flanks above.
" Stop ! " whispered Armstrong. " No shooting ! They'll hear. The knife!"
He held out his knife to my friend.
Brent hesitated one heart-beat. Could he stain his hand with his faithful servant's blood ?
Pumps screamed again.
Armstrong snatched the knife and drew it across the throat of the crippled horse.
Poor Pumps ! He sank and died without a moan. Noble martyr in the old, heroic cause.
I caught the knife from Armstrong. I cut the thong of my girth. The heavy California saddle, with its macheers and roll of blankets, fell to the ground. I cut off my spurs. They had never yet touched Fula- no's flanks. He stood beside me quiet, but trembling to be off.
"Now Brent! up behind me!" I whispered, — for the awe of death was upon us.
I mounted. Brent sprang up behind. I ride light for a tall man. Brent is the slightest body of an athlete I ever saw.
Fulano stood steady till we were firm in our seats.
Then he tore down the defile.
Here was that vast reserve of power ; here the tireless spirit ; here the hoof striking true as a thunderbolt, where the brave eye saw footing ; here that writhing agony of speed ; here the great promise fulfilled, the great heart thrilling to mine, the grand body living to the beating heart. Noble Fulano !
I rode with a snaffle. I left it hanging loose. I did not check or guide him. He saw all He knew all. All was his doing.
We sat firm, clinging as we could, as we must. Fulano dashed along the resounding pass.
Armstrong pressed after, — the gaunt white horse struggled to emulate his leader. Presently we lost them behind the curves of the Alley. No
g THEODORE WINTHROP. [1861-88
other horse that ever lived could have held with the black in that head long gallop to save.
Over the slippery rocks, over the sheeny pavement, plunging through the loose stones, stagger! ug over the barricades, leaping the arroyo, down, up, on, always on, — on went the horse, we clinging as we might
It seemed one beat of time, it seemed an eternity, when between the ring of the hoofs I heard Brent whisper in my ear.
" We are there."
The crags flung apart, right and left. I saw a sylvan glade. I saw the gleam of gushing water.
Fulano dashed on, uncontrollable !
There they were, — the Murderers.
Arrived but one moment !
The lady still bound to that pack-mule branded A. & A.
Murker just beginning to unsaddle.
Larrap not dismounted, in chase of the other animals as they strayed to graze.
The men heard the tramp and saw us, as we sprang into the glade.
Both my hands were at the bridle.
Brent, grasping my waist with one arm, was awkward with his pistol.
Murker saw us first. He snatched his six-shooter and fired.
Brent shook with a spasm. His pistol-arm dropped.
Before the murderer could cock again, Fulano was upon him !
He was ridden down. He was beaten, trampled down upon the grass, — crushed, abolished.
We disentangled ourselves from the melee.
Where was the other?
The coward, without firing a shot, was spurring Armstrong's Flathead horse blindly up the canon, whence we had issued.
We turned to Murker.
Fulano was up again, and stood there shuddering. But the man ?
A hoof had battered in the top of his skull ; blood was gushing from his mouth ; his ribs were broken ; all his body was a trodden, massacred carcass.
He breathed once, as we lifted him.
Then a tranquil, childlike look stole over his face, — that well-known look of the weary body, thankful that the turbulent soul has gone. Murker was dead.
Fulano, and not we, had been executioner. His was the stain of blood.
1861-88] THEODORE WINTHROP. »
KIDNAPPED.
[Cecil Dreeme. 1861.]
TTTE drove on, mile after mile, in the chilly March afternoon, and at last pulled up at a door, in a white stuccoed wall,— a whited wall, edging the road like a bank of stale snow. Within we could see an ugly' dismal house, equally stuccoed white, peering suspiciously at us over the top of the enclosure, from its sinister grated windows of the upper story.
A boy was walking up and down the road at a little distance a fine
black horse, all in a lather with hard riding, and cut with the spurs.
The animal plunged about furiously, almost dragging the lad off his feet.
"You will see Huffmire, Towner," said Churm, "and tell him that I
want to talk with him."
"Yes," cried Towner, eagerly, "let me manage it! " He shook off his cloak, sprang down with energetic step, and rang the bell. A man looked through a small shutter in the door, and asked his business, gruffly enough.
" Tell Dr. Huff mire that Mr. Towner wishes to see him.'' The porter presently returned, and said that Dr. Huffmire would see the gentleman, alone.
" Huffmire will know my name. Send him out here to me, Towner, if he will come ; if not, do you make the necessary inquiries," said Churm. Towner passed in. The porter closed the outer door upon him, and then looked through the shutter at us, with a truculent stare, as if he were accustomed to inquisitive visitors, and liked to baffle them. He had but one eye, and his effect, as he grinned through the square port hole in the gate, was singularly Cyclopean and ogreish. He properly regarded men merely as food, sooner or later, for insane asylums, — as morsels to be quietly swallowed or forcibly choked down by the jaws of Ketreats.
" What ! " whispered Ealeigh to me, as the boy led the snorting and curvetting black horse by us. " That fellow at the eye-hole magnetized me at first. I did not notice that horse. Do you know it? "
"No," said I. "I have never seen him. A splendid fellow! His rider must have been in hot haste to get here. Perhaps some errand like our own ! "
"Densdeth," again whispered Kaleigh, "Densdeth told me he had been looking at a new black horse."
We glanced at each other. All felt that Densdeth's appearance here, at this moment, might be harmful. Churm's name brought Huffmire speedily to the door. Churm, the philanthropist, was too powerful a
g THEODORE WINTHROP. [1861-88
man to offend. Huffmire opened the door, and stood just within, defend ing the entrance. He was a large man, with a large face, — large in every feature, and exaggerated where for proportion it should have been small. He suffered under a general rush of coarseness to the face. He had a rush of lymphatic puffiness to the cheeks, a rush of blubber to the lips, a rush of gristle to his clumsy nose, a rush of lappel to the ears, a rush of dewlap to the throat. A disgusting person, — the very type of man for a vulgar tyrant. His straight black hair was brushed back and combed behind the ears. He was in the sheep's clothing of a deacon.
" You have a young lady here, lately arrived? " said Churm, bowing slightly, in return to the other's cringing reverence.
" I have several, sir. Neither youth nor beauty is exempt, alas I from the dreadful curse of insanity, which I devote myself, in my humble way, to eradicate. To e-rad-i-cate," he repeated, dwelling on the syllables of his word, as if he were tugging, with brute force, at something that carne up hard, — as if madness were a stump, and he were a cogwheel machine extracting it.
" I wish to know," said Churm, in his briefest and sternest manner, "if a young lady named Denman was brought here yesterday."
"Denman, sir! No, sir. I am happy to be able to state to you, sir, that there is no unfortunate of that name among my patients, — no one of that name, — I rejoice to satisfy you."
" I suppose you know who I am," said Churm. I saw his fingers clutch his whip-handle.
A rush of oiliness seemed to suffuse the man's coarse face. " It is the well-known Mr. Churm," said he. " The fame of his benevolence is co extensive with our country, sir. Who does not love him ? — the friend of the widow and the orphan ! I am proud, sir, to make your acquaintance. This is a privilege, indeed,— indeed, a most in-es-ti-ma-ble pri-vile-age."
" Do you think me a safe man to lie to ? " said Churm, abruptly.
" I confess that I do not take your meaning, sir," said Huffmire, in the same soft manner, but stepping back a little.
" Do you think it safe to lie to me ? "
" I, sir ! lie, sir ! " stammered Huffmire. The oiliness seemed to coag ulate in his muddy skin, and with his alarm his complexion took the texture and color of soggy leather.
"Yes; the lady is here. I wish to see her."
As Churm was silent, looking sternly at the pretended doctor, there rose suddenly within the building a strange and horrible cry.
A strange and horrible cry! Two voices mingled in" its discord. One was a well-known mocking tone, now smitten with despair ; and yet the change that gave it its horror was so slight, that I doubted if the old mockery had not all the while been despair, suppressed and dis-
1861-88] THEODORE WINTHROP. Q
guised. The other voice, mingling with this, rising with it up into silence that grew stiller as they climbed, and then disentangling itself, overtopping its companion, and beating it slowly down until it had ceased to be, — this other voice was like the exulting cry of one defeated and trampled under foot, who yet has saved a stab for his victor.
They had met — Towner and Densdeth !
We three sprang from the carriage; thrust aside the doctor, and, fol lowing our memories of the dead sound for a clew, ran across the court and through a half-open door into the hall of the asylum.
All was still within. The air was thick with the curdling horror that had poured into it. We paused an instant to listen.
A little muffled moan crept feebly forth from a room on the left. It hardly reached us, so faint it was. It crept forth, and seemed to perish at our feet, like a hopeless suppliant. We entered the room. It was a shabby parlor, meanly furnished. The stained old paper on the walls was covered with Arcadian groups of youths and maidens, dancing to the sound of a pipe played by a shepherd, who sat upon a broken column under a palrn. On the floor was a tawdry carpet, all beflovvered and befruited, — such a meretricious blur of colors as a hotel offers for vulgar feet to tread upon. So much I now perceive that I marked in that mean reception-room. But I did not note it then.
For there, among the tawdry flowers of the carpet, lay Densdeth,— dead, or dying of a deadly wound. The long, keen, antique dagger I had noticed lying peacefully on my table was upon the floor. Its office had found it at last, and the signet of a new blood-stain was stamped upon its blade, among tokens of an old habit of murder, latent for ages.
Beside the wounded man sat Towner. His spasm was over. The freed serf had slain his tyrant. All his life had been crowded into that one moment of frenzy. He sat pale and drooping, and there was a deso late sorrow in his face, as if his hate for his master had been as needful to him as a love.
" I could not help it," said Towner, in a dreary whisper. " He came to me while I was waiting here. He told Huff mire to send you off, and leave me to him. And then he stood over me and told me, with his old sneer, that I belonged to him, body and soul. He said I must obey him. He said he had work for me now,— just such mean villainy as I was made for. I felt that in another instant I should be his again. I only made one spring at him. How came I by that dagger? I never saw it until I found it in my hand, at his heart. Is he dead? No. I am dying. Shall I be safe from him hereafter? I haven't had a fair chance in this world. What could a man do better— born in a jail ?
Towner drooped slowly down as he spoke. He ended, and his defeated life passed away from that worn-out body, the comrade of its ignominy.
JQ THEODORE WINTHROP. [1861-88
I raised Densdeth's head. The strange fascination of his face became doubly subtle, as he seemed still to gaze at me with closed eyelids, like a statue's. I felt that if those cold feline eyes should open and again turn their inquisition inward upon my soul, devilish passions would quicken there anew. I shuddered to perceive the larking devil in me, slumbering lightly, and ready to stir whenever he knew a comrade was near.
"Spare me, Densdeth ! " I rather thought than spoke; but with the thought an effluence must have passed from me to him.
His eyes opened. The look of treachery and triumph was gone. He murmured something. What we could not hear. But all the mockery of his voice had departed when in that dying scream it avowed itself despair. The tones we caught were sweet and childlike.
With this effort blood gushed again from his murderous wound. He? too, drooped away and died. The soul that had had no other view of brother men than through the eyes of a beast of prey fled away to find its new tenement. His face settled into marble calm and beauty. I parted the black hair from his forehead.
There was the man whom I should have loved if I had not hated, dead at last, with this vulgar death. Only a single stab from another, and my warfare with him was done. I felt a strange sense of indolence over come me. Was my business in life over, now that I had no longer to struggle with him daily ? Had he strengthened me ? Had he weakened me? Should I have prevailed against him, or would he have finally mastered me, if this chance, this Providence, of death had not come between us?
I looked up, and found Churm studying the dead man.
" Can it be? " said I, "that a soul perilous to all truth and purity, a merciless tempter, a being who to every other man was the personifica tion of that man's own worst ideal of himself, — can it be that such an unrestful spirit has dwelt within this quiet form? What was he? For what purpose enters such a disturbing force into the orderly world of God?"
" That is the ancient mystery," said Churm, solemnly.
" Can it never be solved in this world ? "
" It is not yet solved to you ? Then you must wait for years of deeper thought, or some moment of more fiery trial."
We left the dead, dead.
"Where is Huffmire?" Churm asked.
A sound of galloping hoofs answered. We saw him from the window, flying on Densdeth's horse. Death in his house by violence meant inves tigation, and that he did not dare encounter. He was off, and so escaped justice for a time.
THEODORE W1NTHROP. n
The villainous-looking porter came cringing up to Churm,
"You was asking about a lady," said he.
"Yes. What of her?"
" With a pale face, large eyes, and short, crisp black hair, what that dead man brought here at daybreak yesterday ? "
" The same."
"Murdoch's got her locked up and tied."
"Murdoch!" cried Kaleigh. "That's the hell-cat I saw in the car- riage."
" Quick," said Churm, " take us there ! "
I picked up my dagger, and wiped off the blood ; but the new stain had thickened the ancient rust.
The porter led the way up-stairs, and knocked at a closed door.
" Who is there ? " said a voice.
" Me, Patrick, the porter. Open ! "
" What do you want ? "
" To come in."
" Go about your business ! "
"I will," said the man, turning to us, with a grin. He felt that we were the persons to be propitiated. He put his knee against the door, and, after a struggle and a thrust, the bolt gave way.
A large gipsy-like woman stood holding back the door. We pushed her aside, and sprang in.
" Cecil Dreeme ! " I cried. '• Grod be thanked ! "
And there, indeed, was my friend. He was sitting bound in a great chair, — bound and helpless, but still steady and self-possessed. He was covered with some confining drapery.
He gave an eager cry as he saw me.
I leaped forward and cut him free with my dagger. Better business for the blade than murder !
He rose and clung to me, with a womanish gesture, weeping on my shoulder.
"My child!" cried Churm, shaking off the Murdoch creature, and leaving her to claw the porter.
I felt a strange thrill and a new suspicion go tingling through me as I heard these words. How blind I had been !
Cecil Dreeme still clung to me, and murmured, "Save me from them, Eobert ! Save me from them all ! "
"Clara, my daughter," said Churm, "you need not turn from me; I have been belied to you. Could I change? They forged the letters that made you distrust me."
" Is it so, Robert? " said the figure by my heart
"Yes, Cecil, Churm is true as faith."
}2 THEODORE WINTHROP. [1861-88
There needed no further interpretation. Clara Denman and Cecil Dreeme were one. This strange mystery was clear as day.
She withdrew from me, and as her eyes met mine, a woman's blush signalled the change in our relations. Yes ; this friend closer than a brother was a woman.
" My daughter ! " said Churm, embracing her tenderly, like a father.
I perceived that this womanish drapery had been flung upon her by her captors, to restore her to her sex and its responsibilities.
" Densdeth ? " she asked, with a shudder.
" Dead ! God forgive him ! " answered Churm.
"Let us go," she said. "Another hour in this place with that foul woman would have maddened rne."
She passed from the room with Churm.
Ealeigh stepped forward. " You have found a friend," said he to me ; "you will both go with her. Leave me to see to this business of the dead men and this prison-house."
" Thank you, Ealeigh," said I ; "we will go with her, and relieve you as soon as she is safe, after all these terrors."
"A brave woman!" he said. "I am happy that I have had some slight share in her rescue."
"The whole, Ealeigh."
" There he lies ! " whispered Churm, as we passed the door where the dead men were.
Cecil Dreeme glanced uneasily at me and at the dagger I still carried.
"]STo," said I, interpreting the look; "not by me! not by anv of us! An old vengeance has overtaken him. Towner killed him, and also lies there dead."
" Towner ! " said Dreeme ; " he was another bad spirit of the baser sort to my father. Both dead ! Densdeth dead ! May he be forgiven for all the cruel harm he has done to me and mine ! "
Cecil and I took the back seat of the carriage. I wrapped her up in Towner's great cloak, and drew the hood over her head.
She smiled as I did these little offices, and shrank away a little.
Covered with the hood and draped with the great cloak, she seemed a very woman. Each of us felt the awkwardness of our position.
" We shall not be friends the less, Mr. Byng," said she.
" Friends, Cecil ! "
I took the hand she offered, and kept it.
1861-88J THEODORE WINTHROP.
BUT ONCE.
me, wide wandering soul, in all thy quest. Sipping or draining deep from crystal rim Where pleasure sparkled, when did overbrim That draught its goblet with the fullest zest ? Of all thy better bliss what deein'st tliou best ? Then thus my soul made answer. Ecstasy Comes once, like birth, like death, and once have I Been, oh! so madly happy, that the rest Is tame as surgeless seas. It was a night Sweet, beautiful as she, my love, my light; Fair as the memory of that keen delight. Through trees the moon rose steady, and it blessed Her forehead chastely. Her uplifted look, Calm with deep passion, I for answer took, Then sudden heart to heart was wildly pressed.
A PULL FOR LIFE AND LOVE. [Love and Skates.— The Atlantic Monthly. 18G2.]
TDERRY looked in at the cap'n's office. He beheld a three-legged -*- stool, a hacked desk, an inky steel-pen, an inkless inkstand; but no Cap'n Ambuster.
Perry inspected the cap'n's state-room. There was a cracked look ing-glass, into which he looked ; a hair-brush suspended by the glass, which he used ; a lair of blankets in a berth, which he had no present use for ; and a smell of musty boots, which nobody with a nose could help smelling. Still no Captain Ambuster, nor any of his crew.
Search in the unsavory kitchen revealed no cook, coiled up in a corner, suffering nightmares for the last greasy dinner he had brewed in his frying-pan. There were no deck-hands bundled into their bunks. Perry rapped on the chain-box and inquired if anybody was within, and nobody answering, he had to ventriloquize a nega tive.
The engine-room, too, was vacant, and quite as unsavory as the other dens on board. Perry patronized the engine by a pull or two at the valves, and continued his tour of inspection.
The Ambuster' s skiff, lying on her forward deck, seemed to entertain him vastly.
" Jolly ! " says Perry. And so it was a jolly boat in the literal, not the technical sense.
,. THEODORE WINTHROP. [1861-88
" The three wise men of Grotham went to sea in a bowl ; and here's the identical craft," says Perry.
He gave .the chubby little machine a push with his foot. It rolled and wallowed about grotesquely. When it was still again, it looked so comic, lying contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that Perry had a roar of laughter, which, like other laughter to one's self, did not sound very merry, particularly as the north-wind was howling omi nously, and the broken ice on its downward way was whispering and moaning and talking on in a most mysterious and inarticulate manner.
" Those sheets of ice would crunch up this skiff, as pigs do a punkin," thinks Perry.
And with this thought in his head he looked out on the river, and fancied the foolish little vessel cast loose and buffeting helplessly about in the ice.
He had been so busy until now, in prying about the steamboat and making up his mind that captain and men had all gone off for a com fortable supper on shore, that his eye had not wandered toward the stream.
Now his glance began to follow the course of the icy current. He wondered where all this supply of cakes came from, and how many of them would escape the stems of ferry-boats below and get safe to sea.
All at once, as he looked lazily along the lazy files of ice, his eyes caught a black object drifting on a fragment in a wide way of open water opposite Skerrett's Point, a mile distant.
Perry's heart stopped beating. He uttered a little gasping cry. He sprang ashore, not at all like a Doge quitting a Bucentaur. He tore back to the foundry, dashing through the puddles, and, never stopping to pick up his cap, burst in upon Wade and Bill Tarbox in the office.
The boy was splashed from head to foot with red mud. His light hair, blown wildly about, made his ashy face seem paler. He stood panting.
His dumb terror brought back to Wade's mind all the bad omens of the morning.
" Speak ! " said he, seizing Perry fiercely by the shoulder.
The uproar of the works seemed to hush for an instant, while the lad stammered faintly :
" There's somebody carried off in the ice by Skerrett's Point. It looks like a woman. And there's nobody to help.r'
" Help ! help ! " shouted the four trip-hammers, bursting in like a magnified echo of the boy's last word.
''Help! help!" all the humming wheels and drums repeated more plaintively.
Wade made for the river.
1861-88] THEODORE WINTHROP.
15
This was the moment all his manhood had been training and saving for. For this he had kept sound and brave from his youth up.
As he ran, he felt that the only chance of instant help was in that queer little bowl-shaped skiff of the Ambuster.
He had never been conscious that he had observed it; but the image had lain latent in his mind, biding its time. It might be ten, twenty precious moments before another boat could be found. This one was on the spot to do its duty at once.
"Somebody carried off, — perhaps a woman," Wade thought. "Not —No, she would not neglect my warning ! "Whoever it is, we must save her from this dreadful death ! "
He sprang on board the little steamboat. She was swaying uneasily at her moorings, as the ice crowded along and hammered against her stem. Wade stared from her deck down the river, with all his life at his eyes.
More than a mile away, below the hemlock-crested point, was the dark object Perry had seen, still stirring along the edges of the floating ice. A broad avenue of leaden-green water wrinkled by the cold wind sepa rated the field where this figure was moving from the shore. Dark object and its footing of gray ice were drifting deliberately farther and farther away.
For one instant Wade thought that the terrible dread in his heart would paralyze him. But in that one moment, while his blood stopped flowing and his nerves failed, Bill Tarbox overtook him and was there by his side.
" I brought your cap," says Bill, "and our two coats."
Wade put on his cap mechanically. This little action calmed him.
" Bill." said he, "I'm afraid it is a woman,— a dear friend of mine, — a very dear friend."
Bill, a lover, understood the tone.
" We'll take care of her between us," he said.
The two turned at once to the little tub of a boat.
Oars? Yes,— slung under the thwarts,— a pair of short sculls, worn and split, but with work in them still. There they hung ready, and a rusty boat-hook, besides.
" Find the thole-pins, Bill, while I cut a plug for her bottom out of this broom-stick," Wade said.
This was done in a moment. Bill threw in the coats.
" Now, together ! "
They lifted the skiff to the gangway. Wade jumped down on the ice and received her carefully. They ran her along, as far as they could go, and launched her in the sludge.
" Take the sculls, Bill. I'll work the boat-hook in the bow."
16
THEODORE WINTHROP. [1861-88
Nothing more was said. They thrust out with their crazy little craft into the thick of the ice-flood. Bill, amidships, dug with his sculls in among the huddled cakes. It was clumsy pulling. Now this oar and now that would be thrown out. He could never get a full stroke.
Wade in the bow could do better. He jammed the blocks aside with his boat-hook. He dragged the skiff forward. He steered through the little open ways of water.
Sometimes they came to a broad sheet of solid ice. Then it was " Out with her, Bill ! " and they were both out and sliding their bowl so quick over, that they had not time to go through the rotten surface. This was drowning business; but neither could be spared to drown yet.
In the leads of clear water, the oarsman got brave pulls and sent the boat on mightily. Then again in the thick porridge of brash ice they lost headway, or were baffled and stopped among the cakes. Slow work, slow and painful; and for many minutes they seemed to gain nothing upon the steady flow of the merciless current.
A frail craft for such a voyage, this queer little half-pumpkin ! A frail and leaky shell. She bent and cracked from stem to stern among the nipping masses. Water oozed in through her dry seams. Any moment a rougher touch or a sharper edge might cut her through. But that was a risk they had accepted. They did not take time to think of it, nor to listen to the crunching and crackling of the hungry ice around. They urged straight on, steadily, eagerly, coolly, spending and saving strength.
Not one moment to lose! The shattering of broad sheets of ice around them was a warning of what might happen to the frail support of their chase. One thrust of the boat-hook sometimes cleft a cake that to the eye seemed stout enough to bear a heavier weight than a woman's.
Not one moment to spare ! The dark figure, now drifted far below the hemlocks of the Point, no longer stirred. It seemed to have sunk upon the ice and to be resting there weary and helpless, on one side a wide way of lurid water, on the other half a mile of moving desolation. ,
Far to go, and no time to waste !
"Give way, Bill ! Give way ! "
"Ay,ayf"
Both spoke in low tones, hardly louder than the whisper of the ice around them.
By this time hundreds from the foundry and the village were swarm ing upon the wharf and the steamboat.
" A hundred tar-barrels wouldn't git up my steam in time to do any good," says Cap'n Ambuster. " If them two in my skiff don't overhaul the man, he's gone."
" You're sure it's a man ? " says Smith Wheelwright.
1861-88] THEODORE WINTHROP.
17
" Take a squint through my glass. I'm dreffully afeard it's a gal ; but suthin's got into my eye, so I can't see.''
Suthin' had got into the old fellow's eye,— suthin' saline and acrid, — namely, a tear.
''It's a woman," says Wheelwright, — and suthin' of the same kind blinded him also.
Almost sunset now. But the air was suddenly filled with perplexing snow-dust from a heavy squall. A white curtain dropped between the anxious watchers on the wharf and the boatmen.
The same white curtain hid the dark floating object from its pursuers. There was nothing in sight to steer by now.
Wade steered by his last glimpse, — by the current, — by the rush of the roaring wind, — bv instinct.
How merciful that in such a moment a man is spared the agony of thought ! His agony goes into action, intense as life.
It was bitterly cold. A swash of icewater filled the bottom of the skiff. She was low enough down without that They could not stop to bail, and the miniature icebergs they passed began to look significantly over the gunwale. Which would come to the point of foundering first, the boat or the little floe it aimed for?
Bitterly cold ! The snow hardly melted upon Tarbox's bare hands. His fingers stiffened to the oars ; but there was life in them still, and still he did his work, and never turned to see how the steersman was doing his.
A flight of crows came sailing with the snow-squall. They alighted all about on the hummocks, and curiously watched the two men battling to save life. One black impish bird, more malignant or more sym pathetic than his fellows, ventured to poise on the skiff's stern !
Bill hissed off this third passenger. The crow rose on its toes, let the boat slide away from under him, and followed croaking dismal good wishes.
The last sunbeams were now cutting in everywhere. The thick snow- flurry was like a luminous cloud. Suddenly it drew aside.
The industrious skiff had steered so well and made such headway, that there, a hundred yards away, safe still, not gone, thank God ! was the woman they sought.
A dusky mass flung together on a waning rood of ice,— Wade could see nothing more.
Weary or benumbed, or sick with pure forlornness and despair, she had drooped down and showed no sign of life.
The great wind shook the river. Her waning rood of ice narrowed, foot by foot, like an unthrifty man's heritage. Inch by inch its edges wore away, until the little space that half-sustained the dark heap was no bigger than a coffin-lid. VOL. ix. — 2
lg THEODORE WINTHROP. [1861-88
Help, now !— now, men, if you are to save ! Thrust, Richard Wade, with your boat-hook ! Pull, Bill, till your oars snap ! Out with your last frenzies of vigor ! For the little raft of ice, even that has crumbled beneath its burden, and she sinks,— sinks, with succor close at hand !
Sinks ! No, — she rises and floats again.
She clasps something that holds her head just above water. But the unmannerly ice has buffeted her hat off. The fragments toss it about,— that pretty Amazonian hat, with its alert feather, all drooping and drag gled. Her fair hair and pure forehead are uncovered for an astonished sunbeam to alight upon.
" It is my love, my life, Bill ! Give way, once more ! "
"Way enough! Steady! Sit where you are, Bill, and trim boat, while I lift her out. We cannot risk capsizing."
He raised her carefully, tenderly, with his strong arms.
A bit of wood had buoyed her up for that last moment. It was a broken oar with a deep fresh gash in it.
Wade knew his mark, — the cut of his own skate-iron. This busy oar was still resolved to play its part in the drama.
The round little skiff just bore the third person without sinking.
Wade laid Mary Darner against the thwart. She would not let go her buoy. He unclasped her stiffened hands. This friendly touch found its way to her heart. She opened her eyes and knew him.
" The ice shall not carry off her hat to frighten some mother, down stream," says Bill Tarbox, catching it.
All these proceedings Cap'n Ambuster's spy-glass announced to Dun- derbunk.
"They're h'istin' her up. They've slumped her into the skiff. They're puttin' for shore. Hooray ! "
Pity a spy-glass cannot shoot cheers a mile and a half !
Perry Purtett instantly led a stampede of half Dunderbunk along the railroad track to learn who it was and all about it.
All about it was, that Miss Darner was safe and not dangerously frozen, — and that Wade and Tarbox had carried her up the hill to her mother at Peter Skerrett's.
Missing the heroes in chief, Dunderbunk made a hero of Cap'n Ambuster's skiff. It was transported back on the shoulders of the crowd in triumphal procession. Perry Purtett carried round the hat for a contribution to new paint it, new rib it, new gunwale it, give it new sculls and a new boat-hook, — indeed, to make a new vessel of the brave little bowl.
" I'm afeard," says Cap'n Ambuster, " that, when I git a harnsome new skiff, I shall want a harnsome new steamboat, and then the boat will go cruisin' round for a harnsome new cap'n."
1861-88] HENRY MARTTN BAIRD.
BOKN in Philadelphia, Penn., 1832.
THE DEATH OF COLIGNY.
[History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France. 1879.]
TT was a Sunday morning, the twenty-fourth of August— a day sacred -L in the Koman calender to the memory of Saint Bartholomew. Torches and blazing lights had been burning all night in the streets, to render the task easy. The houses in which Protestants lodged had been distinctly marked with a white cross. The assassins themselves had agreed upon badges for mutual recognition— a white cross on the hat, and a handkerchief tied about the right arm. The signal for beginning was to be given by the great bell of the " Palais de Justice " on the island of the old " cite."
The preparations had not been so cautiously made but that they attracted the notice of some of the Huguenots living near Coligny. Going out to inquire the meaning of the clash of arms, and the unusual light in the streets, they received the answer that there was to be a mock com bat in the Louvre — a pleasure-castle was to be assaulted for the king's diversion. But, as they went farther and approached the Louvre, their eyes were greeted by the sight of more torches and a great number of armed men. The guards, full of the contemplated plot, could not refrain from insults. It soon came to blows, and a Gascon soldier wounded a Protestant gentleman with his halberd. It may have been at this time that the shot was fired which Catherine and her sons heard from the open window of the Louvre. Declaring that the fury of the troops could no longer be restrained, the queen now gave orders to ring the bell of the neighboring church of St. Germain 1'Auxerrois.
Meantime Henry of Guise, Henry of Valois, the Bastard of Angouleme, and their attendants, had reached the admiral's house. The wounded man was almost alone. Could there be any clearer proof of the rectitude of his purpose, of the utter falsity of the charges of conspiracy with which his enemies afterward attempted to blacken his memory? Guerchy and other Protestant gentlemen had expressed the desire to spend the night with him ; but his son-in-law, Teligny, full of confidence in Charles's good intentions, had declined their offers, and had, indeed, himself gone to his own lodgings, not far off, in the Kue St. Honore. With Coligny were Merlin, his chaplain, Pare', the king's surgeon, his ensign Cornaton, La Bonne, Yolet, and four or five servants. In the court below there were five of Navarre's Swiss guards on duty. Coligny,
2Q HENRY MARTTN BAIRD. [1861-88
awakened by the growing noise in the streets, had at first felt no alarm, so implicitly did he rely upon the protestations of Charles, so confident was he that Cosseins and his guards would readily quell any rising of the Parisians. But now some one knocks at the outer door, and demands an entrance in the king's name. Word is given to La Bonne, who at once descends and unlocks. It is Cosseins, followed by the soldiers whom he commands. No sooner does he pass the threshold than he stabs La Bonne with his dagger. Next he seeks the admiral's room, but it is not easy to reach it, for the brave Swiss, even at the risk of their own lives, defend first the door leading to the stairs, and then the stairs themselves. And now Coligny could no longer doubt the meaning of the uproar. He rose from his bed, and, wrapping his dress ing-gown about him, asked his chaplain to pray ; and while Merlin endeavored to fulfil his request, he himself in audible petitions invoked Jesus Christ as his God and Saviour, and committed to His hands again the soul he had received from Him. It was then that the person to whom we are indebted for this account — and he can scarcely have been another than Cornaton — rushed into the room. When Pare asked him what the disturbance imported, he turned to the admiral and said : " My lord, it is God that is calling us to himself ! The house has been forced, and we have no means of resistance ! " To whom the admiral, unmoved by fear, and even, as all who saw him testified, without the least change of countenance, replied : " For a long time have I kept myself in readiness for death. As for you, save yourselves, if you can. It were in vain for you to attempt to save my life. I commend my soul to the mercy of God." Obedient to his directions, all that were with him, save Nicholas Muss, or de la Mouche, his faithful German interpre ter, fled to the roof, and escaped under cover of the darkness.
One of Coligny 's Swiss guards had been shot at the foot of the stairs. When Cosseins had removed the barricade of boxes that had been erected farther up, the Swiss in his own company, whose uniform of green, white, and black showed them to belong to the Duke of Anjou, found their countrymen on the other side, but did them no harm. Cosseins following them, however, no sooner saw these armed men than he ordered his arquebusiers to shoot, and one of them fell dead. It was a German follower of Guise, named Besme, who first reached and entered Coligny's chamber, and who for the exploit was subsequently rewarded with the hand of a natural daughter of the Cardinal of Lorraine. Cosseins, Attin, Sarlaboux, and others, were behind him. "Is not this the admiral ? " said Besme of the wounded man, whom he found quietly seated and awaiting his coming. " I am he," Coligny calmly replied. u Young man, thou oughtest to have respect for my old age and my feebleness ; but thou shalt not, nevertheless, shorten my life." There
1861-88] HENRY MARTYN BAIRD. 91
were those who asserted that he added: "At least, would that some man, and not this blackguard, put me to death." But most of the mur derers—and among them Attin, who confessed that never had he seen any one more assured in the presence of death— affirmed that Coligny said nothing beyond the words first mentioned. No sooner had Besme heard the admiral's reply, than, with a curse, he struck him with his sword, first in the breast, and then on the head. The rest took part, and quickly despatched him.
In the court below, Guise was impatiently waiting to hear that his mortal enemy was dead. " Besme," he cried out at last, " have you fin- ished?" "It is done," the assassin replied. "Monsieur le Chevalier (the Bastard of Angouleme) will not believe it," again -said Guise, " unless he sees him with his own eyes. Throw him out of the win dow ! " Besme and Sarlaboux promptly obeyed the command. When the lifeless remains lay upon the pavement of the court, Henry of Guise stooped down and with his handkerchief wiped away the blood from the admiral's face. " I recognize him," he said ; " it is he himself ! " Then, after ignobly kicking the face of his fallen antagonist, he went out gayly encouraging his followers : " Come, soldiers, take courage ; we have begun well. Let us go on to the others, for so the king commands !" And often through the day Guise repeated the words, " The king com mands ; it is the king's pleasure; it is his express command!" Just then a bell was heard, and the cry was raised that the Huguenots were in arms to kill the king.
As for Admiral Coligny 's body, after the head had been cut off by an Italian of the guard of the Duke de Nevers, the trunk was treated with every indignity. The hands were cut off, and it was otherwise muti lated in a shameless manner. Three days was it dragged about the streets by a band of inhuman boys. Meantime the head had been car ried to the Louvre, where, after Catherine and Charles had sufficiently feasted their eyes on the spectacle, it was embalmed and sent to Home, a grateful present to the Cardinal of Lorraine and Pope Gregory the Thir teenth. It has been questioned whether the ghastly trophy ever reached its destination. Indeed, the French court seems to have become ashamed of its inhumanity, and to have regretted that so startling a token of its barbarous hatred had been allowed to go abroad. Accordingly, soon after the departure of the courier, a second courier was despatched in great haste to Mandelot, governor of Lyons, bidding him stop the first and take away from him the admiral's head. He arrived too late, how ever; four hours before Mandelot received the king's letter, "a squire of the Duke of Guise, named Pauli," had passed through the city, doubt less carrying the precious relic. That it was actually placed in the hands of the Cardinal of Lorraine at Rome need not be doubted.
22 HENRY MARTTN BAIRD. [1861-88
Gaspard de Coligny was in his fifty-sixth year at the time of his death. For twelve years he had been the most prominent man in the Huguenot party, occupying a position secured to him not more by his resplendent abilities as a general than by the respect exacted by high moral princi ples. With the light and frivolous side of French character he had little in common. It was to a sterner and more severe class that he belonged —a class of which Michel de 1'Hospital might be regarded as the type. Men who had little affinity with them, and bore them still less resem blance, but who could not fail to admire their excellence, were wont to liken both the great Huguenot warrior and the chancellor to that Cato whose grave demeanor and imposing dignity were a perpetual censure upon the flippancy and lax morality of his countrymen. Although not above the ordinary height of men, his appearance was dignified and commanding. In speech he was slow and deliberate. His prudence, never carried to the extreme of over-caution, was signalized on many occasions. Success did not elate him ; reverses did not dishearten him. The siege of the city of St. Quentin, into which he threw himself with a handful of troops, and which he long defended against the best soldiers of Spain, displayed on a conspicuous stage his military sagacity, his indomitable determination, and the marvellous control he maintained over his followers. It did much to prevent Philip from reaping more substantial fruits from the brilliant victory gained by Count Egmont on the feast-day of St. Lawrence. It was, however, above all in the civil wars that his abilities shone forth resplendent. Equally averse to begin ning war without absolute necessity, and to ending it without securing the objects for which it had been undertaken, he was the good genius whose wholesome advice was frequently disregarded, but never without subsequent regret on the part of those who had slighted it. We have seen, in a former chapter, the touching account given by Agrippa d' Aubigne of the appeal of the admiral's wife, which alone was successful in moving him to overcome his almost invincible repugnance to taking up arms, even in behalf of a cause which he knew to be most holy. I find a striking confirmation of the accuracy of the report in a passage of his will, wherein he defends himself from the calumnies of his enemies. " And forasmuch as I have learned that the attempt has been made to impute to me a purpose to attack the persons of the king, the queen, and the king's brothers, I protest before God that I never had any such will or desire, and that I never was present at any place where such plans were ever proposed or discussed. And as I have also been accused of ambition in taking up arms with those of the reformed religion, I make the same protestation, that only zeal for religion, together with fear for my own life, compelled me to assume them. And, indeed, I must confess my weakness, and that the greatest fault which I have
1861-88] HENRY MARTYN SAIRD. 23
always committed in this respect has been that I have not been suffi ciently alive to the acts of injustice and the slaughter to which my breth ren were subjected, and that the dangers and the traps that were laid for myself were necessary to move me to do what I have done. But I also declare before God, that I tried every means in my power, in order so long as possible to maintain peace, fearing nothing so much as civil dis turbances and wars, and clearly foreseeing that these would bring after them the ruin of this kingdom, whose preservation I have always desired and labored for to the utmost of rny ability."
To Coligny's strategy too much praise could scarcely be accorded. The Venetian ambassador, Contarini, in the report of his mission to the senate, in the early part of the year 1572, expressed his amazement that the admiral, a simple gentleman with slender resources, had waged war against his own powerful sovereign, who was assisted by the King of Spain and by a few German and several Italian princes ; and that, in spite of many battles lost, he preserved so great a reputation that the reiters and lansquenets never rebelled, although their wages were much in arrears, and their booty was often lost in adverse combats. He was, in fact, said the enthusiastic Italian, entitled to be held in higher esteem than Hannibal, inasmuch as the Carthaginian general retained the respect of foreign nations by being uniformly victorious ; but the admiral retained it, although his cause was almost always unsuccessful.
But all Coligny's military achievements pale in the light of his manly and unaffected piety. It is as a type of the best class among the Hugue not nobility that he deserves everlasting remembrance. From his youth he had been plunged in the engrossing pursuits of a soldier's life; but he was not ashamed, so soon as he embraced the views of the reformers, to acknowledge the superior claims of religion upon his time and his allegiance. He gloried in being a Christian. The influence of his faith was felt in every action of his life. In the busiest part of an active life, he yet found time for the recognition of God ; and, whether in the camp or in his castle of Chatillon-sur Loing, he consecrated no insignificant portion of the day to devotion.
„, MART ASHLEY TOWNSEND. [1861-88
BORN in Lyons, Wayne Co., N. Y., 1832.
DOWN THE BAYOU. [Down the Bayou, and Other Poems. 1882.]
WE drifted down the long lagoon, My Love, my Summer Love and I, Far out of sight of all the town, The old Cathedral sinking down, With spire and cross, from view below The borders of St. John's bayou, As toward the ancient Spanish Fort, With steady prow and helm a-port, We drifted down, my Love and I, Beneath an azure April sky, — My Love and I, My Love and I, Just at the hour of noon.
We drifted down, and drifted down,
My Love, my Summer Love and I.
The wild bee sought the shadowed flower,
Yet wet with morning's dewy dower,
While here and there across the stream
A daring vine its frail bridge builded,
As fair, as fragile as some dream
Which Hope with hollow hand hath gilded.
Now here, now there, some fisher's boat,
By trudging fisher towed, would float
Toward the town beyond our eyes ;
The drowsy steersman in the sun,
Chanting meanwhile, in drowsy tone, —
Under the smiling April skies,
To which the earth smiled back replies, —
Beside his helm some barcarole,
Or, in the common patois known
To such as lie before his day,
Sang out some gay chanson creole,
And held his bark upon its way.
Slowly along the old shell-road
Some aged negro, 'neath his load
Of gathered moss and latanier
Went shuffling on his homeward way;
While purple, cool, beneath the blue
Of that hot noontide, bravely smiled,
With bright and iridescent hue,
Whole acres of the blue-flag flower,
1881-88] MART ASHLEY TOWNSEND. 25
The breathy Iris, sweet and wild, That floral savage unsubdued, The gypsy April's gypsy child.
Now from some point of weedy shore An Indian woman darts before The light bow of our idle boat, In which, like figures in a dream, My Love, my Summer Love and I, Adown the sluggish bayou float; "While she, in whose still face we see Traits of a chieftain ancestry, Paddles her pirogue down the stream Swiftly, and with the flexile grace Of some dusk Dian in the chase.
As nears our boat the tangled shore, "Where the wild mango weaves its boughs, And early willows stoop their hair To meet the sullen bayou's kiss; Where the luxuriant ' ' creeper " throws Its eager clasp round rough and fair To climb toward the coming June; Where the sly serpent's sudden hiss Startles sometimes the drowsy noon, — There the rude hut, banana-thatched, Stands with its ever open door ; Its yellow gourd hung up beside The crippled crone who, half asleep, In garments most grotesquely patched, Grim watch and ward pretends to keep Where there is naught to be denied.
Still darkly winding on before, For half a dozen miles or more, Past leagues and leagues of lilied marsh, The murky bayou swerved and slid, Was lost, and found itself again. And yet again was quickly hid Among the grasses of the plain. As gazed we o'er the sedgy swerves, The wild and weedy water curves, Toward sheets of shining canvas spread High o'er the lilies blue and red, So low the shores on either hand. The sloops seemed sailing on the land.
We drifted on, and drifted on, My Love, my Summer Love and I. All youth seemed like an April land, All life seemed like a morning sky.
MART ASHLEY TOWNSEND. [1861-88
Like the white fervor of a star That burns in twilight skies afar, Between the azure of the day And gates that shut the night away; Bright as an Ophir jewel's glearn On some Egyptian's swarthy hand, About my heart one radiant dream Shone with a glow intense, supreme, Yet vague, withal, like some sweet sky We trust for sunshine, nor know why. The reed -birds chippered in the reeds, As drifted on my Love and I ; The sleepy saurian by the bank Slid from his sunny log, and sank Beneath the dank, luxuriant weeds That lay upon the bayou's breast, Like vernal argosies at rest.
Like some blind Homer of the wood, —
A king in beggared solitude, —
Upon the wide, palmettoed plain,
A giant cypress here and there
Stood in impoverished despair;
With leafless crown, with outstretched limbs,
With mien of woe, with voiceless hymns,
With mossy raiment, tattered, gray,
Waiting in dumb and sightless pain,
A model posing for Dore.
Aloft, on horizontal wing,
We saw the buzzard rock and swing;
That sturdy sailor of the air,
Whose agile pinions have a grace
That prouder plumes might proudly wear,
And claim it for a kinglier race.
From distant oak-groves, sweet and strong,
The voicy mocking-bird gave song, —
That plagiarist whose note is known
As every bird's, yet all his own.
As shuttles of the Persian looms
Catcli all of Nature's subtlest blooms,
Alike her bounty and her dole
To weave in one bewildering whole,
So has this subtile singer caught
All sweetest songs, and deftly wrought
Them into one entrancing score
From his rejoicing heart to pour.
Remembering that song, that sky, "My Love," I say, ''my Love and I "— "My Summer Love"— yet know not why.
1861-88] HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. 97
We had been friends, we still were friends;
Where love begins and friendship ends,
To both was like some new strange shore
Which hesitating feet explore.
There had we met, surprised to meet
And glad to find surprise so sweet ;
But not a word, nor sigh, nor token,
Nor tender word unconscious spoken,
Nor lingering clasp, nor sudden kiss,
Had shown Love born of Friendship's broken,
Golden, glorious chrysalis.
Each well content with each to dream, We drifted down that silent stream, Searching the book of Nature fair, To find each other's picture there,
Lifting our eyes
To name the skies Prophets of cloudless destinies, As down and down the long lagoon We swept that semi-tropic noon, Each one as sure love lay below The careless thoughts our lips might breathe, Or lighter laughter might unfold, As doth the earnest alchemist know Beneath his trusted crucibles glow Fires to transmute his dross to gold.
^Bancroft
BORN in Granville, Ohio, 1832.
HOW THEY FOUND THE PACIFIC GOLD. [History of the Pacific States of North America. Volume XXIII. 1888. J
r I ^WOSCOKE miles above Suiter's Fort, a short distance up the south -*- branch of American River, the rocky gateway opens, and the moun tains recede to the south, leaving in their wake softly rounded hills cov ered with pine, balsam, and oak, while on the north are somewhat abrupt and rocky slopes, patched with grease-wood and chemisal, and streaked with the deepening shades of narrow gulches. Between these bounds is a valley four miles in circumference, with red soil now covered by a thin verdure, shaded here and there by low bushes and stately groves. Cu- luma, " beautiful vale," the place was called. At times sunk in isolation,
28
HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. [1861-88
at times it was stirred by the presence of a tribe of savages bearing its name, whose several generations here cradled, after weary roaming, sought repose upon the banks of a useful, happy, and sometimes frolic some stream. Within the half-year civilization had penetrated these precincts, to break the periodic solitude with the sound of axe and rifle ; for here the saw-mill men had come, marking their course by a tree- blazed route, presently to show the way to the place where was now to be played the first scene of a drama which had for its audience the world.
Among the retainers of the Swiss hacendado at this time was a native of New Jersey, James Wilson Marshall, a man of thirty-three years, who after drifting in the western states as carpenter and farmer, came hither by way of Oregon to California. In July 1845 he entered the service of Sutter, and was duly valued as a good mechanic. By and by he secured a grant of land on Butte Creek, on which he placed some live-stock, and went to work. During his absence in the war southward, this was lost or stolen ; and somewhat discouraged, he turned again to Sutter, and readily entered into his views for building a saw-mill.
The old difficultv of finding a site still remained, and several explor ing excursions were now made by Marshall, sometimes accompanied by Sutter, and by others in Slitter's service. On the 16th of May, 1847, Marshall set out on one of these journeys, accompanied by an Indian guide and two white men, Treador and Graves. On the 20th they were joined by one Gingery, who had been exploring with the same object on the Cosumnes. They travelled up the stream now called Weber Creek to its head, pushed on to the American River, discovered Culuma, and settled upon this place as the best they had found, uniting as it did the requisite water-power and timber, with a possible roadway to the fort. Sutter resolved to lose no time in erecting the mill, and invited Marshall to join him as partner. The agreement was signed in the latter part of August, and shortly afterward Marshall set out with his party, carrying tools and supplies on Mexican ox-carts, and driving a flock of sheep for food. A week was occupied by the journey. Shelter being the first thing required on arrival, a double log-house was erected, with a pas sage-way between the two parts, distant a quarter of a mile or more from the mill-site. Subsequently two other cabins were constructed nearer the site. By New- Year's day the mill-frame had risen, and a fortnight later the brush-dam was finished, although not till the fortitude of Mar shall and his men had been tried by a flood which threatened to sweep away the whole structure
They were a cheerful set, working with a will, yet with a touch of insouciance, imparted to some extent by the picturesque Mexican som brero and sashes, and sustained by an interchange of banter at the sim plicity or awkwardness of the savages. In Marshall they had a passable
1861-88] HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT.
29
master, though sometimes called queer. He was a man fitted by phy sique and temperament for the backwoods life, which had lured and held him. Of medium size, strong rather than well developed, his features were coarse, with a thin beard round the chin and mouth, cut short like the brown hair ; broad forehead and penetrating eyes, by no means unin telligent, yet lacking intellectuality, at times gloomily bent on vacancy, at times flashing with impatience. He was essentially a man of moods ; his mind was of dual complexion. In the plain and proximate, he was sensible and skilful ; in the obscure and remote, he was utterly lost. In temper it was so; with his companions and subordinates he was free and friendly ; with his superiors and the world at large he was morbidly ill-tempered and surly. He was taciturn, with visionary ideas, linked to spiritualism, that repelled confidence, and made him appear eccentric and morbid ; he was restless, yet capable of self-denying perseverance that was frequently stamped as obstinacy.
Early in the afternoon of Monday, the 24th of January, 1848, while sauntering along the tail-race inspecting the work, Marshall noticed yel low particles mingled with the excavated earth which had been washed by the late rains. He gave it little heed at first ; but presently seeing more, and some in scales, the thought occurred to him that possibly it might be gold. Sending an Indian to his cabin for a tin plate, he washed out some of the dirt, separating thereby as much of the dust as a ten-cent piece would hold ; then he went about his business, stopping a while to ponder on the matter. During the evening he remarked once or twice quietly, somewhat doubtingly, u Boys, I believe I have found a gold mine." " I reckon not," was the response ; " no such luck."
Up betimes next morning, according to his custom, he walked down by the race to see the effect of the night's sluicing, the head-gate being closed at daybreak as usual. Other motives prompted his investigation, as may be supposed, and led to a closer examination of the debris. On reaching the end of the race a glitter from beneath the water caught his eye, and bending down he picked from its lodgment against a projection of soft granite, some six inches below the surface, a larger piece of the yellow substance than t any he had seen. If gold, it was in value equal to about half a dollar.' As he examined it his heart began to throb. Could it indeed be gold ! Or was it only mica, or sulphuret of copper, or other ignis fatuus ! Marshall was no metallurgist, yet he had prac tical sense enough to know that gold is heavy and malleable; so he turned it over, and weighed it in his hand ; then he bit it ; and then he hammered it between two stones. It must be gold ! And the mighty secret of the Sierra stood revealed !
Marshall took the matter coolly ; he was a cool enough man except where his pet lunacy was touched. On further examination he found
30 HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. [1861-88
more of the metal. He went to his companions and showed it to them, and they collected some three ounces of it, flaky and in grains, the largest piece not quite so large as a pea, and from that down to less than a pin-head in size. Half of this he put in his pouch, and two days later mounted his horse and rode over to the fort.
It was late in the afternoon of the 28th of January when Marshall dismounted at New Helvetia, entered the office where Sutter was busy writing, and abruptly requested a private interview. The horseman was dripping wet, for it was raining. Wondering what could have happened, as but the day before he had sent to the mill all that was required, Sut ter led the way into a private room. " Are you alone?" demanded the visitor. " Yes,'' was the reply. " Did you lock the door? " " No, but I will if you wish it" "I want two bowls of water," said Marshall. Sutter rang the bell and the bowls were brought. " Now I want a stick of redwood, and some twine, and some sheet copper." "What do you want of all these things, Marshall ? " " To make scales." "But I have scales enough in the apothecary's shop," said Sutter ; and he brought a pair. Drawing forth his pouch, Marshall emptied the contents into his hand, and held it before Sutter' s eyes, remarking, "I believe this is gold ; but the people at the mill laughed at me and called me crazy." Sutter examined the stuff attentively, and finally said: "It certainly looks like it; we will try it." First aqua-fortis was applied; and the substance stood the test. Next three dollars in silver coin were put into one of the scales, and balanced by gold-dust in the other. Both were then immersed in water, when down went the dust and up the silver coin. Finally a volume of the "American Encyclopaedia," of which the fort contained a copy, was brought out, and the article on gold carefully studied, whereupon all doubts vanished.
Marshall proposed that Sutter should return with him to the mill that night, but the latter declined, saying that he would be over the next day. It was now supper- time, and still drizzling; would not the visitor rest himself till morning? No, he must be off immediately; and without even waiting to eat, he wrapped his serape about him, mounted his horse, and rode off into the rain and darkness. Sutter slept little that night. Though he knew nothing of the magnitude of the affair, and did not fully realize the evils he had presently to face, yet he felt there would soon be enough of the fascination abroad to turn the heads of his men, and to disarrange his plans. In a word, with prophetic eye, as he expressed himself to me, he saw that night the curse of the thing upon him.
On the morning of the 29th of January Sutter started for the saw-mill. When half-way there, or more, he saw an object moving in the bushes at one side. "What is that?" demanded Sutter of his attendant.
1861-88] HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. 01
" The man who was with you yesterday," was the reply. It was still raining. "Have you been here all night?" asked Sutter of Marshall; for it was indeed he. " No," Marshall said, " I slept at the mill, and came back to meet you." As they rode along Marshall expressed the opinion that the whole country was rich in gold. Arrived at the mill Sutter took up his quarters at a house Marshall had lately built for him self, a little way up the mountain, and yet not far from the mill. Dur ing the night the water ran in the race, and in the morning it was shut off. All present then proceeded down the channel, and jumping into it at various points began to gather gold. With some contributions by the men, added to what he himself picked up, Sutter secured enough for a ring weighing an ounce and a half, which he soon after exhibited with great pride as a specimen of the first gold. A private examination by the partners up the river disclosed gold all along its course, and in the tributary ravines and creeks.
Sutter regarded the discovery as a misfortune. Without laborers his extensive works must come to a stop, presaging ruin. Gladly would he have shut the knowledge from the world, for a time, at least. With the men at the mill the best he could do was to make them promise to con tinue their work, and say nothing of the gold discovery for six weeks, by which time he hoped to have his flour-mill completed, and his other affairs so arranged as to enable him to withstand the result. The men, indeed, were not yet prepared to relinquish good wages for the uncer tainties of gold-gathering.
If only the land could be secured on which this gold was scattered — for probably it did not extend far in any direction — then interloping might be prevented, mining controlled, and the discovery made profit able. It was worth trying, at all events. Mexican grants being no longer possible, Sutter began by opening negotiations with the natives, after the manner of the English colonists on the other side of the continent. Calling a council of the Culumas and some of their neighbors, the lords aboriginal of those lands, Sutter and Marshall obtained from them a three years' lease of a tract some ten or twelve miles square, on payment of some shirts, hats, handkerchiefs, flour, and other articles of no great value, the natives meanwhile to be left unmolested in their homes. Sutter then returned to Few Helvetia, and the great discovery was con summated.
£9 HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. [1861-88
ARGONAUT LIFE AND CHARACTER.
[From the Same.}
/CERTAIN distinctiveness of dress and manner assisted the physical ^ type in marking nationalities; but idiosyncrasies were less con spicuous here than in conventional circles, owing to the prevalence of the miner's garb — checked or woolen shirts, with a predominance of red and blue, open at the bosom, which could boast of shaggy robustness, or loosely secured by a kerchief; pantaloons half tucked into high and wrinkled boots, and belted at the waist, where bristled an arsenal of knife and pistols. Beard and hair, emancipated from thraldom, revelled in long and bushy tufts, which rather harmonized with the slouched and dingy hat Later, a species of foppery broke out in the flourishing towns; on Sundays particularly gay colors predominated. The gam blers, taking the lead, affected the Mexican style of dress : white shirt with diamond studs, or breastpin of native gold, chain of native golden specimens, broad-brimmed hat with sometimes a feather or squirrel's tail under the band, top-boots, and a rich scarlet sash or silk handkerchief thrown over the shoulder or wound round the waist. San Francisco took early a step further. Traders and clerks drew forth their creased suits of civilization, till the shooting- jacket of the Briton, the universal black of the Yankee, the tapering cut of the Parisian, the stove-pipe hat and stand-up collar of the professional, appeared upon the street to rival or eclipse the prostitute and cognate fraternity which at first monopo lized elegance in drapery.
Miners, however, made a resolute stand against any approach to dan dyism, as they termed the concomitants of shaven face and white shirt, as antagonistic to their own foppery of rags and undress which attended deified labor. Clean, white, soft hands were an abomination, for such were the gambler's and the preacher's, not to speak of worshipful femi ninity. But horny were the honest miner's hands, whose one only soft touch was the revolver's trigger. A storekeeper in the mines was a necessary evil, a cross between a cattle-thief and a constable ; if a fail- trader, free to give credit, and popular, he was quite respectable, more so than the saloon-keeper or the loafer, but let him not aspire to the dig nity of digger.
Nor was the conceit illusive; for the finest specimens of manhood unfolded in these rugged forms, some stanch and broad-shouldered, some gaunt and wiry ; their bronzed, hairy features weather-bleached and furrowed, their deep rolling voices laden with oaths, though each ejaculation was tempered by the frankness and humor of the twinkling eye. All this dissolution of old conventionalities and adoption of new
1861-88] HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT.
33
forms, which was really the creation of an original type, was merely a part of the overflowing sarcasm and fun started by the dissolution of prejudice and the liberation of thought.
A marked trait of the Californians was exuberance in work and play, in enterprise or pastime — an exuberance full of vigor. To reach this country was in itself a task which implied energy, self-reliance, self- denial, and similar qualities; but moderation was not a virtue conso nant with the new environment. The climate was stimulating. Man breathed quicker and moved faster; the very windmills whirled here with a velocity that would make a Hollander's head swim. And so like boys escaped from school, from supervision, the adventurer yielded to the impulse, and allowed the spirit within him to run riot. The excite ment, moreover, brought out the latent strength hitherto confined by lack of opportunity and conventional rules. Chances presented them selves in different directions to vaulting ambition. Thrown upon his own resources midst strange surroundings, with quickened observation and thought, the enterprising new-comer cast aside traditional caution, and launched into the current of speculation ; for everything seemed to promise success whatever course might be pursued, so abnormal were the times and place which set at naught all calculations formulated by wisdom and precedent. Amid the general free and magnificent disor der, recklessness had its votaries, which led to a widespread emphasis in language, and to a full indulgence in exciting pastimes. All this, however, was but the bubble and spray of the river hurrying onward to a grander and calmer future.
This frenzied haste, no less than the absence of families, denoted that the mania was for enrichment, with hopes rather of a speedy return to the old home than of building a new one. San Francisco and other towns remained under this idea, as well as temporary camps and depots for the gold-fields, whither went not only diggers, but in their wake a vast following of traders, purveyors, gamblers, and other ravenous non-producers to absorb substance.
The struggle for wealth, however, untarnished by sordidness, stood redeemed by a whole-souled liberality, even though the origin of this ideal Californian trait, like many another virtue, may be traced to less noble sources ; here partly to the desire to cover up the main stimulant —greed ; partly to the prodigality bred by easy acquisition ; partly to the absence of restraining family cares. Even traders scorned to hag gle. A half-dollar was the smallest coin that could be tendered for any service, and many hesitated to offer a quarter for the smallest article. Everything proceeded on a grand scale; even boot-blacking assumed big proportions, with neatly fitted recesses, cushioned chairs, and a sup ply of entertaining journals. Wages rose to a dollar an hour for labor-
VOL. IX. — 3
34
HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. [1861-88
ers, and to twelve and twenty dollars a day for artisans. With them was raised the dignity of labor, sanctified by the application of all classes, by the independence of mining life, and by the worshipful results — gold.
A natural consequence was the levelling of rank, a democratic equali zation hitherto unapproached, and shattering the conservative notions more or less prevalent. The primary range of classes was not so varied as in the older countries ; for the rich and powerful would not come to toil, and the very poor could not well gain the distant land; but where riches lay so near the reach of all, their accumulation conferred less advantage. Aptitude was the esteemed and distinguishing trait. The aspiring man could break away from drudgery at home, and here find many an open field with independence. The laborer might gain the footing of employer; the clerk the position of principal; while former doctors, lawyers, and army officers could be seen toiling for wages, even as waiters and shoe-blacks. Thus were grades reversed, fitness to grasp opportunity giving the ascendency.
The levelling process left indelible traces ; yet from the first the mental reservation and consequent effort were made to rise above any enforced subjection. The idea of abasement was sometimes softened by the disguise of name, which served also for fugitives from misfortune or disgrace, while it flattered imitators of humble origin. This habit received wide acknowledgment and application, especially in the mines, where nicknames became the rule, with a preference for abbreviated baptismal names, particularized by an epithet descriptive of the person, character, nationality ; as Sandy Pete, Long-legged Jack, Dutchy. The cause here may be sought chiefly in the blunt unrestrained good-fellow ship of the camp, which banished all formality and superfluous courtesy.
The requirements of mining life favored partnership; and while few of the associations formed for the journey out kept together, new unions were made for mutual aid in danger, sickness, and labor. Sacred like the marriage bonds, as illustrated by the softening of partner into the familiar "pard," were the ties which oft united men vastly different in physique and temperament, the weak and strong, the lively and sedate, thus yoking themselves together. It presented the affinity of opposites, with the heroic possibilities of a Damon or Patroclus. Those already connected with benevolent societies sought out one another to revive them for the practice of charity, led by the Odd Fellows, who united as early as 1847
Obviously in a community of men the few women present were very conspicuous. There were whole groups of camps which could be searched in vain for the presence of a single woman, and where one was found she proved too often only the fallen image, the centre of gyrating
1861-88] HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. 35
revelry and discord. In San Francisco and other large towns, families began to settle, yet for a long time the disreputable element outshone the virtuous by loudness in dress and manner, especially in public resorts. In the scarcity men assumed the heroic, and women became worshipful. The few present wore an Aphrodite girdle, which shed a glamour over imperfections, till they found themselves divinities, cen tres of chivalric adorers. In the mining region men would travel from afar for a glance at a newly arrived female, or handle in rnock or real ecstasy some fragment of female apparel. Even in the cities passers-by would turn to salute a female stranger, while the appearance of a little girl would be heralded like that of an angel, many a rugged fellow bend ing with tears of recollection to give her a kiss and press a golden ounce into her hand. The effects of these tender sentiments remained rooted in the hearts of Californians long after the romance age, the only mellow trait with many a one, the only thing sacred being some base imitation of the divine image
Distance did not seem to weaken the bond with the old home, to judge especially by the general excitement created by the arrival of a mail-steamer. What a straining of eyes toward the signal-station on Telegraph hill, as the time of her coming drew nigh ! What a rush toward the landing ! What a struggle to secure the month-old newspaper, which sold readily for a dollar ! For letters patience had to be curbed, owing to the scanty provisions at the post-office for sorting the bulky mail. Such was the anxiety, however, that numbers took their position in the long line before the delivery-window during the preceding day or night, fortified with stools and creature comforts. There were boys and men who made a business of taking a place in the post-office line to sell it to later comers, who would find the file probably extending round more than one block. There was ample time for reflection while thus waiting before the post-office window, not to mention the agony of sus pense, heightened by the occasional demonstration of joy or sorrow on the part of others on reading their letters.
The departure of a steamer presented scenes hardly less stirring, the mercantile class being especially earnest in efforts to collect outstanding debts for remittance. At the wharf stood preeminent sturdy miners girdled with well-filled belts, their complacent faces turned eastward. Old Californians they boasted themselves, though counting, perhaps, less than a half-year sojourn ; many strutting in their coarse and soiled camp attire, glorying in their rags like Antisthenes, through the holes of whose clothes Socrates saw such rank pride peering. Conspicuous by contrast were many haggard and dejected faces, stamped by broken con stitutions, soured by disappointment. Others no less unhappy, without even the means to follow them, were left behind, stranded ; with hope
gg HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. [1861-88
fled, and having relinquished the struggle to sink perhaps into the out cast's grave.
Housekeeping in these days, even in the cities, was attended by many discomforts. The difficulty of obtaining female servants, which pre vailed even in later years, gave rise to the phenomenon of male house- servants, first in Irish, French, or Italian, and later in Chinese form. Fleas, rats, and other vermin abounded; laundry expenses often ex ceeded the price of new underwear ; water and other conveniences were lacking, and dwelling accommodations most deficient, the flimsy cloth partitions in hotels forbidding privacy.
For the unmarried men any hovel answered the purpose, fitted as they were for privation by the hardships of a sea-voyage or a transcontinental journey. The bunk-lined room of the ordinary lodging-house, the wooden shed, or canvas tent, could hardly have been more uncomforta ble than the foul-smelling and musty ship-hold. Thus the high price prevalent for board and lodging, as well as the discomforts attending housekeeping and home life, tended to heighten the allurements of vice- breeding resorts. .
The miners were a nomadic race, with prospectors for advance guard. Prospecting, the search for new gold-fields, was partly compulsory, for the overcrowded camp or district obliged the new-comer to pass onward, or a claim worked out left no alternative. But in early days the incen tive lay greatly in the cravings of a feverish imagination, excited by fanciful camp-fire tales of huge ledges and glittering nuggets, the sources of these bare sprinklings of precious metals which cost so much toil to collect. Distance assists to conjure up mirages of ever-increasing enchantment, encircled by the romance of adventure, until growing unrest makes hitherto well-yielding and valued claims seem unworthy of attention, and drives the holder forth to rove. He bakes bread for the requirements of several days, takes a little salt, and the cheering flask, and with cup and pan, pick and shovel, attached to the blanket strapped to his back, he sallies forth, a trusty rifle in hand for defence and for providing meat. If well off, he transfers the increased burden to a pack-animal ; but as often he may be obliged to eke it out with effects borrowed from a confiding friend or storekeeper.
Following a line parallel to the range, northward or south, across ridges and ravines, through dark gorges, or up some rushing stream, at one time he is seized with a consciousness of slumbering nuggets beneath his feet, at another he is impelled onward to seek the parent mass ; but prudence prevails upon him not to neglect the indications of experience, the hypothetical watercourses and their confluences in dry tracts, the undisturbed bars of the living streams, where its eddies have thrown up sand and gravel, the softly-rounded gravel-bearing hill, the
1861-88] HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. 07
crevices of exposed rocks, or the outcropping quartz veins along the bank and hillside. Often the revelation comes by accident, which upsets sober-minded calculation ; for where a child may stumble upon pounds of metal, human nature can hardly be content to toil for a pitiful ounce.
Rumors of success are quickly started, despite all care by the finder to keep a discovery secret, at least for a time. The compulsion to replenish the larder is sufficient to point the trail, and the fox-hound's scent for its prey is not keener than that of the miner for gold. One report starts another ; and some morning an encampment is roused by files of men hurrying away across the ridge to new-found treasures.
Then spring up a camp of leafy arbors, brush huts, and peaked tents, in bold relief upon the naked bar, dotting the hillside in picturesque confusion, or nestling beneath the foliage. The sounds of crowbar and pick reecho from the cliffs, and roll off upon the breeze mingled with the hum of voices from bronzed and hairy men, who delve into the banks and hill-slope, coyote into the mountain side, burrow in the gloom of tunnels and shafts, and breast the river currents. Soon drill and blast increase the din ; flumes and ditches creep along the canon walls to turn great wheels and creaking pumps. Over the ridges come the mule-trains, winding to the jingle of the leader's bell and the shouts of arrieros, with fresh wanderers in the wake, bringing supplies and consumers for the stores, drinking-saloons, and hotels that form the soli tary main street. Here is the valve for the pent-up spirit of the toilers, lured nightly by the illumined canvas walls, and the boisterous mirth of revellers, noisy, oath -breathing, and shaggy ; the richer the more disso lute, yet as a rule good-natured and law-abiding. The chief cause for trouble lay in the cup, for the general display of arms served to awe criminals by the intimation of summary punishment; yet theft found a certain encouragement in the ease of escape among the ever-moving crowds, with little prospect of pursuit by preoccupied miners.
The great gathering in the main street was on Sundays, when after a restful morning, though unbroken by the peal of church-bells, the miners gathered from hills and ravines for miles around for marketing and relaxation. It was the harvest day for the gamblers, who raked in regularly the weekly earnings of the improvident, and then sent them to the store for credit to work out another gambling-stake. Drinking- saloons were crowded all day, drawing pinch after pinch of gold-dust from the buckskin bags of the miners, who felt lonely if they could not share their gains with barkeepers as well as friends. And enough there were of these to drain their purses and sustain their rags. Besides the gambler, whose abundance of means, leisure, and self-possession gave him an influence second in this respect only to that of the storekeeper, the general referee, ad viser, and provider, there was the bully, who gen-
oo HUBERT HOWE BANCROFT. [1861-88
erallj boasted of his prowess as a scalp-hunter and duellist with fist or pistol, and whose following of reckless loafers acquired for him an unen viable power in the less reputable camps, which at times extended to terrorism. His opposite was the effeminate dandy, whose regard for dress seldom reconciled him to the rough shirt, sash-bound, tucked pan taloons, awry boots, and slouchy bespattered hat of the honest, unshaved miner, and whose gingerly handling of implements bespoke an equal consideration for his hands and back. Midway stood the somewhat turbulent Irishman, ever atoning for his weakness by an infectious humor; the rotund Dutchman ready to join in the laugh raised at his own expense ; the rollicking sailor, widely esteemed as a favorite of for tune. This reputation was allowed also to the Hispano-Californians, and tended here to create the prejudice which fostered their clannish- ness. Around flitted Indians, some half -naked, others in gaudy and ill- assorted covering, cast-off like themselves, and fit subjects for the priests and deacons, who, after preaching long and fervently against the root of evil, had come to tear it out by hand.
On week-days dullness settled upon the camp, and life was distributed among clusters of tents and huts, some of them sanctified by the pres ence of woman, as indicated by the garden-patch with flowers. For winter, log and clapboard houses replaced to a great extent the pre carious tent and brush hut, although frequently left with sodded floor, bark roof, and a split log for the door. The interior was scantily pro vided with a fixed frame of sticks supporting a stretched canvas bed, or bolster of leaves and straw. A similarly rooted table was at times sup plemented by an old chest, with a bench or blocks of wood for seats. A shelf with some dingy books and papers, a broken mirror, and news paper illustrations adorned the walls, and at one end gaped a rude hearth of stones and mud, with its indispensable frying-pan and pot, and in the corner a flour-bag, a keg or two, and some cans with pre served food. The disorder indicated a bachelor's quarters, the trusty rifle and the indispensable flask and tobacco at times playing hide and seek in the scattered rubbish.
The inmates were early astir, and the cabin stood deserted through out the day, save when some friend or wanderer might enter its unlocked precincts, welcome to its comforts, or when the owners could afford to return for a siesta during the midday heat. Toward sunset the miners came filing back along the ravines, gathering sticks for the kitchen fire, and merrily speeding their halloos along the cliffs, whatso ever may have been the fortune of the day. If several belonged to the mess, each took his turn as cook, and preceded the rest to prepare the simple food of salt pork and beans, perhaps a chop or steak, tea or cof fee, and the bread or flapjack, the former baked with saleratus, the lat-
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39
ter consisting of mere flour and water and a pinch of salt, mixed in the gold-pan and fried with some grease. Many a solitary miner devoted Sunday to prepare supplies of bread and coffee for the week. Exhausted nature joined with custom in sustaining a change of routine for this day, and here it became one for renovation, bodily and mental, foremost in mending and washing, brushing up the cabin, and preparing for the coming week's campaign, then for recreation at the village. Every evening also, the camp-fire, replenished by the cook, drew convivial souls to the feast on startling tales or yarns of treasure-troves, on merry songs with pan and kettle accompaniment, on the varying fortunes of the cards. A few found greater interest in a book, and others, lulled by the hum around, sank into reverie of home and boyhood scenes.
The young and unmated could not fail to find allurement in this free and bracing life, with its nature environment, devoid of conventional isms and fettering artificiality, with its appeal to the roving instinct and love of adventure, and its fascinating vistas of enrichmen!. Little mat tered to them occasional privations and exposure, which were generally self-imposed and soon forgotten midst the excitement of gold-hunting. Even sickness passed out of mind like a fleeting nightmare. And so they kept on in pursuit of the will-o'-the-wisp of their fancy, neglecting moderate prospects from which prudent men were constantly getting a competency. At times alighting upon a little " pile," which, too small for the rising expectation, was lavishly squandered ; at times descending to wage-working for relief. Thus they drifted along in semi-beggary, from snow-clad ranges to burning plain, brave and hardy, gay and careless, till lonely age crept up to confine them to some ruined hamlet, emblem atic of their shattered hopes — to find an unnoticed grave in the aurifer ous soil which they had loved too well. Shrewder men with better- directed energy took what fortune gave, or combining with others for vast enterprises, in tunnels and ditches, hydraulic and quartz mining, then turning, with declining prospects, to different pursuits to aid in unfolding latent resources, introducing new industries, and adding their quota to progress, throwing aside with a roaming life the loose habits of dress and manner. This was the American adaptability and self- reliance which, though preferring independence of action, could organize and fraternize with true spirit, could build up the greatest of mining commonwealths, give laws to distant states, impart fresh impulse to the world's commerce, and foster the development of resources and indus tries throughout the Pacific.
The broader effect of prospecting, in opening new fields, was attended by the peculiar excitement known as rushes, for which Californians evinced a remarkable tendency, possessed as they were by an excitable temperament and love of change, with a propensity for speculation.
40 MONCURE DANIEL GONWA Y. [ISQ1-SS
This spirit, indeed, had guided them on the journey to the distant shores of the Pacific, and perhaps one step farther might bring them to the glittering goal. The discoveries and troves made daily around them were so interesting as to render any tale of gold credible. An efferves cing society, whose day's work was but a wager against the hidden treas ure of nature, was readily excited by every breeze of rumor. Even men with valuable claims, yielding perhaps twenty or forty dollars a day, would be seized by the vision and follow it, in hopes of still greater returns. Others had exhausted their working-ground, or lay under enforced inactivity for lack or excess of water, according to the nature of the field, and were consequently prepared to join the current of less fortunate adventurers.
jttoncure Spaniel
BORN at " Middleton," Stafford Co., Va., 1832.
DEATH AS FOE, AND AS FRIEND. {Demonology and Devil-Lore. 1879. ]
rMHE Skeleton Death has the advantage over earlier forms of suggest- -*- ing the naturalness of death. The gradual discovery by the people that death is not caused by sin has largely dissipated its horrors in regions where the ignorance and impostures of priestcraft are of daily observation ; and although the reaction may not be expressed with good taste, there would seem to be in it a certain vigor of nature, reasserting itself in simplicity.
In the northern world we are all too sombre in the matter. It is the ages of superstition which have moulded our brains, and too generally given to our natural love of life the unnatural counterpart of a terror of death. What has been artificially bred into us can be cultivated out of us. There are indeed deaths corresponding to the two Angels — the death that comes by lingering disease and pain, and that which comes by old age. There are indeed Azraels in our cities who poison the food and drink of the people, and mingle death in the cup of water ; and of them there should be increasing horror until the gentler angel abides with us, and death by old age becomes normal. The departure from life being a natural condition of entering upon it, it is melancholy indeed that it should be ideally confused with the pains and sorrows often attending it. It is fabled that Menippus the Cynic, travelling through Hades, knew which were the kings there by their howling louder than
1861-88] MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY. 4^
the rest. They howled loudest because they had parted from most pleas ures on earth. But all the happy and young have more reason to lament untimely death than kings. The only tragedy of Death is the ruin of living Love. Mr. Watts in his great picture of Love and Death revealed the real horror. Not that skeleton, which has its right time and place, not the winged demon (called angel), who has no right time or place, is here, but a huge, hard, heartless form, as of man half-blocked out of marble; a terrible emblem of the remorseless ' force that embodies the incompleteness and ignorance of mankind — a force that steadily crushes hearts where intellects are devoting their energies to alien worlds. Poor Love has little enough science ; his puny arm stretched out to resist the colossal form is weak as the prayers of agonized parents and lovers directed against never-swerving laws ; he is almost exhausted ; his lus trous wings are broken and torn in the struggle ; the dove at his feet crouches rnateless ; the rose that climbed on his door is prostrate; over his shoulder the beam-like arm has set the stony hand against the door where the rose of joy must fall.
The aged when they die do but follow the treasures that have gone before. One by one the old friends have left them, the sweet ties parted, and the powers to enjoy and help become feeble. When of the garden that once bloomed around them memory alone is left, friendly is death to scatter also the leaves of that last rose where the loved ones are sleep ing. This is the real office of death. Nay, even when it comes to the young and happy it is not Death but Disease that is the real enemy ; in disease there is almost no compensation at all but learning its art of war; but Death is Nature's pity for helpless pain ; where love and knowledge can do no more, it comes as a release from sufferings which were sheer torture if prolonged. The presence of death is recognized oftenest by the cessation of pain. Superstition has done few heavier wrongs to humanity than by the mysterious terrors with which it has invested that change which, to the simpler ages, was pictured as the gentle river Lethe, flowing from the abode of sleep, from which the shades drank oblivion alike of their woes and of the joys from which they were torn.
AFRICAN SERPENT-DRAMA IN AMERICA. [From the Same.]
ON the eve of January 1, 1863 —that historic New Year's Day on which President Lincoln proclaimed freedom to American slaves, -I was present at a Watch-night held by negroes in the city of >n,
49 MONCURE DANIEL CONWAT. [1861-88
Mass. In opening the meeting the preacher said,— though in words whose eloquent shortcomings I cannot reproduce : — " Brethren and sisters, the President of the United States has promised that if the Confederates do not lay down their arms, he will free all their slaves to-morrow. They have not laid down their arms. To-morrow will be the day of liberty to the oppressed. But we all know that evil powers are around the President. While we sit here they are trying to make him break his word. But we have come together to watch, and see that he does not break his word. Brethren, the bad influences around the President to-night are stronger than any Copperheads. The Old Serpent is abroad to-night, with all his emissaries, in great power. His wrath is great, because he knows his hour is near. He will be in this church this even ing. As midnight comes on we shall hear his rage. But, brethren and sisters, don't be alarmed. Our prayers will prevail. His head will be bruised. His back will be broken. He will go raging to hell, and God Almighty's New Year will make the United States a true land of free dom."
The sensation caused among the hundreds of negroes present by these words was profound ; they were frequently interrupted by cries of "Glory!" and there were tears of joy. But the scene and excitement which followed were indescribable. A few moments before midnight the congregation were requested to kneel, which they did, and prayer succeeded prayer with increasing fervor. Presently a loud, prolonged hiss was heard. There were cries — "He's here! he's here!" Then came a volley of hisses ; they seemed to proceed from every part of the room, hisses so entirely like those of huge serpents that the strongest nerves were shaken ; above them rose the preacher's prayer that had become a wild incantation, and ecstatic ejaculations became so universal that it was a marvel what voices were left to make the hisses. Finally, from a neighboring steeple the twelve strokes of midnight sounded on the frosty air, and immediately the hisses diminished, and presently died away altogether, and the New Year that brought freedom to four millions of slaves was ushered in by the jubilant chorus of all present singing a hymn of victory.
Far had come those hisses and that song of victory, terminating the dragon-drama of America. In them was the burden of Ezekiel : " Son of man, set thy face against Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and prophesy against him and against all Egypt, saying, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah : Behold I am against thee, Pharaoh, king of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of the rivers. ... I will put a hook in thy jaws." In them was the burden of Isaiah : " In that day Jehovah with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent: he shall slay the dragon that is in
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4u
the sea.'; In it was the cry of Zophar: "His meat in his bowels is turned, it is the gall of asps within him. He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again. God shall cast them out of his belly. And these Hebrew utterances, again, were but the distant echoes of far earlier voices of those African slaves still seen pictured with their chains on the ruined walls of Egypt,— voices that gathered courage at last to announce the never-ending struggle of man with Oppression, as that combat between god and serpent, which never had a nobler event than when the dying hiss of Slavery was heard in America and the victorious Sun rose upon a New World of free and equal
men.
^ The Serpent thus exalted in America to a type of oppression is very different from any snake that may this day be found worshipped as a deity by the African in his native land. The swarthy snake-worshipper in J^is migration took his god along with him in his chest or basket— at once ark and altar— and in that hiding-place it underwent transforma tions. He emerged as the protean emblem of both good and evil. In a mythologic sense the serpent certainly held its tail in its mouth. No civilization has reached the end of its typical supremacy.
PORTIA.
[The Wandering Jew. 1881.]
A MONG all these representative figures of the Venetian court-room, -£j- transformations from the flying doves and pursuing hawks, bound victims and exacting deities of ancient mythology, there is one who pos sesses a significance yet to be considered. That is Portia. Who is this gentle woman in judicial costume? She is that human heart which in every age, amid hard dogmatic systems and priestly intolerance, has steadily appealed against the whole vindictive system — whether Jewish or Christian — and, even while outwardly conforming, managed to rescue human love and virtue from it. With his wonted yet ever-marvellous felicity, Shakspeare has made the genius of this human sentiment slip ping through the technicalities of priest-made law a woman. In the mythology of dooms and spells it is often that by the seed of the woman they are broken : the Prince must remain a Bear till Beauty shall offer to be his bride; the Flying Dutchman shall find repose if a maiden shall voluntarily share his sorrow. It is, indeed the woman-soul which has silently veiled the rude hereditary gods and laws of barbarism — the piti less ones — with a host of gentle saints and intercessors, until the heart-
44 MONCURE DANIEL CON WAT. [1861-88
less systems have been left to theologians. Inside the frowning but tresses of dogmatic theology the heart of woman has built up for the home a religion of sympathy and charity.
Portia does not argue against the technique of the law. She agrees to call the old system justice — so much the worse for justice. In the outcome she shows that this so-called justice is no justice at all. And when she has shown that the letter of "justice " kills, and warned Shy- lock that he can be saved from the fatal principle he has raised only by the spirit that gives life, she is out of the case, save for a last effort to save him from the blind law he has invoked. The Jew now sues before a Christian Shylock. And Portia— like Mary, and all sweet interceding spirits that ever softened stern gods in human hope — turns from the judicial Jahves of the bench to the one forgiving spirit there. "What mercy can you render him, Antonio?" The Christian Gratiano inter poses. "A halter gratis: nothing else, for God's sake." A natural appeal for the victim-loving God; but the forgiving Jesus is heard, however faintly, above the Christian, and Antonio forgives his part of Shylock's penalty.
" Vengeance is mine," says the deity derived by fear from the remorse less course of sun and star, ebb and flow, frost and fire. Forgiveness is the attribute of man. We may reverse Portia's statement, and say that, instead of Mercy dropping as the gentle rain from heaven, it is projected into heaven from compassionate human hearts beneath. And heavenly power doth then show likest man's when mercy seasons the vengeance of nature. From the wild forces above not only droppeth gentle rain, but thunder and lightning, famine and pestilence ; it is man with his lightning-rod, his sympathy, his healing art, who turns them from their path and interposes a shield from their fury. When, as the two walked together in the night, Leigh Hunt looked up to the heaven of stars, and said, " God, the Beautiful," Carlyle looked, and said, " God, the Terri ble." It was the ancient worshipper of the Laws of Nature beside Abou ben Adhem, who, loving not the Lord, yet loved his fellow-men, and sees a human sweetness in the stars. All religions, beginning with trem bling sacrifices to elemental powers personified — powers that never for give—end with the worship of an ideal man, the human lover and Saviour. That evolution is invariable. Criticism may find this or that particular deified man limited and imperfect, and may discard him. It may take refuge in pure theism, as it is called. But it amounts to the same thing. What it worships is still a man — an invisible, vast man, but still a man. To worship eternal love, supreme wisdom, ideal moral perfection, is still to worship man, for we know such attributes only in man. Therefore the Shylock-principle is non-human nature, hard natu ral law moving remorselessly on its path from cause to effect; the
1861-88] JOHN ALBEE. 45
Portia-principle, the quality of Mercy, means the purely human religion, which, albeit for a time using the terms of ancient nature- worship and alloyed with its spirit, must be steadily detached from these, and on the ruins of every sacrificial altar and dogma build the temple whose only services shall be man's service to man.
Sfctyn aibce.
BOKN in Bellingham, Mass., 1833.
A SOLDIER'S GRAVE. [Poems. 1883.]
BREAK not his sweet repose — Thou whom chance brings to this sequestered ground, The sacred yard his ashes close, But go thy way in silence ; here no sound Is ever heard but from the murmuring pines,
Answering the sea's near murmur ;
Nor ever here comes rumor Of anxious world or war's foregathering signs.
The bleaching flag, the faded wreath,
Mark the dead soldier's dust beneath,
And show the death he chose ; Forgotten save by her who weeps alone, And wrote his fameless name on this low stone:
Break not his sweet repose.
DANDELIONS.
"OW dandelions in the short, new grass,
Through all their rapid stages daily pass; No bee yet visits them ; each has its place, Still near enough to see the other's face. Unkenned the bud, so like the grass and ground In our old country yards where thickest found ; Some morn it opes a little golden sun, And sets in its own west when day is done. In few days more 'tis old and silvery gray, And though so close to earth it made its stay, Lo! now it findeth wings and lightly flies, A spirit form, till on the sight it dies.
Aa JOHN ALBEE. [1861-88
4o
BOS'N HILL.
1HE wind blows wild on Bos'n Hill, Far off is heard the ocean's rote ; Low overhead the gulls scream shrill, And homeward scuds each little boat.
T
Then the dead Bos'n wakes in glee To hear the storm-king's song ;
And from the top of mast-pine tree He blows his whistle loud and long.
The village sailors hear the call,
Lips pale and eyes grow dim ; Well know they, though he pipes them all,
He means but one shall answer him.
He pipes the dead up from their graves.
Whose bones the tansy hides ; He pipes the dead beneath the waves,
They hear and cleave the rising tides.
But sailors know when next they sail
Beyond the Hilltop's view, There's one amongst them shall not fail
To join the Bos'n's Crew.
GOETHE. [From " Goethe's Self-Culture," a Lecture at the Concord School of Philosophy. 1885.]
IN the moral world, as in the natural, we shall not go far wrong if we seek for truth and reality in the direct opposite of what appears. The apparent is something adjusted to the measure of the senses. Although Goethe laid strong hold of this apparent, there was for once a man who turned it, not half or quarter, but clear round, and saw the other, the real spirit, or ideal face.
He turned the plant clear round, and discovered its secret, the law of its life. And as ever appearances are confusing, while the reality is sim ple and satisfying, so now botany, which, when one looks into a text book or upon a garden of flowers, is the most bewildering of studies, becomes by Goethe's discovery as clear and beautiful as a remembered single line of perfect poetry. In fact it is poetic; and it distinguishes nearly all of his scientific investigation that it is resolved into poetry. He is the first modern man who has well succeeded in working this
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47
transformation ; thus restoring for us the manner of the most ancient . natural philosophers, who rendered everything in verse. It seems to have been his aim in natural science to satisfy the desire for a produc tive thought,— one that should be a further means of self-cultivation. His investigations in osteology resulted in nearly the same law as in botany,— a simple principle on which the structure of animals and plants is built up alike. What is its value? Chiefly to the imagination in man. There is no final good in scientific discoveries unless they furnish us something beyond the useful ; this also has its value, but not the entire. As Goethe himself said, " Whatever is useful is only a part of what is significant." When a simple, pregnant generalization, like Goethe's in botany, is given us, we are not hindered by default of techni cal knowledge from the highest possible perception of the central idea in the plant world. We no more stand before the simplest flower ashamed of our ignorance because we cannot call it by name ; or when we can, satisfied with our knowledge. But there is now freedom for the imagination, and an invitation to reflection. Then truly pansies will be for thoughts ; andf the " flower in the crannied wall " will answer, not what God and man is, but as much as it knows about itself. And though some flowers recommend themselves by their beauty or raritv, and others by their commonness, and some even because they are fash ionable, all of them, when we are acquainted with the law of their inward being, help us to draw nearer to the spiritual symbols and resem blances which connect each province of nature with every other, and all with man.
Goethe teaches us after a method, and to a point where we can teach ourselves. In every direction to which he turned his mind, this is one of his chief merits, that he takes you where you can go alone if you will. This makes him for adults, for poets and writers especially, the most helpful master that has ever lived. How he becomes so is easy to see ; it is because he is trying to teach himself; in short, we come again upon his self-culture as the fruitful source of his achievements and influ ence. His studies and investigations were private, unprofessional, with no worldly or ulterior aim. What he puts into the mouth of Makaria in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels" expresses his habit very nearly: "We do not want to establish anything, or to produce any outward effect, but only to enlighten ourselves." When, therefore, Goethe, a man of ample acquirements and genius, sits down to study something that he wishes to know, and gives us not only the results, but the steps and the method^ of his effort, he becomes a great teacher.
Yet we do not wish to follow any master too far ; he is the best who leads us from himself to self-reliance. A man needs many, to whose influence he can surrender himself, and recover himself again and again.
48 WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. [1861-88
In Goethe's self-cultivation it is striking how often he meets with per sons and objects, and gives himself up to them until he has learned all they have to impart which can help him, or discovers his own false tend ency or position. Then he abandons them without regret or apology. Without regret, except the poetic, inspiring regrets of his love affairs, which cannot be omitted from the account of the sources and circum stances of his inward culture. In these there were usually two produc tive phases or periods; one while elevated by passion, the other when tormented by remorse. It is said by H. Grimm that Margaret grew out of the latter. But usually he had no time or taste for repenting himself of anything that had happened. In his self-complacent way he foresaw compensation, and was not afflicted to know all sides of himself, the weak, the strong, the excellent, and the evil. He confessed that his striving to become an artist was a mistake, but added that mistakes also give us insight. This calm, quite superhuman characteristic has preju diced many good people against Goethe ; they think that he sacrificed everybody to his own selfish purposes. The French call love the egoism of two ; but some say Goethe's love was still no more than that of one, — self-love, in short.
€>'Connor,
BORN in Boston, Mass., 1833. DIED in Washington, D. C., 1889.
THE PRETTY PASS THINGS CAME TO. [Harrington : a Story of True Love. I860.]
TN the mean time things had come to a pretty pass in the private - counting-room of Mr. Atkins's office on Long Wharf. " Yes, sir, things have come to a pretty pass when such an infernal rascal undertakes to let a black beggar loose from aboard my brig," foamed Captain Bangham, red with passion, and pounding the desk with his fist.
The merchant sat in an arm-chair near the desk, looking at the cap tain, with iron-clenched jaws, his eyes sparkling with rage in his set blanched face.
" If I ever heard of such a thing in all my life, Bangham ! " he ex claimed, slapping both arms of his chair with his palms, and glaring all around the little mahogany-furnished office. " But where were you when this was done? "
"I, sir? Asleep in the cabin, Mr. Atkins. Never knew a thing about
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it, sir, till this morning. Just for special safety I didn't have the brig hauled up to the dock yesterday, but let her lay in the stream. ' Jones,' says I, ' have you seen the nigger this morning? ' 'No I haven't,' say's he, cool as you please. ' I guess I'll take a look at him,' says I, and so I took a biscuit and a can of water, and toted down to the hole where I had the nasty devil tied up, and begod, he was gone ! I tumbled up on deck: 'Jones,' I shouted, 'where's the nigger?' 'I don't know where he is now,' says he, lazy as a ship in the doldrums. 'All I know is,' says he, ' that I rowed him ashore about midnight, and told him to put for it.' By " — gasped Captain Bangham, with a frightful oath, " I was so mad that I couldn't say a word. I just ran into the cabin, and when I came out, Jones wasn't to be seen. — Hallo, there he is now ! " cried the captain, starting to his feet and pointing out of the window to a tall figure lounging along the wharf, and looking at the shipping.
The merchant jumped from his chair, threw up the window, and shouted, " Here, you, Jones ! Come in here."
The figure looked up nonchalantly, and lounged across the street toward the office.
"He's coming," said the merchant, purple with excitement, and sink ing back into his chair.
They waited in silence, and presently the tall figure of the mate was seen in the outer office, through the glass door, lounging toward them. He opened the door in a minute, and came in carelessly, chewing slowly, and nodding once to Mr. Atkins. A tall man, dressed sailor-fashion, in a blue shirt and pea-jacket, with a straw hat set negligently on his head, and a grave, inscrutable, sunburnt face, with straight manly features and dull-blue eyes.
"Mr. Jones," said the merchant, his face a deeper purple, but his voice constrained to the calm of settled rage, " this is a fine liberty you have taken. I want to know what you mean by it."
"What do you refer to, Mr. Atkins?" returned the mate, stolidly.
"What do I refer to, sir? You know what I refer to. I refer to your taking that man from my brig," roared the merchant.
"Mr. Atkins," replied the mate, phlegmatically, "Bangham, there, was going to take that poor devil back to Orleans. You don't mean to tell me that you meant he should do it ? "
" Yes, sir, I did mean he should do it ! " the merchant vociferated.
" Then you're a damned scoundrel," said the mate, with the utmost composure.
Captain Bangham gave a long whistle, and sat mute with stupefac tion. Mr. Atkins turned perfectly livid, and stared at the mate with his mouth pursed into an oval hole, perfectly aghast at this insolence, and almost wondering whether he had heard aright. VOL. ix. — 4
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WILLIAM DOUGLASS O'CONNOR. [1861-88
" You infernal rascal," he howled, springing to his feet the next instant, purple with rage, " do you dare to apply such an epithet to mef You — to me f "
"To you? " thundered tbe seaman, in a voice that made Mr. Atkins drop into his chair as if he were shot. " To you ? And who are you ? You damned lubberly, purse-proud aristocrat, do you want me to take you by the heels and throw you out of that window ? Call me that name again, and Til do it as soon as I'd eat. You, indeed ! You're the Lord High Brown, aint you ? You're the Lord Knows Who, you blasted old money-grubber, aint you ? You, indeed ! "
In all his life, Mr. Atkins had never been so spoken to. He sat in a sort of horror, gazing with open mouth and glassy eyes at the sturdy face of the seaman, on which a brown flush had burned out, and the firm, lit eyes of which held him spell-bound. Bangham, too — horror- stricken, wonder-stricken, thunder-stricken — sat staring at Jones for a minute, then burst into a short, rattling laugh, and jumping to his feet, cried, " Oh, he's mad, he's mad, he's mad, he's got a calenture, he's got a calenture, he's mad as a March hare," capering and hopping and pranc ing, meanwhile, in his narrow confine, as if he would jump out of his skin.
"You, too, Bangham," said the mate, making a step toward him, -with a menacing gesture, at which the captain stopped capering, and shrank, while Mr. Atkins slightly started in his chair, "you just clap a stopper on that ugly mug of yours, and stop your monkey capers, or you'll have me afoul of you. I haven't forgot your didoes with the men aboard the Soliman. Just you say another word now, and I'll put in a complaint that'll lay you by the heels in the State Prison, where you ought to have been long ago, you ugly pirate, you ! "
The captain evidently winced under this threat, which Mr. Jones delivered with ominous gravity, slowly shaking, meanwhile, his clenched fist at him.
"And now look here, you brace of bloody buccaneers," continued the irreverent seaman, " short words are best words with such as you. I untied that poor old moke of a nigger last night, and rowed him ashore. What are ye going to do about it? "
Evidently a question hard to answer. Merchant and captain, stupe fied and staring, gave him no reply.
" Hark you, now, Atkins," he went on. " We found that man half dead in the hold when we were three days out— a sight to make one's flesh crawl. The bloody old pirate he'd run away from had put a spiked collar on his neck, just as if he was a brute, with no soul to be saved. I'm an old sea-dog — I am ; and I've seen men ill-treated in my time, but I'm damned if I ever seen a man ill-treated like that God-for-
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51
saken nigger. He'd run away, and no blame to him for running away. He'd been livin' in swamps with snakes and alligators, and if he hadn't no right to his freedom, he'd earned one fifty times over, and it's my opinion that a man who goes through what he did has more right to his freedom than two beggars like you, who have never done the first thing to deserve it Mind that now, both of ye ! "
The mate paused a moment, hitching up his trousers, and rolling his tobacco from one side of his twitching mouth to the other, and then, with his face flushed, and his blue eyes gleaming savagely, went on :
" What's the first thing that brute there did to him ? Kicked him, and he lyin' half dead. Then in a day or two, when the poor devil got his tongue, he told how he'd got away, and the sort of pirate he'd got away from. God! when we all a'most blubbered like babes, what did that curse there do? Knocked the man down, and beat his head on the deck, till we felt like mutiny and murder, every man of us ! And then when we'd got the poor devil below, sorter comfortable, down comes Bangham, and hauls him off to stick him into a nasty hole under hatches, and there he kep' him the whole passage, half-starved, among the rats and cockroaches. Scarce a day of his life aboard that he didn't go down and kick and maul him. He couldn't keep his hands off him— no, he couldn't. When I took the man ashore in the dead o' night, he was nothin' but a bundle o' bones and nasty rags, and he made me so sick I couldn't touch him. That's the state he was in. Now, then, look here."
The mate paused again for a moment, turning his quid, with his face working, and laying the fingers of his right hand in the palm of his left, began again in a voice gruff and grum :
" That infernal buccaneer, Bangham," he said, " was bent on takin' the poor devil back to Orleans, after all he'd gone through to get away. Well, he's a brute, and we don't expect nothin' of brutes like him. But you're a Boston merchant, Atkins, and callin' yourself a Christian man, you put in your oar in this dirty business, and was goin' to help Bang- ham. You thought I was goin' to stand by and see you do it. No ! ' he thundered, with a tremendous slap of his right hand on the palm of his left, which made both the merchant and the captain start, "no! I wasn't goin' to stand by and see you do it ! I'm an old sea-dog and my heart is tough and hard, but I'm damned if it's hard enough to stand by when such a sin as that's afoot, and never lend a hand to stop it. I took that man out of your clutches, you brace of pirates, and I set him adrift ! You think I'm afraid to" own it ? No, I'm not, begod ! I did it. Ephraim Jones is my name, and I come from Barnstable. There's where I come from. I'm a Yankee sailor, and, so help me God, I could see the bunting of my country flying at the peak again, if I let you
never
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WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. [1861-88
two bloody Algerine thieves carry off that man to his murder. That's all I've got to say. Take the law of me now, if you like. I won't skulk. You'll find me when you look for me. And if James Flatfoot don't have his harpoon into both of you one of these days, then there's no God, that's all ! "
Turning on his heel with this valediction, which consigned the mer chant and the captain's future beyond the grave to the Devil, who, under the name of James Flatfoot, occupies a prominent place in marine the ology, Mr. Jones carelessly lounged out of the private room, leaving the glass door open, and with a nonchalant glance at the three or four startled clerks and book-keepers who sat and stood at their desks won dering what had been going on within, for they had only caught con fused scraps of the stormy colloquy, he went down stairs, with a load off his mind which had been gathering there during the whole voyage of the Solimari.
For a moment after his departure, Mr. Atkins sat mute and still, feel ing like one in a horrid dream. Eoused presently by a deep-drawn breath from Captain Bangham, he wheeled his chair around to the desk, and taking out his white hankerchief, wiped away the cold sweat which had started out on his face and forehead.
THE CARPENTER. [From " The Carpenter: A Christmas Story."— Putnam's Magazine. 1868.]
FOR a little while there was complete silence in the hollied room, only broken by the murmur of distant voices and laughter from the other apartments.
"Grandpa," at length said little Lilian, in her plaintive voice, " I want to hear my 'Olian harp very, very much indeed."
The old man smiled.
"Do you, darling ? And so you shall, if the wind wills," he answered. " Let's see. Where shall we put it, so that you won't get the draught ? Here, I reckon."
He had risen as he spoke, and, taking from a shelf near by the ^Eolian harp, he opened the window on the left-hand side of the fire-place a little way, and set the instrument in the aperture ; then resumed his seat and attitude beside the child.
For a minute all was still. But presently stole up on the silence, holy and solitary as the breaking dawn, the long, low strain of remote and thrilling sweetness, wild, delicate, and lonely, and hung hovering for a
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moment in the charmed air, then failed away in a dim, mysterious cadence which ended, jet seemed to linger, like the spirit of bright things departed, of tender summers gone.
Little Lilian listened with a face of breathless ecstasy. The wind- harp was again still, remaining soundless in the minutes that followed and the child finally resigned herself with a little sigh.
" Grandpa," she said presently, " what was Jesus Christ? "
The old man glanced at her smilingly, with his never-failing surprise at the oddity of her abrupt questions.
"A mechanic, my dear," he presently answered. "What our fine Southern gentlemen call a common mud-sill," he added, sardonically " A carpenter— God bless him I "
Lilian quietly sat, cogitating his reply, while the old man wagged his sturdy head, grimly chuckling over the significance of his response with an enjoyment beyond words.
"Grandpa/' the silver elfin-voice began again, "will Jesus Christ come here this evening ? "
o
Elkanah stared at her in blank wonderment, then burst into a bellow of laughter.
"Well, you are a young one!" he said, wagging his old head with hearty amusement. " If I ever heard the like of that ! Now, what put that into your noddle, Lily kin? "
"I put it in my own self," she answered with intense positiveness. " But will he, grandpa ? "
"Well, I don't know. He might," replied Elkanah, jocosely.
"Because he's alive, grandpa," earnestly pursued the child. "Old uncle Peter always said he was aliye, and going 'round doing good. Only that he'd grown old and gray walking in the world so many hun dred years — just as old loafer Tomeny painted his picture in there on the fire-place. And that's all true, grandpa ; ain't it ? "
"Of course," replied the waggish Elkanah, tickled to his very midriff.
"Well, then, I guess he might come," continued the little prattler, with a satisfied air. " And I wish he would, for I want to see him very, very much."
Elkanah laid back his head, and roared and shook with merriment Finally, subsiding, mellowed to the core with mirth, he relapsed into his former position, his hands between his knees, his head bent forward, gazing at the elk-horned flames, and tittering secretly. The little girl sat sedately, taking it all with perfect seriousness.
"Now, supposing he was to come here this evening," she resumed, " and we was sitting here, and talking, and he should knock at the door — and then, you know, we wouldn't hear him, grandpa."
The flames suddenly died down, involved in light-blue smoke, and the
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WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. [1861-88
hearth gave forth a strange and lovely amber light upon the darkening room. At the same moment there was a faint, sweet chord of mysteri ous, trembling music from the harp.
"Well," said Elkanah, "what then?"
" Then," continued the child, " he would say, ' Behold, I stand at the door and knock.' "
The fire became so strangely low, and cast so weird a light, that the old man felt a sort of wonder creeping over him, and, without replying, or moving from his crouching attitude, turned his face slowly around, with the singular glow and cross-bars of shade upon his features, and scanned the shadowed room, embowered in holy foliage, and hallowed by that dusky, amber radiance. The distant voices had ceased, and the house was still. The unusual light, the breathless hush that lay upon all, surprised him, and he slowly turned his head back again, with a secret thrill.
At that moment there was a gentle knock at the door.
Elkanah did not move, but only revolved his great eyes and stared in blank astonishment at the little girl. She sat very placidly, looking at the fire. There was a moment's pause.
" Come in," he boomed, in a stentorian tone.
At that instant a red cinder flew from the hearth, with a loud crack, upon Lilian's dress, and in the momentary alarmed diversion of his attention, as he hastened to fillip it back into the fire, the old man heard the opening and shutting of the door. It was with a feeling of vacant amaze, almost rising into fright, that, turning his head, as he did immedi ately, he saw a large, gray stranger standing in the room.
The old man rose slowly from his seat to his full height, with won dering eyes astare upon the new-comer. The latter stood composedly gazing at him. He was tall and stalwart, with uncovered head ; a brow not large, but full, and seamed with kindly wrinkles; a complexion of rosy clearness ; heavy-lidded, firm blue eyes, which had a steadfast and draining regard ; a short, thick, gray beard almost white, and thinly- flowing dark-gray hair. His countenance expressed a rude sweetness. He was dressed in a long, dark overcoat, much worn, and of such uncer tain fashion that it almost seemed a gaberdine. As he stood there in the gracious darkling light, he looked an image of long and loving experience with men, of immovable composure and charity, of serene wisdom, of immortal rosy youth in reverend age. A faint perfume exhaled from his garments. In the lapel of his coat he wore a sprig of holly. His left hand, in which he also held his shapeless hat, carried a carpenter's plane.
Elkanah stood, almost quaking inwardly in the presence of this
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august stranger, in whose aspect were singularly blended the prophet and the child. The child in him inspired love ; the prophet, awe. He drew and he repelled.
" This must be yours," said the stranger, in clear, slow accents, sweet and vibrating, extending, as he spoke, the implement in his hand. " I found it at your gate-post on the highway."
"Why, yes," faltered Elkanah, with a slight start, taking the plane. " Tom's work, I know. He was shaving away there where the gate shut hard, and, just like the little love-daft noddy, he leaves the tool behind him."
"I am a wayfarer," said the stranger, after a pause, "and would like permission to remain with you a little while."
" Why, certainly. Grod bless me ! what am I thinking of ? " abruptly broke forth Elkanah, recovering immediately at the chance of offering hospitality, and beaming into smiles. " You are welcome, sir, right welcome. My name is Elkanah Dyzer. Sit ye down, sir — sit ye down. Hah ! spang ! Up goes the merry fire ! " he cried, laying the plane upon the mantel, and bustling forward his own oak chair for the stranger, as the blaze laughed upward with a flood of light. "You are right wel come. Your hand, sir," and, bowing with stately courtesy, he extended his own.
The stranger slowly took the proffered hand, with a pressure so grad ual, so cordial, and so strong, that Elkanah felt it down deep into his very heart. As the sublime Scripture phrase has it, his bowels yearned to this new friend, and, despite the reverent distance which the lofty and sweet reserve of the stranger maintained, he felt a sudden intimacy as of many years, born from his quality of manly love. At the same time, his old brain was still in a daze of wondering confusion.
" Sit ye down, sir — sit ye down," he chirruped, stepping backward with a wave of both hands ; while the stranger, slow in all his motions, paused standing beside the chair. "And if I might not be thought over-bold, sir," he went on, confusedly engaged with the odd coincidence of the stranger's advent and personal aspect with the child's words, " what might I call your na — occupation — the name of your occupation — no — yes — O dear me, dear me ! "
And Elkanah tweaked his great eagle nose in comical bewilderment, somewhat dubious what he had asked for, but impressed that it was the name, after all, as he intended.
"I am a carpenter," said the stranger, simply, in a rather low but dis tinct voice. "My name —
"Ah, yes ; excuse me," said Elkanah, unaware that he was interrupt ing, in the haste of his flurried belief that he had got the information he meant to ask for. " Carpenter. A name I like well — as I do you, sir,
56 WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. [1861-88
if you'll excuse an old man's frankness. Sit ye down, Mr. Carpenter. You are right welcome."
The stranger bent his grand and gentle head with a slow smile, like one amused at the new name accidently conferred upon him, yet well content to let it be so ; and, tossing his shapeless hat upon a footstool in the angle behind the fire-place, took the oaken chair.
Little Lilian, who had been intently looking at him with an air of breathless satisfaction, and had not uttered one word, now rose, deposited dolly carefully upon his hat, limped back between his knees, and stood a-tiptoe with her small arms upreached to him. He took her up instantly on his breast, and kissed her with a long kiss upon the mouth.
"I know who you are," she whispered eagerly. "And I won't tell nobody."
The stranger made no answer. She snuggled close upon his bosom, and into his beard, for a minute or so, in perfect quietude ; then sud denly clambered down, and resumed her seat in the little chair, with an air of confidential and solemn gratification.
" I declare," said Elkanah, softly laughing, and rubbing his hands as he sat down before the fire near the stranger, "it's the queerest thing I ever knew. Do you know, Mr. Carpenter, you quite gave me a turn when you came in ? I've got the nerves of an ox, anyway, but I tell you I felt queerish for about the first time in my life. Well, now, it was the oddest thing ! And by Gee and Dee, odd it is still !
"I'll tell you how it was," he continued, after a pause, before the slow-speaking carpenter could reply. " Little magpie there was twitter ing a lot of stuff we have over here a good deal in the family. Of course, you never heard of my old uncle, Peter Dyzer :
" ' Old miser Dyzer, skin a fly, sir, Sell the skin, and turn the money in.'
as the boys used to rhyme it about him. I inherited this fine old place from him. Well, of all the queer, odd, eccentric, funny old chaps that ever were — my, my ! But he wasn't loony on a bargain, sir — no, indeed; and he'd plenty of hard horse-sense, and took good care of his property, you can rely: but he had notions, sir, on some subjects, that would make you think him mad as any March hare you ever knew."
The old man paused, shaking with restrained mirth.
" You. ought to have seen him," he resumed. "Tall, big-boned, dry as a chip in all his speech and ways. And plumed himself on a kind of resemblance he had to President Washington. On Sundays, sir— he never went to church — read Tom Paine, Yolney, Diderot, Yoltaire, and all the French fellows of those days, and hated clergymen (priests as he called 'em) worse than p'ison — swore by Tom Jefferson, too, in politics,
1861-88] WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. 57
and in everything else, except his knuckling under to slavery — and there I'm with him, sir, there I'm with him :— well, sir, as I was saying, on Sundays he'd rig himself out like President Washington, claret-col ored, square-tailed coat, long satin vest, ruffles, knee-breeches, black-silk stockings, buckled shoes, cocked hat, and so forth — and take a walk all over the place, flourishing a gold-headed cane, peert as a lizard, sir — peert as any lizard you ever saw. With a train of his darkeys behind him (he'd buy 'em, take out their manumission papers, and keep 'em on wages ; ' Lesson for bloody aristocrats,' he'd say) — with a train of 'em behind him, in even line, the women first — ' mothers before men,' he'd say ; then the male adults ; then the little girls ; then the boys, ranged in their order down to the smallest walking piccaninny — 'Brothers in Adam, sisters in Eve,' he'd say. He at the head, flourishing his gold- headed stick, every now and then turning, and halting them to see if they were in exact line. ' Keep the straight line ! ' he'd bawl ; ' every real trouble in life comes from not keeping the straight line ! ' And if he saw one of 'em out of line, he'd march down, pull ears if it was a girl ; rap pates if it was a boy ; punch her in the ribs with the gold head of his cane if it was a woman ; and if it was a man, by George ! he'd pull him out, and thrash him like a sack, sir ! "
And Elkanah drooped his head, shaking with silent inward laughter.
" That's a sample-lot of old Peter Dyzer," he resumed. Lord, sir! I could sit here all night and tell ye stories about him ! Well, as I was going on to say, one of old Peter's fancies was pictures. He'd got hold of an old loafer, Tomeny by name, a house-painter, as near as I could ever gather, with the strongest taste for apple-jack you ever knew in your life, and he kept him here to paint pictures for him. The horrid- est old daubs— my sakes ! I'd like to show you a lot of 'em up garret, though they're pretty well faded out now. But uncle Peter thought Tomeny the prince of painters, an unappreciated genius, and all that— Tomeny the Great, he always called him ;— and when he died, he buried him with a handsome gravestone at his poor old apple-brandy soaked head, and on it just the words, ' Simon Tomeny, Painter,' as if that was enough for all posterity. Now, one of old Peter's maddest notions was that Jesus Christ was still alive, and grown old and gray with walking the earth for eighteen hundred years, as well he might, indeed. He'd got hold of the old story of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, d'ye see. ' That's him— that's Christ,' says old Peter. ' But, Mr. Dyzer,' one would say, 'that's the man the story says Christ put a curse on, bidding him walk the world till h6 came again.' < All a flam,' says rough old Peter ; 'the Good Man '—he commonly spoke of Christ as the Good Man- Good Man never put a curse on any one. It's Christ himself, I tell you. Or, perhaps one might say, ' Why, Mr. Dyzer, what should
Kg WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. [1861-88
going 'round the world for?' * Going 'round doing good,' snaps uncle Peter. Ah, my Lord, my Lord ! the mad old fellow ! Well, sir, with his own hands — for old Peter was a shifty man — he put a facing of prime old oak on the chimney-place in yonder ; and d'ye know, he got old loafer Tomeny to paint on the right-hand side of it — an ugly thing to tell, sir, but it's true — a portrait of himself as Judas, grasping the bag — did you ever hear the like of that now ? — and on the other side a fig ure of Christ, old and gray, as he fancied him. Tomeny's master-piece, he called it. Well, little humming-bird there was bringing up all this in my mind, as I said, and you can perhaps fancy the turn it gave me when you came in, with your gray hair and beard, and long coat, and the plane, and all that. And the queerest thing of all is — I hope you'll excuse me for saying so, for the picture is a wretched piece of imagery, as much as you can see of it for the faded colors — the queerest thing is, that you do look something like the figure of Christ as old Tomeny has painted it."
And Elkanah again laughed softly, rubbing his hands, with his eyes on the silent-smiling carpenter, who had listened, as the old man vaguely thought, with the air of one to whom the story was not entirely new.
" It's a sort of pretty notion, too, that of old Peter's." presently resumed Elkanah. " And little chattering blue-jay there gave it quite a fairy turn in my mind by asking, just before you came, sir, if Jesus Christ, old and gray, was coming here to-night. Dear me ! it made me laugh till I felt juicy all through ; but it grew in me afterwards what a pretty- thing it was, and for so young a child to say. Such a pretty thing ! And how would you think of Christ, sir, as coming here to-night, if such a thing could be?"
"I think of him always," said the carpenter, slowly, in solemn sweet vibrations, " as the all-loving man. Yes, he might come, perhaps as you fancy him in this house, gray and old — come as cheer-bringer, dispeller of evil, uniter of the estranged, assuager of sorrows, reconciler, consoler. Always the wise friend, the lover true. Something so."
The old man silently cogitated the reply, with eyes poring on the fire.
" Pardon the liberty," he said suddenly, " but what might your pro fession be?"
" I walk the hospitals," returned the stranger, quietly.
" Nursing the Union soldiers ? "
" Union and rebel," was the answer.
" I hope," said the old man, after a moment's pause, kindling and flushing a little with a faint misgiving, " I hope that you stand by the country, sir. Sir, this is a loyal house. One son only, my boy that once was, Rupert — but we never mention his name here, sir, never, for
1861-88] WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. 59
he's in the ranks of the rebels — he only brings dishonor on the breed of old Elkanah Dyzer. But we strive to atone for it. My boy John served in the Union army, and he's going again. My boy Tom wants to go, and shall. 'Wait, laddie,' I said a year ago, 'till your bones harden a little more ; you'll fight the better for it ' ; and the time's come for him. My boy George " — his voice faltered — " was lost at Fredericksburg — and blown to bloody atoms on the field of battle, or alive rotting in some rebel prison, I'm content and proud, for it's in the service of his coun try. And I myself, old as I am, I'm going too. The young eyes that saw the bright flag dance so long when everything laughed with prom ise, shall see it now, now they're old, flap defiance to the last as all goes down in war. There's but one flag, one country in the world for me. I stand by them both forever."
" What you say is well," answered the stranger. " I like what you say."
" Well ! " retorted the fiery old man, "is there anything better? "
" There is nothing better than what you say," replied the other firmly.
Elkanah cooled down instantly, a little perplexed with the air the stranger had of cherishing some equal, perhaps more comprehending, truth.
WHAT A WITCH AND A THIEF MADE. [From Ms Allegretto Capriccioso, " To Fanny."— The Atlantic Monthly. 1871.]
TNTO a grand conservatory, -*- Lit by the moon of summer's glory, The thief stole deep in the midnight hours, And from a mass of camellias there, Plucked the splendid candid flowers, — Never a one did he spare ; And lone in her aromatic saloon, — Where in the darks and lights of the moon, Slept shapes of parian, buhl, and pearl, And rich-hued ottoman and fauteuil ;— Where wind-moved draperies' shadow-play Crossed and confused the sumptuous ray, And shadowy flames from tripods made Delicious shimrnerings kin to shade;— A temple of bloom and dusk and gleam, An alabaster and velvet dream;— The bright witch, smiling and debonair, Sat aud^charmed in the magic night, The petals into a lady white,— Glowing white and fair.
WILLIAM DOUGLAS O'CONNOR. [1861-88
Still they bloom, brilliant and fresh,
In your camellia flesh ;
They are the splendor and grace
Of your japonica face ;
And the glossy camellia leaves are seen
In the dress you wear of silken green.
And the thief went off where night uncloses
Her sleeping wild white roses.
He left them slumbering on the stem,
But he stole the odor out of them,
And brought it all to the fay.
She was singing a melody sweet and gay
Of tender and dreamful sound ;
And as she sang there breathed around
Some rich confusion, dim and strange ;
And change that was and was not change
Perplext the semblance of her hall
To a doubtful bowery garden tall ; —
The columns and wavering tapestries
To indeterminate shapes of trees,
With darkling foliage swaying slow ; •
And checkering shadows strown below
On the pile enflowered of Persian looms,
Becoming vague parterres of blooms ;
And glittering ormolu, green divan,
Fauteuil, and lounge, and ottoman,
Half-merged, transfiguring yet thereto,
In forms of bushes gemmed with dew,
Shrubs blossomy- bright or freaked with gleams,
Dark banks and hillocks touched with beams;
With vase and statue here and there,
As in some ordered garden rare.
And what o'er all did stream and flee,
Lifted and dropt perpetually, —
Flame-shimmerings and the flooding ray, —
Half-seemed the revel of sun and May.
A wilder life began to show ;
A wilder air began to blow ;
Subtly through all, like a soul,
The breath of the wild-rose stole ;
But suddenly the song did swoon,
And the place was again a grand saloon,
With the small witch, smiling and debonair,
O'er the work she had wrought in secret there.
What was it ? Where was the odor gone ? —
O arch, gay face I am dreaming on, —
Sweet face that tenderly shows
In its delicate paly glows,
It was moulded from the perfume of the wild white rose,—
1861-88] HORACE HOWARD FURNES8.
Ol
He who gazes sees, if he but will,
The dream of the roses on it still!
The wild-rose fragrance haunts the face so fair,
And the witch's song is there.
Rotate f otoatfi f unte0&
BOKN in Philadelphia, Penn., 1833.
A KINDRED DRAMATIC METHOD, IN THEIR USE OF DOUBLE TIME, PURSUED BY J3SCHYLUS AND SHAKESPEARE.
[A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare.— Vol. VIL The Merchant of Venice. 1888.]
TT seems to me that whatever Professor Wilson says of the Double -*- Time in Othello is applicable to the Double Time in the Merchant of Venice, and that Shakespeare's consummate art is shown here no less than there. Wilson claimed for Shakespeare originality in the use, or in the invention, of this art. Original it unquestionably was, as far as Shakespeare's knowledge of it was concerned, but I think it can be shown that the same art was employed in The Agamemnon, by Shakes peare's greatest predecessor in Tragedy.
In Othello, through this art, we accept as perfectly natural the gradual change of intense love to a murderous frenzy of jealousy, all within the space of thirty-six hours. Days and weeks are compressed into minutes and hours, not only without our detecting any improbability, but with a full faith that events have followed their natural, orderly course.
Here in the Merchant of Venice, by the same thaumaturgy, three months are to be compressed into as many days, a harder task than in Othello, in so far as the limit is fixed. At the very outset we are told that the bond is to be for so much money " and for three months." There is no attempt to weaken the impression. As soon as it is firmly fixed, then Shakespeare begins at once to " hurl his dazzling spells into the spongy air." He knew, none better, that just as soon as the ducats were pursed, Bassanio, swift as the thoughts of love, must fly to Portia. Did not Bassanio know, had he not himself told Anthonio, that the wide world knew Portia's worth, and the four winds blew in from every coast renowned suitors? Could he afford to risk an hour's delay? In that longing sigh, " Oh, my Anthonio," did he not breathe his soul out for the means to hold a rival place with the many Jasons ? As soon, there fore, as he has received the means from Shylock, he comes before us full of eager, bustling haste,— supper must be ready, at the very farthest, by
62 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS. [1861-88
five of the clock, — letters must be delivered, — his servant must make purchases and stow them aboard, — he must return in haste, — he must go for Grratiano to come at once to his lodging, — and then after all these commissions, full of feverish impatience, he bids his servant, — " hie thee, — go." But — and here we catch the first glimpse of Shakespeare's spell — the three months have begun to run, and against the swift cur rent of Bassanio's haste there must be some check. Bassanio tells his servant to "put the liveries to making." This takes time. Liveries are not made in a day. Next, Bassanio tells Launcelot that Shylock had spoken with him that very day about Launcelot's change of masters. This sounds as though Bassanio and Shylock had met casually in the street; surely they would not mingle the business of signing such a bond and of handing over so large a sum of money with discussing the qualities of servants. But these two checks will serve well enough for the thin edge of the wedge ; and Bassanio's eager haste returns again, and he excuses himself to Gratiano on the plea that he has "business." In this bustling, feverish, hurrying mood we leave him, and do not see him or hear him again until he has reached Belmont, and is entreating Portia to let him choose, to let him to his fortune and the caskets, for, as he is, he " lives upon the rack." What man is there, whose blood is not snow-broth, but knows that Bassanio has sped to Belmont with all speed of wind and tide.
But Shakespeare's magic will be busy with us before we see Bassanio again. Nearly a fourth of the play is carried on (herein revealing Shakespeare's art in the mere construction of his dramas), and days and weeks and months must pass before us, consuming the time of the Bond.
A new interest is excited. Jessica and her fortunes are introduced. Time obliterates Shylock's antipathy to eating with Christians. We are taken to Belmont to see the Prince of Morocco and watch his choice of the casket. We are brought back to Venice to find Shylock so publicly furious over the loss of his ducats and his daughter that " all the boys in Venice follow him." Burners, too, are in the air of the loss of Anthonio's ships. Salarino talked with a Frenchman about it "yester day." Again we are taken to Belmont ; by this mere shifting of scenes, back and forth, from Belmont to Venice, and from Venice to Belmont, is conveyed an impression of the flight of time. The deliberate fool' the Prince of Arragon, fails in his choice, and departs. Lest we should be too much absorbed in all this by-play and lose our interest in Bas sanio, we are told immediately after Arragon has left that a young Venetian has alighted at the gate. We are not told outright that it is Bassanio, yet we know that he is on the way, and it must be he. But before we actually see him, fresh from Venice as we know he is, although it is so long since we saw him and so much has happened,
c /
1861-88] HORACE HOWARD FURNE8S. 53
more spells must be woven round us ; there must be the very riping of the time.
One is always conscious that between the Acts of a play a certain space of time elapses. To convey this impression is one of the purposes for which a drama is divided into Acts. Thus here, after merely inti mating that Bassanio has reached Belmont, an entr'acte artfully inter venes, and when the curtain again rises we are all the more ready to accept any intimations of the flight of time which may be thrown out. Accordingly, when the Third Act opens with Salanio's question: "What news on the Eialto ? " Salarino replies that "it yet lives there unchecked" that Anthonio has lost a ship. Furthermore, the wreck has taken place not on any sea-coast near at hand, from which communica tion could be speedy, but on the remote Goodwins, almost as far off as it could be, within the limits of Europe ; even for rumor to reach Ven ice from so remote a quarter implies much time ; it could be brought only by slow argosies or heavy carracks, and days and weeks might elapse before any arrived direct from the scene of the disaster, and for many a long day the rumor might live unchecked. Much more time was implied to an Elizabethan audience, in this distance between the Goodwins and Venice, than it is to us.
Then Shylock enters, still so deeply cut by his daughter's flight that his first words are reproaches to Salarino and Salanio for being privy to it ; but evidently his first ebullition has cooled, and time has brought some self-control. It must have been days, nay, weeks. Have not Anthonio's bearing and deportment undergone a gradual change that only time can bring about? Shylock says, that Anthonio scarce dare show his head on the Eialto ; this is not the work of hours, but of days, perhaps weeks. Anthonio's smug air upon the mart is spoken of as a thing long past: "he that was used to come so smug upon the mart." Then comes in with startling effect, "let him look to his bond:' By this one allusion the three months shrink; we feel the first cold chill of Anthonio's fast-approaching peril, and this impression is deepened with every repetition of the allusion by Shylock: "let him look to his bond! He was wont [again, how long ago that seems !] to call me usurer. Let him look to his bond ! he was wont to lend money for a Christian cour tesy. Let him look to his bond ! " This is one of the masterstrokes of art in the play. Except one fleeting allusion to it by Salarino, we have heard nothing of the bond. We have watched Jessica elope with her lover, and gilded with ducats glide out of sight in a gondola, the Prince of Morocco has come and gone, the Prince of Arragon has strutted forth and back, the Eialto, with its busy life and whispered rumors of Antho nio's losses, has passed before us day after day, week after week, the smug merchant has broken down, and now all of a sudden looms up the
g4 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS. [1861-88
fateful bond, and its term is shrivelling as a scroll. To deepen this impression of the Long Time that has elapsed, Tubal returns from his weary quest after Jessica; he tells Shylock that he often came where he heard of her; he must have kept moving from place to place, because Shylock groans over the money that was spent in the search. Then, too, another of Anthonio's ships has been cast away coming from Tripolis, much nearer home than the Goodwins ; and some of the ship wrecked sailors have reached Genoa, nay, have even talked with Tubal. There is no hope for Anthoriio now, his bankruptcy is sure; and so close has the limit come that Tubal must go, and go at once, to secure an officer for Anthonio's arrest ; within a fortnight the term will have expired and the bond be forfeit.
The minute-hand that has recorded for us so many varied events is fast catching up with the hour-hand.
There is no entr'acte now. We are taken at once to Belmont, at last to meet Bassanio in happy torment, full of eagerness and haste, fresh from Venice, unwilling to piece the time or stay one minute from his election. With the success of Bassanio's hazard and with the winning of his prize, the only obstacle to the completion of the full term of the bond disappears. There is no longer need of further delay. Time's steeds may now be fiery-footed and gallop apace. Yet even at this last minute two more spells from the past are to be cast around the present, and our imaginations must untread again the long weeks that have passed since the bond was signed. Salerio brings word from Venice that morning and night Shylock is plying the Duke for justice, and that twenty merchants, the Duke himself, and the magnificoes, have been pleading with the Jew for mercy. And Jessica, too, who left Venice when Bassanio left it, has reached Belmont after her merry junketings at Genoa (which we accept without questioning their possibility), and adds a masterstroke of legerdemain by saying that she had heard her Father swear to Tubal and to Chus that he would rather have Antho nio's flesh than twenty times the value of the bond. We never stop to think that she left Venice within a few hours after the signing of the bond, and had seen her Father but once, and then for only a few min utes. Her words summon up pictures of many a discussion between the three old usurers in the seclusion of Shylock's house, and tell plainly enough of the gradual hardening of Shylock's heart. Thus the mighty magician " winds him into us easy-hearted men, and hugs us into snares"; and so completely entangled are we that there is no jar now when Anthonio's letter says that his ships have all miscarried, his creditors grow cruel, his estate is very low, and his bond to the Jew forfeit !
The minute-hand is on the stroke of the hour. But one more fleeting impression and the hammer falls. Anthonio says that his griefs and
18G1-88] HORACE HOWARD FURNESS. ?*
00
losses have so bated him that he will hardly have a pound of flesh to spare for his "bloody creditor to-morrow." The royal Merchant's gaunt and haggard looks tell of many a weary week, and the bond expires to-morrow !
Although it was necessary that Portia should hasten to Venice as rapidly as Bassanio, yet some time must be given to her to master her brief; she might have done it while on the ferry, after receiving Bella- rio's notes and garments from Balthasar at the Traject, and probably did do so ; but Bellario's letter to the Duke supplies the requisite time, if any be needed, in our imagination, by saying that he and the young Doctor " had turned over many books together," evidently a faithful and prolonged consultation, ending in an "opinion," the result of labo rious and learned research.
How long the home journey from Venice to Belmont lasted, whether it took one day or two days, is a matter of small moment. Nothing was at stake, no art is demanded, nothing has to be smoothed away ; we need neither Long Time nor Short Time. For aught that concerns the dramatic action, it might have taken a month. All that is needed is that Portia should reach home first, and that Bassanio should follow hard after. When Nerissa tells Gratiano that the Doctors Clerk had been in her company "last night/' she had already given Gratiano the ring, or was in the act of handing it to him ; the jest was revealed, her eyes were dancing with merriment, and he would know in a fla&h that what was true of last night, be it in Belmont or Venice, was equally true of every night since she had been born.
It is to Dr. "W. W. Goodwin, of Harvard College, that I owe the sug gestion that in The Agamemnon an illustration might be possibly found of a treatment of Dramatic Time similar to Shakespeare s Double Time. In representing the arrival of Agamemnon at Argos within a few hours of the fall of Troy, JEschylus has been charged by many an Editor with a violation of the Unity of Time. Dr. Goodwin suggested that a solu tion of the difficultv might be traced in the Herald's speech to the Chorus. It is greatly to be regretted that a pressure of many duties has kept these pages from being enriched with Dr. Goodwin's promised investigation of the question, and that the task has therefore fallen, instead, to my unskilful hands.
In the first place, if there be in The Agamemnon a violation of the Unity of Time, ^Eschylus committed it either wittingly or unwittingly. To say that he committed it unwittingly is almost unthinkable. From the very structure of a Greek tragedy, a downright violation of the Unity of Time, during the continued presence of the Chorus, would be a defect glaring alike to auditors and author; if to our eyes there appears to be such a violation, the presumption is strong, so strong as to VOL. ix.— 5
66 HORACE HOWARD FURNESS. [1861-88
amount almost to a certainty, that the defect lies in our vision, not in
the play itself.
This apparent violation, then, ^Eschylus must have committed wit tingly ; and if so, an analysis of the tragedy will show, I think, that in dealing with time he waved over his audience, with a master's art, the same magician's wand that Shakespeare wields, and tjiat by subtle, fleet ing impressions of the flight of time a false show of time is created, which is accepted by us for the real. We must remember that in listen ing to Shakespeare or to ^Eschylus we are subject to their omnipotent sway, and that when they come to us " with fair enchanted cup, and warbling charms," we are powerless to "fence our ears against their sor ceries."
The opening Scene of The Agamemnon reveals the tired Watchman on the Palace top at Argos. Of a sudden he sees on the distant horizon the flash of the fire on Mt. Arachnaeum, the signal that Troy is taken. The Chorus enters, and the Watchman hastens to tell Clytemnestra. When the Queen enters, and is asked by the Chorus to tell how long it is since the city had fallen, she replies that "it was this night, the mother of this very day" (Tfj? vvv Tsuouffr?? cp&s rod7 evcppovrjt, Uyv, line 279.)
The Chorus, knowing how far it is from Troy, and how many days and nights must pass in journeying thither, expresses surprise that the news could travel so fast; whereupon Clytemnestra explains that it was through the aid of Hephaistos ; a fire was lit on Ida, then on the Her- msean crag of Lemnos, then on Mount Athos, and so on, till " the great beard of flame" flashed on the roof of the Atreidse, and " this very day the Achaeans hold Troy" (Tpoiav 'Axotiol rydj SXOVG' ev rj^fpa, line 320).
The opening hour of the Tragedy has struck. It is the morning after the night during which Troy was taken. The release of the weary Watchman from his sleepless years, Clytemnestra's description of the speed, the speed of light, with which the beacon-fires had brought the news, her rejoicings over the end of the warrior's hardships, all empha size it. No impression with regard to Anthonio's three months' bond is conveyed more clearly than that here, in Argos, it is but a few hours since Troy had fallen.
" The voyage from Troy to the bay of Argos," says Dr. Goodwin, in a letter, " would now be a good day's journey for a fast steamship. So I think we are entitled to at least a week of good weather for the mere voyage, leaving out the storm and the delays." That much time, then, will it take Agamemnon to reach his home, if he starts within an hour after he has conquered Troy. But the drama has begun, the Chorus is on the stage, and before it leaves the stage Agamemnon must arrive,
1861-88] HORACE HOWARD FURNESS.
67
here in Argos, and yet all traces of improbability must, if possible, be concealed.
The time daring which the Chorus is on the stage is JGschylus's Short Time, and corresponds to Bassanio's journey from Venice to Bel- mont. ^Eschylus's Long Time is Agamemnon's week's voyage from Troy to Argos, corresponding to Anthonio's three months' bond. The same power that can compress three months at Venice into one day at Belmont, must expand a few hours at Argos into a se'en night's voyage from Troy.
The task in The Agamemnon is the reverse of the task in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare must compress a long term into a short one, while JEschylus must dilate a short time into a long one. Shakespeare presents to us the spy -glass, and bids us see what is distant close at at hand; while ^Eschylus reverses the glass, and what is but an arm's length from us recedes to the verge of the horizon.
To a certain extent and for many purposes, what Shakespeare can effect by Acts and the shifting of Scenes. ^Eschylus can bring about by means of the Chorus. Yet here it is not easy to see how the Chorus can help him ; nothing that the Chorus could say would lessen the shock to our sense of the fitness of things if Agamemnon himself were to be brought at once upon the scene. Old Argive citizens* compose this Chorus ; they have remained here quietly in Argos ; of Agamemnon, or of his journey, they can tell us nothing.
Of a sudden Clvtemnestra sees a Herald hastening from the shore. In thus introducing a Herald, art is shown. Heralds always travel in advance of their lords, and this Herald, as far as we know, may possibly have left Troy before its fall. That it is a Herald from the Argive king we feel sure, and having accepted the fact of his presence, we sink into a receptive mood for any impression which his story can impart. But while he is yet at a distance, Clytemnestra sees that he is travel-stained with dust and grime. Thus is the spell begun, the magician is at work. We accept the Herald without a shade of suspicion ; what can be more natural than that he should have travelled with extreme haste ? The thrill of joy at the sight of one who can bring us news is heightened by waving olive branches, the pledges of peace and victory, which he bears aloft. Thus artfully is the Herald announced before he enters on the stage ; when at last he does enter and breaks out into a thrilling greet ing of his home, criticism is forgotten in joy and sympathy.
We must remember, and we cannot too deeply remember, that both The Agamemnon and The Merchant of Venice were written, not to be studied and pored over, line by line, and analyzed sentence by sentence, but to be acted; to be communicated by the speaking voice to the hear ing ear and interpreted by the quick thought. It is by a repetition of
gg HORACE HOWARD FURNESS. [1861-88
faint, fleeting, subtle impressions, felt but scarcely heeded at the time, that a deep, abiding effect may be at last produced. The " suowflake on the river " may be but " a moment there, then gone forever " ; yet let but enough fall and the stream is locked in frost.
What need to hurry with our questionings how the Herald came hither; he stands before us, and his story will tell us all.
In order to appreciate the delicacy with which ^Eschylus smooths away the objections to this speedy appearance of the Herald, we must bear in mind that every allusion to the flight of time since the hour that Troy has fallen, however light and evanescent the allusion may be, helps to make that hour recede into the past ; and, for my purpose, I think I may be permitted to claim every possible impression which I can detect, of this nature, however fleeting, and then to multiply its effect on Grecian ears many times over. How clearly must it not have spoken to those ears, when it can penetrate even my adder's sense !
Thus, when the Herald in his first speech (lines 523 et seq.) saj^s that Agamemnon must be welcomed back, who has, with the crowbars of the just gods, levelled Troy to the ground, with all its towers and fanes, and that all earth's seed lie scattered on the ground, is not Time's thievish progress intimated here? Can walls, and towers, and temples be top pled over in a<£ninute? Can harvests be burnt, and acres ploughed up, for leagues around, in an hour ? Lost in the thought of these great tasks and of the mighty victory, we never stop to count the days ; but the succession of pictures creates the flight of time, and the hour of Troy's fall begins to recede.
Too much, however, is not demanded of us at once; the Chorus here speaks; and then Clytemnestra exults in the assurance that the beacon- fires are true, and we are gently prepared for Agamemnon's approach by the message which the Chorus is to deliver when he arrives, telling him of her fidelity during his absence. Hereupon the Chorus asks after Menelaus, and the Herald reluctantly confesses that his fate is unknown. The Chorus presses for a more exact reply, and asks whether he. set sail with all the rest of the fleet and then ]eft them, or whether a storm snatched him away, but the Herald only ambiguously replies that it was even so. The Chorus returns to the point, and asks what rumors there were about him in the fleet, among the sailors. " No one knows anything about him," replies the Herald; "the sun, the nourisher of the' earth, alone can tell his fate."
It seems needless to point out how insidiously, up to this point, the passage of time has been worked in by a succession of pictures, every one of which is suggested by a word or phrase which could not have fallen unheeded on Grecian ears. Troy has been conquered; and burnt ; and razed to the ground ; and reduced to a desolate ruin ; the
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Greeks have divided the spoils ; and allotted the trophies to be hun* up in temples (577) ; the armies have been gathered together ; and embarked in their fleet; and have advanced on their voyage; and been overtaken by a storm ; and after the storm sufficient time has elapsed for the fleet to be collected ; their losses counted ; and rumors to "live unchecked" as to the fate of their companions.
(And Troy fell only last night!}
Trusting to the effect already produced, the Poet advances more boldly. Moreover, on the emotion, the uncritical emotion, excited in his auditors by the absorbing interest of the Tragedy he has a right to count.
Urged by the Chorus, the Herald hereupon describes this frightful storm which fell upon the fleet " by night" (line 653 et seq.\ when fire and sea combined against it, and Thracian blasts dashed all the ships together ; and " when the fair light of the sun arose, we saw the ^Egean Sea enamelled like a meadow (dv$ov v) with the drowned corpses of sail ors and of Greeks."
To all the previous indications of the flight of time, which were but delicate, artful hints, there must be now added the explicit description of a night of storm, when the fleet was well on its way (the blasts came dowTn from Thrace), and the next morning afterwards when the sun shone bright and clear.
Is not the goal won ? The days of gloom, the night of storm, the smiling morrow, have passed before us ; we have lived through them all, and the journey from Troy to Argos is accomplished. To Grecian eyes has not every league been measured?
Not to disturb this impression, but to deepen it by repose, the Chorus breaks in with four Strophes and four Antistrophes, wherein no allusion to the journey is found, — that is left as something fixed and settled ; but it anathematizes Helen, and at the close, so far away have our thoughts been carried that any allusion to the journey from Troy to Argos seems like a thrice-told tale ; that journey has become a fact around which no shadow of mistrust can cling.
Thus heralded, thus prepared for, Agamemnon enters, and the task is done. After the spells that have been woven around us, we find no more violation of probability in Agamemnon's appearance, from Troy, at that minute than in the expiration of the three months' Bond within the hour after Bassanio has chosen the leaden casket ; and is there a man, who, when sitting at the play, can say with truth that, on that score, he ever felt a jar ?
I do not think it is claiming too much thus to urge that the two great est dramatic poets of the world used a kindred skill in producing kin dred dramatic effects. If we find those effects in their dramas, their
^Q HORACE HOWARD FURNESS. [1861-88
hands put them there, and to imagine that we can see them and that the mighty poets themselves did not, is to usurp a position which I can scarcely conceive of any one as willing to occupy.
"IT HATH THE EXCUSE OF YOUTH."
[From the Same.]
IN Dixon's Story of Lord Hacoris Life, p. 98, Lady Anne Bacon tells her son Anthony that she sends him " xij pigeons, my last flight, and one ringdove beside, and a black coney taken by John Knight this day, and pigeons, too, to-day." This incident I am sure that I have seen, in some attempted proof that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, cited (in conclusive answer to C. A. Brown's question) as the genuine dovecote whence issued Gobbo's doves. I mistrust the fitness of spend ing any time in search for it. My editorial conscience is rendered placid by the simple allusion ; merely begging to be allowed to remark that if Bacon wrote this passage, I fully respond to Pope's estimate of Bacon's baseness, and find herein even a lower depth, in thus introducing his Mother as a prototype of old Gobbo. One is sometimes inclined to say to those who dispute the authorship of these plays, as the Cockney did to the eels, " down, wantons, down ! " but a little calm reflection reveals to us that this attempt to dethrone Shakespeare, so far from being trea son, or lese majeste, is, in fact, most devout and respectful homage to him. In our salad days, when first we begin to study Shakespeare, who does not remember his bewildering efforts to attribute to mortal hand these immortal plays? Then follows the fruitless attempt to discern in that Stratford youth, the Emperor, by the grace of God, of all literature. In our despair of marrying, as Emerson says, the man to the verse, we wed the verse to the greatest known intellect of that age. Can homage be more profound? But, as I have said, this we do when we are young in judgment. The older we grow in this study, and the further we advance in it, the clearer becomes our vision that, if the royal robes do not fit Shakespeare, they certainly do not, and cannot, fit any one else. Where fore, I conceive that we have here a not altogether inaccurate gauge of the depth, or duration, or persistence of Shakespearian study, and, measuring by a scale of maturity, or growth, in this study, I have come to look upon all attempts to prove that Bacon wrote these dramas, merely as indications of youth, possibly, of extreme youth, and that they find their comforting parallels in the transitory ailments incident to childhood, like the chicken- pox or the measles. The attack is pretty sure to come, but we know
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that it is neither dangerous nor chronic, that time will effect a cure and that, when once well over it, there is no likelihood whatever of its recur rence.
George <0. floating,
BORN in Poundridge, Westchester Co., N. Y., 1833.
VIX. [Whip and Spur. 1875.]
the work on the Central Park had fairly commenced, in the spring of 1858, I found— or I fancied— that proper attention to my scattered duties made it necessary that I should have a saddle- horse.
How easily, by the way, the arguments that convince us of these pleasant necessities find their way to the understanding!
Yet, how to subsist a horse after buying one, and how to buy ? The memory of a well-bred and keen-eyed gray, dating back to the earliest days of my boyhood, and forming the chief feature of my recollection of play-time for years ; an idle propensity, not a whit dulled yet, to linger over Leech's long-necked hunters, and Herring's field scenes; an almost superstitious faith in the different analyses of the bones of the racer and of the cart-horse ; a firm belief in Frank Forester's teachings of the value of " blood," — all these conspired to narrow rny range of selection, and, unfortunately, to confine it to a very expensive class of horses.
Unfortunately, again, the commissioners of the Park bad extremely inconvenient ideas of economy, and evidently did not consider, in fixing their schedule of salaries, how much more satisfactory our positions would have been with more generous emolument.
How a man with only a Park salary, and with a family to "support, could set up a saddle-horse, — and not ride to the dogs, — was a question that exercised not a little of my engineering talent for weeks ; and many an odd corner of plans and estimates was figured over with calculations of the cost of forage and shoeing.
Stable-room was plenty and free in the condemned buildings of the former occupants, and a little " over-time '' of one of the men would suffice for the grooming.
I finally concluded that, by giving up cigars, and devoting my ener gies to the pipe in their stead, I could save enough to pay for my horse's keep ; and so, the ways and means having been, in this somewhat vague
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manner, provided, the next step was to bay a horse. To tell of the days passed at auction sales in the hope (never there realized) of find ing goodness and cheapness combined, — of the stationery wasted in answering advertisements based on every conceivable form of false pretence ; to describe the numberless broken-kneed, broken-winded, and broken-down brutes that came under inspection, would be tedious and disheartening.
Good horses there were, of course, though very few good saddle-horses (America is not productive in this direction), — and the possible animals were held at impossible prices.
Those who rode over the new Park lands usually rode anything but good saddle-horses. Fast trotters, stout ponies, tolerable carriage-horses, capital cart-horses, there were in plenty. But the clean-cut, thin-crested, bright-eyed, fine-eared, steel-limbed saddle-horse, the saddle-horse par excellence, — may I say the only saddle-horse ? — rarely came under obser vation ; and when, by exception, such a one did appear, he was usually so ridden that his light was sadly dimmed. It was hard to recognize an elastic step under such an un elastic seat.
Finally, in the days of my despair, a kind saddler, — kept to his daily awl by a too keen eye for sport, and still, I believe, a victim to his pro pensity for laying his money on the horse that ought to win but don't, —hearing of my ambition (to him the most laudable of all ambitions), came to put me on the long-sought path.
He knew a mare, or he had known one, that would exactly suit me. She was in a bad way now, and a good deal run down, but he always thought she " had it in her," and that some gentleman ought to keep her for the saddle, — "which, in my mind, sir, she be the finest bit of 'orse-flesh that was never imported, sir." That was enough. " Imported" decided my case, and I listened eagerly to the enthusiastic story, — a story to which this man's life was bound with threads of hard-earned silver, and not less by a real honest love for a fine animal. He had never been much given to saving, but he was a good workman, and the little he had saved had been blown away in the dust that clouded his favorite at the tail of the race.
Still, he attached himself to her person, and followed her in her dis grace. " She weren't quite quick enough for the turf, sir, but she be a good 'un for a gentleman's 'ack."
He had watched her for years, and scraped acquaintance with her dif ferent owners as fast as she had changed them, and finally, when she was far gone with pneumonia, he had accepted her as a gift, and, by careful nursing, had cured her. Then, for a time, he rode her himself, and his eye brightened as he told of her leaps and her stride. Of course he rode her to the races, and— one luckless day— when he had lost every-
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73
thing, and his passion had got the better of his prudence, he staked the mare herself on a perfectly sure thing in two-mile heats. Like most of the sure things of life, this venture went to the bad, and the mare was lost, — lost to a Bull's Head dealer in single driving-horses. "I see her in his stable ahfter that, sir ; and, forbieten she were twelve year old, sir, and 'ad 'ad a 'ard life of it, she were the youngest and likeliest of the lot, — you'd swore she were a three-year-old, sir.''
If that dealer had had a soul above trotting-wagons, my story would never have been written ; but all was fish that came to his net, and this thoroughbred racer, this beautiful creature who had never worn harness in her life, must be shown to a purchaser who was seeking something to drive. She was always quick to decide, and her actions followed close on the heels of her thought. She did not complicate matters by waiting for the gentleman to get into the wagon, but then and there — on the instant — kicked it to kindlings. This ended the story. She had been shown at a high figure, and was subsequently sold for a song, — he could tell me no more. She had passed to the lower sphere of equine life and "usefulness, — he had heard of a fish-wagon, but he knew nothing about it. What he did know was, that the dealer was a dreadful jockey, and that it would never do to ask him. Now, here was something to live for, — a sort of princess in disgrace, whom it would be an honor to rescue, and my horse-hunting acquired a new interest.
By easy stages, I cultivated the friendship of the youth who, in those days, did the morning's sweepirig-out at the Bull's Head Hotel. He had grown up in the alluring shades of the horse-market, and his daily com munion from childhood had been with that "noble animal." To him horses were the individuals of the world, — men their necessary attend ants, and of only attendant importance. Of course he knew of this black she-devil; and he thought that "a hoss that could trot like she could on the halter " must be crazy not to go in harness.
However, he thought she had got her deserts now, for he had seen her, only a few weeks before, "a draggin' clams for a feller in the Tenth Avener." Here was a clew at last, — clams and the Tenth Avenue. For several days the scent grew cold. The people of the Licensed Vender part of this street seemed to have little interest in their neighbors' horses ; but I found one man, an Irish grocer, who had been bred a stable-boy to the Marquis of Waterford, and who did know of a u poor old screw of a black mare " that had a good head, and might be the one I was looking for; but, if she was, he thought I might as well give it up, for she was all broken down, and would never be good for anything again.
Taking the address, I went to a stable-yard, in what was then the very edge of the town, and here I found a knowing young man, who devoted his time to peddling clams and potatoes between New York and Sing
^ GEORGE E. WARING, JR. [1861-88
Sing. Clams up, and potatoes down,— twice every week, — distance thirty miles; road hilly; and that was the wagon he did it with,— a heavy wagon with a heavy arched top, and room for a heavy load, and only shafts for a single horse. In reply to my question, he said he changed horses pretty often, because the work broke them down; but he had a rnare now that had been at it for three months, and he thought she would last some time longer. " She's pretty thin, but you ought to see her trot with that wagon." With an air of idle curiosity, I asked to see her, — I had gone shabbily dressed, not to excite suspicion ; for men of the class I had to treat with are usually sharp horse-traders, — and this fellow, clam-pedler though he was, showed an enthusiastic alacrity in taking me to her stall. She had won even his dull heart, and he spoke of her gently, as he made the most of hfcr good points, and glossed over her wretched condition.
Poor Yixen (that had been her name in her better days, and it was to be her name again), she had found it hard kicking against the pricks! Clam-carts are stronger than trotting- wagons, and even her efforts had been vain. She had succumbed to dire necessity, and earned her igno ble oats with dogged fidelity. She had a little warm corner in her driver's affections, — as she always had in the affections of all who came to know her well, — but her lot was a very hard one. Worn to a skele ton, with sore galls wherever the harness had pressed her, her pasterns bruised by clumsy shoes, her silky coat burned brown by the